The Supernatural Murders Read online

  In rebuttal of the insanity claim, the prosecution presented expert testimony on Tuesday morning. Dr H.H. Drysdale, a Cleveland psychiatrist, had a very straight-forward explanation for the poisonings: ‘She wanted to marry this man – whoever he is – and she took the poison-method to gain her end, which was to remove the obstacles that stood in front of her desires.’ Dr Drysdale seemed to be speaking less as a man of science than as a spokesman for the Hardscrabble back-fence community – which gossiped, according to the Gazette, that ‘Mrs Wise, rebuked by her mother for having men visitors, poisoned her, then set out to destroy Fred Gienke, Sr, because he admonished her after her mother’s death’. Agreeing with Drysdale that the defendant was responsible for her actions, Dr Tierney, another Cleveland alienist, assured the jury that neither pyromania nor kleptomania was a form of insanity.

  Dr Wood, the Wises’ family-physician, rejected the defence hypothesis that Martha Wise was epileptic; he stressed her cunning, evidenced by her suggestion to him that Lillian Gienke had died of influenza. In his closing argument for the prosecution, Joe Seymour laid similar emphasis on the premeditation that was attached to the murder of three persons and the non-mortal poisoning of a baker’s dozen:

  Slipping into the Gienke home when no one was watching, pinching arsenic into their water pail, returning twice to add further poison – that’s not the manner in which insane people murder.

  Still, the state asked that a verdict of Guilty be coupled with a recommendation of clemency.

  Defence attorney Pritchard, in response, regretted that the jury had not been permitted to view the ‘worn path’ connecting the home of Mrs Wise with that of the Gienkes, a sight that would have dramatised the kindly feelings between the two families. He also condemned the authorities’ use of a ‘candy pail’ to convey Lillian Gienke’s stomach from Medina to the Elyria hospital for examination, without indicating that the sugary receptacle might have influenced the autopsy results. After expressing these introductory grievances, Pritchard evoked the forgiveness that Martha Wise’s surviving victims showed for a relative who had lost the power to distinguish between right and wrong. Tearfully, he compared ‘the condition of the ill-fated and physically-crippled Marie Gienke with the queer, mentally-unbalanced Martha Wise, broken in body and broken in mind’.

  The jury of seven women and five men found Martha Wise guilty of murder in the first degree, with a recommendation of clemency, returning its verdict only one hour and ten minutes after retiring. The verdict automatically required the imposition of a sentence of life-imprisonment in the state reformatory for women, without possibility of parole.

  Immediately after the conviction of Mrs Wise, Medina County authorities turned their attention to one of the men in her life, Walter Johns. On Sunday, 10 May, when the trial was in weekend recess, Lester Wise, Martha’s fourteen-year-old son, had told Prosecutor Seymour that one day last November he had heard his mother discussing poison with a male visitor; when Mrs Wise observed that the boy was listening intently, she ordered him to leave the house. His mother’s trial had already begun when Lester first reported the incident to his aunt, Mrs Merton Adams, who brought the boy to Seymour. ‘I got out my old Bible,’ she told the prosecutor, ‘and Lester swore to me that he was telling the truth.’

  On Friday evening, 15 May, Walter Johns was arrested in Cleveland on a warrant charging him with the murder of Mrs Sophie Hasel, and lodged in Medina County Jail. On the following Monday evening, he was confronted with Martha Wise, who now seemed anxious to shift the blame from Satan to her former admirer. ‘He made me do it!’ she shrieked when she first caught sight of Johns. ‘He kept at me to do it! He told me I should get the arsenic and get rid of my mother and then I’d be free and happy.’ When Johns protested that she was lying, she lifted her left hand – but then corrected the gesture, raising her right hand high. ‘I swear it’s true,’ she asserted. ‘He told me that with Mamma gone, I’d be more free.’

