If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
—Mark Twain (1894)
Did Minnie Wallace intend to murder James Walkup when she married him? At her trial, the prosecution would claim that she—in a conspiracy with her mother—had planned to do so from the start, but it is not likely. Why kill the goose that laid the golden egg? In Kansas, the widow’s portion (assuming she could get away with murder) was one-third of her husband’s estate if he died without a will, whereas if she remained married to him, she could have access to the whole thing.
No, Minnie was a cunning schemer, but she would not have resorted to such drastic measures unless she felt she had no other option. Of course, most people would look to separation or divorce as a civilized option to an intolerable marriage, but Minnie had married him for his money and she had no intention of giving it up. Neither did she intend to stay married to this boorish lout who insisted on having sex frequently, was possibly physically rough with her, and—more to the point—would not let her spend money whenever she wanted to.
That James Walkup did not view his marriage in the same negative shades as his wife is evident in a letter he wrote to her mother on August 13, just nine days before his death, while he was on a business trip to Topeka. He seems to have been very happy with his wife and enthusiastic about being able to provide for her and her family:
Willie arrived all right, and is delighted with the city and country. . . . He is going to start to school next month. I want him to go nine months steady. Minnie is perfectly satisfied. She appears as well satisfied as if she was at home in New Orleans, and you may rest assured that I will leave nothing undone to make her happy. We are going next to Omaha, Neb., for a few days. I have not been away from home but one day since we were married. You may rest assured that Minnie is well contented and happy. Thanking you for giving me as good and affectionate wife as Minnie is, I will close.1
While Minnie would later say that James Walkup was away quite a bit on business, he writes in his letter that the trip to Topeka was his first one. It would make more sense that he did not go away before this, as his frequent absence might have made the marriage more tolerable for her, at least for a longer time than one month. She would lie about the absences to gain sympathy as an abandoned wife and possibly to take away the imputed motive of familiarity breeding contempt.
The only clue we have as to a possible premarriage plan to get rid of her husband is Minnie’s story, told offhandedly to a druggist, about trying to buy strychnine in Cincinnati. Did she think she might eventually need to use it on her husband? Did she really ask for strychnine? And if she made it all up, to what end did she do so? She said she had gone to a drugstore for strychnine, but it turned out that the clerk had given her quinine instead.2
What would make Minnie suspect that she had not been sold the strychnine she asked for? The only answer can be that she gave it to her husband and he didn’t die! She was determined to get it analyzed so she could know for sure what she had. After all, he was a big man, and maybe she just needed to give him a bigger dose. And so began her almost daily forays to Emporia’s drugstores.
On Wednesday, August 12, 1885, Minnie went to Kelly’s Drugstore on Commercial Street. She could hardly tell the druggist that the strychnine she bought in Cincinnati hadn’t done its job, so she made up a story about getting a paper of calomel from a lady friend in New Orleans. She wanted Kelly to tell her if it was, indeed, calomel (used for constipation). She did not tell him why she suspected it was not.
The druggist, R. B. Kelly, did not analyze Minnie’s powder, but put some on his tongue. He told her it was definitely not calomel, but rather morphine, quinine, or strychnine, and from the bitter taste of it, most likely the last. He advised her to throw it away. When Kelly felt sick later, he was sure it must have been strychnine.
The next day, Thursday, James Walkup left for a two-day business trip to Topeka and Atchison. Minnie went to Dr. John A. Moore’s Drugstore, also on Commercial Street, and asked the clerk to analyze the powder, telling him the same story she had used at Kelly’s. This time the testing was done, and the powder was proved to be harmless quinine.
Minnie eventually concocted a completely different story as to why she needed the powder analyzed: When she was in Cincinnati, her cousin Dora Bowers had given her some face powder called “snowflake.” Minnie also had with her some calomel, which looked very similar to the snowflake. In an unbelievably stupid move, she took a sheet of pale pink stationery, cut it in two, and put the snowflake and the calomel in separate pieces—without labeling them! When she got to Emporia, she couldn’t remember which was which—hence, the need for analysis.3
Since she now had no poison, but was stuck with quinine instead, Minnie went to yet another drugstore, that of forty-five-year-old Moses H. Bates, and asked for ten grains of strychnine, half a grain of which is sufficient to kill most people. Bates, who was also Walkup’s brother-in-law (he was married to the late Hannah Walkup’s sister Betsey), would only sell her eight grains, as that was all he had left in the opened bottle, and while he went to get it, he assumed she was filling out the legally mandated information in the poison book: name and purpose of purchase. He could see her writing something in this register, so it was a logical assumption.
