Episode 107: Sight Unseen

This is the story of the one.

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Learn more at AARP.org/slash skills.

His was one of the most brilliant minds of the past five millennia, and yet for centuries, his notebooks had remained locked away in private hands.

It wasn't until an auction in 1936 that many of the notebooks, annotations, and papers of Sir Isaac Newton were finally made available to the world, helping us to better understand how the man worked and thought.

But there was more.

Among those papers auctioned off in 1936 were a collection of items pertaining to alchemy, that ancient predecessor to modern chemistry.

Notes about his experiments to transform base elements into gold through arcane methods, a blending of science and magic that was the primary goal of so many medieval researchers.

Now remember, Newton wasn't some random guy with a chemistry set.

He was a professor of mathematics at Trinity College in Cambridge.

He put to paper the laws of motion and gravity that became the core of pre-modern science all the way until Einstein's theory of relativity.

He wasn't a slouch, or a hack, or a crackpot.

Despite all of those credentials, Newton spent years dabbling with alchemy, attempting to transform one thing into another.

He experimented with all sorts of metals, including mercury and lead, often running his equipment for days at a time with little food and no sleep.

And when he did rest, it was in a bedroom set up in the adjoining room.

And while he never managed to succeed, he did manage to change his own body.

He had a full head of gray hair by the age of 32 and was riddled with health problems like insomnia and indigestion.

He suffered from violent mood swings and an argumentative personality.

Never enough to cost him his job overseeing the Royal Mint, but certainly noticeable by close friends.

And scientists today are pretty sure why.

At some point in the past, one of Newton's actual hairs was discovered between two pages in one of his notebooks.

And back in 1979, a team of researchers were given permission to test it.

What they found was shocking, and at the same time, it made perfect sense.

While the typical person has a parts per million lead measurement of roughly 24, Newton's was 191, and although most people have a parts per million for mercury of 5, Newton's hair contained 197.

That's nearly 40 times the normal levels.

And of course, mercury and lead are both highly toxic.

Newton, it seems, was a walking chemistry set.

Even centuries later, in this modern world of cleaner air and safer work conditions, there are invisible forces that can contaminate us, infect us, and even harm us.

But what's even more frightening than that is the theme that pops up so often in horror films and suspenseful thrillers.

the notion that someone, without our knowledge or permission, might actually use that process against us.

While everyone is busy looking for death from the most obvious places, history is full of individuals who took the more invisible approach.

Their ingenuity and creativity allowed them to slip under the radar and deliver pain and suffering in a way that few would have suspected.

And it's left us with something utterly terrifying to worry about:

death

by poison.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

Like mother, like son.

At least that's what they say.

And in the case of Barbara and Herman, it was more than a little accurate.

But we're probably getting ahead of ourselves, aren't we?

Let's back up and start from the real beginning.

Barbara hadn't always lived in Cleveland.

She'd actually been born in the area of Europe that we call the Czech Republic today.

I'll be honest and tell you that I don't know when she was born, but my best guess is around 1820.

It was about 50 years later though that she packed up and moved across the Atlantic to the United States.

She wasn't alone either.

1870s was a decade of massive immigration from Central Europe.

And thanks to the culture of that area, these immigrants were highly educated, religiously diverse, and skilled in a wide range of trades.

But while many of Barbara's fellow travelers were trained in medicine or law, she had a unique set of skills, something that helped her stand out from all the rest.

She was a charmer.

The services she offered ranged the spectrum, from fortune-telling to predictions to charms and potions.

It was a fringe occupation, to be sure, but it also fit neatly into the personality of her community.

These were thinkers and planners, and they wanted all the help and guidance they could get.

Barbara only offered them what they were already looking for.

In the 1880s, her adult children finally left Europe to come join her in America.

Daughter Elsa and son Herman were both unmarried, but for Herman, that was a new thing, having recently divorced his wife.

He was looking for a fresh start, and the land of opportunity his mother had discovered seemed like the perfect place to find it.

He also found true love again, and in 1890, he married his second wife, Mary.

The trouble was, Mary's family didn't care for Herman.

