Episode 212: Unforeseen

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Seeing is believing.

That's what we've always been told, anyway.

To see something with our own eyes is just the push our minds need to fully believe it's true.

And for a very long time, it's worked.

The careers of people like P.T.

Barnum stand as monuments to this sort of notion.

Folks saw it in the mummified creature he declared was a real-life mermaid, but was in fact just half a monkey and half a fish, crudely sewn together.

And people saw it when he paraded Joyce Heth around the country, a blind, paralyzed, enslaved woman who he claimed was over 160 years old and a former nursemaid to George Washington.

It seems that as long as there was some sort of physical proof to set their eyes on, there were no limits to the stories people would believe.

And it's a deception that historically has run the spectrum from the innocent to the criminal.

After all, snake oil salesmen wouldn't have been as believable without those little glass vials of liquid to accompany their wild fantastical promises.

Popping the cork and downing the potion added a visceral concrete layer to an otherwise intangible idea.

To some folks, something isn't real until they can set their eyes upon it, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Think about all the Bigfoot or Loch Ness monstrous stories you've heard.

What's at their core?

The search for confirmation.

Proof that can be touched and seen.

Skepticism can be healthy and should always be part of the scientific process we use to better understand our world.

But when it comes to matters of life and death, belief in the invisible, might be just as important.

In fact, sometimes it's the things you can't see that are the most dangerous of all.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this

is Lore.

Beautiful lady.

That's what they called it.

Although in Italian that meant people said Belladonna, which admittedly sounds even more romantic.

And it certainly is beautiful, for a shrub at least, complete with little purple bell-shaped flowers and dark, glossy berries.

But the secret inside that plant is that just about everything, from the leaves and flowers to the berries themselves, contain a number of highly poisonous toxins, which is why it has another more descriptive name, deadly nightshade.

During the Middle Ages, the berries were mashed up and diluted to make a liquid used for all sorts of things.

Women rubbed it on their cheeks as a blush, and centuries later it was used by eye doctors to dilate the pupils of their patients during exams.

In fact, the eye drops used today are just synthetic versions of that age-old tool, a toxic plant.

Of course, nightshade found other uses throughout history, primarily as a tool of murder.

But it wasn't alone, because for thousands of years, people have used poisons to remove obstacles and create new opportunities by killing those who stood in their way.

Poisoning became such a risk that many rulers throughout history had to rely on people whose main job it was to taste their food and drink to see if it was safe.

And for the discerning poisoner, there were many options out there.

There was nightshade, as I mentioned a moment ago, the poison that some historians think was used by the real Macbeth to kill Danish invaders in Scotland a thousand years ago.

But another deadly plant is the one most people call hemlock, most famously drank by Socrates as his punishment for the crime of heresy.

Strychnine is another plant-based poison, which, it probably goes without saying, was the easiest type of toxin for folks to get their hands on for a very long time.

This poison comes from the plant's seeds and has no known antidote.

Although in an ironic twist, the process to make strychnine also results in quinine, a substance used to treat malaria and save lives.

And just about everyone has heard of cyanide.

This is the one that we bump into in all those murder mystery shows and films, where the body of the victim has a bluish tint and someone clever notices the smell of almonds.

That blue color is the result of the poison's ability to essentially stop the victim's ability to process oxygen, suffocating them to death.

But those bits of evidence were also the things that eventually made cyanide less popular among poisoners.

Because remember, the point of poison was that it was the invisible killer.

In the age before forensic science and chemical analysis, there was really no way of knowing whether poison had been used at all.

Basically, cyanide left too many clues, and so it fell out of style.

Although it was supposedly used by the men who killed Rasputin, the Russian monk who advised Tsar Nicholas II.

Some of those men claimed that they put the poison in the wine and cakes that they served him that night, but if they truly did, Rasputin showed no symptoms.

But the most famous and most common poison by far isn't the byproduct of a plant found in the wild.

No, it's actually a common chemical element that's found almost everywhere in nature.

It's in the air we breathe and the water we drink, although not at the levels that can kill us.

It's truly invisible and the perfect tool for any would-be killer looking to put a bit of distance between themselves and their victim.

Arsenic The arsenic that most people think of, the white or yellow powder, was often the byproduct of the mining industry, being a metal that can often be found in mineral ore inside mines for other things like silver.

And that byproduct was sold and traded and worked its its way into a number of practical uses and dangerous plots.

Poison, it seems, is all around us.

From the shrubs and flowers in our yards to the water we brew our coffee with, just how deadly they can be is all just a matter of degrees.

