as those caused when someone with an open cut on a hand polished the family silver. The exposure was low enough that most people, after becoming miserably sick, survived. But Gettler had logged one fatality, following a meal served by a cook who failed to thoroughly wash out a pot after polishing it to a gleam inside and out. Gettler worried—no, he knew—that people using cyanides didn’t appreciate how dangerous they were: “It is of considerable practical significance that hydrocyanic acid is a poison for all members of the animal kingdom.”
In other words, cyanides were useful, plentiful, easy to acquire—and astonishingly lethal.
STILL, most murderers tended to avoid cyanide—the poison left a too-obvious trail of evidence. The resulting corpse would be a textbook study in violent death, marked by bruising discoloration, twisted by the last convulsions, often eerily scented with cyanide’s characteristic warning perfume, a faint, fruity scent of almonds. (Researchers would later find that a fair number of people carry a genetic mutation that keeps them from smelling cyanide.)
It was more popular as a suicide choice due to its reputation for acting quickly. As Gettler wrote, “The symptoms of acute poisoning proceed with almost lightning-like rapidity. Within two to five minutes after ingestion of the poison, the individual collapses, frequently with a loud scream (death scream).” In lesser amounts the poison kills more slowly, if faster than most other toxic substances. The average survival after swallowing cyanide is between fifteen and forty-five minutes. Fast or slow, it is never a kind ending. The last minutes of a cyanide death are brutal, marked by convulsions, a desperate gasping for air, a rising bloody froth of vomit and saliva, and finally a blessed release into unconsciousness.
WHETHER SWALLOWED or inhaled, all members of the cyanide family kill in the same way—they shut down the body’s ability to carry or absorb oxygen. In the late 1890s one daring physician swallowed a light dose of potassium cyanide to test its effects. In Gettler’s day medical papers still cited his gasping cries that he was suffocating. Although the doctor survived, no one had repeated that experiment.
Cyanide’s action is murderously precise. It attaches with stunning speed to protein molecules in the blood—called hemoglobins—that carry oxygen throughout the body. Thus the poison is rapidly circulated by the bloodstream and delivered to cells through the body. There it shreds cellular energy mechanisms, breaks down cellular respiration, and causes rapid cell death due to oxygen starvation. Cellular respiration suffers an instant “paralysis,” as Gettler once put it, and the body begins to die. Enzyme production is stymied, electrical signals falter, and as muscle cells and nerve cells explosively fail, body-rattling convulsions frequently result.
After death, the bluish tones of oxygen deprivation mottle the skin. On autopsy, the blood shows such a dark red that it sometimes appears purple. The veins leading from lung to heart are engorged with blood—evidence of the heart’s desperate efforts to circulate more and more blood as the body seeks desperately for any stray trace of oxygen. In Gettler’s time, the easily available cyanide salts provided further specific evidence of the poison because they were so corrosive. If swallowed, they burned their way down. An autopsy of a cyanide victim found the mucous membranes of the lips, mouth, and esophagus darkened to a bloody, ragged red—especially if the poison had been taken without food to buffer the impact. The stomach became swollen, discolored, clotted with swampy, streaky mucus produced as the cyanide salts broke down.
In the four years since Gettler had become city toxicologist, he’d investigated seventy-nine cyanide deaths, scattered across the boroughs. Forty-nine had been suicides, usually by sodium cyanide. Sodium cyanide was
In other words, cyanides were useful, plentiful, easy to acquire—and astonishingly lethal.
STILL, most murderers tended to avoid cyanide—the poison left a too-obvious trail of evidence. The resulting corpse would be a textbook study in violent death, marked by bruising discoloration, twisted by the last convulsions, often eerily scented with cyanide’s characteristic warning perfume, a faint, fruity scent of almonds. (Researchers would later find that a fair number of people carry a genetic mutation that keeps them from smelling cyanide.)
It was more popular as a suicide choice due to its reputation for acting quickly. As Gettler wrote, “The symptoms of acute poisoning proceed with almost lightning-like rapidity. Within two to five minutes after ingestion of the poison, the individual collapses, frequently with a loud scream (death scream).” In lesser amounts the poison kills more slowly, if faster than most other toxic substances. The average survival after swallowing cyanide is between fifteen and forty-five minutes. Fast or slow, it is never a kind ending. The last minutes of a cyanide death are brutal, marked by convulsions, a desperate gasping for air, a rising bloody froth of vomit and saliva, and finally a blessed release into unconsciousness.
WHETHER SWALLOWED or inhaled, all members of the cyanide family kill in the same way—they shut down the body’s ability to carry or absorb oxygen. In the late 1890s one daring physician swallowed a light dose of potassium cyanide to test its effects. In Gettler’s day medical papers still cited his gasping cries that he was suffocating. Although the doctor survived, no one had repeated that experiment.
Cyanide’s action is murderously precise. It attaches with stunning speed to protein molecules in the blood—called hemoglobins—that carry oxygen throughout the body. Thus the poison is rapidly circulated by the bloodstream and delivered to cells through the body. There it shreds cellular energy mechanisms, breaks down cellular respiration, and causes rapid cell death due to oxygen starvation. Cellular respiration suffers an instant “paralysis,” as Gettler once put it, and the body begins to die. Enzyme production is stymied, electrical signals falter, and as muscle cells and nerve cells explosively fail, body-rattling convulsions frequently result.
After death, the bluish tones of oxygen deprivation mottle the skin. On autopsy, the blood shows such a dark red that it sometimes appears purple. The veins leading from lung to heart are engorged with blood—evidence of the heart’s desperate efforts to circulate more and more blood as the body seeks desperately for any stray trace of oxygen. In Gettler’s time, the easily available cyanide salts provided further specific evidence of the poison because they were so corrosive. If swallowed, they burned their way down. An autopsy of a cyanide victim found the mucous membranes of the lips, mouth, and esophagus darkened to a bloody, ragged red—especially if the poison had been taken without food to buffer the impact. The stomach became swollen, discolored, clotted with swampy, streaky mucus produced as the cyanide salts broke down.
In the four years since Gettler had become city toxicologist, he’d investigated seventy-nine cyanide deaths, scattered across the boroughs. Forty-nine had been suicides, usually by sodium cyanide. Sodium cyanide was
Similar Books
Resurrection Express
Stephen Romano
Zombies: The Recent Dead
Paula Guran
The Swashbuckling Yarn of Milady Vixen
Christopher Newman
Eruption (The Hunted Series Book 3)
Ivy Smoak
Without a Doubt
Lindsay Paige
From the Ashes
Daisy Harris
Spilled Blood
Brian Freeman