فصل 27

27

NEWARK, NEW JERSEY

—1927—

The news of Flinn’s non-medical degree was shocking to all. Wiley, reeling from being duped, called him “a real villain.”1 Hamilton wrote to Flinn urging him to “consider very seriously the stand you are taking.”2 But Flinn was nonplussed. He replied to Hamilton: “What you mean by ‘my recent conduct’ is beyond my ken.”3 He seems to have been unperturbed by Berry’s discovery of his real degree; in his eyes, he was still an expert in industrial hygiene—just as Hoffman, a statistician, could also be called a specialist in that field—and he had done nothing wrong.

Hamilton was frustrated by Flinn’s glib reply. He is “impossible to deal with,”4 she exclaimed. Berry, meanwhile, reported Flinn to the authorities for practicing medicine without a license.

Separately from the Flinn matter, Hamilton now equipped Berry with what would prove to be an all-important secret weapon: a personal connection with Walter Lippmann and the World. The World was arguably the most powerful newspaper in America at the time. It promised to “never lack sympathy with the poor [and] always remain devoted to public welfare,”5 so the dial-painters’ case was a perfect cause célèbre for the paper to get behind. Lippmann was one of its leading writers; he would become the paper’s editor in 1929 and later be deemed by several sources as the most influential journalist of the twentieth century. To have him in the girls’ camp was something of a coup.

Immediately, Berry got a taste of just what Lippmann could do. USRC, as was to be expected, had cited the statute of limitations in its defense; the company argued that the cases should be thrown out of court before the firm’s guilt could even be examined. But Lippmann was quick to give his own interpretation of that kind of legal trickery in the World, calling the attempt by the corporation to take refuge in the statute “intolerable”6 and “despicable.”7 “It is scarcely thinkable,” he wrote, “that the Court will not agree with counsel for the complainant.”8

He was right, in a way; the court did not agree with the company. Instead, the girls’ cases—which had all been consolidated into one case to avoid duplicate hearings—were transferred to the Court of Chancery, where their cases would be presented and a ruling given on whether Berry’s interpretation of the statute held. Assuming he and the girls were triumphant, there would then be a second trial, which would rule on whether the company was at fault. The Court of Chancery was dubbed “the Court of King’s Conscience”9: it was where pleas for mercy that might be left unanswered through a strict reading of the law were heard. The trial date was set for January 12, 1928.

There was much to do before then. Berry had at last found a specialist who would run the new radioactivity tests on the girls; Elizabeth Hughes was a physicist and former assistant to von Sochocky. The tests were planned for November 1927. Berry knew, however, that whatever Mrs. Hughes found, the results would be questioned in court. USRC, in fact, had already said, “We should also like to have a physical examination of the plaintiff[s] by our doctor,”10 and Berry anticipated that there would be some dispute over the tests. The results could be variable, no doubt; a humid day could skew the readings, and even different doctors looking at the same figures could interpret them contrarily.

Berry’s problem thus mirrored that of Dr. Martland in 1925. How could he prove it was radium that was killing the dial-painters? There was only really one way to do that, and it wasn’t something Berry could ask of his clients. For the only way to extract radium from a victim’s bones—to demonstrate incontrovertibly that radium was present—was to reduce those bones to ash. “The deposit [of radium],” commented Martland, “can be removed only by cremating the bone and then boiling the ash in hydrochloric acid.”11

No: this was nothing that Grace, or Edna, or Katherine, or the Maggia sisters could help with. Except…

Except for maybe one of the Maggia girls.

Mollie.

It was shortly after nine a.m. that the men came to Rosedale Cemetery on October 15, 1927. They made their way through the rows of memorials until they stopped at one particular grave. They erected a tent over it and removed the headstone. Then they worked to uncover the coffin, heaving sodden earth out of the hole until they unveiled a nondescript wooden box, which held Amelia “Mollie” Maggia—the girl, so people said, who had died of syphilis. The men ran ropes under it, then attached stronger silver chains. It was raised just slightly, “to free it from water that had seeped in around it as a result of the recent rains.”12 Then they waited for the officials to arrive. Berry had arranged with the radium company that they would all converge at 3:30 p.m. exactly.