  The widow backed her charges by claiming that Johns had asked her about a will Mrs Hasel had made before she was poisoned. Prodded by Seymour, she claimed that, without the influence of Johns, she would never have thought of killing her mother. Her lover instructed her ‘how much arsenic to buy and how much to put in mother’s water-pail – half a teaspoon’. Though she did not hate him, forgiveness was out of the question. She would have carried their secret to the grave, but ‘it had to come out’; she was to be punished and wanted to be, but Johns was just as guilty.

  While Martha Wise made her accusations about the poisonings, Johns denied everything she said, and so she changed her tactics, seeking his confirmation of the details of their romance. Johns, however, was almost as reluctant to concede their intimacy as to acknowledge a partnership in crime, and after he remained unresponsive to her description of the Gienkes’ sufferings, her exasperation with her lover led to a new outburst: ‘You couldn’t shed a tear to save your soul from Hell!’

  John F. Curry, a former Cleveland councilman, who was Walter Johns’s attorney, complained that the widow’s rancour was ‘just a case of a woman scorned’. His client hadn’t gone to see her after she was arrested for the simple reason that he thought a visit might make her feel worse; her false accusations were the result of his considerate restraint.

  At length Prosecutor Seymour saw that Martha’s ravings would not breach her lover’s defences, and was constrained to play his final card, which was to demand Johns’s explanation of a letter he had written to the widow when they were on better terms:

  Dear Martha,

  … Well, now, I suppose you are saying to yourself I guess I won’t hear from that guy any more, but as usual, I have been very busy; it is a poor excuse I understand in this case, but you will excuse me once more, won’t you, Martha; say yes….

  I want to say to you that we have a very nice place to live in now, everything our own way and we realise how to take that comfort and enjoy it very much; I wish you could share with our comforts….

  W. JOHNS

  Seymour came down hard on the phrase ‘everything our own way’. Didn’t the words suggest that Johns and Mrs Wise had taken steps to clear away the obstacles to their marriage? In fact, the context of the letter plainly suggested a more innocent reading: the writer seemed to be referring to the increased amenities that he and his children found in their new residence which they hoped the widow would share with them. Nevertheless, faced with Seymour’s damning alternative interpretation, Johns appeared to panic. ‘I never wrote anything about “now we have everything our own way,” he insisted; the rest of the letter was in his handwriting, but someone must have inserted the disputed words.

  Despite Johns’s equivocal position regarding his letter, Seymour reluctantly concluded that there were insufficient grounds for prosecution and released the nervous machinist on Wednesday, 20 May. On the following Saturday, the convicted widow was taken to the Ohio State Reformatory for Women, in Marysville, to begin her sentence. During her journey – the first long automobile ride she had ever taken – she was accompanied by Sheriff Fred Roshon and his wife Ethel. During her two months of confinement in the Medina jail, Martha had made Mrs Roshon a confidante, speaking freely to her of the crimes – and remarking ominously on one occasion: ‘It’s a good thing you caught me when you did…. ’

  Thirty-seven years later, in 1962, the ‘Poison Widow of Hardscrabble’ was paroled after her first-degree murder sentence was commuted to second-degree by Governor DiSalle, and the head of the state’s division of corrections announced that she would be moved to ‘a home for the aged in southern Ohio’. Mrs Wise’s freedom, however, was to be tantalisingly brief. Upon her release, Helen Nicholson, a parole officer, took her to board with Mrs Muriel Worthing in Blanchester, Clinton County. When they arrived, though, Mrs Worthing had changed her mind – ‘fearful of a small town’s reaction’. After this unexpected rebuff, Mrs Nicholson boarded Martha Wise for the night at her own home in Cincinnati. Next day, she returned her charge to pr
ison after learning that the parole had been rescinded pending further study of its practicability.

  Six years later, Martha Wise made her last appearance in public print. The Cleveland Plain Dealer described the famous prisoner’s regime at Marysville. Because of her age (eighty-six), she was one of seven permanent patients in the reformatory hospital. For years she had worked in the poultry house, caring for chickens. Superintendent Martha Wheeler referred to her forename-sake as a ‘sweet old lady’, one of the best-liked inmates at Marysville.

