‘Housewife,’ she said, for she was currently caring for her young children at home.
And then Markley was off, with question after question to suggest she knew nothing about radium at all. He rather hounded her, undermining not only her qualifications but her skill in handling the breath tests, until he had backed her into a corner and forced her to admit that she ‘couldn’t define an appreciable amount’ of radium.
‘All right,’ said Markley triumphantly, ‘I am perfectly satisfied if you say you do not know.’
But at this Backes, once more, stepped in. ‘I want to know what the witness knows,’ he exclaimed, ‘not merely have you satisfied that she says she doesn’t know. I think she said a little more than what your characterisation would purport.’
When the lunch recess fell midway through Elizabeth’s testimony, it seemed to come as a relief to both her and Berry. After lunch, Markley returned still in pugnacious mood. The doctor who had conducted Mollie Maggia’s autopsy was on the stand, giving his testimony that radium had killed her, and Markley tried to get all evidence regarding Mollie struck out – though he was unsuccessful: ‘I will hear it,’ said Backes.
‘I want to call to Your Honour’s attention,’ Markley growled, piqued at this decision, ‘the fact that this girl was buried on a death certificate for syphilis.’
Markley had good reason to fight this hard for the firm. Having shut down the headache of the Orange plant, USRC was now back on track financially; just one single order the firm had recently received, only a few days before, was for $500,000 (almost $7 million). They did not want to lose this case.
The final witness on the stand on 25 April was Dr Humphries, the girls’ long-time physician. He was authoritative in describing their unusual conditions. He testified that ‘in all these patients’ the same condition arose; and not just in them, but in other women he had seen – including Jennie Stocker. Finally Humphries had solved the puzzle of her peculiar knee condition. He now declared, ‘I think she died of radium poisoning.’
His testimony was long and something of an endurance test for the five women. For Humphries recounted each of their cases in detail – how they had first come to him with these puzzling pains; how he had ‘guessed’ at how to treat them; and how now, today, his patients were all crippled. They were not the women he had first seen; though they tried to keep their spirits buoyant, their bodies betrayed them. ‘I thought it would never end,’ recalled Katherine of his account, ‘this excruciating, horrible testimony.’ Yet she was brave about it. ‘It had to be done,’ she went on, ‘had to be told – or else how would we be able to fight for the justice that was due us?’
And so the women listened. They listened as, in the public courtroom, Humphries admitted, ‘I do not think that anything will cure it.’
The eyes of the many reporters flickered to the women, even as their own filled with tears. Yet the radium girls stoically accepted his pronouncement of certain death.
Like the journalists, however, Backes couldn’t seem to bear it. ‘You hope to find something every minute?’ he said urgently.
‘We hope to find something,’ Humphries concurred.
‘Every minute,’ pressed the judge again.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Humphries simply, but all the judge’s urging couldn’t magic up a cure. The girls were destined to die.
The only question was whether they would be given justice before they did.
The following day, the trial continued with more expert evidence. Distinguished doctors testified that it had been common knowledge since at least 1912 that radium could do harm. Berry admitted into the court record a host of literature – including articles published by USRC itself – to support the doctors’ words.
Though Markley tried to weaken the impact of these documents by citing the curative powers of radium – such as were promoted by USRC client William Bailey in his Radithor tonic – it was apparent there were holes in his arguments. When he quoted a little-known study in an obscure journal and one of the testifying doctors conceded he had never heard of the author, the expert witness added, ‘Who is he? What is he connected with?’ Markley could reply only defensively: ‘I am not here to be questioned.’
The day was going well for Raymond Berry; the doctors were not rattled by their cross-examination in the slightest. One described those using radium as ‘fools’ and said he thought that radium curatives ‘should be abolished’.
‘[Aren’t they] approved by the Council of Pharmacy?’ asked USRC’s lawyers indignantly.
‘I suppose so,’ retorted the esteemed doctor airily, ‘but they accept so many things it means nothing to me, sir.’
Andrew McBride and John Roach from the Department of Labor gave evidence regarding their part in proceedings; USRC presidents Clarence B. Lee and Arthur Roeder also took the stand. Roeder confirmed he had been in the dial-painting studio on ‘numerous occasions’ yet testified: ‘I don’t recall any instance of an operator putting a brush in her mouth.’ He also denied von Sochocky had ever told him the paint was harmful; he said the first he knew of any possible hazard was ‘after we heard of some of these early complaints and cases’.
‘What was the first case that you heard of?’ asked Berry.
‘I don’t remember the name,’ replied Roeder coldly. The dial-painters weren’t important enough for him to recall such insignificant details.
And then Berry called on someone very special to testify for the girls: Harrison Martland took the stand. Berry had managed to persuade him to testify. And the Chief Medical Examiner was a superstar; no other word for it. ‘His forthright, uncompromising testimony stood out conspicuously,’ raved the newspapers; they called him the ‘star witness’.
He began by explaining in detail his autopsies of the Carlough sisters, which had confirmed the existence of radium poisoning. It was very difficult testimony for the five women to hear; Quinta, in particular, found it ‘excruciating’. ‘As she listened to Martland,’ one newspaper observed, ‘she approached the verge of collapse. Then, by sheer grit, she seemed to regain her composure and sat through the balance of the hearing with only slight traces of emotion.’
Martland was unstoppable. When the company lawyers tried to suggest radium poisoning couldn’t exist because ‘out of two hundred or more girls, these girls [suing] are the only ones that had this trouble’, Martland replied frankly: ‘There [are] about thirteen or fourteen other girls that are dead and buried now who, if you will dig them up, will probably show the same things.’
‘I ask that be stricken out as an assumption on the part of the doctor without foundation,’ said the USRC lawyer hurriedly.
‘Let it stand,’ replied Backes promptly.
The company tried to say that ‘there are no other reported cases’ beyond Orange.