Thankfully, most people are good at avoiding any dangerous interactions with them.

Honestly, aside from murder, dodging poison is basically just a matter of common sense.

But every now and then, rational thought has been set aside.

After all, belief is a powerful thing, and history holds countless examples of how dangerous it can be to set aside sound judgment.

Because when folklore gets involved, all bets are off.

Every story has context, the thing that explains the how and the why of it all, the structural supports for the larger, more visible events.

And for this story, that context was the Great Depression.

I doubt it's a period of American history that needs much explaining.

And while it was a complex collapse of the economy, most remember the big things like the 1929 stock market crash.

But the results of all that took years to play out and recover, making the 1930s a very difficult decade for a lot of people.

In Philadelphia, they felt it even harder.

While the national unemployment rate was about 15% at the time, it was over 25% in the city of brotherly love.

Lots of people were out of work.

Money didn't hold much value even if you had some, and food was scarce.

And when people get desperate, two things happen.

Common sense goes out the window and criminals step in to take its place.

That's where Herman and Paul Petrillo enter the picture.

They were cousins, Italian immigrants, and struggling businessmen.

Paul had been a tailor and a pretty successful one from what I can tell, and his cousin had worked as a spaghetti salesman, which, yes, was a thing.

But the depression changed all of that.

So the cousins made a pivot into the insurance business, but not in the typical sense.

No, Paul decided to sell life insurance to sick people, getting himself named as their beneficiary and then cashing the checks after their death.

And Herman followed Paul's example, starting up a nice little racket involving home insurance and arson for hire, netting him and his clients a bit of profit.

But business might not have been as lucrative as he had hoped, so he eventually added in another idea that was guaranteed to print money.

Counterfeiting.

They were apparently flying pretty low under the radar for a long time, but all of that changed in June of 1938.

That was when a guy named George Meyer was released from jail and went looking for work.

He had this dream of starting his own business, but it would require a loan.

And in the process of finding a lender, he met Herman Petrillo.

Herman offered Meyer a sweet deal.

He could walk away with either $600 in real currency or $2,500 in counterfeit bills, both of which were enormous sums of money given the economy.

The catch?

He had to help kill one of Herman's insurance clients, a young day laborer named Ferdinand Alfonsi, yet another of Philadelphia's many Italian immigrants.

And it seems that Alfonse's insurance policy offered a bigger payout if his death was violent but accidental.

So the plan was for Meyer to hit him over the head and then dump him down a flight of stairs.

And Meyer really did consider taking the job.

The money was good after all.

But in the end, he got spooked and ran to the police instead.

And the police didn't believe him.

It was too far-fetched, too complicated, and too difficult to believe.

But they did think that the counterfeit aspect deserves some more investigation, so the U.S.

Secret Service was brought in to look into the claim.

That agent, Stanley B.

Phillips, reached out to Herman Petrillo himself to offer his own services as an assassin, with the hope that some of that fake money might exchange hands.

And it worked.

But in October of 1938, their reason for talking went away.

It seems that Alfonse had been admitted to a local hospital complaining of stomach pains.

Herman offhandedly told Phillips, our intrepid undercover Secret Service agent, that it was a miracle Alfonse was still alive at all, considering they'd given him enough poison to kill six men.

And when he died a few days later, that was all Phillips needed to shift the investigation from counterfeiting to murder.

Something else happened, though.

Independently of Phillips' case, a trio of Philadelphia police detectives noticed something odd on Alfonse's autopsy report.

It was the discovery of huge amounts of arsenic, and it was a cause of death that these detectives had been seeing a lot of lately, so they did their own digging around.

In the wake of Alfonse's death, arrests were made.

Thanks to Phillips, the police were able to arrest Herman Petrillo, naturally, but they also brought in the victim's widow, Stella Alfonse.

It turns out she was the beneficiary of not one but several insurance policies taken out in his name and was set to receive a massive payout, something the authorities considered good motivation for murder.

And just like that, the murder case went to trial.

They were hoping to convict Herman Petrillo and close the books, but what they uncovered in the process changed everything.

It seems that folklore was alive and well in the 1930s in Philadelphia, and those who believed it were dead serious.

I won't bore you with the court proceedings.

There's no need to get a blow-by-blow of the witnesses, the evidence, and the daily drama inside the courtroom.

But there are a few things we need to know.

First, this wasn't a small operation.

Herman and Paul Petrillo had been working for years with a large network of about 25 members in a sort of deadly social club.