  Not all readers would have shed tears over the article: certainly not Rudolph Gienke, who throughout his life remained greatly disabled as the result of the paralysis caused by the arsenic poisoning. His sister Marie, also permanently handicapped, recovered sufficiently to marry and live to the age of eighty-one. She now lies at rest in Hardscrabble cemetery, where the Poison Widow dispatched many of her relatives before their time.

  Afterword: Spring 1991

  Martha Wise died in Marysville Reformatory exactly twenty years ago and was buried there. The details of her crimes are sharply etched in the memory of Walter Wolfe, an eighty-year-old township trustee and respected patriarch of Valley City, who recently escorted the author and his wife on a tour of the sites associated with the Hardscrabble murders. Walter is a descendant of the Gienkes – which is not surprising, he explained when he unlocked the gate of little Myrtle Hill Cemetery and showed us the victims’ graves: ‘In the 1920s, all the local farmers were “shirt-tail” relatives.’ A schoolmate of Martha Wise’s son Lester, Walter recalls his community’s famed poisoner as a tall woman who used to walk ‘cross-lots’ from her hilltop residence to the Gienkes’ place in the valley below. Both of those modest frame-houses still stand. Walter cannot account for the origin of the name ‘Hardscrabble’, because the land in northern Medina County, far from being hard to cultivate, let alone scrabbly, is rich; but the fair-haired wheat that was raised in Martha’s time has now been replaced with less delectable crops such as soybeans and hay.

  Prophesies of Doom

  BRAM STOKER

  IN PARIS, towards the end of the seventeenth century, a woman named Des Hayes Voisin, a widow who had taken up the business of a midwife, made herself notorious by the telling of fortunes. Such, at least, was the manifest occupation of the worthy lady, and as she did not flaunt herself unduly, her existence was rather a retired one. Few who did not seek her services knew of her existence, fewer still of her residence. The life of a professor of such mysteries as the doings of Fate – so-called – is prolonged and sweetened by seclusion. But there is always an ‘underground’ way of obtaining information for such as really desire it; and Madame Voisin, for all her evasive retirement, was always to be found when wanted – which means when she herself wanted to be found.

  She was certainly a marvellous prophet, within a certain range of that occult art. Like all clever people, she fixed limitations for herself; which was wise of her, for to prophesy on behalf of everyone who may yearn for a raising of the curtain, be it of ever so small a corner, on all possible subjects, is to usurp the general functions of the Almighty. Wisely therefore, Madame Voisin became a specialist. Her subject was husbands; her chief theme, their longevity. Naturally, such women as were unsatisfied with the personality, circumstances, or fortunes of their partners, joined the mass of her clientele – a mass which, taking it by and large, maintained a strange exactness of dimensions. This did not much trouble the public, or even the body of her clients, for no one except Madame herself knew their numbers. It was certainly a strange thing how accurately Madame guessed, for she had seemingly no data to go on: the respective ages of the husbands were never taken into the confidence of the prophet. She took care to keep almost to herself the rare good fortune, in a sense, which attended her divination; for ever since the misfortune which had attended the late Marquise de Brinvilliers became public, the powers of the law had taken a quite unnecessary interest in the proceedings of all of her cult. Longevity is quite a one-sided arrangement of nature; we can only be sure of its accuracy when it is too late to help in its accomplishment. In such a game, there is only one throw of the dice, so that it behooves anyone who would wager successfully to be very sure that the chances are in his – or her – favour.

  Madame Voisin’s clients were generally in a hurry, and so were willing to take any little trouble or responsibility necessary to ensure success. They had two qualities which endear customers to those of La Voisin’s trade; they were grateful and they were silent. That they were of cheery and hopeful spirit is shown by the fact that as a rule they married again soon after the dark cloud of bereavement had fallen on them. When the funeral baked meats have coldly furnished forth the marriage tables, it is better to remain as inconspicuous as possible; friends and onlookers will take notice – and when they notice, they will talk. Moreover, the new partner is often suspicious and apt to be a little jealous of his predecessor in title.