Although Minnie expressed concern that someone would find out about her purchase, Bates assured her that the register would only be looked at if there were “an accident.” After she left, however, he noticed she had not put anything in the “purpose” column.
Minnie must have wanted to stockpile her poison supply, because the next day—Friday, August 14—she was back downtown trying to buy more strychnine. At Irwin’s Drugstore, she asked for ten cents worth but refused to put down the reason after signing the register. She would only tell him it was for a private preparation she was mixing. Irwin said he couldn’t sell her the strychnine unless she indicated the purpose. “I’m sorry to trouble you, but I have already got my name signed,” she told him, probably thinking he’d say, “Oh, go ahead and take it, then.” But he didn’t. He said it was no trouble to remove her name.
It was William Irwin whom Minnie told about trying to buy strychnine in Cincinnati and the clerk’s giving her quinine instead. “He probably did it on purpose,” Irwin commented, “thinking you would put it to bad use.” “No,” Minnie told him, “he was a young clerk, and he just made a mistake.” This Cincinnati purchase must have been the powder she took to Kelly’s and Moore’s for analysis.
Undaunted by her failure at Irwin’s, Minnie next tried Ryder’s but came up against the same legal problem: no signing, no poison. “Why do I have to do that?” she asked Charles Ryder. “Do you think I’m going to commit suicide or something?” The druggist explained that it was the law, and everyone had to follow it.
At this point, it must be asked: How did Minnie think she could get away with poisoning her husband when she was trying to buy strychnine all over town? And why didn’t she just make up a purpose as to why she wanted it instead of refusing to sign the register? The answer is that she had not thought she would be questioned about it and had not had time to think up an unimpeachable reason if anyone should connect her purchase with her husband’s death. She couldn’t say “rats,” for example, if it turned out there were no rats on the premises at 157 Merchants Street. Moreover, she thought her youth, beauty, and status would insulate her from suspicion.
By the time she got to Irwin’s, however, she realized she’d have to think of something, so she came up with the “private preparation,” undoubtedly hoping that the druggist would assume it was some embarrassing feminine problem that was none of his business. Because if she really had what she would later claim was a special recipe for stain removal—strychnine combined with urine—she could have gotten the poison merely by putting “stain removal” in the purpose column. Obviously, then, she didn’t think of the urine (or, indeed, the stain remover) until later, when she realized that she would need to come up with something embarrassing enough to account for her reluctance to indicate the purpose.
At 4:00 A.M. on Saturday, August 15, James Walkup returned from Topeka. That night he was taken ill with a combination of symptoms he said he had never before experienced: nausea, diarrhea, and a stretching and tightening feeling in his legs—the classic symptoms of strychnine poisoning. Minnie called Dr. Luther Jacobs, who gave Walkup a solution of morphine. Because the illness had come on so suddenly, Dr. Jacobs thought it might be either indigestion or cholera.4
Like James Walkup, Luther D. Jacobs, forty-three, a Pennsylvania native and a University of Pennsylvania Medical College graduate, had jumped into Emporia life with both feet once he arrived there. He was an officer in the Emporia Lodge, president of the Board of Health, and a member of other Emporia and Lyon County organizations. And he was also affiliated with the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railway Company—as surgeon. He had been practicing medicine for twenty years.5
By Sunday morning, as a result of Dr. Jacobs’s ministrations, Walkup was much better, able to be up and around. Minnie must have been mightily disappointed, so she took Mary Moss aside and gave her a note to take to Bates’s Drugstore. “Don’t tell any of the family where you’re going,” Minnie admonished her. “If anyone asks, say you’re going downtown for butter.”6
The note asked the druggist to give the servant more strychnine, as Minnie had dropped the bottle she had bought there on Thursday, spilling its contents. (The strychnine was in crystal form. If she were telling the truth—which she was not—she could easily have salvaged most of it and put it in a new container herself.) She wrote that she would stop by on Monday to pay for the new bottle. But Mary Moss, who was ignorant of the note’s contents, was unable to tell the druggist the purpose of the strychnine, so had to come away without it.
