The Legacy of Typhoid Mary Pt. 1

Due to the nature of this case, listener discretion is advised.

This episode includes discussions of death.

Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen.

What if it felt like the whole world was against you?

Total strangers accused you of terrible crimes.

The media called you a menace to society or even a murderer.

Mary Mallon was a professional cook.

She nourished wealthy families for a living.

She couldn't have poisoned them.

Mary denied the accusations used against her until her dying breath.

Still, Mary's employers continued to fall ill.

To this day, we don't know what to call Mary Mallon.

Do we call her a serial killer acting with willful malice?

Do we call her a victim of circumstance?

Or do we simply call her by the one name that stuck?

The one name she was never able to shake?

Typhoid Mary.

I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast.

You can find us here every Monday.

Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast.

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If you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.

This is our our first episode on Mary Malin.

In early 1900s, New York, Mary unknowingly spread typhoid to at least 51 people, leading to a suspected three deaths and the moniker, Typhoid Mary.

Stay with us.

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Youtine, adjective, used to describe an individual whose spirit is unyielding, unconstrained, one who navigates life on their own terms, effortlessly.

They do not always show up on time, but when they arrive, you notice an individual confident in their contradictions.

They know the rules, but behave as if they do not exist.

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When Mary Mallon was born in 1869, Ireland was still reeling from calamity and tragedy.

The Irish potato famine had decimated the small island country's population.

A blight or sickness targeted potato crops and had devastated the Irish farmlands.

Even more devastating was the fact that potatoes at the time were the main staple of every good Irishman and woman's diet.

Thousands upon thousands of Irish citizens died during the famine to either malnutrition, starvation, or one of many diseases ravaging the country.

To escape these harsh conditions, a good number of Irish citizens emigrated to England, Canada, and the United States.

Growing up in the 1870s and 80s, Mary Mallon was lucky enough to have missed the worst parts of the famine, but her parents, John and Catherine, remembered the bitter flavor of hardship, and they knew they needed to give a better life to their young daughter however they could.

So in 1883, when she was 14 years old, they sat Mary down and told her about America.

In America, they told Mary, she would learn to live on her own.

She would have more opportunities there and more hope.

Mary was fortunate to be a healthy young woman.

She deserved to go somewhere where she could grow and flourish.

So Mary boarded a ship bound for New York City.

As the vessel pulled away from the Irish harbor, Mary watched her mother and father standing by the docks, waving goodbye to their only daughter.

She watched them get smaller and smaller until they disappeared entirely from view.

Eventually, Mary arrived safely on the shores of New York City, where she moved in with her aunt and uncle.

There, she spent her days doing chores and cooking.

This work prepared her for a career as a domestic servant, pretty much the only choice she she had in America.

A good number of women who immigrated from Ireland around this time ended up as cooks.

It wasn't glamorous work, but it paid the bills, which was about all you could ask for.

Still, it was by no means easy.

The days were long, living quarters were cramped, there was no personal privacy, and sometimes outright sexual harassment.

But a young woman like Mary Mallon had only two choices to support herself.

She could either work or get married.

But she found herself in a catch-22.

Once she started working, the grueling hours got in the way of meeting men.

There was a lot of social pressure going against Mary Mallon in turn-of-the-century America.

At the time of her first work placement, 28-year-old Mary was a single, childless woman.

In 1897, this automatically made her an object of suspicion.

But Mary was also an immigrant at a time when the Irish were discriminated against.

And not only was she a worker, but a domestic worker.

From her childhood in Ireland through her adulthood in America, she faced her life with grit and self-preservation.

She was a hard worker, self-reliant, and proud of her competence.

But something else made her more than qualified to work in the kitchens of New York's most elite families.

Mary Mallon was an excellent cook, second to none.

She could wield a kitchen knife like nobody's business, and her dishes were to die for.

So the agency had no trouble finding work for Mary.

