One of the minor characters in the book is Henry Bliss, a 69-year-old real estate agent who, on September 13, 1899, stepped from a streetcar in New York City and was promptly hit by an electric-powered taxicab. As I explain on page 36, Bliss suffered massive injuries and died the next morning, becoming the first person killed in a motor vehicle accident in the United States.

I didn’t have time to go into it in the book, but Bliss, despite his name, led an exceptionally unhappy life. In 1895, four years before he stepped off that streetcar and into history, Bliss’s ex-wife, Evelina, with whom he was still quite close, was murdered. She was poisoned by arsenic. Evelina’s daughter from a previous marriage, Mary Alice, was charged with the crime.

At the time, Mary Alice, whose three children were all born out of wedlock, was badly in need of money, and she stood to inherit $85,000 upon her mother’s death.

By all accounts, Mary Alice was a handful. According to a 1935 New Yorker article about the case, she did not get along with Henry Bliss and his children: “They” – the Blisses – “were not excessively narrow folks; one or two illegitimate babies they might have overlooked, but with Mary Alice, as they pointed out to her, these events could no longer be classed as mere accidents.”

On the afternoon of Friday, August 30, 1895, Mary Alice made some clam chowder, which she had her 12- or 13-year-old daughter Gracie deliver to Evelina, carefully instructing the girl not to touch “Grandma’s chowder.”

Evelina Bliss ate the chowder at four o’clock that afternoon. Ten minutes later she fell violently ill. A doctor was called. Evelina told the doctor she suspected she had been poisoned by her daughter. At eleven o’clock that night she was dead. Tests showed the chowder contained arsenic.

Mary Alice was taken into custody at her mother’s funeral. “Oh, arrested!” she said. “What a bore!” While in jail awaiting trial, she gave birth to her fourth illegitimate child.

Her claim on the inheritance enabled Mary Alice to hire Charles W. Brooke, the most famous criminal defense lawyer in New York. His defense strategy, it seems, was to confuse the jury. He alternately claimed that Evelina had died of natural causes; had committed suicide; or had been accidentally overdosed on a prescribed medication. It worked. After twelve hours of deliberation, the jury found Mary Alice not guilty.

Mary Alice, who was 37 at the time, collected her $85,000 inheritance. Occasionally she was spotted at “the brighter spots along Broadway,” but for the most part she lived the rest of her days in quiet anonymity.

(Photo retrieved from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Henry_hale_bliss_1873.jpg on March 1, 2009)