Maybe it was his family connections to the occult, or his previous marriage, or perhaps they thought he looked a bit too rough.

He was a tall, heavy-set man with a big mustache and a bigger belly.

Whatever the reason, they warned the couple not to go through with it, and after they did anyway, the family essentially disowned them.

But that was alright, because Herman had settled in near his mother and had begun to work as her apprentice.

Now, working for mom didn't pay the bills though, so Herman also dabbled in other endeavors.

He worked for a local tailor for a while and as a butler in a wealthy home.

He even put enough funds together to purchase a bar, but it was clear that he wasn't cut out for any of those pursuits.

No, he had magic in his blood thanks to his mother, and he wanted to use it to help others.

In the late 1890s, he and Mary moved from the Cleveland area to the growing Czech community in Chicago.

Their destination was a small but thriving neighborhood known as Pilsen.

situated between the modern highways of 290 and 255, where a large number of Czech immigrants had already settled down.

It was a tiny vision of the real America we often forget about, a collection of diverse languages, cultures, skills, and dreams, all working together to build better lives than the ones they left behind.

And right there in the middle of it all was Herman, plying his services as a charmer and a fortune-teller.

When he opened his first storefront, he dropped his last name in favor of his mother's new married name, Bilik.

He felt it was easier to say out loud and to spell, making it a sort of branding decision that any modern marketing company might approve of.

Folks in the area took to calling him Professor Billock and turned to him for all sorts of occult services.

It was an odd occupation, to be honest.

Herman was sort of a hybrid of an herbalist and a spiritualist.

He used a magic box in many of his spells, placing the ingredients inside and mixing them with water.

When they were ready, those ingredients might be ingested or sprinkled in special locations or carried on their person like a charm.

It was the sort of stage dressing that believing clients found attractive, a mysterious black cube with powers to alter whatever Herman put into it.

But it also served as his excuse when things didn't work out right.

The box, he told them, just didn't want to help them.

It was out of his hands.

And with that, he fell into a sort of rhythm with his work.

People came to him for love charms, medical cures, and questions about their future, and Herman provided solutions.

For most of the year, he worked out of his shop in Pilsen within a rough neighborhood.

But during the summer months, he would pack up the family and travel west toward the Desplaines River, where they lived out in a tent and served the tourists that came each year.

It wasn't glamorous, for sure.

But it also wasn't permanent.

Thanks to his special skills, life was about to change for Herman Billick.

Whether or not that was a good thing, though, was yet to be seen.

Martin and Rosa were the typical American success story.

A year after their wedding in 1880, they packed up and left Europe, hoping for a better life in the United States.

And Martin really did try to build that new life for them.

In fact, he struggled for nearly two decades as a skilled carpenter, but it just wasn't enough.

So in 1900, he and Rosa took their meager savings and used it to purchase a milk depot.

Now, let's walk through what that is, because it sits outside our realm of modern experience.

You see, back in 1900, there were no refrigerators and 7-Elevens.

You couldn't just stroll down to the local grocery store and pull a gallon of cold milk off the shelf.

No, the milk needed to be brought into the city on a daily basis, where it was sold out of milk depots that the local folks could go to to get their daily supply.

And that's the business Martin and Rosa purchased.

It was a whole building, in fact, and came with two apartments above the shop, as well as a small yard out back where they could raise chickens and pigs for the family.

And that family was big.

By the time they bought the Milk Depot, Martin and Rosa had seven children, six daughters and a son, that ranged from early childhood to late teens.

That was a lot of hungry bellies and a lot of clothing and necessities.

So Martin and Rosa worked hard to make sure they had everything they needed.

But the real hope, the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, was marriage.

If they could marry off their daughters to good men, they would be able to sleep well and know their family was cared for.

And their oldest daughter, Emma, even had a love interest, a young man named Albert Russ.

The trouble was, just when things were looking hopeful, Albert broke it off.

Desperate to make it work, her parents stepped in and tried to mend the relationship, but nothing helped.

So they looked across the neighborhood for a less orthodox solution and found it in that local charmer, Professor Herman Billock.

Billock agreed to help.

He would craft them a love charm, but it would require special ingredients and that was expensive.