For her first job as a cook, she moved in with a wealthy New York family who spent their summers in Mamaronek, Westchester County.

This was likely the first time since arriving in America that Mary had lived outside of her aunt and uncle's home, so this was her first real go at self-reliance.

Mary must have felt proud of her first official offer of professional employment.

Not only did she have a job, but she was working for a well-respected family.

Standing in the Mamaronek kitchen one afternoon, an hour or so before dinner, Mary paused to take a look around her.

A slight sea breeze ruffled her apron as she tied it back.

The summer sun made the pots and pans hanging on their hooks gleam.

Now, Mary's life had creature comforts she had never dared imagine before.

Workers in the homes of the elites didn't have to deal with the dirt, noise, and squalor of New York City.

She was doing work she was good at, and she would only get better, and having a steady income didn't hurt.

Standing there in the kitchen, 28-year-old Mary smiled.

For maybe the first time in her life, she felt something like hope.

She felt like everything was going to change.

See, there had been a recent visitor to the house in Mamaranek, a young man who enjoyed Mary's cooking quite a bit.

On that day, he wandered into the kitchen as Mary worked to prep for dinner.

She noticed that he looked a little paler than he had since his arrival a few days earlier.

Curiously, he kept scratching at his chest through his shirt.

Striking up conversation, the young man asked the cook what was for dinner.

As she listed each item menu, though, she noticed that that he seemed distracted.

He raised a hand to his temple and held it there.

She asked him if he was feeling all right.

He nodded but kept his hand to his head.

It was just a headache, nothing to worry about, the young man said.

He requested that she open a few more windows in the house when she had a minute and then went to bed without eating the lovely dinner she'd prepared.

Mary was disappointed but thought little else of it.

But the next morning, when he didn't come to breakfast, Mary went looking for him.

When she got to the young man's room, she found him still in bed, his sheets doused in sweat, his skin crawling with bright red rashes.

Even in just the minute she stood by him, he was tossing and turning on the sheets, clawing and scratching.

Trying to soothe him, she laid a hand to his forehead, then immediately had to pull it away.

Heat radiated off the young man, and his face was so pale that it looked like he had no blood in him at all.

Mary did not have a ton of first-hand experience with disease, but she knew a serious one when she saw it.

She knew that this one was a matter of life and death.

Typhoid fever had made its dramatic entrance in Mary Mallon's life, and it intended to stay for quite a while.

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Mutine, adjective, used to describe an individual whose spirit is unyielding, unconstrained, one who navigates life on their own terms, effortlessly.

They do not always show up on time, but when they arrive, you notice an individual confident in their contradictions.

They know the rules, but behave as if they do not exist.

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Day after day, the young man's fever raged.

Two weeks passed, then three, then four,

and still his body burned.

The servants tending to him feared for their own health, even their deaths.

At that time, typhoid fever could still be expected to kill 10% of those infected with it.

But it was their duty to care for him, so they did their best.

Day after day, week after week, the fever didn't break.

Hour by grueling hour, the life drained from the young man's eyes.

The good news was that no one else in the family Mary was working for came down with symptoms, and typhoid tended to attack travelers.

Therefore, they reasoned the young man must have contracted the disease before he got to Mamaranek.

So the family was safe.

Or were they?

By 1900, the typhoid fever that had plagued the Western world in the previous century was considerably better understood and definitely better controlled, but it was still out there and still deadly.

And no one in the Mamarinek house could point to any known cause for the outbreak.

While it was mostly the sick themselves who spread typhoid, it also passed easily through milk and water.

Maybe the family's water supply had been contaminated?

An unsuspected filtration worker could track in anything on his boots and not notice.

But in the end, none of these theories proved conclusive.

No one had any idea what had possibly gone wrong.

In the months that followed, no one thought to blame the cook.

Fortunately, Mary didn't catch typhoid from the young man, but she did decide to move on from the Mamaronek house.