At 3:00 p.m., the specialists from the company arrived at Mollie’s grave.

There were six of them, including Vice President Barker and the ubiquitous Dr. Flinn. Prudently, Berry had arranged for a special investigator to be present for the morning’s activities; he now watched the company men closely as they milled outside the tent. At 3:30 p.m., as specified, Berry walked up to the grave with Mrs. Hughes, Dr. Martland, and a cohort of New York doctors, who would lead on conducting the autopsy. There were thirteen officials in all, gathered together to witness Mollie’s exhumation.

Standing awkwardly among the doctors and lawyers were three other men: James McDonald and James Larice, Mollie’s sisters’ husbands, and her father, Valerio. The family hadn’t protested when Berry had put the idea to them. Mollie’s body could provide perfect corroborating evidence for the dial-painters’ fight in court. Even after all these years, she could still help her sisters.

After the arrival of Berry’s team, preparations were made for raising the coffin. Curtains were drawn around and the entire party went inside the tent. The grave workers heaved on the ropes and chains. Slowly, Mollie rose the six feet to the surface. “The outer box was in bad condition and easily pulled apart; the casket was likewise ready to fall apart.”13 Despite the dim fall day, the coffin seemed to glow with an unnatural light; there were “unmistakable signs of radium—the inside of the coffin was aglow with the soft luminescence of radium compounds.”14

Someone lent over the glowing coffin and pulled a silver nameplate from the rotten wood. Amelia Maggia, it read. They showed it to Valerio for identification. He nodded: yes, that was the one. That was the one the family had chosen for his child.

As soon as Mollie’s identity was confirmed, the top and sides of the casket were removed. And there she was. There was Mollie Maggia, back from the grave, in her white dress and her black leather pumps, just as she had been dressed on the day she was buried in 1922.

“The body,” observers noted, “was in a good state of preservation.”15

They removed her carefully from her coffin, placed her gently in a wooden box, and then took her by automobile to a local undertaking parlor. At 4:50 p.m., her autopsy would begin. At 4:50 p.m., Amelia Maggia would finally have the chance to speak.

There is no dignity in death. The doctors started with her upper jawbones, which were removed in several pieces; they had no need to do the same with her lower jaw, for it was no longer present, having been lifted out in life. They sawed through her spine, her head, her ribs. They scraped her bones with a knife to prepare them for the next steps. And there was, somehow, a kind of ritualistic care in their steady tasks, as they “washed [her bones] in hot water, dried, and reduced [them] to greyest white ash.”16 Some bones they put to the x-ray film test; others they ignited to ash and then tested the ash itself for radioactivity.

When they checked the x-ray film, days later, there was Mollie’s message from beyond the grave. She had been trying to speak for so long—now, at last, there was someone listening. Her bones had made white pictures on the ebony film. Her vertebrae glowed in vertical white lights, like a regiment of matches slowly burning into black. They looked like rows of shining dial-painters, walking home from work. The pictures of her skull, meanwhile, with her jawbone missing, made her mouth stretch unnaturally wide, as though she was screaming—screaming for justice through all these years. There was a smudge of dark where her eye had once been, as though she was looking out, staring accusingly, setting straight a lie that had blackened her name.

There was, the examining doctors said, “No evidence of disease, in particular no evidence of syphilis.”17

Innocent.

“Each and every portion of tissue and bone tested,” the doctors concluded, “gave evidence of radioactivity.”18

It wasn’t Cupid’s disease, as the gossipmongers charged. It was radium.

The doctors’ autopsy findings gathered wide publicity; the girls’ fight for justice was slowly becoming famous. And it was this publicity that now brought another girl to Berry’s office, though she did not sign with him at that time.