When Mary returned to the Merchants Street house, the family was at dinner. She told Minnie she was unable to get the “butter,” and Minnie immediately got up from the table, took Mary into the hallway, and had a whispered conversation with her about what the druggist had said.
That afternoon, as soon as Walkup and Willie had driven off in the wagon to inspect one of the farms, Minnie hurried upstairs to take off her Mother Hubbard and don her going-to-town outfit.7 Walking toward Commercial Street at her usual double-time pace, she stopped long enough to tell neighbors Sallie McKinney and Julia Sommers she was going down to get her husband some medicine.
Seeing their pastor, the Reverend Winfield Snodgrass, crossing Merchants Street, she hailed him and asked if he could stop by the house at 4:00 the next day to talk about a sensitive matter: “I’m in trouble,” she told him, “and don’t know who else to turn to. I don’t really know anyone here well enough and I’m afraid the neighborhood ladies might gossip. But I know I can safely confide in you.”8
Minnie asked Snodgrass not to let on to James Walkup that she had talked to him, but said that he should say he was stopping by to inquire about Walkup’s health after his bout with sickness on Saturday night. When they parted, the minister was confused as to whether Walkup was going to be present at this talk or even in the house at all. He and his wife discussed what Minnie might possibly be going to reveal at their meeting.
Possibly disillusioned over the failure of the strychnine to dispatch her husband, as well as her inability to get more of it, Minnie decided to switch to arsenic on that Sunday trip downtown. (She did not know it, but it is much easier to recover from strychnine than from arsenic.)9 Her first stop was Kelly’s, where she had initially taken her paper of powders to be analyzed the previous Wednesday. Kelly asked her if she were the same woman who had come in with the unknown powder and, when Minnie admitted she was, he inquired whether she had thrown it out as he advised. “I burned it,” she told him. But that, of course, was a lie.
Arsenic was an easier purchase than strychnine because everyone knew ladies used it to whiten the complexion. And Minnie’s complexion was as white as could be, albeit naturally. Some people thought she was addicted to opium because of her extreme pallor, but her face had been that way her whole life.10 She had no need of artificial aids. So Minnie was able to sign the register and purchase twenty cents worth of arsenic (half an ounce). As she had with Bates and the strychnine, she urged Kelly not to tell anyone what she had bought.
Kelly carefully packaged the arsenic so there could be no mistaking what it was: First, he wrapped it in manila paper and labeled it “Arsenic.” Then he put this into a cardboard box, again labeled “Arsenic—Poison,” and wrapped this entire package with more manila paper, also labeled “Poison.”
Minnie scurried home, changed back to her Mother Hubbard, and was sitting on the porch in the exact same clothes she had on that morning just as her husband and Willie drove up. She must have been pleased to have timed it so well, thus avoiding having to answer questions and also at her success in getting “medicine” for her husband.
On Monday, August 17, Minnie went back downtown to explain to Bates why she had sent the servant girl to get more strychnine on Sunday: She had gone to Newman’s Department Store after leaving Bates’s drugstore on Thursday and left the package on the counter there. She must have forgotten what she had said in her note about breaking the bottle. Minnie would soon tell yet another story about the “disappearance” of the Bates strychnine.
After Minnie finished explaining to Bates, she did not ask him for more poison, and he did not offer to sell her any. Nor did he have her sign the register for the Thursday purchase, since she said she no longer had it.
That afternoon, Reverend Snodgrass, as promised, stopped by the Walkup house to see Minnie. She told him a disturbing story and said she wanted his advice, but in reality, she was setting him up to be a reliable witness who would later attest that James Reeves Walkup had already attempted suicide at least once.
On Friday, August 7, Walkup was in his room cleaning his gun when he dropped it and it went off, putting a hole in the wall. Downstairs, Minnie heard the shot and—afraid to check it out herself—sent Willie Willis up to see what had happened. He came back with the assurance that it had been an accident and Walkup was all right. This much, at least, was factual.
