Crimson & Gold
Harmless fungus or Destroying Angel? Killer or innocent man? Ask John H. Trestrail III.
Photo by Rex D. Larsen. Copyright 2007 The Grand Rapids Press. All rights reserved. Used with permission. |
The case is remarkable for a number of reasons. First, Crippen was arrested while fleeing to Canada thanks to a steamship captain having radioed his suspicions back to London the first time in history that wireless communications played a part in an arrest. Secondly, the scant human remains found in Crippen’s house were beyond identification, save for a “scar” that the prosecuting attorney claimed matched the victim. Third, Crippen’s alleged mode of dispatch poison was at odds with the body’s dismemberment, since poisoners normally want their victim’s death to appear to have been from natural causes. Or, at least, that’s part of the criminal psychological profile of a poisoner worked up by John Trestrail, managing director of the Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital Regional Poison Center in Grand Rapids, Mich.
Recently Trestrail a student of criminal poisoning cases was instrumental in establishing a fourth reason the Crippen case is remarkable: The remains in Crippen’s basement were not those of his wife.
A Different Path
“I always said I was going to write a book called ‘Murder, Mushrooms and Medicine: The Memoir of a Maverick Pharmacist,’” says Trestrail with a laugh. “The maverick doesn’t walk by the same path.”
Trestrail’s small office is crammed with mementos documenting the unconventional path his fascination with poisons has taken him everything from a mounted rattlesnake head he bought more than fifty years ago at a Battle Creek museum gift shop, to an autographed photo of the cast of CSI Miami.
“I’ve been interested in poisons since I was 8 or 9 years old, reading about snakes and all kinds of stuff,” Trestrail says. “I tell people I don’t work here. My career has just been an extension of my hobby. It was a perfect marriage.”
Trestrail graduated from Battle Creek Central High School in 1962 and entered what was then Ferris Institute. During his fourth year of study at Ferris he began to suspect there was something different between him and his classmates. Most of his fellow Pharmacy students had family members who owned stores, while Trestrail had only been in a drugstore as a customer. Trestrail also parted company with classmates over pharmacognosy the study of medicines derived from natural sources.
“I thought, this is wonderful all these poisonous plants and stuff used by primitive tribes,” Trestrail recalls. My classmates were saying, ‘I’ll never use this.’ Probably they were right. There were two kinds of Pharmacy students the scientist and the businessman. I wasn’t interested in running a store. I have no focus for business at all.”
After graduading from Ferris, Trestrail started a Ph.D. program in natural product chemistry at The Ohio State University. In 1968 his education was interrupted as were many others by the cancellation of student deferments as the Vietnam War escalated. “I wasn’t so sure I wanted to work for the Department of Defense,” says Trestrail, who instead signed up for a hitch with the Peace Corps. After several weeks of intensive language and cultural sensitivity training at San Jose State College, Trestrail boarded an airplane bound for Manila.
“I wound up teaching chemistry at the University of the Philippines’ College of Agriculture, which was about 30 miles south of Manila. It was a wonderful experience,” recalls Trestrail. “I’m so glad things happened the way they did. In the semester breaks I would head out into the jungles on the island of Mindoro and live with the indigenous Mangyans, a cultural minority, in the mountains. I would talk to them about mythology and kinship all this cultural anthropology stuff that always fascinated me as well as the plants they used as medicinal agents.”
Back in the United States after two years, Trestrail studied for and passed his pharmacy board examination, after he had finished his internship at Bronson Methodist Hospital in Kalamazoo as a senior unit-dose technician, and then remained at the hospital as a staff pharmacist. In one of many serendipitous circumstances in Trestrail’s life, the pharmacy department at Bronson housed a small poison center that had fallen on hard times, due to lack of a coordinator. “When the phone rang, staff were kind of intentionally busy elsewhere,” says Trestrail. “I asked if I could have the poison center as my special project, because everyone had to have a project. They said, ‘please, take it!’”
By 1976, Trestrail had five years in at Bronson when the regional poison center in Grand Rapids called, asking him to apply as director of the year-old facility. Initially, he was hesitant to lose his seniority at Bronson to take the new position, but his wife, Mary (Wenzel, AH’67), said that he would regret it if he didn’t take the position. More than 30 years later, he’s still at the DeVos Regional Poison Center.
A Passion for Poison
A nurse wearing a telephone headset knocks on Trestrail’s office door. Near Cadillac, a two-year-old child weighing 26 pounds has eaten a wild mushroom and is on the way to a local hospital. “The cap is smooth, domed, with a dimple, creamy white in color, gills are white to cream, there is a racetrack at the top of the stem, there is no skirt or veil on the stem; stem is fibrous and solid,” says the nurse. “It appears to be growing out of a hollow egg.”
“Could be Amanita virosa,” says Trestrail. “Have them send in a picture of it.”
This is just one of the more than 1.2 million calls the center has handled since its inception. Trestrail has been there for almost all of them. The center fields an average of 130 calls every 24 hours. They come in from a 45,000 square-mile area, encompassing 65 of Michigan’s 83 counties. Eighty percent of the calls are placed directly from the home. “It’s a 9-1-1 system, only for poisoning,” Trestrail explains. “The main focus of the center is to take care of emergency calls and providing information. We have new moms and dads every day. And, of course, kids are not born with a set of instructions that says, ‘Make sure you don’t leave your chewable vitamins out on the kitchen table.’ We also have new grandparents every day who no longer have their houses poison-proofed.”
