The Deadly Pepper Pot
The East Twenties in Chicago present one of the most interesting and diverse complexes of humanity to be found in America. Here is part of the Tenderloin; here are squalid streets lined with boarding-houses and shoddy apartment houses. Here are blacks and whites, tans and yellows, wanderers and strays from all the regions of this world.
It was in this region of contrasts—of dreams and dregs—at 415 East Twenty-ninth Street, in the fall of the year 1911, that one of the strangest of all poison mysteries was unfolded.
On the afternoon of October 23 of that year an ambulance appeared before the door. Several stretcher men mounted a flight of stairs and carried from the apartment of Mrs. Louise Vermilya, a widow, the prostrate form of Policeman Arthur T. Bissonette, who was supposed to be suffering from a severe attack of gastritis. The officer was quickly motored over to Mercy Hospital and put to bed in charge of the ordinary nurses, while Mrs. Vermilya shortly arrived, declaring that she would be present to give the patient special attention, since she was his fiancée. Doctor F. A. van Arsdale, the policeman’s physician, and physicians of the hospital attended the sick man, gave him stimulants and restoratives, plied him with stomachics, and did what could be done for a man sore stricken in his alimentary tract. It was all to no avail. On the twenty-fifth Officer Bissonette died.
There is nothing strange in such a death. Men overeat, overdrink, and otherwise abuse the vital internal machinery. If nature has not specially equipped them for such outrages against their forces, by a long line of hard-living ancestry and its consequent hereditary benefits, they do not always survive the effects.
Yet this man, Bissonette, was a strong, robust fellow. His station mates knew that he did not drink. He may have had a liking for food, but was he not a healthy youngster of twenty-six, pounding a beat all day, playing hand-ball by the hour, and able to eat a raw bear if need be? Was it possible that such a man should be walking his beat on one Thursday and dead the next? Obviously it was, since the evidence was at hand—but it was strange.
Mrs. Vermilya, had she been as wise as some have made her out, would have maintained a dignified silence at this point. The doctors had certified that Bissonette had died of acute indigestion and that was final enough. The lady seemed to feel the urge for explanations. She said that Bissonette was a very heavy drinker on the sly, at home, when there was no one to observe him.
Unhappily, perhaps, men know too much about the peculiarities of these heavy solitary drinkers. Among other things, they know that the solitary lush does not rise at early hours in the morning, looking like a lily and playing hand-ball like an athlete.
There was another little matter. Bissonette was not twenty minutes dead when an undertaker, by name C. C. Boysen, appeared and claimed the corpse on behalf of the dead man’s landlady and fiancée. As it turned out, a sister of the deceased had already arrived, and she vehemently opposed any such surrender of her brother’s body. There came near being violence. In the end the sister triumphed.
Finally, there was a third matter to stir curiosity. Bissonette had, as already stated, been a blooming youngster of twenty-six. Mrs. Vermilya was a lady in mature life—forty-two she said. She was not one of those miraculously preserved modern women who look thirty when nearly fifty years have passed. Indeed, she was an ordinary kind of creature, whose face was actually unpleasant in some lights and positions. What was young Bissonette doing, betrothed to this faded creature?
At any rate, suspicion reached the point where Coroner Hoffman decided to act. An autopsy was begun, and Mrs. Vermilya was ordered to be detained. She was not technically arrested, mainly for the reason that she had, herself, collapsed after the death of Bissonette and the first whisper of suspicions against her. Instead of being jailed, she was put to bed in her apartment, with two policemen and a matron or nurse always present, with instructions to watch her closely against any attempt at suicide.
While the suspected woman lay there, the internal organs of the dead policeman were submitted to the State toxicologists and chemists. And while these gentlemen were busy at their slow and precise tasks, the newspapers began to clear up the externals of the story. They sent their reporters in every direction, ran down every rumour, and built up about the beleaguered landlady a most astounding story, the like of which has been told few times in the history of feminine criminality.
The woman, now known as Mrs. Louise Vermilya, had been born of farmer parents in the little country settlement of Barrington, Illinois, now no more than a suburb of Chicago. She had married, when still a slip of a girl, a farmer, Fred Brimmerkamp, much older than she, having with him children by an earlier marriage. To these, the second marriage added three more, a boy and two girls.