But, Minnie now told Reverend Snodgrass, when she went upstairs, Walkup confessed to her that he had tried to shoot himself in the head and missed. How can someone miss his own head? And in this case, he would have to have been a contortionist to have succeeded, based on the bullet’s final location in relation to where he was sitting. It was possible, but not probable. The purported motive for this action by a man who indulged himself in every possible way throughout his whole life and did not take “no” for an answer from anyone? He was depressed at a letter from his daughter Mattie in which she objected to his marrying a sixteen-year-old girl only a year after the death of his second wife.
The Reverend believed the story and was properly aghast at this revelation—which had not been divulged to anyone for an entire ten days after its occurrence. But when Walkup was later asked by his friends about the possible suicide attempt, he scoffed at the idea. It was nothing but a careless accident, he told them: “I damn near shot my hand off!”11
On the night that Minnie “confided” in the Reverend, Walkup was feeling so much better that he went downtown for the city council meeting, over which he was presiding as president and acting mayor. He took Minnie with him and sat her down in Moore’s Drugstore to wait until the meeting was over. (He had a tendency to treat her as if she were a doll or a child, often referring to her as his “little wife.”)
But Tuesday afternoon, Walkup was deathly ill again with vomiting, diarrhea, and pains in his stomach. He had no fever, which Dr. Jacobs thought was strange. The physician came back four times the following day, Wednesday, and finally convinced Walkup to submit to an injection of morphine to ease his symptoms. (The sick man’s reluctance is more readily understood when it is known that the injection was to go into his eye.) “I’ll give you $20 if this is any more painful than a fly bite,” Dr. Jacobs told him.
As her husband lay ill all day Wednesday, Minnie made up a list of items she wanted from Newman’s (naturally, to be charged to Walkup’s account) and sent it down with Mary Moss. But Newman’s either couldn’t or wouldn’t fill the order and sent back a note saying so with their young messenger boy, Johnnie Samuel.12
By Thursday, August 20, Walkup was much improved. He felt like eating some “cove” (canned) oysters and sent Mary Moss down to Davis and Hughes’s grocery to get them.13 The preferred method of eating cove oysters was to pour vinegar on them, which Mary did, but not without tasting some first. She confessed to taking two or three but may have been reluctant to admit to more. The vinegar they had in the house wasn’t strong enough, so Mary left the oysters on the counter—unattended—while she left to borrow a stronger version from a neighbor. When the new vinegar was added, Minnie took the oysters to her husband.
Willie Willis had told them all to stay away from canned oysters, as he knew of some cases of poisoning, but his warning fell on deaf ears: Walkup wanted his oysters, and when he finished them, he wanted some soft drinks (“pop”). It was a hot day and Mary Moss refused to go back downtown for the pop, so Minnie said she’d go herself.
In fact, Minnie was glad to have an excuse to go downtown. She got the pop, all right, but she also stopped by yet another drugstore, that of thirty-year-old Ben Wheldon. She bought a glass of soda water and then said she wanted some arsenic. “Do I have to tell you what it’s for?” she asked him. When Wheldon said she did, she said it was for her complexion, but that she didn’t want to state that. He told her she had to.
Wheldon sold her four ounces of very poisonous commercial-grade arsenic for twenty-five cents. He told her that ladies did not buy this kind for their complexion, but instead used the less dangerous Fowler’s Solution, which was highly diluted. As had Kelly, Wheldon carefully wrapped the arsenic in labeled paper. He put the package on the counter and went to get the poison register for Minnie to sign. But when he came back, she had taken the arsenic and left. Since she had stated the purpose, however, he signed it for her.
Afterward, Ben Wheldon remembered his wife’s saying that James Walkup had been sick off and on with some mysterious illness, and the druggist thought Minnie’s arsenic purchase, under those circumstances, was odd. He went down to see Walkup’s partner, Dwight Bill, and told him about it. Bill said he would talk to Dr. Jacobs.
Meanwhile, Minnie had returned back home with the pop, and Walkup drank two bottles. Shortly after that, he vomited the oysters and proceeded to become ill again with many of the same symptoms he had before. Willie felt that his warning about the oysters should have been heeded: “Minnie and the old man should have listened to me,” he told neighbors. But Mary Moss, who had sampled at least two (and probably more) of the oysters, had suffered no ill effects.