  Thus, Madame Voisin being clever and discreet, and her clients being – or at any rate appearing to be – happy in their new relations and silent to the world at large, all went prosperously with the kindly-hearted prophet. No trouble arose as to testamentary dispositions. Men who are the subjects of prophecy usually have excellently drawn wills. This is especially the case with husbands who are no longer young. Young husbands are, as a rule, not made the subjects of prophecy.

  Madame Voisin’s great accuracy of prediction did not excite as much public admiration as it might have done if she or her clients had taken the public more into their confidence; but it was noted afterwards that in most cases the male individual who retired early from the scene was the senior partner in that congeries of three which has come to be known as ‘the eternal triangle’. In later conversations, following the wake of the completed prophecy, confidences were exchanged as to the studies in certain matters of science in which Madame Voisin seemed to have attained a rare proficiency.

  The late Mr Charles Peace, an adventurous if acquisitive spirit, worked alone during the long period of his professional existence, and with misleading safety. The illustrious French lady-prophet unwisely did not value this form of security, and so multiplied opportunities of failure. She followed an entirely opposite policy – one which, though it doubtless stood by her on many occasions, had a fatal weakness. In some ways, it may facilitate matters if one is one’s own Providence: such a course temporarily avoids errors of miscalculation.

  La Voisin, probably through some unfavourable or threatening experiences, saw the wisdom of associating the forces of prediction and accomplishment, and, with the readiness of an active personality, effected the junction. For this she was already fairly well equipped with experiences. Both as a wife and as a lover of warm and voluptuous nature, she understood something of the passions of humanity on both the female and the male side; and, being a woman, she knew perhaps better of the two the potency of feminine longing. This did not act so strongly in the lesser and more directly commercial, if less uncertain, phases of her art, such as finding lost property, divining the results of hazards, effecting immunity from danger, or preserving indefinitely the more pleasing qualities of youth. But in sterner matters, when the issue was of life or death, the masculine tendency towards recklessness kicked the beam. As a nurse in active touch with both medical and surgical wants, aims, and achievements, she was at ease in the larger risks of daily life. And after all, her own ambitions, aided by the compelling of her own natural demands for physical luxury, were quite independent, only seeking through exiguous means a way of achievement. In secret, she studied the mysteries of toxicology; and, probably by cautious experiment, satisfied herself of her proficiency in that little-known science. That she had other aims, more or less dependent on this or the feelings which its knowledge superinduced, can be satisfactorily guessed from some of her attendant labours, which declared themselves later.

  After a time, La Voisin’s vogue as a sorceress brought her into certain high society where freedom
of action was unhampered by moral restraints. The very rich, the leaders of society and fashion, the unscrupulous whose ambitious efforts had been crowned with success of a kind, leaders of Court life, those in high military command, mistresses of royalty and high aristocracy – all became companions and clients in one or more of her mysterious arts. Amongst them were the Duchesse de Bouillon, the Comtesse de Soissons, Madame de Montespan, Olympe de Mancini, Marshal de Luxembourg, the Duc de Vendôme, Prince de Clermont-Lodève.

  It was not altogether fashionable not to be in touch with Madame Voisin.

  Undeterred by the lessons of history, La Voisin went on her way – forced, as is usual in such cases, by the circumstances which grow around the criminal and prove infinitely the stronger. She was at the height of her success when the public suspicion, followed by action, revealed the terrible crimes of the Marquise de Brinvilliers; and she was caught in the tail of the tempest thus created.

  This case of Madame de Brinvilliers is a typical one of how a human being, goaded by passion and lured by opportunity, may fall swiftly from any estate. It is so closely in touch with that of Madame Voisin that the two have almost to be considered together. They began with the desire for dabbling in foreign mysteries. Three men – two Italians and one German, all men of some ability – were violent searchers for the mythical ‘philosopher’s stone’ which was to fulfil the dream of the medieval alchemist by turning at will all things into gold. In the search, they all gravitated to Paris. There the usual thing happened: money ran short and foolish hoping had to be supplemented by crime. In the whirling world of the period, there was always a ready sale for means to an end, however nefarious either might be. The easy morality allowed opportunity for all means, with the result that there was an almost open dealing in poisons.