18 tiny deaths, p.8
18 Tiny Deaths, page 8
Most seriously, Magrath also discovered that his office lacked funding for basic necessities. The state legislature failed to appropriate money for the medical examiner’s office for the first fifteen months of his tenure. It wasn’t until 1908 that state lawmakers provided funds for a telephone, printed stationery, and the wages for assistants. Magrath’s salary was $3,000 a year.
Suffolk County had four medical examiners in all. Dr. Timothy Leary, a pathologist at Tufts University Medical School, was appointed medical examiner in 1908. By agreement, Magrath and Leary divided the jurisdiction in half, with Magrath in charge of the northern division and Leary in charge of the southern division. The two medical examiners often worked together on cases. Two associate medical examiners assisted Magrath and Leary.
When he was appointed medical examiner, Magrath found scant material on legal medicine. There were a few textbooks and journals but nothing like the literature in Europe, where the field of legal medicine was much more developed.
No medical school in the United States offered the training Magrath believed was necessary preparation for the responsibilities of a medical examiner. Medical school trained him in pathology, the study of diseases and abnormal conditions. But legal medicine, what would later come to be called forensic pathology, was focused on patterns of fatal injuries, poisoning, postmortem changes, and other subjects that were outside the usual teachings of medical practice.
Before undertaking the job, Magrath spent more than a year in Europe to immerse himself in legal medicine. He spent time in London and Paris observing their systems of death investigation, regarded as the most advanced in the world. Upon his return, Magrath incorporated the principles and practices learned from Europe’s brightest legal medicine minds in his work as medical examiner and in Harvard’s medical school curriculum. He expressed his view of the responsibilities ahead:
The duties of this office consist chiefly in the investigation of deaths due to injury of any sort and those which are sudden or unexplained; they necessarily include service from time to time in court… In doing my work I have sought to apply to the branch of state medicine, which my office represents, the result of the generous type of scientific medical education which it was my good fortune to receive… The general standard of medical jurisprudence in this country is none too high and it is my aim to help raise its level by applying to my own work the principles and the methods of modern scientific medicine and by impressing on the student the importance of the responsibility of the physician in all matters wherein medicine is brought into the service of the law.3
Magrath carried a leather-bound loose-leaf field book to document cases he investigated as Suffolk County medical examiner. He kept notes on each case in a code understood only by himself and his secretary so that if the field book fell into the wrong hands, no derogatory information would be disclosed about a deceased person.
Inside the cover of his field book, Magrath inscribed a quotation by Paul Brouardel, pathologist and member of the Académie Nationale de Médecine, France’s leading legal medicine authority. Brouardel’s words became Magrath’s fundamental guiding principle:
If the law has made you a witness, remain a man of science; you have no victim to avenge, no guilty person to convict, and no innocent person to save. You must bear testimony within the limits of science.4
On duty twenty-four hours a day, Magrath was a well-recognized figure on the streets of Boston, motoring around in the same clattering 1907 Model T that served as his transportation for the duration of his career. The Model T, which Magrath named “Suffolk Sue,” was equipped with a fire engine bell to clear traffic and a small, round Medical Examiner medallion mounted on the grille.
He was mild mannered and even-tempered, not one known to lose his patience. “He was always cheerful and genial, kindly and tolerant,” Lee said. “He never sat in judgement on anyone. I never saw him angry or impatient.” Magrath was just like Suffolk Sue’s license plate—181—which read the same backward or forward or upside down. “Like his car license, ‘always the same,’” Lee said.5
Physically, Magrath was a striking figure—tall, with broad shoulders muscled from years of rowing on the Charles River and an unruly shock of flaming red hair. He favored flowing ties and a dark-green waistcoat, wide-brimmed hats, and an ever-present curve-stemmed tobacco pipe. Magrath intentionally cultivated an air of eccentricity, for example, by letting it be known that he only ate one ample meal a day, at midnight.