Dr. Jacobs was beginning to suspect arsenic poisoning and had already consulted with a medical colleague about it. He was reluctant to act without being sure of his diagnosis, and had even surreptitiously carried away some of the liquid that came up from the patient when he tried to vomit. (He had tried to get a urine sample, but by then Walkup’s kidneys had ceased functioning.) However, an analysis of the vomit did not show any arsenic (because it had already passed out of his stomach), so Dr. Jacobs said nothing. But when Dwight Bill contacted him with Ben Wheldon’s information, he knew he had been right.
That night, sick again, Walkup told Dr. Jacobs that he did not want any more medicinal powders but preferred to take liquid solutions instead. Did he suspect the powders his wife was giving him? Minnie was refusing to let anyone else give him his medicine or take him his food. Although Walkup did not say why he did not want powdered prescriptions, Minnie told Dr. Jacobs that her husband was complaining of a scratchy feeling in his throat. Jacobs knew that the reliable Squibb’s product he was using—subnitrate of bismuth—could never cause scratchiness but that arsenic could.
By now, Libbie had returned from her trip to Colorado, arriving at the Walkup home on Tuesday, August 18. She was alarmed at her father’s state of health and at odds with her new stepmother. She was missing some cloaks that belonged to her and Mattie, and asked Minnie if she had seen them. When Minnie said she hadn’t, Libbie pointedly remarked that maybe they should look in some of those boxes that had been sent to New Orleans. Later, Mary Moss found some of the missing clothing inside Minnie’s closet in the master bedroom.14
On Wednesday night, an abominably hot one, Libbie went up to bed early and lit a smoke concoction called “Persian Insect Powders” in the hallway to rid the upstairs of mosquitoes. It had burned out before she fell asleep, had never caused flames to begin with, and was at least eight feet from her bed, but Libbie woke up a few hours later to find her bed clothes on fire at her feet and next to her head. She went into her father’s room across the hall to get some water from the basin and heard Walkup and Minnie snoring. The fire extinguished, Libbie went back to sleep.
Libbie always suspected that Minnie had set fire to her bed—whether to kill her or to get her to move out of the house, she didn’t know. Or maybe it was for revenge: Because Libbie accused Minnie of stealing her clothes, it was possible that setting the bed on fire was Minnie’s way of saying “Don’t mess with me.” Otherwise, the fire incident makes no sense. If Minnie were trying to eliminate heirs to Walkup’s fortune, there were two more—William and Mattie—she would have no access to. But sometimes evil has no rational motive.
An interesting side note to this incident is that Mary Moss was sleeping in the hallway between the two bedrooms, so anyone crossing from one bedroom to the other (as Libbie had to do to get the water and Minnie would have if she had set the bed on fire) or going up or down the stairs would have had to step over her. Mary said she did not wake up at all and knew nothing about the fire until the next morning. Libbie’s bedroom had another door, so it is possible that Willie Willis could have come up from his cot in the living room to set fire to her bed, but this seems very far-fetched. Libbie could have set fire to her own bed, but it seems unlikely that she would put herself in such danger or want to destroy her grandmother’s homemade quilt, which was completely ruined. In the end, it might have been merely an unfortunate accident, made more sinister in light of the poisoning that would soon follow.15
At noon on Friday, August 21, Dwight Bill went to warn his partner about his suspicions that Minnie was poisoning him and to make sure she stayed out of the sickroom.16 If it were not already too late, perhaps Walkup could recover from the latest dose. Minnie met Bill at the door. “What do you think is the matter with him?” she asked. “I think it’s peritonitis,” he told her. “Don’t they die very suddenly when they have that disease?” “Yes,” Bill said, “there is usually no hope for them.” Minnie asked him not to let Walkup know what was wrong with him, so as not to worry him, and Bill assured her he would not, a promise he had no intention of keeping.
Bill found Libbie with James Walkup’s mother in the sickroom and asked them to leave, as he needed to talk to his partner in private. Libbie and her grandmother left, and Bill began by saying that he didn’t want to offend Walkup, but hoped to be able to speak freely.
“You can say anything you wish to me,” Walkup assured him.