Some eighteen years before the present events—which would be in 1896—Fred Brimmerkamp died suddenly, apparently without having received medical attention.
Only a few months later, on February 24, 1897, Mrs. Brimmerkamp’s little daughter Florence, four and one half years old, also died at the Barrington farm, after what the newspapers declared to have been a short and mysterious illness.
On November 23, 1898, Cora, the eight-year-old daughter, followed her little sister to the grave, having also been strangely attacked and surviving only a few days.
Shortly after the death of this child, Mrs. Brimmerkamp met and married Charles Vermilya, a railroad man, who also had been married before, and who brought a maturing son into the household.
In 1904, according to the information gathered by the authorities and the newspapers, Mrs. Vermilya had a quarrel with this stepson, the issue being the sale of some property belonging to the elder Vermilya, situated at Crystal Lake. The young man, then a telegrapher, twenty-three years old, died soon afterward of an illness diagnosed as heart disease.
In 1906 came another death, this time of Lillian Brimmerkamp, the daughter of the lady’s first husband. She also was ill only a short time, dying of a malady that was not satisfactorily diagnosed.
In 1909 the second husband, Charles Vermilya, died of a sudden and mysterious ailment, though only fifty-nine years old and in robust health until a few days before his demise.
In 1910, Frank Brimmerkamp, the last of the accused woman’s children by her first husband, died after lingering agony, but not before he had made certain bitter and suggestive statements to his fiancée.
Mrs. Vermilya now began to take in boarders, and the first of them was Richard T. Smith, an Illinois Central Railway conductor. Some said he had married the lady, although it appeared that the marriage, if there had been one, had existed without benefit of clergy. Mr. Smith departed this earth in March, 1911.
Then Patrolman Bissonette went to board in Mrs. Vermilya’s little apartment, with the results already noted.
All this might not have seemed so strange, for the dread Thanatos sometimes has a way of “following fast and following faster” some afflicted family. Yet there was a matter of money involved here.
When Fred Brimmerkamp had died, he had left his widow five thousand dollars in sound insurance. Vermilya had left almost as much. Smith had left her two thousand dollars, and her stepson twelve hundred. In all, the district attorney declared, Mrs. Vermilya had benefited to the extent of about fifteen thousand dollars through the sudden deaths of these various relatives and near ones.
Lying on her bed and trying to be brave, Mrs. Vermilya issued statements. Indeed, she talked herself into more trouble than might have been brewed for her. With the policemen and a nurse always at hand, she felt the human impulse to talk to some one. She gave out statement after statement, without knowing just what she did.
Her first husband had drunk himself to death, as any one in Barrington might testify. Her second husband had been taken ill on his train, had been brought home, and tenderly nursed by her, till his death. She could readily explain why this man or that had taken out insurance in her favour. The ordinary precautions of life were being twisted into serpents to sting her. In time she would be able to explain everything. She had nothing to fear, for she had done no wrong beyond having had a lot of people die about her—a mere coincidence.
The authorities and the newspapers, however, viewed things in quite another light. To them the facts were incriminating. Here was a woman who led men into her arms and then slew them for trifling amounts of money. She had slain two husbands, her own little daughters and her own grown son out of the most sordid of motives. It may have been true that she slew all the others for their insurance money, but the filing of the will of Bissonette clearly showed that she could have had no such motive in his case. His will left most of his slender property to Miss Lydia Rivard, a farmer’s daughter of Kankakee, Illinois, whom he specifically noted in the testament as his fiancée. As Mrs. Vermilya had witnessed this paper, she must have known its contents and seen clearly that she could not benefit by the policeman’s death. On the other hand, the fact that she had witnessed a paper in which another woman was specially named as fiancée, and still had claimed the same relationship to that man before and after his death, gave rise to further suspicion.
Mrs. Vermilya answered that she knew all about Miss Rivard, and had met the young lady. The engagement between Policeman Bissonette and her was an old affair, and had been superseded by his troth with her. Miss Rivard denied this with some heat, but that was, after all, a woman’s squabble.
On November 2, while still lying sick at home, her guardians ever at her side, Mrs. Vermilya did a strange thing. It was not then explicable, but soon showed the direction in which her mind was working. She made her will, and the newspapers of the country, which by this time were watching the Vermilya case carefully, recorded this happening at length. Even Mrs. Vermilya’s faithful keepers asked her why she wanted to make a will. She returned a significant remark:
“I am suffering from the same pains the others suffered from.”
