Separately to the Flinn matter, Hamilton now equipped Berry with what would prove to be an all-important secret weapon: a personal connection with Walter Lippmann and the World. The World was arguably the most powerful newspaper in America at the time. It promised to ‘never lack sympathy with the poor [and] always remain devoted to public welfare’, so the dial-painters’ case was a perfect cause célèbre for the paper to get behind. Lippmann was one of its leading writers; he would become the paper’s editor in 1929 and later be deemed by several sources as the most influential journalist of the twentieth century. To have him in the girls’ camp was something of a coup.
Immediately, Berry got a taste of just what Lippmann could do. USRC, as was to be expected, had cited the statute of limitations in its defence; the company argued that the cases should be thrown out of court before the firm’s guilt could even be examined. But Lippmann was quick to give his own interpretation of that kind of legal trickery in the World, calling the attempt by the corporation to take refuge in the statute ‘intolerable’ and ‘despicable’. ‘It is scarcely thinkable,’ he wrote, ‘that the Court will not agree with counsel for the complainant.’
He was right, in a way; the court did not agree with the company. Instead, the girls’ cases – which had all been consolidated into one case to avoid duplicate hearings – were transferred to the Court of Chancery, where their cases would be presented and a ruling given on whether Berry’s interpretation of the statute held. Assuming he and the girls were triumphant, there would then be a second trial, which would rule on whether the company was at fault. The Court of Chancery was dubbed ‘the Court of King’s Conscience’: it was where pleas for mercy that might be left unanswered through a strict reading of the law were heard. The trial date was set for 12 January 1928.
There was much to do before then. Berry had at last found a specialist who would run the new radioactivity tests on the girls; Elizabeth Hughes was a physicist and former assistant to von Sochocky. The tests were planned for November 1927. Berry knew, however, that whatever Mrs Hughes found, the results would be questioned in court. USRC, in fact, had already said, ‘We should also like to have a physical examination of the plaintiff[s] by our doctor,’ and Berry anticipated that there would be some dispute over the tests. The results could be variable, no doubt; a humid day could skew the readings and even different doctors looking at the same figures could interpret them contrarily.
Berry’s problem thus mirrored that of Dr Martland in 1925. How could he prove it was radium that was killing the dial-painters? There was only really one way to do that, and it wasn’t something Berry could ask of his clients. For the only way to extract radium from a victim’s bones – to demonstrate incontrovertibly that radium was present – was to reduce those bones to ash. ‘The deposit [of radium],’ commented Martland, ‘can be removed only by cremating the bone and then boiling the ash in hydro-chloric acid.’
No: this was nothing that Grace, or Edna, or Katherine, or the Maggia sisters could help with. Except . . .
Except for maybe one of the Maggia girls.
Mollie.
It was shortly after 9 a.m. that the men came to Rosedale Cemetery on 15 October 1927. They made their way through the rows of memorials until they stopped at one particular grave. They erected a tent over it and removed the headstone. Then they worked to uncover the coffin, heaving sodden earth out of the hole until they unveiled a nondescript wooden box, which held Amelia ‘Mollie’ Maggia – the girl, so they said, who had died of syphilis. The men ran ropes under it, then attached stronger silver chains. It was raised just slightly, ‘to free it from water that had seeped in around it as a result of the recent rains’.
Then they waited for the officials to arrive. Berry had arranged with the radium company that they would all converge at 3.30 p.m. exactly.
At 3 p.m., the specialists from the company arrived at Mollie’s grave.
There were six of them, including Vice President Barker and the ubiquitous Dr Flinn. Prudently, Berry had arranged for a special investigator to be present for the morning’s activities; he now watched the company men closely as they milled outside the tent. At 3.30 p.m., as specified, Berry walked up to the grave with Mrs Hughes, Dr Martland and a cohort of New York doctors, who would lead on conducting the autopsy. There were thirteen officials in all, gathered together to witness Mollie’s exhumation.
Standing awkwardly among the doctors and lawyers were three other men: James McDonald and James Larice, Mollie’s sisters’ husbands, and her father, Valerio. The family hadn’t protested when Berry had put the idea to them. Mollie’s body could provide perfect corroborating evidence for the dial-painters’ fight in court. Even after all these years, she could still help her sisters.
After the arrival of Berry’s team, preparations were made for raising the coffin. Curtains were drawn around and the entire party went inside the tent. The grave workers heaved on the ropes and chains. Slowly, Mollie rose the six feet to the surface. ‘The outer box was in bad condition and easily pulled apart; the casket was likewise ready to fall apart.’ Despite the dim fall day, the coffin seemed to glow with an unnatural light; there were ‘unmistakeable signs of radium – the inside of the coffin was aglow with the soft luminescence of radium compounds’.
Someone lent over the glowing coffin and pulled a silver nameplate from the rotten wood. Amelia Maggia, it read. They showed it to Valerio for identification. He nodded: yes, that was the one. That was the one the family had chosen for his child.
As soon as Mollie’s identity was confirmed, the top and sides of the casket were removed. And there she was. There was Mollie Maggia, back from the grave, in her white dress and her black leather pumps, just as she had been dressed on the day she was buried in 1922.
‘The body,’ observers noted, ‘was in a good state of preservation.’
They removed her carefully from her coffin, placed her gently in a wooden box, and then took her by automobile to a local undertaking parlour. At 4.50 p.m., her autopsy would begin. At 4.50 p.m., Amelia Maggia would finally have the chance to speak.
There is no dignity in death. The doctors started with her upper jawbones, which were removed in several pieces; they had no need to do the same with her lower jaw, for it was no longer present, having been lifted out in life. They sawed through her spine, her head, her ribs. They scraped her bones with a knife to prepare them for the next steps. And there was, somehow, a kind of ritualistic care in their steady tasks, as they ‘washed [her bones] in hot water, dried, and reduced [them] to greyest white ash’. Some bones they put to the X-ray film test; others they ignited to ash and then tested the ash itself for radioactivity.