He charged them $50 to get started, roughly $1,500 in modern American currency, and then he got to work.

And his first task was to travel west to San Francisco, where the best arcane ingredients could be found.

Over the following weeks, Martin and Rosa waited as patiently as they could, but Herman was slow to deliver the goods.

He was quick, however, to ask for more money.

First, it was 100, and then another 100.

Soon enough, Martin and Rosa were in deep, but it was impossible to back out then.

Emma's future depended on Herman's work, which was unfortunate.

Because a few months into the job, Albert made it clear he would never take Emma back when he married another woman.

Now, you'd think that would have soured them against Herman Billock.

Martin and Rosa Verzel had just had their hopes dashed by an occult herbalist with powerful marketing skills, after all, but instead they found other projects for him to tackle.

Little jobs at first, but soon enough Herman worked his way into the family like a tick, and he was gorging himself on their finances.

At one point, the Verzels hired him to curse a rival milk depot owner, and they actually saw their own revenue increase, a sure sign of Billick's power.

And that was good, because trouble was coming down the river toward them, and they would need every ounce of Herman's supernatural charm.

Emma, you see, was in trouble.

She had started dating a new man in the fall of 1904, a fellow by the name of Joe Cooney.

But there were issues with that.

First, Cooney was a bit of a rough guy.

He drank a lot, fought almost as as often, and cursed like a sailor.

But worse than that, in their eyes, was the biggest problem of all.

Rumor had it that Cooney was a married man with a house full of young children.

Emma, though, didn't believe it.

Herman represented Martin and Rose's only hope of stopping Emma's road to ruin.

The trouble was, no one ever stopped to ask Emma what she wanted.

It turns out she had never wanted to get back together with Albert, and she wanted to be with Joe Cooney more than anything else.

It seemed that her family was constantly trying to force her to do things she didn't want to do.

And that was about to get worse.

Sometime in February of 1905, three things happened.

First, Herman confronted Cooney at his home where he revealed the affair to Cooney's wife.

That was the push that Martin and Rosa had been looking for.

and it ended Emma's relationship with the married man.

Second, Emma revealed that she was pregnant with Cooney's child, and her parents were livid.

They had just gone through hell trying to extricate her from that man's orbit, and here she was carrying his child.

So, against her wishes, and against the law in Chicago at the time, Rosa called for a midwife to perform an abortion.

When it was over, they made up a story about illness and kept Emma indoors for a long while.

The third thing that happened must have felt like a bolt of lightning on a clear day that landed on an already burning house.

Martin hadn't been feeling the best for a few weeks and it had become more serious.

At first he was having trouble with what seemed like arthritis, but he was a relatively young and healthy man, so that didn't make sense to them.

The family physician diagnosed him with gastritis, but that didn't do anything to help his pain and fatigue.

Soon enough, Martin was stuck in bed, and Rosa was left to pick up his slack in the milk depot.

His eyes had become swollen too, and his skin was splotchy and off-color.

Then, just a few days after Herman Billock wrapped up his work separating Emma and Joe Cooney, he took one final payment from them and then boarded a train to Cleveland.

He claimed he wanted to go visit his mother, who still lived there and ran her business as a charmer and enchantress.

But the timing couldn't have been more suspicious.

Four days later, at the young age of just 47, Martin Verzel

passed away.

The next year and a half was a never-ending roller coaster of agony, suffering, and loss.

And I want to walk you through it step by step.

Not because I'm a glutton for pain, but because it is within this collection of events that the rest of the story finds its core.

So pay attention.

You never know what details you might need along the way.

The death of Martin Verzil was tragic.

There's no doubt about that.

Anytime a family loses one of their own, it's painful.

And when that person also happens to be the sole breadwinner for a family as large as theirs, well, you can see how this would have been difficult to recover from.

There was a cloud of depression over the Verzal home for some weeks to come.

As everyone else mourned, Emma slowly recovered from her forced abortion.

But while her body might have been healing, her mind was dark, and she took that out on her siblings.

The stories say that she verbally and physically abused many of her sisters.

Then the next blow arrived.

Emma's sister Mary became sick shortly after the funeral for her father.

