It was now May 1927. They were just in time.
With not a moment to lose, Berry began preparations for a lawsuit. Grace’s case would be the first to be filed; perhaps because she had been the first to call on him, or maybe because she was stronger than Katherine in terms of her mental health. She was also – in Hoffman’s words – ‘a very estimable person employed by one of [Newark’s] largest business corporations’. Berry may well have known that USRC’s lawyers would be looking for any chink in their armour, and Grace’s good character stood them all in good stead. Thus on 18 May 1927, Grace’s formal complaint was filed against the radium firm.
It made for uncomfortable reading – for USRC. Berry charged that they had ‘carelessly and negligently’ put Grace at risk so that her body ‘became impregnated with radioactive substances’ which ‘continually attack and break down the plaintiff’s tissues . . . causing great pain and suffering’. And he concluded: ‘Plaintiff demands $125,000 [$1.7 million] damages on the first count.’
There were two counts included. In total, Grace was suing her former firm for a cool $250,000 ($3.4 million).
They kind of had it coming.
From the very start, Grace’s case attracted heart-rending headlines that supported her cause: HER BODY WASTING, SHE SUES EMPLOYER: WOMAN APPEARS IN COURT WITH STEEL FRAME TO HOLD HER ERECT declared the Newark Evening News after Grace’s first appearance in court to file the papers. And such coverage – combined with the friendship networks of the girls – soon led to other dial-painters coming forward. Quinta McDonald was one, with her sister Albina beside her.
And with these married women, Berry now launched lawsuits not only for them, but also for their husbands. As Berry wrote in legal papers for Quinta’s partner: ‘James McDonald lost the services of his wife and will in the future be deprived of the comfort and aid of her society and will be compelled to expend large sums of money in an endeavour to treat and cure his wife. Plaintiff James McDonald demands $25,000 [$341,000].’
Adding the husbands to the lawsuits wasn’t an excessive gesture – the truth was that it was increasingly impossible for Quinta to be the wife and mother she wanted to be. She admitted: ‘I do what housework I can nowadays. Of course, I can’t do much. I can’t bend over now.’ Given her extreme disability, she and James had recently been forced to hire a housekeeper; another expense.
Her sister Albina was in dire need of aid too. Her left leg was now four inches shorter than her right, leaving her crippled and bedridden. She and James had not given up on their dream of a family, but she had since suffered a miscarriage, leaving her feeling worse than ever. ‘Life,’ Albina said dully, ‘is empty for me and my husband.’
And there was someone else who was suffering. Edna Hussman had been released from her year-long sentence in her plaster cast, but her ailments continued: her left leg shrank by three inches; her right shoulder became so stiff it was impossible for her to use her arm; and her blood tests showed she was anaemic. When her mother had died, in December 1926, her spirits darkened further.
Yet Edna had hope. Hadn’t that company doctor, Dr Flinn, told her she was in perfect health? She took the prescribed drugs for her anaemia and followed her doctors’ orders. And then, one night in May 1927, as she groped in the dark for her medicine on the bureau, she caught sight of herself in a mirror. At first, she might have wondered if it was her mother Minnie returned from the grave to haunt her. For in the dead of night, in the dead of dark, a ghost girl glowed in the mirror.
Edna screamed and fainted. For she knew exactly what her shining bones foretold, shimmering through her skin. She knew that glow. Only one thing on earth could make that glimmer. Radium.
She went back to Dr Humphries and told him what she’d seen; how much pain she was in. And there at the Orange Orthopaedic Hospital, she said, ‘I heard Dr Humphries talking with another doctor. He told the doctor I was suffering from radium poisoning. That is the first I knew of it.’
Edna was a ‘peaceful and resigned woman’. She later said, ‘I’m religious. Perhaps that is why I’m not angry at anyone for what has occurred.’ But that didn’t mean she didn’t feel it was unjust. She went on, ‘[I] feel that someone should have warned us. None of us knew that paint paste was dangerous; we were only girls: fifteen, seventeen and nineteen years old.’ Maybe that innate sense of injustice was why, in June 1927, only a month after receiving her diagnosis, Edna and Louis Hussman made their way to Raymond Berry.
There were five of them now: five girls crying out for justice; five girls fighting for their cause. Grace, Katherine, Quinta, Albina and Edna. The newspapers went mad, inventing memorable monikers to define this new quintet. And so, in the summer of 1927, it became official.
The Case of the Five Women Doomed to Die had now begun.
25
The company executives, it would be fair to say, were taken completely by surprise by the five lawsuits. In fact, they dubbed it a ‘conspiracy’, cooked up by what they termed ‘Berry’s outfit’. Their previous unshakeable confidence in rejecting all pleas for clemency had been based upon the fact that the statute of limitations had made them, in their eyes, invincible – but now, with Berry’s adroit interpretation of the law, they were left scrambling for their defence.
It was, perhaps, inevitable who they would blame. The plaintiffs, the firm alleged in their reply to the girls’ claims, were ‘guilty of contributory negligence in failing to exercise due care and precaution for [their] safety’. And the corporation went further: it denied that the girls were ever instructed to lip-point; it denied any woman in the studio did; it denied the radium powder clung to them. On and on, denial after denial, for pages and pages of legalese. The company admitted only one thing: ‘it gave no warning’. That was because it ‘denie[d] that radium was dangerous’.