“The doctor and some of the rest of us are suspicious that you have been poisoned, and we mistrust your wife.”
“I have mistrusted her, too.”
“She told me she had bought some strychnine to take out stains from her dresses.” (Why would Minnie volunteer this information unless possibly Walkup began to be suspicious about being poisoned and confronted her about it?)
“You were getting better Thursday evening, were you not?” Bill asked.
“Yes, I thought I was going to be well enough to come down to the council meeting this morning.”
“You had a very bad night last night, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I was very sick,” Walkup told him.
“Your wife bought twenty-five cents worth of arsenic at Ben Wheldon’s drug store yesterday afternoon.”
“My God, is that so? Let us have her arrested!”
Bill told his friend that they wanted to be absolutely sure before they did anything so drastic as to arrest his wife, but they also didn’t want him taking any more medicine from her. Walkup replied that he wouldn’t even take a glass of water from her. He assured Bill that he wanted to live and hoped it was not too late to reverse the poisoning (thereby scotching Minnie’s suicide story). He was completely nonplussed, though, and couldn’t think why Minnie would want to kill him. He had thought they were getting along fine.
From that point on, Libbie was put in charge of giving him his medicine (the subnitrate of bismuth powders dissolved in water), and Minnie was not allowed to be in his room without someone else there as well.
By one o’clock that afternoon, Minnie was aware of their suspicions, as she had to be told why she was forbidden to tend to her husband. While Libbie was in the sickroom, Minnie went in, and Walkup told her to sit down. When she sat on the edge of the bed, he told her to sit on a chair instead. “You don’t want me near you; you think I’m guilty,” she said. “No, I don’t say either way, but evidence is very strong against you,” he told her. At this, Minnie began to cry and protest her innocence.
James Walkup’s next visitor was a neighbor, fifty-seven-year-old Luther Severy, director of the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railway and another extremely successful Kansas capitalist with extensive landholdings. It was Severy who had earlier urged Walkup to get his affairs in order and had sent a telegram to the Hoods in Colorado that Mattie’s father was dying. (Walkup said he’d make out his will, but he never did.)
“I suppose you’ve heard of the suspicion surrounding my sickness,” Walkup told Severy. Severy said he had. The sick man told him that Minnie had bought arsenic at Wheldon’s for her complexion and put it in a box. Maybe they should weigh it and see if it was all there. Severy thought that was probably a good idea.
Grocer William Ireland, thirty-three, spent most of Friday afternoon with his friend James. “Walkup, what is the matter with you?” was his greeting as he entered the sickroom. “The doctor says I’m poisoned.” Ireland was shocked. “Where did you get your poison?” “I don’t know,” Walkup told him.
Later, Minnie came into the room, walked dramatically to the window, then slowly turned to face Ireland and another visitor. “Gentlemen, do I look like a person who could do such a thing?” Ireland, who had not been told of the suspicions against her, asked, “Mrs. Walkup, what do you mean?” “I am accused of poisoning Mr. Walkup.” Walkup muttered, “I guess not,” and Ireland told Minnie he had not heard such a thing, nor did he think she could do it. “I didn’t, but I’m accused of it,” Minnie told him. Again, Walkup murmured, “I think not.” “Yes, the doctors accuse me of it,” Minnie repeated, began to cry, and left the room.
After Minnie was gone, Walkup told Ireland that if he recovered from his illness, he would always have his suspicions.
Down in the parlor at 3:00 P.M., Minnie was called to meet with Dwight Bill, Luther Severy, and Dr. Jacobs. She scolded Bill, saying he was very cruel to accuse her of poisoning her husband, as Walkup was “the very best friend I have in the world.” The men asked her to account for her purchase of all that poison, and she told them about the “special recipe” for removing stains: strychnine mixed with urine, a recipe she had been given by “a colored woman in New Orleans.” She had never tried it before and had no idea how much to use of either ingredient (the “colored woman,” whom she later gave the name of Annie, not having thought to give her this vital information along with the recipe). As for what happened to the strychnine she bought at Bates’s, she now thought it had been removed from her handbag while it was hanging on her dressing case. (This, of course, would implicate either Libbie or Mary Moss. Minnie was thinking ahead.)