She struggled with pains in her stomach for weeks before being confined to bed due to a lack of strength.

A few days later, she was dead.

Naturally, the family was rocked to its core.

They'd lost their father and now a sister.

Helpful enchanter Herman Billick was there to assist whenever he could, but there was very little he could do to alleviate their grief.

Instead, he helped Rosa put the pieces back together as best they could.

And that meant saving the family milk business.

Herman had an idea.

You see, the Verzels purchased their milk from a farm outside of Chicago that was owned by a German man named William Nyman.

William was in his 30s and widowed with two small children.

What if, Herman suggested, they tried to marry Emma off to Nyman?

It would solidify their milk supply partnership and it would give Emma a fresh start.

To Herman and and Rosa, it sounded like a good plan.

Soon enough, Herman and Rosa took Emma out to meet William.

Emma seemed invested in the idea, even arriving with a pouch of tobacco as a gift for him.

It seemed to set the tone for a friendly, generous partnership, and Emma was immediately hired on as a housekeeper.

After that, it was a simple matter of using a bit of magic.

Herman visited the farm in the dead of night to sprinkle a mysterious white powder on the road outside the Nyman farm, and weeks later, Emma and William Nyman announced their engagement.

This time, it seemed as if Emma was happy with the arrangement, even though it had been Herman's idea.

It seemed like just the joy they needed, but in December of 1905, another tragedy visited the family.

Emma's younger sister Tilly, who was 18 at the time, became sick with a mysterious illness.

The family doctor suspected it was typhoid, but he wasn't certain, and he did his best to try and treat her condition.

It didn't work, though.

Tilly died in late December and was buried on Christmas Day.

Rosa began to take chloroform as a medication for her nerves and grief, and Herman was there for her and the rest of the family with less traditional powders and potions.

In fact, Herman's big hulking shape was there a lot, and everyone noticed that.

It was almost as if he had stepped into their father's place, at least at home.

And that was unsettling.

That winter, one of the Verzil children went outside to fetch some eggs and found a number of the chickens had died overnight, as had one of their pigs.

It felt eerily familiar until one of the children remembered how their family dog had gotten sick and died days before their father Martin had, a dog that had been a gift.

from Herman Billock.

Something was going on.

I have to believe that most of them could sense it, like that feeling you get when someone sneaks up behind you.

There was an obvious answer to the questions surrounding their tragedies, but no one could put a finger on it.

And then, before they could focus, more trouble headed their way.

In July of 1906, a neighbor noticed a strong scent of natural gas coming from the Verzal house.

She rushed out to find a doctor, and when they returned, they managed to revive the girls that had been sleeping inside.

And there was something else, something even more strange.

According to this doctor, as he entered the house for the first time, he swore he saw the shape of a tall, hulking man exiting through the rear.

Two weeks later, two more of the Verzal children became sick.

Jerry, the only son, and his sister Rosie were both in their mid-teens and had come down with what the family doctor seemed to believe were heart conditions.

After being treated, Jerry Jerry seemed to improve, but his sister did not.

Rosie died in August, at the age of just 14 years old.

This was the breaking point for their mother, Rosa.

She couldn't handle balancing the normal parts of life with all of the darkness that was being thrown at her, so she sold the milk depot and the adjoining apartment to William Nyman and took her three remaining children to stay at the home of her cousin Kate.

But you can't outrun grief.

Rosa's drinking increased, as did her use of chloroform.

But it was all still there, like a dark cloud hovering over her.

And it was while she was buried under the weight of that loss and pain that one final tragedy visited her.

Her 12-year-old daughter Ella was diagnosed with Addison's disease.

After weeks of abdominal pain and weakness, she too passed away.

on November 30th.

It was Rosa's cousin Kate who finally convinced her that something bigger had to be going on.

Someone was murdering her family, and even though all of the deaths seemed to be unrelated, there must be something that connected them all.

And if they wanted to find the answer to that riddle, they needed the police.

Emma had a different suggestion, though.

Stop wasting time asking questions, she told them all.

There's only one person the police should be looking for.

And you know it.

Herman Billick.

That search for the truth would have to carry on without Rosa though.