Magrath told his Harvard colleague, the toxicologist William F. Boos, that being conspicuous was a large part of professional advancement. “You ought to set about to impress yourself on ’em more,” Magrath said to Boos. “It helps.”6
At the scene of a death, any semblance of showmanship disappeared. Magrath’s investigations were meticulous and thorough, applying keen scientific judgment to the tasks at hand. He often pointed out clues overlooked by police and suggested productive lines of investigation.
In the autopsy room, Magrath fell into a mood of deep concentration the moment the decedent was wheeled in on a gurney. Frank Leon Smith, a young reporter, sometimes spent nights with his friend, a morgue assistant, when he missed the last train to Melrose. Smith often watched Magrath at work. The medical examiner had “the controlled frenzy of the explorer,” he said. “More than most men, he had the chance and the genius to explore the mysteries which each of us carries within the envelope of the skin,” Smith said. “He gave the same careful attention to a repelling ‘floater’ taken from the harbor, as the well preserved man of distinction who’d happen to drop dead on Tremont Street.”7
On the witness stand, Magrath was confident and unshakable. With a baritone voice burnished by choral practice, he answered questions in a clipped, direct manner, hewing to facts that he knew to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, based on scientific evidence, and not drifting into speculation or conjecture. “His statements were the model of precision,” Boos said.8
In courtroom sketches of Magrath, he is drawn with his face cast downward, eyes closed or obscured behind spectacles. He looks like he might be sleeping but is deep in thought, listening to a question or formulating his response. Framed by a wild mane of hair, on the witness stand, Magrath was “like a lion resting,” one observer said.9
Outside court, Magrath declined to talk with reporters about cases still unresolved or under investigation. The proper place for matters of legal medicine was the courtroom, he believed, not in the pages of newspapers. Magrath sometimes talked about closed cases years after the fact, spinning yarns about some of his infamous investigations for crime reporters, but never before a case concluded with a conviction or acquittal.
If he had one fatal flaw, it was his weakness for alcohol. Magrath relied upon the medicative effects of distilled spirits. He never drank to the point of stuporous belligerence but consumed on a daily basis to maintain a steady state of intoxication. He drank to calm his nerves at the end of the day. He drank to erase the unspeakable horrors to which his occupation forced him to bear witness. He drank to chase the demons that lurked in the recesses of his mind.
Although the man dissected human bodies for a living, he “went into something approaching eclipse at the death of those close to him,” a contemporary of Magrath said.10 Death is not something one gets entirely accustomed to, particularly when the decedent is somebody known personally or by reputation.
Some of Magrath’s duties must have been deeply upsetting, such as the requirement that he witness the execution of condemned prisoners and pronounce their deaths. Friends would meet Magrath outside the state prison after executions to “get three drinks into him quickly.”11
Those who knew Magrath said it was his superior intellect, integrity, and a fastidious eye for detail that made him particularly well suited for legal medicine. For every measurement he took, he measured twice. So as to not influence an investigation with misbegotten hunches, Magrath forced himself to keep an open mind until he knew all the facts and considered all the circumstances and then applied judgment and common sense in a relentless pursuit of the truth.
“As a Medical Examiner he was preeminent, finding in that profession the niche into which he exactly fitted,” Lee said of her friend. “His meticulous accuracy, his exact adherence to the truth, and his immeasurable patience and skill in determining what was the truth, made his advice and judgement much sought after.”12
At the time of his appointment as medical examiner, Magrath lived in a renovated dwelling at 274 Boylston Street, overlooking the swan boats in the Boston Public Garden. With no other suitable office space available, Magrath based the medical examiner’s office on Boylston Street, which was its official address for the next thirty years.
The room behind his medical examiner’s office was Magrath’s living space, the walls lined with shelves groaning with books. He had a seven-foot-long ship’s bunk with a reading light at one end, a steamer chair by a fireplace, and a telephone at the bedside so he could respond quickly in an emergency. To the rear of this room was a combined bathroom and kitchenette, with cabinets and a gas stove.
