“NICE woman,” toxicologist Alexander Gettler commented to reporters at the trial of Ruth Snyder, New York’s infamous “Double Indemnity” murderer. In 1927 Snyder (pictured) and her lover killed Snyder’s husband with alcohol, chloroform, garrote wire and a bash to the skull with an iron sash weight. It was bloody overkill but, as Gettler testified, it was the chloroform that killed him.
In Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook, we see Gettler and his colleague, chief medical examiner Charles Norris, wield Bunsen burners and flasks against the “nice” denizens of jazz-age Manhattan. Here are the ladies who spiked cocoa with thallium,…