Just days after the death of Ella, she too took sick and became confined to her bed.

On December 5th of 1906, she passed away, setting the police in motion to search for answers with more urgency.

And it began with Herman Billick.

It was actually Jerry Verzil, the only son and one of the only three surviving siblings, who set those wheels in motion.

He was the one to guide the police to Billock's nearby apartment, and once they tracked the man down, things moved quickly.

He was brought into the police station and questioned, and in the process, he slipped enough incriminating information to warrant taking him into custody.

Among the items he revealed, he claimed that he often medicated members of Rosa's family, including their father, Martin.

But he told the police that he was a harmless fraud, often administering nothing more than a benign mixture of saltpeter and whiskey.

And yes, while he did happen to treat many of the children shortly before their deaths, he swore he had caused them no harm.

Searches of his house also turned up something else.

A bundle of letters written in Czech, what they referred to back then as bohemian.

These letters turned out to be love letters written to Herman by none other than Rosa Verzel.

It seems the pair had been planning their future, and part of those plans involved conspiring to poison a number of people, including Herman's own mother, in an attempt to gain their wealth through inheritance.

Soon enough, the general public was consumed with talk of Herman Billick and his murder of the Verzel family.

Newspaper articles seemed to condemn the man before his trial even began, and stories about his secret life of money and women became commonplace.

But it was the testimony of the surviving Verzal children that ultimately sent him to trial.

Well, that and one more thing.

You see, the moment the police began to suspect poisoning, they started to wonder if there was a way to connect all of the deaths together.

A common tool, perhaps.

So after examining Rose's body and discovering a large amount of arsenic in her internal organs, they ordered the exhumation of Martin.

What they found was shocking.

He too had been poisoned with arsenic.

When the trial began, it had national attention.

Both sides spent close to six months preparing their strategy and evidence.

and then the official proceedings began.

Many of the early witnesses were people who might have information about where Herman Billett could have acquired so much arsenic, hoping to nail down solid proof of his guilt.

But nothing definitive was ever uncovered.

Emma Verzel was questioned in July, as well as her brother Jerry and their youngest sister, 8-year-old Bertha.

And while the siblings hadn't been able to answer questions with authority prior to the trial, Once they entered the courtroom, it was clear they all had a similar, powerful story to tell.

Herman Billick, they claimed, had constantly administered mysterious medication to their family, always shortly before their deaths.

Billock denied it all, of course.

When he took the stand, he walked everyone through the events of the past few years.

He told them of his fraudulent business as a fortune-teller and charmer, and of how he was hired to reunite Emma with her lost love, Albert Russ.

He walked the courtroom through her abortion, the death of Martin, and his love affair with Rosa.

He essentially admitted to all of the small claims and charges, but as for the main issue of murder by poisoning, he staunchly denied all involvement.

His own daughter, nine-year-old Edna, even took the stand to explain how good of a father Herman was, but it was too little, too late.

Even without proof of how or where he acquired the arsenic, the jury returned with a verdict of guilty.

Herman Billick was immediately sentenced to death by hanging.

But the fight wasn't over just yet.

During his brief stay in jail while awaiting his execution, a visiting Catholic priest named Father O'Callaghan spent time with Herman and became convinced that the man was innocent.

He began to work with Herman's defense team to request an appeal, setting in motion a legal circus that would take nearly 10 years to come to an end.

The decade between 1907 and 1917 was filled with appeal after appeal.

Herman would be given an official execution date, and then the court would issue a stay and request more hearings.

Over and over, the case of Herman Billick was brought back out of the darkness and put on display, and each time it was, new information came with it.

Information and doubts.

The biggest revelation, it turns out, was a letter that Father O'Callaghan received from Jerry Verzel.

In it, Jerry claimed that he and his sisters had been coached by the police to tell a very specific set of made-up stories, all with the aim of getting Herman Billock convicted for a crime that he actually didn't have any evidence to support.

After that, Jerry switched sides and joined Billick's defense team, and it seemed to have worked.

Sure, it took a lot longer than they would have hoped for, but on the evening of January 3rd, 1917, A brand new governor of Illinois took office and immediately issued a full pardon for Herman.