He ate most of his meals at St. Botolph Club, a gentleman’s club conveniently around the corner in a mansion at 7 Newberry Street, to the west of the Public Garden. St. Botolph Club was a gathering place for men who appreciated the arts, sciences, and humanities. Magrath’s old school friend George Glessner was a member of St. Botolph, as were H. H. Richardson and many other Harvard men of substance. Magrath was at St. Botolph so often, he used the club as his residential mailing address.
Magrath was on duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If he wanted to take a vacation, which he rarely did, it was his responsibility to pay for a medical examiner to serve in his place. He was never far from a telephone, never out of touch with his secretary, always immediately available to go to the scene of a death. By necessity, his hours were irregular. He once rowed in an eight-man crew in a regatta after staying awake for forty-eight hours—and won the race.
On a typical day, after working at the morgue or the scene of a death, late in the evening, Magrath telephoned the chef at St. Botolph just as he was about to close down for the night and gave his order for dinner—clams and spaghetti or beef steak barely charred and served bloody rare. Magrath would show up at midnight for his meal, socialize and tell stories for a while, and return home to read until the wee hours of the morning.
Magrath made a name for himself by applying the rigorous methods of medical science to the investigation of death. Newspaper stories about his high-profile cases added to his prestige as a Sherlockian “crime doctor.” In time, he was asked to consult on cases by police departments throughout Massachusetts and nearby New England states.
And always, every day and every night as he did his work, Magrath used science to learn as much about the facts of a death as humanly possible. He believed that death merited the most rigorous critical analysis and that the archaic coroner system should be abandoned for one that allowed a rational basis for determining causes of death.
One of the prominent cases that cemented the value of the medical examiner system was the death of Avis Linnell.13 Linnell was a nineteen-year-old choir singer from Hyannis living at Boston’s Young Women’s Christian Association. Shortly after 7:00 p.m. on the evening of October 14, 1911, residents of the YWCA heard sounds of distress from within the shared bathroom, which was locked from the inside. They forced open the bathroom door to find Linnell sitting in a chair, her feet immersed in a tub half filled with warm water, gasping for breath and groaning in great agony. The YWCA matron sent for a female doctor immediately. Linnell was moved to a bed, but by the time the doctor arrived, she was dead.
The YWCA matron had the presence of mind to close the bathroom door and leave the room as it was until the police and Leary, the medical examiner, arrived on the scene. Magrath was out of town on a rare vacation, so Leary responded to the scene to inspect the bathroom and Linnell’s body. Linnell was taken to the morgue for an autopsy.
During the minutes before she died, Linnell told witnesses at the YWCA that she had lunch that day with her fiancé, Reverend Clarence Richeson, a pastor in Cambridge. The matron asked one of the girls to call Richeson by telephone and notify him of her death. At first, he denied knowing Linnell. Then he said, “Why are you telling me this?”
Leary’s autopsy revealed that Linnell was pregnant and had been for about three months. The lining of her stomach had a deep red discoloration with streaks of red radiating over the gastric mucosa, indicating a poisoning by cyanide. Leary retained Linnell’s organs for examination by Magrath upon his return.
Magrath agreed with Leary’s diagnosis and prepared specimens of Linnell’s gastric mucosa for examination under the microscope and laboratory testing for the presence of cyanide. The tests confirmed their suspicion.
The police were ready to close the case as a suicide. Obviously, they said, she took the cyanide herself. Nobody was in the bathroom with her, and the door was locked from the inside. Perhaps the shame of her delicate condition led her to end her life.
Leary disagreed. For one thing, Linnell had a change of clothing in the bathroom to wear after her bath. She also had a harness and sanitary napkin even though she was pregnant and hadn’t menstruated in months. It appeared as though she expected to begin menstruating, and she may have been attempting to induce an abortion. Leary was certain that Linnell expected to leave that bathroom alive and insisted that the police keep digging.