We know this because Paul's nephew John was in Sing Sing prison serving time for the murder of his own girlfriend.

And when John heard about the Alfonse case, he reached out to the authorities to testify.

Few people in the organization were connected through friendship.

It was all business, which meant that when the police started poking around, everyone started to talk.

And it was John's explanation of his own experience and how it all worked that gave the police the tools they needed to pull confessions from a number of people, who only wanted to protect themselves.

But here's where it gets wild.

This wasn't a carbon copy of all those mafia stories you might have seen or heard.

This wasn't a network of trained killers, clandestine encounters, and big business.

No, this was an organized, weaponized group of people who used two things to get the job done.

Arsenic and folklore.

You see, when people move from one place to another, they take things with them.

Clothes, furniture, mementos, and their beliefs.

At the core of the entire Petrillo conspiracy were a handful of women who had leaned heavily on the old world beliefs they brought with them from Italy, superstitions about black magic and the evil eye, as well as folk remedies like amulets and potions.

These women set up shop as spiritual advisors, a sort of modern version of what might have been viewed as a folk healer a couple of centuries earlier, and desperate people came looking for help, mostly wives trapped in loveless or abusive marriages.

They came looking for advice, for a solution to their worries, and these women, employed by Petrillo, had just the thing, A love potion.

After spending a session or two chatting with these desperate housewives, offering general relationship advice and getting a better feel for their situation, these witches, for lack of a better term, would move things into the realm of the supernatural.

Their love potions were explained very carefully to each customer, in an effort to make it clear who would be to blame if things went badly.

They were not to reveal the potion to their husbands, but they needed to know the risks.

If he was a good man, it would cure his bad behavior and bring romance and peace back into their home.

A good outcome for sure.

But if he was, deep down, just a bad man with no hope of redemption, the love potion would kill him.

Risky, yes, but again, desperate times and all.

And women were buying these hand over fist.

Each potion sold for the modern equivalent of roughly $5,000, making them a huge investment for the women who needed them.

And of course, big profit for Herman and Paul Petrillo.

And the key ingredient in these potions?

Oh, you know the answer.

Arsenic.

Through the investigation and trial, this entire ring of folklore-driven poisoners was exposed for what they really were.

At least 12 so-called witches worked to sell the potions, while other members of the ring helped with life insurance policies.

One woman, known by everyone at the time as the Philadelphia Witch, was Karina Favado, who killed her husband, his brother, and another man to the tune of close to $30,000 in life insurance money, a small fortune today.

When it was all said and done, the trial was able to pin at least 70 deaths on the poison witch insurance fraud.

Of the 25 people who were tried, 22 of them were convicted.

Because she turned state's evidence against the ringleaders, Karina Favado got away with life in prison.

But others weren't so lucky.

Paul and Herman Petrillo were found guilty and sentenced to death.

Both men died in the electric chair in 1941, bringing their folklore-based crimes to an end.

Looking back over the past few thousand years, you can see the stains left behind by poison if you know where to look.

From rulers to consumers, poison has made a dramatic appearance in just about every culture culture and century, and it's easy to see why.

Remember the features that made poison so popular.

It was almost always invisible and undetectable.

It allowed the killer to be very far away from their victim when they died, and it was easier to explain away the visible symptoms with other less treacherous rationale.

Why assume it was murder when it could just as easily be sudden illness?

Ferdinand Alfonse was admitted to the hospital for toxemia, blood poisoning from a bacterial infection.

Yes, they got the toxic part right, just not the cause.

So you can see just how easy it would be for folklore to step in and fill the gaps in so many of those stories.

Without proof, all people had were guesses, and assumption is the foundation that so much of folklore is built on.

So for a very long time, those who died from arsenic poisoning were rarely documented as such.

You can see why a desperate killer would view that white powder as a miracle drug.

But even toxins like arsenic eventually lost their clandestine power thanks to modern science.

Back in the 19th century, an American forensic scientist named Rudolf Withaus did a study of over 800 deaths that have been known to be caused by arsenic between 1752 and 1889, and what he found was shocking.

Over half of them were the result of murder.

Of course, our journey today makes all of that pretty clear.

The black magic poisoning ring of 1930s Philadelphia found the sweet spot, still early enough for folklore to have a major role, but modern enough to allow science to step in and solve the mystery.

A couple of centuries earlier, and that story would have ended in a very different way.

Because poison made murder possible, profitable, and relatively easy.

But it was folklore that made it unforeseeable.

Death by poison is one of those both and types of stories.