After a decade of fighting for his life, he had won.

He was innocent.

And he was free.

It was a cause for celebration, for sure, but as he stepped out of the Joliet prison on January 4th and felt the sun shine on his face, a new, darker question seemed to settle on the shoulders of everyone else involved.

If Herman Billick didn't kill the Verzel family, someone else had.

They'd slipped in unseen, quietly done their work, and then vanished without a clue.

Just like poison.

Poison is frightening because it's invisible.

Whether it's added into our food or slipped into a drink, most of us would never know it's there.

Arsenic in particular was a favorite for exactly those qualities, being odorless and tasteless.

You or I would never have seen it coming.

Rosa Verzel certainly didn't, and neither did the doctor she reached out to for help.

Historian Steve Schukis has documented nearly 20 visits from the local family doctor and another 50 visits from a second.

None of them seemed to suspect a thing, and as we've learned, that allowed the killer to just keep working.

Silently.

Deadly.

Of course, the children were exhumed along with their father, Martin, and just as in his own body, large amounts of arsenic were found inside them.

Not in their stomachs, though, but in other organs, hinting at a long history of slow, regular doses.

Something only a person close to the family might have been able to manage.

But there are some who think they know who the real killer was, and the proof they claim can be found in the timeline and details of those horrible, tragic 18 months between the deaths of Martin Verzel in March of 1905 and his daughter Ella in November of 1906, because all of them seemed to line up with family gatherings.

Tilly became sick right after a birthday party for her sister Emma out at the Niamond Farm, while Rosie died the day after Ella's birthday, and Ella would later become sick following Rosie's funeral, finally passing away the day after the family Thanksgiving gathering.

And the one thing all of those events had in common was the food, all prepared by one specific person.

Food, by the way, that would have left scraps, which were always fed as slop to the animals in the backyard.

Animals that eventually died.

Food that was cooked and provided by someone they never would have suspected.

Emma

Emma was always feeding her family.

If they weren't out at the Nyman Farm, she was visiting them.

Arms full of items she had prepared and brought into the city as a gift.

And that's interesting to note, because one of their neighbors actually stopped visiting the Niamon Farm after noticing that he always felt sick the day after a meal there.

While most didn't put the pieces together, and no more than a few had a hunch, there was one person who suspected Emma all along.

Her husband William.

In fact, when they purchased the milk depot in Chicago from Emma's mother, he failed to include Emma's name on the new deed.

He also canceled his life insurance policy, preventing her from profiting from his death, if it should ever happen.

And in the autumn of 1907, it did.

It happened suddenly, and for a man who was only 39 years old, it was quite unexpected as well.

According to Emma, he had been complaining of chest pains and difficulty breathing for a while, but it had recently begun to take its toll on him as the weeks went by.

Soon enough, he was having trouble doing the most simple things, which had to have been frustrating for a farmer in the prime of his life.

Eventually, his own brother moved in to help carry the man from room to room and pick up the slack on the farm.

And all the while, Emma was there to take care of him, even filling his pipe for the occasional smoke in his favorite rocking chair.

In fact, on the day he passed away, he had just begun to smoke that pipe when he seized with a fit of coughing and gasping.

The doctor examined William's body at Emma's request.

I'm sure she pointed out the similarity to the many murders that had already taken place in her family.

and maybe she even pretended to be worried that William had become yet one more victim of a mysterious killer.

But the medical exam turned up no sign of arsenic in his stomach.

Those tests, however, ignored one key area of Williams' body, his lungs.

And had they looked there, one has to wonder if they might have found something more than illness or disease, something that might have explained why a 39-year-old farmer would be so quick to decline after nothing more than the occasional pipe.

A pipe filled with tobacco.

that he had never purchased for himself, but had received months earlier as a gift.

A gift

from his wife Emma.

The story of Hermannbillik and the Verzel family is a powerful example of just how vulnerable we all are to invisible forces.

And while their story might have played out over a century ago, there's one final detail that touches our very own lives today.

Stick around after this short sponsor break to hear all about it.

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There's something powerful about cleanliness.