With her health and her distinctive culinary talents intact, Mary Mallon had no trouble finding a new job in another kitchen.

In the winter of 1901 to 1902, at 32 years old, Mary found herself working for another well-to-do New York family.

Again, Mary was happy to be working in good conditions.

She busied herself making her schedule and her routines, and the kitchen became a symphony of stirring and chopping.

The house was full of noise and laughter.

Then one morning, things got a little quieter.

There was no crank of the rotary washing machine, which everyone had become used to hearing in the mornings, and usually the laundress hummed to herself while she worked, but no one heard that either.

Maybe the laundress had accidentally slept in, tired from days of hard work in the summer heat, so another servant was sent to wake her.

Suddenly, the servant was sprinting back into the kitchen, begging for the others to join her.

The terror in her eyes was unmistakable.

Mary dropped her whisk into a bowl of egg yolks and dashed out after her.

Running into the bedroom, Mary saw something that stopped her dead in her tracks.

The laundress was slumped over in her bed, pale as a ghost, and a now-familiar red rash peeked out from the sleeves and collar of the laundress's bedclothes.

Mary's blood went cold.

Not again, she almost said out loud.

It couldn't be.

She just barely stopped herself from crying out.

But it was.

Typhoid fever was back.

Again, Mary left her job and began to look for work somewhere else.

Again, she managed to avoid getting sick.

And again, her skills helped her find a new place of employment without too much delay.

I should say that we can't be certain that Mary's disappearance was directly linked to typhoid fever.

Domestic servants moved about quite frequently, perhaps hoping the next place they found work would be better.

Sometimes a job would be seasonal or temporary, so there are some logical reasons Mary would have chosen to leave.

However, the timeline of her departure and the outbreak does align.

By June of 1902, 33-year-old Mary Mallon was cooking in Dark Harbor, Maine, at the luxurious summer residence of New York lawyer J.

Coleman Drayton and his family.

The Drayton family was looking forward to spending an enjoyable summer together in Dark Harbor, a common destination for wealthy families from New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.

But tragedy dealt them a heavy blow.

In rapid succession, five of the household servants and four members of Coleman Drayton's family came down with, you guessed it, typhoid fever, all while Mary Mallon was cooking for them.

Only Mary herself and Coleman Drayton were left unscathed.

He asked Mary to stay on to nurse the sick.

Maybe it was out of survivor's guilt that Mary agreed.

Certainly, she was well compensated for her additional responsibilities.

In this small but meaningful way, Mary benefited from this particular typhoid outbreak.

In the case of the Drayton family in Dark Harbor, it was concluded that the sickness had started with their footman.

This seemed obvious because he was the first one to have come down with the disease.

What we don't know is whether Mary noticed a morbid trend following her.

Sure, some things weren't adding up in the equations, but she was the common denominator.

And what made this situation even more confusing and frightening was that typhoid fever was apparently considered a working-class disease back then.

The working poor were usually crammed into congested and unsanitary living situations.

With no room to quarantine their sick, they easily transmitted typhoid and other illnesses among themselves.

So it was quite unusual for this so-called working-class disease to find a home in the ritzy, remote, seasonal escapes of New York City's most elite families.

But maybe this next one would be different.

In 1906, 37-year-old Mary Mallon went to Long Island to cook for prosperous New York banker Charles Henry Warren at the Warrens' summer residence in Oyster Bay.

It started out an idyllic summer for the Warrens and their cook.

Every night, the Warren family gathered for dinner.

Seated together around the table, they would happily recount anecdotes from their long days leisurely spent.

And the main course?

Every night another home run of a meal by Mary.

And even better than these unbeatable entrees was the dessert.

The Warren children clapped their hands as Mary plated out scoops of the sweetest vanilla ice cream they'd ever put a spoon to, on top of which sat handfuls of sliced peaches.

Plump, juicy, and sunset pink, they glimmered in the fading light like jewels.

