When they checked the X-ray film, days later, there was Mollie’s message from beyond the grave. She had been trying to speak for so long – now, at last, there was someone listening.
Her bones had made white pictures on the ebony film. Her vertebrae glowed in vertical white lights, like a regiment of matches slowly burning into black. They looked like rows of shining dial-painters, walking home from work. The pictures of her skull, meanwhile, with her jawbone missing, made her mouth stretch unnaturally wide, as though she was screaming; screaming for justice through all these years. There was a smudge of dark where her eye had once been, as though she was looking out, staring accusingly, setting straight a lie that had blackened her name.
There was, the examining doctors said, ‘No evidence of disease, in particular no evidence of syphilis.’
Innocent.
‘Each and every portion of tissue and bone tested,’ the doctors concluded, ‘gave evidence of radioactivity.’
It wasn’t Cupid’s disease, as the gossip-mongers charged. It was radium.
The doctors’ autopsy findings gathered wide publicity; the girls’ fight for justice was slowly becoming famous. And it was this publicity that now brought another girl to Berry’s office, though she did not sign with him at that time.
Ella Eckert, Mollie Maggia’s friend, the fun-loving girl with frizzy blonde hair who had laughed her head off at so many company picnics, now called on the Newark lawyer in the fall of 1927. She was in better health than any of the five women suing, but she nevertheless told Berry, ‘I have spent at least $200 [$2,724] for X-rays, blood tests, medicine and medical attention, all to no avail.’ She’d had a fall at work, at Bamberger’s, the year before and been forced to give up her job as her shoulder had never healed. Indeed, Berry could see that her arm was ‘badly swollen, extending from the shoulder down to the hand’. She said she was in severe pain and begged him to help her.
And that help was not just for her. Ella Eckert had taken her fun-loving ways to what were then considered extremes; she’d had a son with a married man who had since disappeared, and now she was bringing up the boy on her own. She couldn’t afford to be out of work, or to get sick: her son needed her.
Berry knew their paths would cross again; in the meantime, his pace of work sped up. An important date was 14 November 1927: this was when the first testimony was taken in the girls’ trial, as part of a deposition. Berry had issued his formal summons to Dr Drinker – now the reluctant doctor gave his evidence under oath.
It was at this juncture that Berry met his main adversary: Edward A. Markley, the attorney for the radium firm’s insurance company, who was leading USRC’s defence. Markley was almost six feet tall, with brown hair and eyes, which he framed with glasses. His father had been a judge and he was the eldest son in his family; he had all the suave confidence and self-possession such attributes would give. He was some six years older than Berry, with all the added experience that implied.
From the moment the deposition-taking started, Berry realised it was not going to be an easy ride. He was trying to admit all the Drinker evidence: the blinkered, blustering letters that Roeder had sent to justify suppressing the Drinker report; the firm’s false claims to the Department of Labor. To every single question, every single item of evidence, the USRC lawyers fought back.
‘We object to the question,’ said Markley, ‘on the ground that the purpose is immaterial.’
‘We object,’ said Stryker, ‘to the witness stating what he told Mr Roeder.’
They even shut down Drinker himself.
‘I should like to make a statement for the purpose of the record on my side relative to this,’ the doctor began calmly.
‘Before you do that, we object to it,’ jumped in Markley, before Drinker could proceed.
The lawyers deemed the collection of authentic letters ‘a scurrilous statement of rumours’ and took a clever line of questioning with the pioneering scientist and his colleagues. To each of the three investigators who had authored the Drinker report, they put the question: ‘Had you had any experience in investigating radium poisoning?’
The answer from all, of course, was ‘None’. The implication being: how could the word of such inexperienced ‘experts’ be taken seriously? Only Katherine Drinker pointed out the obvious: ‘This is the first time the disease was [discovered].’
Berry was not daunted by all this, however. Submitting the Drinkers’ report, he said cheekily, ‘It is offered as the best evidence we have and will be used in the event Mr Roeder has “mislaid” the original.’
The company lawyers merely responded, ‘If the original is used it is of course subject to our objections . . .’
January was going to prove a tough battle: that was for sure.
Before they got there, however, an unexpected event took everyone by surprise. Berry had been concerned about the young woman who’d visited him earlier in the year, for Ella Eckert, he had heard, had been ‘near death’ in the Orthopaedic Hospital for weeks now. She had the usual symptoms of radium poisoning: the anaemia, the white shadow through her bones. Yet despite these tell-tale signs, Dr Martland commented: ‘This case is very puzzling and not as clear-cut as the others.’
On 13 December 1927, Ella Eckert died. Martland traced her name on the List of the Doomed. D is for Death.
She’d had an operation earlier that day, on her swollen shoulder. And herein lay the cause of her mystery. For when the doctors cut her open, they found a ‘calcareous formation [was] attached and [had] permeated the entire shoulder region’. It was a growth of ‘considerable size’. Such a growth was new to Martland, to all the doctors. No dial-painter, so far as they knew, had ever presented such a thing.
Radium was a clever poison. It masked its way inside its victims’ bones; it foxed the most experienced physicians. And like the expert serial killer it was, it had now evolved its modus operandi. Ella had developed what was called a sarcoma: a cancerous tumour of the bone. She was the first known dial-painter to die from such a thing – but she would not be the last.
Her death shocked the five girls suing; her decline had been so fast. Yet it also gave them even more inspiration for the fight that lay ahead.
On 12 January 1928, the trial of the decade would begin.
28
‘I could hardly sleep the night before the court hearing,’ Katherine Schaub wrote, ‘for I had been waiting for ages, it seemed, to see this very day.’