Two days later this rather cryptic statement was solved.
November 4 opened with the official report of the chemists. They had found in the viscera of Policeman Bissonette no less than eight grains of white arsenic, about a teaspoonful, enough, according to text-books on toxicology, to dispatch four ordinary men.
This news was conveyed to Mrs. Vermilya that day at noon.
“Is that so?” she said calmly.
An hour later Mrs. Vermilya told her nurse, Miss Rose Wiseman, that she would like some fried eggs, several of them. Since eggs were considered excellent diet for her, the nurse hastened to prepare them, placing them on a platter with a little bread and the ordinary salt and pepper shakers. She brought these materials to the bedside. Mrs. Vermilya grinned with satisfaction, and the police, who sat by, marvelled at her composure. Then the sick woman’s face changed a little. She said:
“Miss Wiseman, I never could stand black pepper. You will find white pepper in an old talcum-powder can on the second shelf in the kitchen, back in the corner. Do you mind getting it for me?”
The nurse got the can, and Mrs. Vermilya shook great quantities of the white pepper over her eggs, smacking her lips all the while, declaring that she just couldn’t eat eggs without lots of white pepper. Finally she gulped down her eggs with a look of positive enjoyment.
The police guards and the nurse congratulated themselves. They had got the patient to eat at last. She was getting better, and would be able to face her accusers. Yes, the way she ate those eggs was an excellent sign.
Suddenly Mrs. Vermilya raised herself in bed in a violent convulsion, shrieked with pain, and fell back unconscious.
Suspicion at once fell upon that old talcum can. It was sent to a chemist, who reported in a few minutes that it contained black pepper and powdered white arsenic!
Amazement seized the police and the prosecutor. They had searched Mrs. Vermilya’s house again and again for poison. They had taken away with them a dozen bottles from her kitchen shelf and bathroom cabinet, only to find them filled with innocuous substances. They had inquired of drug stores in Chicago and Barrington, trying to trace to Mrs. Vermilya a purchase of poison. They had failed again and again. Yet here, all this time, stood the wanted evidence in the common old talcum can.
The woman, who stood now self-accused, was violently ill. Doctors went to work on her with antidotes and emetics, and on the second day it was announced she would live.
Meanwhile the pepper shaker was becoming famous. Pictures of it were printed everywhere. It brought in a fresh bit of direct evidence. The father of Arthur Bissonette came forward, though he had previously remained in the background, grieved and depressed, to tell the district attorney of a meal he had once taken at his son’s boarding place, in which the pepper shaker had figured.
He had gone to call on his son, and dinner had been served while he was there, he being invited to stay. Ham and fried eggs were served, and he thought them first-rate. The famous pepper shaker was on the table, and he had helped himself liberally. Afterward, he had left the house and been seized on the street with terrible cramps. He had gone to a drug store, got an emetic, and been relieved. He was still feeling pains and stiffness of the limbs, although that had been several weeks before the death of his son.
Another witness also came forward in the person of Miss Elizabeth Nolan, fiancée of Frank Brimmerkamp, Mrs. Vermilya’s own son, who had died on October 30, 1910. Miss Nolan said that young Brimmerkamp, in the course of his last illness, had said to her on several occasions that he thought he was being poisoned, as his father had been before him. Miss Nolan had seen him refuse to drink mineral water offered to him by the accused woman. His dying words were that Mrs. Vermilya might as well call the undertaker, and have him stuck in the ground. Miss Nolan also said that her fiancé had been extremely suspicious of his mother, declaring several times that he knew his father had been poisoned. To all these Miss Nolan made solemn affidavit.
The authorities, now feeling certain that they had in their hands a murderer of the utmost skill and heartlessness, went to work feverishly to exhume the bodies of Richard Smith and Frank Brimmerkamp. The town was in a great state of excitement as to the outcome of these new analyses, and Mrs. Vermilya, as soon as she had recovered from the self-administered pepper and arsenic, also took a lively interest in the matter. She had meantime been transferred from her home to the detention hospital, where she was under close surveillance for fear of further attempts to take her life. On November 10 she was informed, as was the public, that arsenic had also been found in the bodies of Smith and Brimmerkamp, through both of whom Mrs. Vermilya had reaped insurance money.