Ella Eckert, Mollie Maggia’s friend, the fun-loving girl with frizzy blond hair who had laughed her head off at so many company picnics, now called on the Newark lawyer in the fall of 1927. She was in better health than any of the five women suing, but she nevertheless told Berry, “I have spent at least $200 [$2,724] for x-rays, blood tests, medicine, and medical attention, all to no avail.”19 She’d had a fall at work, at Bamberger’s, the year before and been forced to give up her job as her shoulder had never healed. Indeed, Berry could see that her arm was “badly swollen, extending from the shoulder down to the hand.”20 She said she was in severe pain and begged him to help her.

And that help was not just for her. Ella Eckert had taken her fun-loving ways to what were then considered extremes; she’d had a son with a married man who had since disappeared, and now she was bringing up the boy on her own. She couldn’t afford to be out of work, or to get sick: her son needed her.

Berry knew their paths would cross again; in the meantime, his pace of work sped up. An important date was November 14, 1927: this was when the first testimony was taken in the girls’ trial, as part of a deposition. Berry had issued his formal summons to Dr. Drinker—now the reluctant doctor gave his evidence under oath.

It was at this juncture that Berry met his main adversary: Edward A. Markley, the attorney for the radium firm’s insurance company, who was leading USRC’s defense. Markley was almost six feet tall, with brown hair and eyes, which he framed with glasses. His father had been a judge, and he was the eldest son in his family; he had all the suave confidence and self-possession such attributes would give. He was some six years older than Berry, with all the added experience that implied.

From the moment the deposition-taking started, Berry realized it was not going to be an easy ride. He was trying to admit all the Drinker evidence: the blinkered, blustering letters that Roeder had sent to justify suppressing the Drinker report; the firm’s false claims to the Department of Labor. To every single question, every single item of evidence, the USRC lawyers fought back.

“We object to the question,” said Markley, “on the ground that the purpose is immaterial.”21

“We object,” said Stryker, “to the witness stating what he told Mr. Roeder.”22

They even shut down Drinker himself.

“I should like to make a statement for the purpose of the record on my side relative to this,” the doctor began calmly.

“Before you do that, we object to it,” jumped in Markley, before Drinker could proceed.

The lawyers deemed the collection of authentic letters “a scurrilous statement of rumors” and took a clever line of questioning with the pioneering scientist and his colleagues. To each of the three investigators who had authored the Drinker report, they put the question: “Had you had any experience in investigating radium poisoning?”

The answer from all, of course, was “None.” The implication being: how could the word of such inexperienced “experts” be taken seriously? Only Katherine Drinker pointed out the obvious: “This is the first time the disease was [discovered].”

Berry was not daunted by all this, however. Submitting the Drinkers’ report, he said cheekily, “It is offered as the best evidence we have and will be used in the event Mr. Roeder has ‘mislaid’ the original.”

The company lawyers merely responded, “If the original is used it is of course subject to our objections…”

January was going to prove a tough battle: that was for sure. Before they got there, however, an unexpected event took everyone by surprise. Berry had been concerned about the young woman who’d visited him earlier in the year, for Ella Eckert, he had heard, had been “near death”23 in the Orthopedic Hospital for weeks now. She had the usual symptoms of radium poisoning: the anemia, the white shadow through her bones. Yet despite these telltale signs, Dr. Martland commented: “This case is very puzzling and not as clear-cut as the others.”24

On December 13, 1927, Ella Eckert died. Martland traced her name on the List of the Doomed. D is for Death.

She’d had an operation earlier that day, on her swollen shoulder. And herein lay the solution to her mystery. For when the doctors cut her open, they found a “calcareous formation [was] attached and [had] permeated the entire shoulder region.”25 It was a growth of “considerable size.”26 Such a growth was new to Martland, to all the doctors. No dial-painter, so far as they knew, had ever presented such a thing.

Radium was a clever poison. It masked its way inside its victims’ bones; it foxed the most experienced physicians. And like the expert serial killer it was, it had now evolved its modus operandi. Ella had developed what was called a sarcoma: a cancerous tumor of the bone. She was the first known dial-painter to die from such a thing—but she would not be the last.

Her death shocked the five girls suing; her decline had been so fast. Yet it also gave them even more inspiration for the fight that lay ahead.

On January 12, 1928, the trial of the decade would begin.