Police interviewed Richeson but were unable to connect him to the cyanide that killed Linnell. The thirty-five-year-old Richeson was a serial philanderer who had left a trail of fraud and broken hearts stretching from Boston to Kansas City. He may have been a cad, but did that make him a killer?
Newspapers latched onto the tragic death of the young singer. Reading about the case, the owner of a drugstore in Newton Center, William Hahn, contacted police to inform them that Richeson had been in his business four days prior to Linnell’s death. Hahn knew Richeson, a regular customer. He said that on October 10, Richeson told him that he had a dog at home that was going to have puppies. “She is whining around the house and is a nuisance,” Hahn said Richeson told him. “I want to get rid of her.”
Hahn sold Richeson potassium cyanide—enough to kill ten people. “It is as quick as lightning, but it is very dangerous,” he warned his customer.14
Richeson didn’t own a dog.
When confronted with Hahn’s statements, Richeson confessed to poisoning Linnell. He wanted to leave Linnell and marry a wealthy socialite, but her pregnancy threw a wrench into his plans. Richeson gave Linnell the cyanide, telling her that it was a medicine that would induce an abortion.
Two weeks before he was to stand trial for her murder, Richeson stood before a judge and admitted that he intentionally killed Linnell. He was sentenced to death. Magrath was a witness when Richeson was executed on May 21, 1912. Were it not for the insistence of Leary, Richeson might well have gotten away with murder.
“There was no primary suspicion of foul play,” Magrath pointed out. “It was only when the post mortem examination disclosed a condition in the stomach suggesting poisoning by potassium cyanide that death from causes other than natural was suggested.”15
“The further discovery of a physical condition compatible with suicide strongly suggested this motive of death,” he said. “Only the care and diligence of the Medical Examiner Leary, who had charge of the case, led to a further investigation by the police resulting in the conviction of Richeson.”
If Boston had been operating under a coroner system and without the benefit of standardized practices such autopsies, Magrath knew, Richeson more than likely would have gotten away with murder.
Newspapermen believed history may have repeated itself a year later when another young woman was found dead under suspicious circumstances. Marjorie Powers, a twenty-eight-year-old stenographer, was discovered facedown in a half-filled bathtub in a West End hotel room on November 15, 1912. Police found a tumbler of gin in the bathroom and what appeared to be mustard powder sprinkled in the bathwater.16
Twenty-four hours earlier, Powers had checked into the hotel with her employer, Albert Cummings, a prominent Faneuil Hall produce dealer. They registered at the hotel as “O. P. Davis and wife, Lynn.” Cummings was seen leaving the hotel shortly before Powers’s body was found. Police went to Faneuil Hall and arrested Cummings to hold in custody pending the results of Magrath’s postmortem examination.
Reporters wasted no time in framing the death as another murder. “Another Boston Girl Thought Victim of Man—Parallel to the Death of Avis Linnell Is Seen in the Case of Stenographer whose Death Is Being Investigated” one newspaper headline said. “Police Hint at Second Avis Linnell Tragedy” read a subhead in the United Press story.
Under questioning by police, Cummings admitted being with Powers for about four hours. Then he left and went home. The next morning, when Powers didn’t show up for work, Cummings telephoned the hotel and was informed that the occupant could not be roused. He went to the hotel, found her dead, and left in a panic. Cummings denied any responsibility for Powers’s death. Police reported that Cummings was on the verge of collapse during questioning.
In speaking with Powers’s family, Magrath learned that she had not been in the best of health. The young woman had been suffering fainting spells of late but had no other significant medical history. No marks of violence were observed during the postmortem examination, nothing to indicate asphyxiation or poisoning. During the autopsy, Magrath discovered that Powers had a severely dilated heart. Her death was entirely due to natural causes.
Cummings had no culpability in Powers’s death but through a coincidence of circumstances was caught in an embarrassing situation. Police released Cummings from custody, and he went home to his wife. The details of their reunion were not recorded for posterity.
