On Saturday, December 24, 1898—one year almost to the day since his gloating triumph over Roland Molineux—Harry Cornish arrived for work at his customary time, shortly after ten in the morning. As usual, he first checked his mailbox. Along with several letters, the box contained a surprise: a small package, wrapped in manila paper and tied with string. The wrapping bore several canceled postage stamps and a handwritten inscription:
MR. HARRY CORNISH
KNICKERBOCKER ATHLETIC CLUB
MADISON AVENUE AND FOURTY FIFTH STREET
NEW YORK CITY.
There was no return address.
Curious, he carried the package upstairs to the gymnasium and settled himself at his desk. When he tore off the wrapping, he discovered a pale blue gift box from Tiffany’s. Removing the lid of the box, he found, at one end, a small receptacle resembling a silver candlestick, its lip and the rim of its base adorned with a beaded design.
At the other end of the box, separated by some crumpled tissue paper, was a small bottle labeled “Emerson’s Bromo-Seltzer.” With the manufacturer’s wrapper removed, the bottle fit perfectly into the silver holder. Cornish did not examine the bottle very carefully. Had he done so, he might have observed some odd features. The bottle appeared to be used, its label badly soiled as though from repeated handling. It was also smaller than the average bromo-seltzer bottle, and of a darker shade of blue.
Cornish’s assistant, Patrick Fineran, and a club member named Harry A. King were standing beside the desk when Cornish opened the package. The three men chuckled. Clearly the gift was a practical joke—an amusing warning for Cornish not to overindulge during the upcoming holidays.
At Fineran’s suggestion, Cornish—who had tossed the wrapping paper into his wastebasket—fetched it out and scissored off the address. Perhaps he might be able to identify the anonymous sender at some later time by the handwriting. Cornish stuck the scrap of paper into his desk drawer and turned his attention to other matters.
King, who was suffering from a mild headache, picked up the bromo-seltzer bottle in its sterling silver holder and carried it to the water cooler, just outside the gymnasium door. Somewhat to his annoyance, the cooler was empty. He returned the bottle, unopened, to Cornish’s desk—unaware that he had just been the beneficiary of an extraordinary stroke of good luck.1
For the past two months, Cornish had been boarding with his distant cousins, Mrs. Katherine Adams—a sturdily built widow of sixty-two—and her grown daughter, Florence Rodgers, who was then separated from her husband.2 When Cornish returned from work that evening and told the two women about his gift, they teased him about it, joking that it must have been sent by an unknown lady admirer.
Three days later, on Tuesday, December 27, Cornish brought the silver holder and the medicine bottle back to the apartment. As it happened, the design on the holder closely matched the pattern on Florence’s toiletry items—her silver-handled brush, comb, and mirror. Cornish told her to keep the holder; he placed the bromo-seltzer bottle on the dresser in his bedroom.
That evening, Cornish and the two women attended the theater, then went for a late supper at the Colonial Cafe on Columbus Avenue and Eighty-second Street, where Mrs. Adams imbibed one too many glasses of wine.3
The next morning, December 28, Florence arose at her usual time, around 9:00 A.M. Emerging from her bedroom, she found her mother seated at the dining room table, looking very pale and pressing a moist compress to her forehead.
“Are you all right, Mother?” she asked.
Mrs. Adams replied that she had awakened with a bad headache. She had been up for an hour or so, puttering around the apartment in an effort to “work off” the pain. But the headache had only gotten worse. Was there anything in the house for her to take?
Florence was about to answer no when she remembered the bromo-seltzer her cousin had brought home the previous evening. Stepping to Harry’s bedroom, she knocked on the door.
Cornish had been awake for the past half hour. He had washed up, dressed, and was now seated in his room, reading the newspaper, which was left outside the apartment door each morning by the building hallboy.
When Florence asked for the bromo-seltzer, explaining that her mother was feeling ill, he handed her the bottle and returned to the paper.
A few minutes later, he heard her call his name. Responding to her summons, he carried his paper into the dining room, where he found her seated beside her mother at the table.
