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The company executives, it would be fair to say, were taken completely by surprise by the five lawsuits. In fact, they dubbed it a “conspiracy,”1 cooked up by what they termed “Berry’s outfit.”2 Their previous unshakable confidence in rejecting all pleas for clemency had been based upon the fact that the statute of limitations had made them, in their eyes, invincible—but now, with Berry’s adroit interpretation of the law, they were left scrambling for their defense.

It was, perhaps, inevitable who they would blame. The plaintiffs, the firm alleged in their reply to the girls’ claims, were “guilty of contributory negligence in failing to exercise due care and precaution for [their] safety.”3 And the corporation went further: it denied that the girls were ever instructed to lip-point; it denied any woman in the studio did; it denied the radium powder clung to them. On and on, denial after denial, for pages and pages of legalese. The company admitted only one thing: “it gave no warning.”4 That was because it “denie[d] that radium was dangerous.”5

Such denials (such outright lies, one might say…) comprised its written rejoinder through the law, yet that was only the start of the firm’s attempt to take control of the situation. Now faced with the women squaring up to it in court, it fought back behind their backs. Miss Rooney, the former forelady of USRC, who was a good friend of Edna Hussman, was surprised when one of her erstwhile bosses suddenly appeared at Luminite and asked to speak to her. At first, she chatted happily with the visiting executive about the girls who had worked under her management, sharing intimate details of how they were getting on. The executive, thrilled, noted she gave him “considerable information.”6

It seems both the firm and the former forelady totally underestimated the strength of will of Grace Fryer. “Miss Rooney says that she feels certain that Grace Fryer was urged into the suit by the lawyers,”7 a company memo said. They little knew that, without Grace’s two-year fight to find an attorney, none of this would be happening.

The company, in fact, started to suspect not just the lawyers but a former friend of stabbing it in the back. “Miss Rooney seems to have reason to believe that Dr. [von] Sochocky was in back of all these cases,” the memo noted. “I certainly think we should get a line on what [von] Sochocky is doing and where he is.”8

The executive who conducted these informal chats with Miss Rooney came not once, not twice, but three times to her workplace to grill her about the girls. By the third visit, it seems she had cottoned on to what was happening. “Miss Rooney claimed to have no further information this morning,” noted the executive’s final memo on the subject. “Have an idea that she is merely shutting up on information for fear of doing her friend harm.”9

But it was of no consequence; the company had got what it needed and there were other sources of information easily to hand. For the firm now paid private detectives to follow the five girls, looking for dirt on them that it could present in court. Berry perhaps suspected that such underhanded tactics would be employed, given his decision to lead with Grace’s case.

Yet despite the lily-white innocence of Grace Fryer, it didn’t mean that any dirt kicked up didn’t stick. There was that old rumor—not even a rumor, a cold hard fact in black and white, printed on Amelia Maggia’s death certificate. She had died of syphilis, so who was to say that all these other girls, who had once worked alongside a girl of her sort, weren’t touched by the same Cupid’s disease? The rumors wafted around the streets of Orange, sidling as close to the girls as a second skin, just as the radium dust had once done. “You know how in small towns people gossip…” a relative of Grace later said.10

USRC had not forgotten that Grace had once proposed a $5,000 settlement. When the firm filed its legal response to Berry, there was a final paragraph included: “Kindly let us have your rock-bottom figure in settlement,” the firm’s lawyers wrote. “Do not let us dicker. Give us your very best offer.”11

As it was his job to do, Berry put the idea to Grace. One can imagine her response; Berry duly wrote back to USRC’s legal team—which now comprised three separate firms, some of which were representing the company’s insurers, who would have to pay out if the girls won—“So far as settlement is concerned, [Grace] does not desire to make any proposition.”12 In other words: we will see you in court.

Berry immediately threw himself into building his case. He quickly met the girls’ allies—Wiley, Hamilton, Hoffman, Martland, Humphries, and von Sochocky—and spent a lot of time reading their notes and interviewing them. Wiley gave him a damning account of all she had learned: “Although its employees were falling sick,” she said, “the corporation did nothing. USRC has done everything it could to obscure the issue and render proper relief to its employees impossible.”13

Learning of the cover-up of the Drinker report, Berry immediately grasped the impact of such double-dealing for his case—and wrote to Cecil Drinker to request that he give evidence to help the women. But Drinker responded, via his secretary, that: “He does not care to make testimony.”14 Berry would spend all summer trying to change his mind but, in the end, he was forced to issue a formal court summons.

Drinker wasn’t the only doctor not keen to testify. “While I thoroughly sympathize with the girls,” wrote Martland, “I cannot take sides in a civil suit.”15 Martland disliked lawyers and had no desire to get caught up in a legal battle; as much as he enjoyed a Sherlock Holmes mystery, he was not a fan of courtroom drama.

As Martland’s testimony was not certain—Berry would not give up trying to persuade him—Berry started hunting for another specialist who could take new breath tests of the girls to prove they were radioactive. But try as he might, he hit dead end after dead end. He found one specialist in Boston who was willing to assist, but the girls were not well enough to travel.