That freshly mopped floor or the way your desk looks after a good dusting.

I think we're hardwired as humans to be drawn to things that are clean and pure and good.

And that has manifested in our modern society as a focus on a cleaner environment.

You can't paint your living room with lead-based paint anymore because, surprise, surprise, lead can be toxic.

We've stopped giving mercury to children for constipation or coughing because, well, it was killing them.

Today we work a lot harder to make sure the things we put into our body aren't secretly going to harm us.

But what a lot of people don't know is that it's not a 21st century idea.

In fact, we can find one of the earliest pushes for food safety in a very familiar place.

The trial of Herman Billick.

Shortly after Rosa Verzel's death and the discovery of arsenic in her body, the Illinois state legislature banned the use of the chemical in embalming fluids.

And half a year later, on the very same day that the Chicago Tribune ran the story of Emma Verzel-Nyman's testimony in court, they printed another article right beside it.

The headline, Pure Food Rules Put Ban on Drugs.

And do you know what one of the worst food industries was at the time?

Dairy.

Partly because of an honest desire to help preserve it and partly out of criminal business tactics, a tall glass of milk had a lot more in it than just bovine dairy.

In fact, most milk depots, like the one owned and run by the Verzals, used a standard ratio of one pint of water in each quart of milk to thin it down and earn more money in the long run.

But that made the milk thin and watery, watery, so new things had to be added in to help it look more milk-like.

Plaster of Paris was often used, or sometimes chalk.

And to add back in that thick, frothy layer of cream, milk depots would add a very unusual thickening agent, pureed cowbrains.

At this point, I'm pretty sure none of us would ever drink a glass of milk if we were to slip through a wormhole and land in 1906 Chicago, but sadly, it gets worse.

To fight the natural spoiling process, milk facilities also added in chemicals.

Formaldehyde was one of their favorites because, hey, if it's good enough for keeping corpses fresh, surely it could help their milk supply.

Right?

Of course, they didn't call it formaldehyde.

No, it was given a fancy new name, preservaline, and it was used throughout the food industry to keep perishable items fresh longer.

And when they weren't using that, they were using other additives that did just as much harm.

Salicylic acid, often used as a fungicide, would sometimes be added, as would the cleaning agent borax.

I can't help but think of Sir Isaac Newton again, toiling away in his lab for days on end, then exposing himself to all manner of toxic chemicals in the process.

Yes, he lived a relatively long life, passing away in 1727 at the age of 84.

But if all the historical records are true, it was a life that was deeply affected by his exposure to toxins.

In the end, I suppose, it's all just one more version of an ancient tradition.

How can we transform one thing into another, and at the end, walk away richer than we started?

Whether it's the stereotypical mission to transmute lead into gold, or the more modern attempts to use chemistry to squeeze a bit more profit out of a commodity, it's really all the same.

And it also reveals the true toxic element that seems to poison everything it touches.

Us.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Carl Nellis and music by Chad Lawson.

Today's episode drew from from a lot of different sources, but the most helpful and well-written was the book Poisoned by Steve Schukas.

If you want to go deep into the life of Herman Billick and the Verzil family, you need to grab this book.

I highly recommend it.

You can find Poisoned over on Amazon.com and learn more about Steve Schukas and his passion for this story over at chicagotruecrime.com.

Of course, lore is much more than just a podcast.

There is a book series available in bookstores and online, and two amazing seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video.

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

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

And you can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place, theworldoflore.com/slash now.

And you can also follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcast, all one word, then click that follow button.

And when you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always,

thanks for listening.

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Hi, I'm Chris Gathard, and I'm very excited to tell you about Beautiful Anonymous, a podcast where I talk to random people on the phone.

I tweet out a phone number, thousands of people try to call.

You talk to one of them, they stay anonymous.

I can't hang up.

That's all the rules.

I never know what's going to happen.

We get serious ones.

I've talked with meth dealers on their way to prison, I've talked to people who survived mass shootings, crazy, funny ones.

I talked to a guy with a goose laugh, somebody who dresses up as a pirate on the weekends.

I never know what's gonna happen.

It's a great show.

Subscribe today, Beautiful Anonymous.