They are both incredibly simple and highly complex, all at the same time.

Just a little powder sprinkled in the ingredients of a cake, or a couple of drops in a cup of tea, and yet those murders often took huge amounts of effort to plan and execute.

But arsenic has a more textured history, and one that has more talking points than simply as a murder weapon.

In fact, in the 1800s, one unique bit of folklore took hold of the public imagination, and its effects could still be felt a century later.

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He died just eight years after they married.

It was far too soon, and he was certainly far too young.

But for those who knew James and Florey Maybrick, it wasn't all that much of a surprise.

The couple had married in 1881, and those early days were full of so much promise.

But just a few years in, it was all falling apart.

In 1887, Florey discovered that her husband had a mistress, and had for some time.

She also learned that their finances weren't as healthy as she had assumed, and it was going to force them to drastically alter their lifestyle, something she wasn't very happy about.

Flory, for her part, wasn't blameless.

She had her own affair, which James found out about.

And for a couple of years, things at home were, well, rocky, to say the least.

But in April of 1889, James became very sick.

It seemed like a stomach bug with a lot of vomiting.

And you know how it is.

Everyone assumed it was some seasonal thing and that he'd be better in a couple of days.

But he wasn't.

In fact, by May 11th, James was dead.

And when the authorities took their troubled marriage into consideration, all of a sudden his death wasn't looking too natural.

So an autopsy was performed and traces of arsenic were found in his blood.

To make matters worse, the police found large amounts of arsenic in their house.

All of a sudden, Florey was a suspect on trial for murder.

Now, you and I might assume that all the pieces pointed to the obvious answer.

It certainly seems like it was murder, given the information we know now.

But when Florey's defense attorney spoke up, he offered an alternative that had its roots in Europe and a decades-old story.

It wasn't murder, and it wasn't suicide.

But James had killed himself.

To understand what I mean, we need to go back in time to the 1850s, in the Austrian state of Styria.

It's best known for its wines, castles, and bodybuilder-turned-acting legend Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But the real talk of town for a long time was a group of people known as taxicophagy.

Literally speaking, they were arsenic eaters.

The practice is exactly what it sounds like.

For a very long time, a small group of people developed a habit of intentionally ingesting small amounts of arsenic.

They did it because they believed it offered health benefits, like a more vibrant complexion and better endurance on the long walks in the mountains there.

In 1856, a doctor named W.B.

Kestevan wrote a long article about the practice for the British Medical Association, but no one believed him.

Arsenic was a poison, and who would do such a thing so willingly?

Besides, no one had proof, so it was probably just a legend, nothing more.

But more and more experts began to weigh in on it.

Chemists like Charles Heisch and Henry Roscoe traveled to Austria and confirmed arsenic in the blood of those who claimed to use the poison as a vitamin.

Roscoe even brought home one of the white tablets and tested it.

And wouldn't you know it?

It was arsenic.

The locals said it wasn't a dangerous habit if done right.

New users would start with a minuscule dose and slowly build up.

Those at their peak were known to ingest twice the known lethal dose each day.

But like a lot of drugs both then and now, quitting the habit meant excruciating withdrawal symptoms, and there had been the occasional overdose.

The scientific community wouldn't accept any of this as truth, though.

At least not until 1875, when two doctors from Scotland traveled to Styria and brought two arsenic eaters back with them.

There, in front of a group of fearful scientists, the two men popped a good amount of arsenic into their mouths and lived.

Which brings us back to 1889 and the murder trial of Florie Maybrick, whose husband James clearly died as a result of ingesting arsenic.

Her defense, James had been an arsenic eater.

and the pharmacist confirmed that James purchased the stuff often.

That was why the substance was found all over their house, and that was why he had become sick.

He had accidentally overdosed on a toxic chemical he was voluntarily taking for dietary reasons.

Sadly for Flory, the jury and the judge didn't buy it.

They were looking at a woman who had cheated on her husband, a man who had died by poison, and centuries of story told them that murder was the only option to consider.

So Flory was sentenced to death.

The only silver lining in this story is that the public outcry over her trial saved her life.

A petition was started, and over half a million people signed it, requesting Flory be given a second chance.

As a result, the queen stepped in, and Flory's sentence was commuted to life in prison.

A difficult and peculiar story that shows us the most curious parts of human nature, and one overarching lesson that's never gotten old.

Sometimes the truth is too hard to swallow.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Jenna Rose Nethercott and Sam Elberty, and music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just a podcast.

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Check them both out if you want a bit more lore in your life.

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My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical.

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