Again Mrs. Vermilya was not disconcerted. It was strange that both these men who had died in her apartment should have been found poisoned with arsenic. Coincidence was a great thing. Maybe one of them had put the arsenic into her white pepper. How could she know?
There were a good many men and women of fair mental equipment who felt as she did. They expressed a great doubt of her guilt, a sympathy for her, and the belief that a jury would not convict her. Her attorney declared that she was an unfortunate woman, the victim of men and of circumstances, and that at the proper time her innocence would be established. It was not an especially surprising statement from a defence attorney, but an indication of the front that was being put up in the face of evidence that seemed conclusive.
The formalities, of course, went forward briskly. On November 27, the coroner’s jury held Mrs. Vermilya, and on December 19 the grand jury brought in the indictment. The news of this portentous event was brought to the prisoner in jail, where she was now occupying a cell like other accused women, among them a Mrs. Quinn, who, having been charged with having shot her husband, was supposed to feel a natural kinship with the lady of the pepper shaker. Once more Mrs. Vermilya merely shrugged and said that time would vindicate her.
It happened that there were being held in the Cook County jail at this time four young roughs who had held up on the road, and beaten to death, a farmer. Their motive had been simple robbery. The scaffolding for their hanging was being erected in the jail yard. Mrs. Vermilya could hear the thudding of the hammers and the working of the saws. She knew, as all the prisoners did, that preparations were being made for a hanging, and she had been told of the crime of the four young men.
The reporters, who brought her the news of her own indictment and got her nonchalant reaction, asked her the cruel question of her feeling toward the men who were about to be hanged.
“They should be hanged,” said Mrs. Vermilya crisply. “They deserve it. Only it’s a shame it’s so near Christmas.”
The whole country, or that part of it which follows the strange and the terrible, became interested in the problem of this inscrutable woman. Psychologists and alienists were besought for opinions and gave them.
Meantime, old friends and acquaintances of Louise Wolfe Brimmerkamp Vermilya came forward to tell, in their simple way, of events in her life which they had deemed merely curious. Certainly they had never suspected them as having the least significance. One of these friends was an undertaker in Barrington.
When old Fred Brimmerkamp was still alive, and his wife’s children were babies, the woman used to love to come around to the undertaker’s shop and help embalm the bodies. She knew, before he did, who was dead or dying in the little settlement, and she had a strange way of intruding herself into the confidence of families where a death was expected. She would sit with the dying and watch the ebbing of life with a rapt and unflagging attention. She could watch those scenes which drive the hardest and best beloved from the bedside of the expiring—watch them without any emotion unless it was a secret pleasure.
After a death, she would appear at the undertaker’s rooms and seem to delight in performing those dread offices which men must harden themselves to endure. She came and took part in the processes of preparing bodies for burial, though she usually received no pay for her work, and though she was sometimes made to feel unwelcome.
The Chicago undertaker, Boysen, who was at first suspected of having had some evil connection with the woman, although later quite cleared, had a similar story to tell. Mrs. Vermilya’s mind turned about death and the dead. Her topics of conversation revolved about the matter of who might die next. She almost kept a record of the sick in her neighbourhood, and had an uncanny way of knowing where death had struck or was about to strike. She loved to spend her time in the undertaker’s rooms, often doing his most disagreeable work gratis.
In other words, this woman was a necrophile. Those who care to examine examples of this kind in other lands and under other circumstances may consult the medical books, particularly Krafft-Ebbing. There is the kind of being who, because of some quirk in the brain mechanism or the nerve and gland system, reverses the usual attitude, the normal feeling, of the race, and, instead of being repelled and horrified by death and the dead, is attracted to them.
In Chicago a good many people saw through the terrible enigma of Louise Vermilya and wanted to have her tested for lunacy. Her attorney, sensing the direction of the wind, and seeing that there were certain holes in the State’s case, had her brought to trial on March 7, 1912. Of the details of the trial, we need no recounting, the whole affair, except for moves of the defendant counsel, having already been told.
On April 6, a day less than a month after the opening of the trial, the jury set to try Louise Vermilya came to a disagreement. The woman was never again haled into court to defend herself.
—E.H.S.