The children, already drawn to Mary's jolly demeanor, simply adored their cook almost as much as they loved her desserts.

This was actually quite a peaceful time for Mary.

Surely the grim specter of typhoid fever was finished with her.

She began to feel a little of that hope she had discovered when she first started doing the work she loved.

But regardless of whether typhoid was finished with her, it was just getting started with the Warrens.

To Mary's dismay, by the end of that summer, six members of the household had come down with typhoid fever.

By now, it's clear to us that a dark shadow is following Mary Mallon.

We can see its sickly fingers threading these segments of her life together and slowly, slowly tightening the knot.

Mary could see it too, couldn't she?

Or was Mary the one pulling the strings?

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By 1906, 37-year-old Mary Mallon had infected some two dozen New Yorkers with typhoid fever.

And as that number grew, this lethal trend got harder and harder to ignore.

See, Mary worked as a cook in the summer homes of New York City's most elite families.

But at the time, typhoid was still considered by many to be a working-class disease.

So why was typhoid suddenly surging among these well-to-do families?

Unsettled, they started asking questions.

And a man named George Soper was going to find the answers.

Soper was a sanitation engineer, a man of science.

After their typhoid outbreak, the Warren family commissioned him to investigate what could have possibly gone wrong.

In 1907, so-called germ theory was a relatively new concept to science, but new though it was, it provided scientists with both confidence and relief.

A growing amount of evidence supported their work, and they were relieved to have something to blame for many of the epidemics ravaging the world in recent memory.

The discovery of tiny organisms called microbes gave scientists a culprit they could see, touch, and name.

However, despite the optimism germ theory inspired, it was still a surprising idea.

Before microbes, scientists most often traced diseases to polluted air called miasmas.

Bad air was how your average American citizen would say most people got sick.

At that time, routine hand washing hadn't yet come into vogue, even after using the bathroom.

There was only so much soap and water could do to defend against those miasmas that most people thought caused sickness.

So why waste your time with it?

In 1907, the average American had probably not yet heard of germ theory, and if they had heard of it, they might find this new information so surprising, they just might start to think it was a little...

unbelievable.

But George Soper certainly believed in germ theory.

He trusted science, and he believed that with the help of modern science, he could solve this typhoid mystery.

Soper learned that the Warrens had changed cooks just before the outbreak, and that cook, Mary Mallon, had vanished shortly after.

He took it upon himself to see if she'd worked anywhere else in the area.

When he found out she had, and that these disappearances had become something of a pattern, he began to suspect what was going on.

In George Soper's understanding of the matter, Mary Mallon was a kind of scientific phenomenon that health experts were only just beginning to understand in 1907.

Soper discovered that Mary Mallon had never had typhoid herself, but was linked to several outbreaks.

He suspected her of being an otherwise healthy carrier of the disease.

A carrier is able to pass an illness to other people without suffering from its symptoms herself.

Because they aren't sick themselves, carriers go about their normal lives without realizing that they're making other people ill.

In some cases, they infect complete strangers.

If Mary was a carrier of typhoid fever, and Soper was pretty sure that she was, then he needed to know everything about her.

Where she went, who she saw there, she had to be watched.

Because wherever she went, Mary Mellon had the potential to infect anyone.

And it was up to George Soper to protect the public by any means necessary.

In George Soper's view, Mary Mallon was not necessarily an evil woman, but she was careless and uneducated.

She just needed someone to show her the error of her ways.

Once Soper explained things to her, he was certain that she would wise up and stop spreading the disease.

Doggedly, Soper traveled across New York City, Long Island, and the North Atlantic to dig up as much information about Mary Mallon as possible.

He wanted to be be sure he was right about her.

As he talked to family after family, he painted for himself a clearer and clearer picture of Mary's role in these typhoid outbreaks.

He became more and more sure that he was on the right track.

And not only was he on the right track, but he was doing the right thing.