In the other camp, meanwhile, USRC was having no such problems, as Flinn was still acting as its expert; and not just for them, as Berry soon discovered.

Berry had now learned of the Waterbury Clock Company cases of radium poisoning. Essentially, their existence proved that his clients’ disease was occupational. Consequently, Berry wrote to the Workmen’s Compensation Commission in Connecticut, the state in which the watch firm was based, looking for evidence he could cite in court. But the commission’s response was totally unexpected: “Had anybody in this vicinity suffered an occupational disease,” its officer wrote, “I should have [had] it brought to my attention, as occupational diseases have been compensable in this state for several years. No claims have been filed with me. I have heard a number of rumors such as you have, but know nothing about them.”16

It was a conundrum. Connecticut law had a much more favorable statute of limitations of five years, which was just about long enough for a dial-painter to discover she had radium poisoning before bringing a lawsuit. By now, at least three dial-painters had died in Waterbury, and others were ill. Had not one of their families filed suit?

They had not—and there was a very good reason why: Dr. Frederick Flinn. Flinn had enjoyed access to the Waterbury girls almost from when they began falling ill. He was given privileged admittance to the workforce, and the girls not only knew him but trusted him. When he told them they were in perfect health, they believed him. And once radium poisoning was discovered, Flinn became “willing to play a two-faced role: to the dial-painters, he presented himself as a concerned medical expert, whereas for the company he persuaded dial-painters to accept settlements that explicitly freed the company from further liability.”17

And this was the reason that not one case had been filed with the Compensation Commission—any claims that might have been raised had been quietly settled by the firm. There was one obvious reason for the difference in the Waterbury Clock Company’s approach compared with that of USRC—and the clue is in its name. As Waterbury was a clock company, and not an out-and-out radium firm, agreeing to settlements—and in so doing tacitly admitting that the paint had harmed the girls—didn’t affect its wider business, for it didn’t make money from selling radium. And so, when its employees started dying, the company simply settled any cases that came up, using the gentle mediations of Dr. Flinn. “In these negotiations,” wrote one commentator, “Flinn held the upper hand. He knew what he wanted and the women he dealt with were invariably young, unsophisticated, vulnerable, and without the benefit of legal counsel.”18 Had the Waterbury women taken some legal advice, they could have discovered what Berry well knew: that under Connecticut law, many of them might well have found justice thanks to the more generous five-year statute. It is to be noted, however, that the statute was five years only at the time of the discovery of radium poisoning; following the emergence of the girls’ cases, the law was rewritten in order to shorten it.

With the good doctor’s intervention, the company spent an average of $5,600 ($75,000) per affected woman, but this figure is skewed by a handful of high settlements. Most victims received less than this average; some, insultingly, were offered only two-digit sums, such as—in one shocking case—$43.75 ($606) for a woman’s death.

If one squinted at the situation and tried really hard, one could say that Flinn did the Waterbury girls a favor. He certainly saw it that way: intervening to save them the trouble of bringing a lawsuit. But the company and Flinn held all the cards—and Flinn hadn’t finished with what Martland called his “double-dealing and two-faced”19 shenanigans. For even though Flinn had now been forced to acknowledge the existence of radium poisoning, it didn’t mean that all the girls who fell sick suffered from it. And so, as Flinn continued to run his tests on the Waterbury women, he continued to find no positive cases of radium poisoning. Not one—not in 1925, not in 1926, not in 1927. Only in the fading months of 1928 would he concede, at last, that five girls might be affected. He told one worker, Katherine Moore, on eight separate occasions that there was not a single trace of radium in her body. She later died from radium poisoning.

Berry, hearing back from the commission, knowing nothing of Flinn’s work at Waterbury, was completely stumped by the lack of evidence. But his new friend Alice Hamilton quickly realized what had gone on and filled him in. With the cases settled quietly by Flinn, of course there had been no evidence: no publicity; no Department of Labor knocking on the clock company’s door; no lawyers involved at all—just a tidy sum passed across a desk, and a grateful recipient who took it. It was all hush-hush.

None of it helped Raymond Berry.

From the beginning, Berry was very interested in Dr. Flinn. He had learned from the girls about his declarations of their good health—declarations that had confused them and for some girls taken the wind out of their sails when it came to filing suit. Berry thus decided as early as August 1927 to dig a little deeper into Dr. Flinn. His inquiries soon unearthed a shocking piece of news.

Dr. Flinn had been examining the girls: taking blood, reading their x-rays. He had been arranging medical treatment and writing to the women on the letter-headed paper of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. “[I] understood,” said Grace’s physician Dr. McCaffrey, who’d arranged her examination with Flinn, “that Dr. Flinn was an MD.”20

But now, when Berry asked the authorities to look into exactly who Flinn was, he received the following letter from the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners: “Our records do not show the issuance of a license to practice medicine and surgery or any branch of medicine and surgery to Frederick B. Flinn.”21

Flinn was not a medical doctor. His degree was in philosophy.

He was, as the Consumers League put it, “a fraud of frauds.”22