A University of Pittsburgh researcher was in court today in West Virginia (where he was stopped by police during a road trip). The occasion was an extradition hearing which began the process of returning him to Pennsylvania for trial. And the charge against him there was murder, the cyanide poisoning of his wife and scientific colleague in April.
Neuroscientist, Robert Ferrante, 64, who appeared only briefly, said he would not fight the transfer. The lawyers for Ferrante, a long-time specialist in Lou Gehrig's disease, have indicated, not surprisingly, that he denies the homicide charge. It's not clear, of course, how he'll explain the fact that he purchased a half-pound of cyanide with his university credit card, which - according to the police - was not a material used in any of his research projects.
Investigators also found witnesses who saw Ferrante experimenting with mixing up the creatine-enhanced energy drink that his wife, Dr. Autumn Klein, was taking in the belief that it would help her become pregnant. Klein, 41, and Ferrante had a six-year-old daughter, and she was hoping to have a second child. Perhaps she hoped it would save a troubled marriage; the police also turned up indications that she'd been thinking about leaving Ferrante.
If this is true - if he used this loving hope against her - it reinforces something I've said often about poisoners: They are the coldest killers. Poison murders, after all, are always premeditated - planned, plotted, calculated. And if this is true, it makes the following text exchange released by the police evidence of that point:
According to my calendar I ovulate tomorrow," Klein wrote on April 17. "Perfect timing. Creatine." was Ferrante's response, police say. "Will it stimulate egg production too?" Klein asked. Ferrante allegedly responded with a smiley face.
Three days later, she was dead. As I wrote in May, suspicion of poisoning grew slowly. The fact that it grew at all was due to some very good detective work at the university's medical center. As Klein lay in a coma, there was no initial suspicion of cyanide poisoning. Ferrante himself was publicly querying friends as to what might have caused the collapse. The hospital ran a spectrum of tests and one of the results, reportedly, was an unusually high level of acid in her blood stream.
In fact, lactic acidosis - the build up of lactic acid in the blood as the body is starved of oxygen - is a classic sign of cyanide poisoning. It's associated with poisoning through a variety of cyanide compounds, including hydrocyanic acid, the cyanide salts (sodium and potassium cyanide) and sodium nitroprusside. And you might predict that because cyanides do starve the body of oxygen; they destroy an enzyme crucial for cellular metabolism of the gas. The resulting cascading cell death eventually kills the victim as well.
But before Klein died, some smart doctor saw those peculiar acid levels in her blood and decided to test for cyanide. Murder by cyanide is rare these days - it's a regulated poison, difficult to get if you don't work in the pharmaceutical or chemical business. In fact, in most places, it's usually not part of the standard toxicology screen. Last year in Chicago, for instance, medical examiners did not test for cyanide following the mysterious death of a man who had just received a lottery check worth more than $400,000. It was only months later, after being badgered by his family, that they ran the tests and discovered he'd died by that very poison. At least partly due to the delayed investigation, no arrests have been made in that case.
In 2010, a doctor in Cleveland was convicted of murdering his wife by putting cyanide into some special nutrition supplements that he'd made for her (yes, it does have a creepily familiar sound, doesn't it?). He gave her a poisoned capsule shortly before she left to run some errands; the theory was that he expected her to collapse while driving and die in a car crash. And she did crash the car but barely, a mere fender-bender. The fact that she started to die with no injury from the accident triggered an investigation which eventually found massive amounts of cyanide in her body. Her husband, Dr. Yazeed Essa, was sentenced to life in prison. But the medical examiner testified, in the trial, that if she'd been more severely injured in the crash they probably wouldn't have looked for it.
If there had been no cyanide-poisoned body to test would, Dr. Essa have been caught? Dr. Ferrante had his wife's body cremated almost immediately after her death. If her blood hadn't been drawn first and, probably more important, if that smart doctor hadn't decided to check for cyanide, would her husband be in court today? Or consider the recent conviction of a New Jersey chemist for murdering her husband with another rare poison, thallium. That killing was discovered only because a nurse in the hospital where the man died had experience with a thallium poisoning in China.
It's easier, of course, to pick up on a well-known poison such as ethylene glycol, the primary toxic compound in antifreeze, on reason why police were able to so rapidly charge the doctor at the M.D. Anderson cancer center in Houston with poisoning her lover's coffee last month. In case you're wondering at this point, I'm not trying to persuade you that we're in the midst of an epidemic of homicidal scientists.
But there are some patterns here worth mentioning. One can argue that people choose the familiar as weapons - that a doctor or a researcher might choose cyanide or thallium not only because they could get it but because they would know that's not high on the list of suspect poisons. They'd have reason, even though its a detectable poison, to think they wouldn't get caught. And that raises another point. That we've developed an array of tools for detecting poisons - but it takes good human judgment to put them to work.
As happened in the Pittsburgh cases. And that brings me to the final point in this pattern. The poisoner - even the one with scientific knowledge - can calculate, make his plans. But they don't make him the smartest scientist in this story. The really smart scientist is the one who, against the calculations, ran the blood test and found that lethal poison.
And that's why Dr. Robert Ferrante is in court today.
Image: 19th century poison bottle/Visible Proofs exhibition/National Library of Medicine
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