“I can’t get it open, Harry,” she said. “Can you try?” She passed him the bottle and went off to use the bathroom.
Taking her seat, Cornish examined the mouth of the bottle. It was sealed with wax and tightly stoppered with a cork. With no corkscrew in the apartment, he was forced to make do with the tines of a dinner fork. After several minutes of concentrated struggle, he finally managed to work the bottle open.
“You’ll need half a glass of water,” he said, reading the directions on the label.
Mrs. Adams rose and repaired to the kitchen, returning a few moments later with two glasses, one empty, the other half full.
The directions specified a heaping teaspoonful of the bromo-seltzer. After banging on the bottle to dislodge some of the powder, Cornish poured it into the empty glass. Mrs. Adams then added the water from the other glass, stirred the mixture with a spoon, raised the glass to her lips, and sipped.
“Awful,” she said with a grimace, setting the glass down on the table. Indeed, the taste was so disagreeable that she’d been unable to finish the dose. A small amount remained at the bottom of the glass.
Cornish picked it up and took a swallow. “Tastes all right to me,” he said. “It’s supposed to be bitter—it’s medicine.” Then, he took up his paper and went back to his reading, while Mrs. Adams turned and left the room.
In view of our contemporary concerns about product tampering, it seems almost unbelievable that anyone would casually ingest medication received through the mail from an anonymous sender. That both Mrs. Adams and Harry Cornish (and others, too, as events would prove) did so without a second thought reveals something about their era, though exactly what is hard to say. Perhaps people were simply more trusting back then. Certainly, they paid little heed to the ingredients of the Kilmer’s Acid Phosphate, Carlsbad Sprudel Salt, Cascarets Candy Cathartic, Peruna Catarrh Tablets, and countless other nostrums they routinely put into their bodies.
It was also true that the person who had mailed Cornish the bottle had taken care to make it appear unopened, sealing it with paraffin and enclosing it in its original manufacturer’s wrapper.
Precisely how long it took for the potion to do its work is unclear—two minutes, three minutes, perhaps as many as five. Florence Rodgers was still in the bathroom when the door suddenly flew open and her mother burst inside, her face a sickly color. Staggering across the floor, she bent over the bowl and began to vomit loudly.
The window opened onto an air shaft, and Florence—embarrassed that the neighbors might hear her mother retching—asked her not to make so much noise. She then left the bathroom, assuming that her mother was having a bad reaction to the bromo-seltzer.
No sooner had Florence reached the dining room, however, than she heard her mother emit a “peculiar cry” (as she later described it). She immediately dashed back into the bathroom. Raising her head from the bowl, Mrs. Adams—whose complexion was now a ghastly blue—lifted her hands toward her daughter, then collapsed onto the tiled floor. Florence sprang to her mother’s side and tried to raise her, but to no avail. “She was a dead weight,” Florence later said, recalling the horror of the moment. Terrified, she shouted for Harry.4
Hearing his cousin’s cry for help, Cornish rose from his chair. His legs felt oddly weak. By the time he made it into the bathroom, he was afraid he might throw up. Fighting back the nausea, he knelt beside Mrs. Adams’s body and attempted to raise her. Though he normally could have carried her “as easily as a child,” he found that he did not have the strength to lift her from the floor.5
With the assistance of a house guest, Fred Hovey—an old family friend who had spent the night at the Adams apartment—Florence and Harry managed to carry Mrs. Adams into the dining room and set her down on the sofa. Cornish then made for the front door and shouted for the hallboy.
“Get the doctor at once,” he said. “Tell him that Mrs. Adams collapsed after taking some medication. Run!”
A few minutes later, at approximately 9:35 A.M., Dr. Edwin F. Hitchcock was seated in his office at 72 West Eighty-seventh Street when the hallboy burst in and conveyed the message. Quickly gathering up his emergency kit—which included a pair of hypodermic needles, a stomach siphon, and three tablet cases—he strode to 61 West Eighty-sixth Street and proceeded upstairs to the second floor. At the top of the landing, he saw a small group of people clustered outside the Adams apartment. They parted to make way for the doctor as he hurried inside.