Minnie had a dress with a stain on it, she explained (for once she was telling the truth), and wanted to try the special mixture on it. She had purchased enough strychnine “to clean all the dresses in Christendom,” yet had only one stained dress and no immediate plans to use it.17 She was nearly frantic in her many attempts to get strychnine right now, yet switched abruptly to arsenic and abandoned all thoughts of cleaning her dress.
So Minnie bought the arsenic, she said, to change her complexion (which was already snow white). Later, she would say she wanted to get rid of pimples, which nobody else could see on her face. As to what happened to the first batch she bought at Kelly’s (thereby necessitating the purchase at Wheldon’s), she said she had been in the process of transferring it from all that protective labeled packaging into an unlabeled face-powder box. Now, this was a task that could be accomplished in a few seconds, yet she told the men that, as she was pouring the arsenic into the face-powder box, she heard her husband coming up the stairs. Fearing he would not approve of her using it for her complexion, she—illogically, as most of it should have been in the powder box by then—threw the whole batch into a chamber pot, conveniently located right next to her.
Even more illogical was Minnie’s “prescription” for using the arsenic: She had no idea how it worked, so she guessed she’d just dissolve some in water and drink it, using her own judgment as to how much. Later, she would come up with a “friend in New Orleans” who used arsenic all the time, but this woman, as did the “colored woman” with the strychnine, neglected to give Minnie the correct proportions of poison to liquid.18 And, once again, she didn’t think to ask. But there was no mention of the existence of the “friend in New Orleans” in the Walkup parlor on that Friday afternoon. She was making all this up as she went along and would later refine her various versions, hoping nobody would remember that they contradicted each other. Minnie was a liar, but she was not yet an accomplished one.
Dr. Jacobs decided to test her, so he told her that it was possible Walkup had been poisoned by the oysters, as he had known “a score of people” who had been poisoned from eating canned fish. Minnie immediately turned to someone in the room and said, “Do you hear what Dr. Jacobs said? He has known of an entire family having been poisoned by canned fish. It must have been those oysters that poisoned him.”
Luther Severy remembered Walkup’s suggestion about weighing the arsenic, and he now presented this to Minnie. She claimed to have all four ounces of the Wheldon arsenic—as with the Kelly arsenic, transferred from its warning wrappings to the unmarked face-powder box—and went to get it for Dr. Jacobs, who was just leaving.
Severy and Dr. Jacobs were standing out on the walkway when Minnie came out with the arsenic, holding the box by its lid. As she went to step off the porch, it fell out of her hands, the lid already off and still in her hand, spilling its contents on her dress and onto the stairs. Minnie said nothing—not “Oh, my!” or “Oh, no!” or “Oh, dear!” or anything else that most people would have used at the accidental destruction of their chance at exoneration, although even Severy cried out as he looked on. She simply walked into the house, came back with a table knife, and began scraping what she could back into the box.
Dr. Jacobs took some of the spilled powder and tested it. It was, indeed, arsenic. Severy was under the impression that, before being spilled, the little box was only three-quarters full. Later, druggist Charles Ryder tried to put four ounces of arsenic into a box of exactly the same dimensions as the one Minnie had, and he found that a quarter of it would not fit.19 If Severy’s impression were correct as to the box’s not being full to start with, this left approximately two ounces of arsenic unaccounted for.
Throughout that Friday and into Saturday morning, as James Walkup lay dying, Dr. Jacobs was more than a little surprised at Minnie’s demeanor. She was one cool customer, completely composed and stoic about her husband’s condition and the town’s suspicions of her. The only time he saw her anywhere close to being upset was when he informed both Minnie and Libbie that, in his opinion, Walkup would die. While Libbie burst into tears, Minnie just let out “a distinct sigh of distress.” Or maybe it was relief.
By Saturday morning, August 22, 1885, James Reeves Walkup’s system was shutting down. He had pain in his bowels, from which emitted bloody mucus, and he could not urinate, his bladder having collapsed. At 10:50 that morning, surrounded by friends and family—including Minnie, who kissed him and begged him to show that he recognized her—he died, his eyes fixed on the face of his young wife.
It was exactly one month to the day since his wedding to Minnie Wallace.