Given the ubiquity of serial killers in our movies, TV shows, and paperback thrillers, a person might be forgiven for thinking that our country is crawling with homicidal psychopaths. In reality, the number of serial killers at large in the United States at any given time is, relative to the total population, infinitesimal: no more than fifty, according to the most reliable FBI estimates. The average citizen, in other words, is far less likely to be stabbed by a psycho while taking a shower than to slip in the bathtub and die.
The same sort of disparity existed in the nineteenth century in regard to poisoners. According to one crime historian, “poisoning accounted for less than one percent of murder cases that entered the criminal justice system” in the 1800s.1 And yet, poison-murder was everywhere in the popular culture of the time. At least a hundred true-crime books were devoted to the subject, while writers of “sensation novels, detective stories, and other popular fiction turned frequently to poisoning as a plot device.”2
Gilded age newspapers were quick to exploit the public’s fascination with poisoners. During one month-long span in the late 1800s, the New York City dailies ran no fewer than five poison-related headlines: POISONED COLOGNE SENT TO BROOKLYN GIRL; ARSENIC IN JELLY; HIRED TO POISON A CHILD;GRANDMOTHER ACCUSED OF POISONING NEIGHBOR’S WELL; and POISON IN WINE PRETTY GIRL INDUCED HER LOVER TO DRINK. Even an instance of alleged pet murder—DOG DEAD BY POISON, SAYS MASTER—made the front pages.3
Several poisoning cases became bona fide media sensations. In 1891, for example, New York City was riveted by the story of Carlyle Harris, a medical student who murdered his young wife by putting a lethal dose of morphine in her sleeping pills. The following year, a Manhattan physician named Robert Buchanan used the same narcotic (mixed with some belladonna to conceal the symptoms of poisoning) to rid himself of his own wife, a former brothel keeper he had wed for her money. Shortly after Buchanan’s trial came to an end, yet another physician, Dr. Henry Meyer, was convicted of murdering an acquaintance with arsenic and antimony as part of an insurance scam.
And then there was the irresistibly lurid case of the San Francisco femme fatale, Mrs. Cordelia Botkin.
The estranged wife of a fellow with the unlikely name of Welcome A. Botkin, Cordelia was thirty-eight years old in 1892—already past her prime in an era when a woman of forty was considered to be “in the cold and constricting clutch of middle age.”4 “Time had laid upon her the unkind stigmata of full-blown maturity,” as one commentator puts it.5
Despite her advanced years, however, she possessed a powerfully seductive charm and, in September of that year, embarked on an affair with a young cad named John P. Dunning, a journalist ten years her junior with a wife and children of his own in Delaware. Their liaison lasted for nearly six years, until Dunning, tired of his “maturely alluring” lover, broke off the relationship and decamped for Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War as a correspondent for the Associated Press.
Not long afterward, on the afternoon of August 9, 1898, a package arrived at the Dover, Delaware, post office addressed to Dunning’s wife, Elizabeth. Inside was a box of chocolate bonbons, along with a handwritten note reading: “With love to yourself and baby. Mrs. C.”
That evening, after a dinner of trout and fritters, Mrs. Dunning sat on the porch and shared the treats with her older sister, her nephew and niece, and two young neighbors, Misses Bateman and Millington, who had stopped by for a visit. A few hours later, all six became violently ill. The children and the two young ladies eventually recovered, but Mrs. Dunning and her sister—who had devoured the lion’s share of the candies—died painfully a few days later. Autopsies revealed the presence of lethal doses of arsenic in the viscera of both women, a finding confirmed when the leftover bonbons were analyzed by chemists.
John Dunning was immediately summoned home. He needed only a glance at the handwritten note to know who had sent the package. “Cordelia!” he gasped, then—“broken with grief and abased with shame”6—he proceeded to spill out the story of his affair with Mrs. Botkin.
The San Francisco papers quickly got wind of the investigation, and Hearst’s Examiner turned the case into a full-fledged media circus. His “murder squad” located the confectionery store where the bonbons had been purchased, traced the arsenic to a local drugstore, and tracked down Cordelia Botkin herself, who had taken refuge at her sister’s house in St. Helena. One of Hearst’s ace women reporters, Lizzie Livernash, immediately sped to Mrs. Botkin’s side and, ingratiating herself with the fugitive, wangled a series of interviews that were splashed across the Examiner’s front pages.
The frenzied coverage of Mrs. Botkin’s trial, which began in early December 1898, boosted the already sky-high circulation of the Examiner to stratospheric new heights, proving that few stories could sell more papers in that era than a poisoning case with the right sensational ingredients. Hearst, then in the thick of his newspaper war with Joseph Pulitzer, could only hope that fate would supply him with an East Coast version of the Botkin affair, which he could exploit to equally dramatic effect in the Journal.
And then—even before Mrs. Botkin’s inevitable conviction was handed down—fate obliged.