Mrs. Adams lay unconscious on the sofa, drawing harsh, agonized breaths. Her complexion was blue, her features contorted with pain. At his first glance of the stricken woman, Dr. Hitchcock assumed that she had ingested some variety of irritant poison. Bending to the body, he made a quick examination. Her pulse was barely detectable, her forehead cold and clammy. He could see that she was near death.
Immediately, he went into action. He loosened her clothing, applied warm compresses to her chest, held ammonia to her nose, slapped her on the face, injected her with stimulants—whiskey and a small dose of sulphate of strychnine—and gave her artificial respiration.
While he worked, he put some questions to her daughter, who sat at one end of the sofa, cradling her mother’s head in her lap. Florence explained what had happened—how her mother had gotten terribly ill after taking a dose of the bromo-seltzer that her cousin Harry had received in the mail a few days earlier. As Hitchcock kept up his hopeless efforts, Florence clung to the desperate belief that her mother was simply “in a faint.” Even when Mrs. Adams’s jaw went slack and her bosom ceased its convulsive heaving, she wouldn’t accept the truth. She continued to wave an open phial of ammonia beneath her mother’s nose, trying to revive her.
From somewhere else in the apartment, Dr. Hitchcock could hear the sound of violent retching. “Who’s that?” he asked Florence.
Explaining that it was Harry—who had taken the same medication that had sickened her mother—Florence urged Hitchcock to run in and help him. She would stay there with her mother.
Hitchcock found Cornish in the bathroom, bent nearly double over the toilet bowl, retching violently. Fred Hovey was holding Cornish’s head. Hitchcock turned up the light from the gas jet and peered into the bowl to see if he could tell anything about the poison from the look of Cornish’s ejecta. But the bowl was empty, Cornish having long since emptied the contents of his stomach.
When Cornish asked for something to quell the retching, Hitchcock refused. Though not an expert on poisons, he knew that copious vomiting was recommended for such cases.
Leaving Cornish with Hovey, Hitchcock returned to the dining room and resumed his efforts. He knew, of course, that they were futile. Mrs. Adams was already dead. But he wanted Florence to feel that everything humanly possible had been done for her mother.
Several minutes later, Cornish entered the dining room on wobbly legs, his normally ruddy complexion replaced by a blue-tinged pallor. Shakily, he lowered himself onto one of the chairs. The bottle labeled bromo-seltzer still sat on the table. Cornish picked it up and passed it to Hitchcock.
“Do you have any idea what this might be?” he asked hoarsely.
“Well, it’s evidently not bromo-seltzer,” said Hitchcock, examining the bottle.
Licking the tip of his pinky, he stuck his finger into the bottle and extracted a small quantity of the substance. He then brushed his fingertip lightly across the lapel of his jacket, knocking away all but a small particle, which he placed on the tip of his tongue.
Instantly, he tasted bitter almonds and knew that he had just ingested half a grain of one of the deadliest poisons in existence—cyanide.
Almost immediately, he began to feel sick. Taking a swig of whiskey to revive himself, he asked if Cornish felt strong enough to go for help.
Cornish rose to his feet and nodded.
Hitchcock asked him to go fetch Dr. E. Styles Potter, a colleague who lived two blocks away. In sending Cornish on this errand, Hitchcock had several motives. He wanted to keep Cornish moving and get him out in the open air. He also feared that he himself might soon be incapacitated (if not killed) by the poison he had just sampled.
While Cornish was gone, Hitchcock continued to work on Mrs. Adams’s body, partly to keep himself active, partly to satisfy Florence Rodgers, who still begged him to help her mother. About ten minutes later, Cornish returned with Dr. Potter, who needed just a quick look at Mrs. Adams to see that she was (as Hitchcock later put it) “perfectly dead.”6
Potter then turned his attention to the two poisoned men. After satisfying himself that they were in no danger of dying, he took a linen napkin from the dining room table and gently covered Mrs. Adams’s face, while Florence Rodgers—unable to deny the truth any longer—buried her own face in her hands and wept.