Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (36 page)
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Authors: Harold Schechter
“I told her that quinine was apt to make one feel wretched,” Mrs. Potts later testified, “but I thought it would do her good, so I advised her to take it. I left her at around three o’clock in the afternoon.” That was the last time she saw her daughter alive.
H
ELEN’S THREE ROOMMATES
, Frances Rockwell, Rachel Carson, and Henrietta Cookson, spent that Saturday evening at a symphony. Returning to the Comstock School at around ten-thirty, they found Helen already asleep. As they lit the gas jets and chatted about the concert, Helen awoke and said groggily: “Girls, I have had such beautiful dreams. I wish they could go on forever.”
Completing their toilets, the three young women extinguished the lights and retired. No sooner were they in bed, however, than they heard Helen groan. Rising, Frances and Rachel hurried to her side.
“I feel so queer, girls,” Helen said hoarsely. She was having trouble swallowing and was numb all over. “I can’t feel your hand at all,” she moaned when Frances tried calming her by stroking her head. “I believe I am dying.”
By then, Rachel had relit the gas lamps. Returning to Helen’s bedside, she was shocked at what she saw. “She looked like death,” the young woman later recalled. “She was very pale and the veins all stuck out on her forehead and were blue.”
Terrified, Rachel roused the headmistress, Lydia Day, who immediately summoned the school physician, Dr. Edward Fowler. By then, Helen, drenched in cold sweat and barely breathing, had lapsed into a deep coma. Recognizing the symptoms of profound opium poisoning, Fowler, assisted by two colleagues, labored throughout the night, applying artificial respiration, administering black coffee enemas, injecting atropine, whiskey, and digitalis, and employing electric shocks and oxygen gas—to
little avail. Scouring the room for clues, Fowler turned up the empty box of pills prescribed by Carlyle Harris, who—having just returned from his pleasure jaunt to Old Point Comfort—was immediately sent for.
Harris’ response to the crisis—typical of the “malignant narcissism” that criminal psychologists now recognize as a hallmark of sociopathic behavior—would turn out to be one of the most damning bits of evidence against him. Arriving at 6:00 a.m., he seemed shockingly indifferent to Helen’s dire condition. Insisting that the pills he had prescribed were harmless, he expressed concern only for himself. “Do you think I will be held responsible?” he repeatedly asked Dr. Fowler, who—appalled by the young man’s self-centeredness—snapped: “I am not interested in who is responsible. I am trying to save this girl’s life.”
Fowler and his colleagues labored heroically but futilely for another four hours. When, at around 10:00 a.m., Helen was finally pronounced dead, Harris responded in his predictably shameless way. “My God,” he cried. “What will become of me?”
In heartbreaking contrast to her husband’s reaction, Helen’s parents were devastated, particularly her father, who refused to believe that his daughter was gone. Insisting that he saw a flush on her cheek as she lay in her open coffin at her funeral service, he would not permit her to be buried, in the desperate conviction that she was not really dead and would arise at any moment. It was not until three days after the service that he accepted the truth and allowed her to be lowered into the ground.
Several theories were put forth about Helen’s death. Some speculated that, in filling the prescription, the pharmacist had committed a terrible mistake and reversed the relative proportions of quinine and morphine. Others suggested that, after taking the first pill and finding it had no effect, Helen had swallowed the remaining three at once and died from an accidental overdose. There was even talk of deliberate suicide.
As reporters for the yellow press dug deeper into the case, however, they began uncovering scandalous facts about Carl Harris, including his arrest for running a liquor and gambling joint and his proclivity for performing abortions on his pregnant girlfriends. He was promptly expelled from medical school and denounced from city pulpits as “the vilest wretch ever vomited out of hell.” On March 5, the body of his “girl-wife” (as the papers consistently referred to Helen) was exhumed and the viscera turned over to the country’s leading toxicologist, Prof. Rudolph Witthaus, who confirmed that the otherwise healthy young woman had been poisoned. Five days later, Carlyle W. Harris was indicted for murder.
A
T THE TRIAL
, which began in mid-January 1892 after a protracted delay, Assistant District Attorney Francis Wellman built a devastating case against Harris, depicting him as one of “the greatest libertines of the age”—a “human wolf” who, after satisfying his “unbridled and unholy lust,” had concocted a diabolical plan to rid himself of his all-too-trusting victim. Harris had evidently hit on his scheme while attending a lecture on poisons by one of his professors, Dr. George Peabody, who “laid particular stress upon the difficulty of detection in cases where morphine had been used feloniously.” During the talk, “samples of the drug were handed around in wide-mouthed bottles, and the students were permitted to take out and could examine the contents.” Evidently, when Harris’ turn came, he managed to steal some of the opiate and smuggle it out of the classroom.
A few days later, he went to the pharmacy and procured a half-dozen capsules of quinine and morphine compound, ostensibly for Helen’s headaches. Bringing them home, he “removed the mixture contained in one, substituting in its place pure morphine to the amount of at least five grains—a frightful quantity when half that much is considered a lethal dose.
“He then delivered the box containing the four capsules to his loving young wife,” continued Wellman. “On the very next day, he started for Old Comfort, Virginia, where he remained a week. It was safe to assume that the deadly pill would not be taken last, so that there would be one or more left for analysis when the questions as to Helen’s death were raised. As only a harmless mixture would be found, it would be assumed that natural causes were responsible. Then again, the direction to take the capsules before retiring would insure her passing away in her sleep, with no opportunity to observe the symptoms. Harris being away at the time, no one would think of connecting him with the catastrophe.”