He was going to save countless lives.

But as a man of laboratory science, he knew what he had to do.

Up until this point, all he he had was correlation, speculation, and hearsay.

What George Soper needed was proof.

In March of 1907, fueled by his research, Soper went to confront Mary Mallon.

38-year-old Mary did not realize it then, but as she opened the door to George Soper, a larger, metaphorical door in her life slammed shut.

In public reports following his first encounter with Mary Mallon, George Soper expressed surprise and disappointment.

Particularly, he was discouraged by her lack of womanly niceties.

He thought she was too rough around the edges to be respectable.

From the moment George Soper walked into her kitchen, Mary was on guard.

She eyed him with suspicion, asking him what he was doing there.

Mary's terse words and narrowed eyes told George Soper to get right to the point.

So he did.

Speaking plainly, he told her that the Warrens had hired him to figure out what exactly had caused the typhoid outbreak in their summer home, and Soper had determined Mary Mallon was to blame.

Mary was aghast.

She'd never had typhoid in her life.

But Soper assured her she was a carrier of a deadly disease.

It was the only explanation.

Mary's whole body went cold.

For just a moment, her vision blurred.

The only way she knew she was still alive and standing there was the sound of her heart battering away in her throat.

That's why typhoid followed her like a shadow?

It had been her fault the whole time?

It couldn't be, she thought to herself, terrified and bemused.

Then her expression hardened.

Her vision cleared.

No, it definitely couldn't be.

George Soper had to be wrong.

But before she could speak up in protest, Soper added insult to injury.

He needed definitive proof so the New York Health Department could take proper steps.

To complete his investigation, Soper required her cooperation.

This complete stranger demanded, point blank, that she give him samples of her blood, urine, and feces

right here, right now.

What?

Mary was horrified.

Reading the disgusted look on her face, Soper assured her that the samples would just need to be sent to a lab for testing.

He expected nothing more than her happy and willing compliance.

Mary could hardly believe her ears.

Who was this man, this complete stranger, to burst into her house and say these awful things about her?

And why would she do anything to help him support his ridiculous and offensive accusations?

Meanwhile, George Soper paused to take a breath.

He knew he had her cornered.

With all of modern science supporting him, Mary wouldn't dare deny his claims.

She simply had to do what he said.

She had no way out.

And this was true both literally and figuratively.

While he was talking, George Soper had backed Mary into a corner of her kitchen.

So Mary reacted as any cornered creature might.

She fought back.

A cook knows her kitchen as well as anything.

So here, Mary relied on pure reflex.

In one smooth motion, she reached over her sink and pulled out her largest carving fork.

Mary Mallon hissed at George Soper to get out.

The look on her face and the tone of her voice were of complete calm.

She planted her feet and did not move them.

But Soper wouldn't relent.

He told her he couldn't leave without the samples.

So with the fork clutched tightly and expertly in her fist, Mary Mallon advanced on George Soper, getting closer and closer until Soper turned and fled.

Any thought that Soper had that Mary might be a reasonable person vanished.

He warned that anyone trying to reason with Mary Mallon should be prepared to become quite aggressive.

She had resisted, so Mary was now to be taken by force.

But it would take more than force to stop Typhoid Mary Mallon.

Thanks for tuning in to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast.

We'll be back Monday with another episode.

For more information on Typhoid Mary Malin, among the many sources we used, we found Typhoid Mary, Captive to the Public's Health by Judith Levitt, extremely helpful to our research.

Stay safe out there.

This episode was written by Emily Duggan, edited by Joel Callan, fact-checked by Anya Bayerly, researched by Mickey Taylor and Chelsea Wood, and sound designed by Kelly Gary.

With production assistance by Ron Shapiro, Trent Williamson, Carly Madden, and Bruce Kitovich.

Our head of programming is Julian Boirot.

Our head of production is Nick Johnson.

And Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor.

I'm your host, Vanessa Richardson.