There are 58 certified poison centers in the United States. Trestrail says what differentiates him from the other 57 directors is his passion for the subject of toxicology. That passion led him to found the Toxicological History Society. “It’s a gathering of strange people in toxicology around the world who like to delve into old books. We hold our annual meeting along with the North American Congress of Clinical Toxicology I call it the ‘gathering of the wizards.’” Last year’s meeting in New Orleans included papers presented on poisons used in voodoo, the history of religious snake-bite cults and how the contents of the doctor’s bag has changed over the centuries. The congress presents just five papers per year. The popularity of the venue means that Trestrail is currently taking papers for the meeting to take place in 2014.
The “penny dreadful” tabloid newspapers of the day made alleged poisoner Hawley Harvey Crippen one of the most notorious men in the history of English crime. |
“They said they’d love to, but didn’t have the time. They asked me what I had. Six months later they sent me an airplane ticket and I gave my talk to 30 or so detectives from around the country,” says Trestrail. “I went down 25 times to teach the classes and it just kept getting bigger and bigger, until all of a sudden I had a four-hour workshop.” Subsequently, he has given his presentation not only nationally but internationally, including trips to Brussels to lecture for the Belgium-Luxembourg Toxicological Society and a return trip to the Philippines to speak to the National Bureau of Investigation. He has been interviewed by the History Channel, Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel, National Geographic, National Public Radio and quoted by the New York Times. Mystery writer Tony Hillerman even mentions Trestrail in his most recent novel, The Shape Shifter.
“I talk about what a wonderful weapon poisons are. They’re invisible. There’s seldom a witness. The chances of you getting caught are very slim. It looks like a natural death,” muses Trestrail. “I’d like to turn that around, so that the assumption is that a death without any visible means of violence is a poisoning until proven otherwise.”
Trestrail’s expertise has found its most complete expression in his two books: Criminal Poisoning: Investigational Guide for Law Enforcement, Toxicologists, Forensic Scientists and Attorneys (now in its second edition) and The Poison Quiz Book. One of the sections of Criminal Poisoning documents several famous poisoning cases throughout history, including Arthur Warren Waites, DDS (“The Playboy Poisoner”), Nannie (“Arsenic Annie”) Doss and Hawley Harvey Crippen, M.D., who was discovered to have had the remains of a body buried in his basement, a body which DNA analysis now proves was not his wife, Cora, for whose alleged murder Crippen paid with his own life.
Answers, and More Questions
Outside Trestrail’s office hang original news clippings of the Crippen case, which he has collected. To say that they are carefully framed now carries new meaning.
“For close to 40 years, I have studied the Crippen case,” explains Trestrail. “This is the second most famous murder case in England after Jack the Ripper. To be involved in this after 30 years of studying it is amazing.” For nearly a century, Crippen, a homeopathic physician, was believed to have poisoned his flamboyant and domineering wife with the obscure toxin Hyoscine hydrobromide (also known as Scopolamine) before running away with his mistress.
Because of his interest in Crippen’s case, Trestrail toured the Police Evidence Museum at New Scotland Yard while he was in London working with the World Health Organization. “I went there specifically to look at the Crippen artifacts, because they had hair, and so on, from the remains.”
With the advent of DNA analysis, the possibility existed of conclusively identifying the remains as being those of Cora Crippen if mitochondrial DNA could be matched to living relatives. As at so many other junctures in Trestrail’s life, fate seemed to be at work to solve this problem. One of the nurses he hired to staff the poison center, Beth Wills, turned out also to be a genealogist. It took seven years of her searching, but she and Trestrail found two of Cora’s half-grandnieces and one half great-grandniece living in California and Puerto Rico.
“We tested all three of the descendents, who matched each other. Then we went after something to test it against,” says Trestrail. Although New Scotland Yard was not forthcoming with sharing the remaining evidence, the Royal London Hospital loaned one of the original 1910 prosecution’s microscopic slides containing some tissue from the recovered remains, which then went to Dr. David Foran, a forensic biologist at Michigan State University. Despite the tissue sample being sealed in pine sap and preserved in formaldehyde, mitochondrial DNA was able to be extracted, analyzed and compared against the living relative exemplars.
So who really perished in or near Crippen’s London home, their remains ending up in his basement? Whoever it was, it wasn’t Crippen’s showgirl wife. There is some speculation that the remains may be those of a woman who sought an illegal abortion and whose procedure turned fatal. Crippen’s American credentials were not recognized in England, and he may have provided some clandestine medical services.
Although some aspects of the Crippen case may never be fully understood, this new revelation provides Trestrail with the satisfaction of knowing that there was indeed something about the whole affair that didn’t match up with the outlines of the poisoner profile he is still working to fully develop. “What made the case interesting to me is the fact that as a poisoner, you don’t dismember victims. When you start cutting the person up, there’s something that doesn’t make sense.”
Given how pursuing his deepest interests have worked out for him, Trestrail wants others to know that they don’t always have to take the expected path. “When students come to the Poison Center to intern they say, ‘Wow, this is really interesting!’ I tell them this is the road I was meant to be on.”
Interns might also be treated to Trestrail quoting Joseph Campbell’s famous dictum about following your bliss. “When you’re on that path, doors open for you that you didn’t know would open, and wouldn’t open for someone else,” he says. Surrounded by his collection of memento mori, Trestrail’s advice seems less like new age philosophy than practical advice from a real-world wizard.