As an added precaution, however, Harris made sure to retain two of the original six capsules, so that “if any suspicion were to attach to him afterwards,” he could prove that the medicine he had prescribed for Helen could not possibly have killed her. “Truly,” Wellman declared, “a cold-blooded plan worthy of its callous inventor.” That it had not succeeded was proof of an eternal truism. “The plans of the shedder of human blood always fail,” thundered Wellman. “Murder will out because God wills it so!”
T
HROUGHOUT HIS THREE-WEEK
trial, Harris observed the proceedings with a look of unflappable calm that was in marked contrast to the demeanor of his mother, who sat devotedly by his side, making no effort to conceal her feelings. When, after deliberating for less than ninety minutes, the jury returned a guilty verdict on February 2, Mrs. Ledyard (according to contemporary accounts) “uttered a piercing cry and dropped to the floor in a dead faint,” while Harris himself “did not betray any reaction by so much as a flutter of the eyelash.”
He went to the electric chair the following year with the same unnatural composure, coolly declaring his innocence even as the guards adjusted the straps. He was buried in a handsome casket to which his mother had affixed a metal plate inscribed with the words:
C
ARLYLE
H
ARRIS
Murdered May 8th 1893
Carlyle Harris was still awaiting execution in Sing Sing when New York City was riveted by another murder trial involving a member of the medical community, a physician named Robert Buchanan. That the two cases occurred so close together was no coincidence. Buchanan was a classic copycat, a poisoner who paid close attention to his predecessor’s MO and set out to prove that he could do better.
Born in Nova Scotia, Buchanan studied in Edinburgh, Scotland, before moving with his wife to Manhattan, where he established a thriving practice. Like Carlyle Harris, he led a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence, maintaining a respectable façade by day while passing his evenings at a posh New Jersey bordello run by a middle-aged madam named Anna Sutherland. Though Sutherland was no beauty—one historian reports that “she was obese, sported a wart on her large nose, had dyed orange hair, and was twice his age”—she possessed a substantial fortune that, in Buchanan’s avaricious eyes, more than made up for these flaws. The two soon became lovers. In short order, Buchanan had divorced his wife, persuaded Sutherland to draft a new will leaving everything to him, and took the former brothel keeper as his bride.
Tensions immediately developed between the newlyweds. Though fond of her fortune, Buchanan was so put off by his wife’s coarse manners and unsightly looks that he tried to conceal the marriage from the world, claiming that the “old hag” now occupying his Manhattan residence was his housekeeper. He continued to spend his nights carousing in various dens of iniquity. For her part, Anna seethed with resentment over her husband’s incorrigible ways and his obvious distaste for everything about her except her money.
It was the trial of Carlyle Harris in January 1892 that showed Buchanan a way out of his predicament. From Buchanan’s point of view, the young medical student had had the right idea when he tried ridding himself of his unwanted wife by slipping her poison. But Harris had carried out his scheme like “a bungling fool,” “a stupid amateur.” As Buchanan observed to various acquaintances, morphine poisoning was too easily detected from its effect on the pupils, which were contracted to pinpoints by the drug. Such a telltale sign could easily be disguised by putting a few drops of belladonna in the victim’s eyes, causing the pupils to dilate.
Three months later, in April 1892, Anna Buchanan fell ill after finishing breakfast, quickly slipped into a coma, and died. The attending physician attributed her death to a cerebral hemorrhage. A few days after her funeral, Dr. Buchanan—now richer by $50,000 (more than $1 million in today’s money)—traveled to Nova Scotia, where he promptly remarried his first wife and brought her back to New York.
In his absence, however, friends of the late Anna Sutherland, suspicious of her sudden death, had contacted a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s World, who began his own investigation, turning up a wealth of incriminating information. Under pressure from the paper, the coroner ordered Anna’s body exhumed. When an analysis of her viscera confirmed the presence of morphine, Buchanan was arrested.
After the high drama of the Harris case, New Yorkers must have experienced a keen sense of déjà vu when Buchanan’s trial opened in March 1893, since a number of the same figures were involved, including the eminent toxicologist Dr. Rudolph Witthaus, who asserted that “treatment of the eyes with atropine”—a derivative of belladonna—“might very well eliminate the narrowing of the pupils which otherwise follows morphine poisoning.” His testimony led to a dramatic and unusually gruesome demonstration. A live cat was brought into the courtroom and injected with a fatal dose of morphine. Then, as jurors closely observed the effects on the dying animal’s pupils, drops of belladonna were placed into its eyes. District Attorney Francis Wellman, who had successfully prosecuted Carlyle Harris, helped seal Buchanan’s fate when he called the nurse who had attended Anna in her final hours and who confirmed that the defendant “had put some drops into his wife’s eyes for no apparent reason.”
Believing that Carlyle Harris’ attorneys had made a strategic error by not putting their client on the stand, Buchanan insisted on testifying on his own behalf, only to be torn apart by Wellman’s ferocious cross-examination. Convicted and sentenced to the electric chair, he languished on Sing Sing’s death row for two years before his final appeal was denied. He was electrocuted on July 2, 1895.
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Sources: The Trial of Carlyle W. Harris for Poisoning his Wife, Helen Potts, at New York (New York: 1892); Charles Bosworth and Lewis Thompson, The Carlyle Harris Case (New York: Collier Books, 1961); Hope Ledyard, Articles, Speeches and Poems of Carlyle W. Harris (New York: J. S. Ogilvie, 1893); Francis L. Wellman, Luck and Opportunity: Recollections (New York: Macmillan, 1938).
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Sources: Francis Wellman, Luck and Opportunity: Recollections (New York: Macmillan, 1938); Jay Robert Nash, Murder, America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982); “Morphine,” in Crimes and Punishment, vol. 18 (Westport, CT: H. S. Stuttman, Inc., 1994).
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