Unknown Narrator / Historian Deborah Blum
Appearances
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
There were dozens of these formulas, each with a different number, each with a different mix of things.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
The government is starting to go, OK, this isn't working. Let's supercharge poisons into the alcohol that the bootleggers are stealing.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
The police go back to his apartment. They find this dismembered body. I love this story so much. And the...
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
Norris is the on-call medical examiner that night. He goes all the way out to Brooklyn, driven by his chauffeur, to this shabby little back-worker apartment in Brooklyn and goes in.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
He takes one look at it and goes, you know, no, that woman was dead before he cut her up.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
A lot of people lived in buildings that were pretty much equipped by what was called illuminating gas, right? And illuminating gas was a coal-derived gas. It had hydrogen in it, so it was explosive. And it had carbon monoxide in it, so it was poisonous.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
When you are killed by carbon monoxide, your skin flushes a deep pink. So here she is, she's bled out completely, right? She should be pale as a sheet. Instead, she's flush pink because that's what carbon monoxide does.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
They knock a kettle or something over that's boiling away on a gas burner, put out the flame, illuminating gas, which they don't smell, starts seeping into the apartment. And he and Gettler have already shown that when carbon monoxide gets to the kind of level he's looking at, it kills you. So she has to have been dead.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
And he goes actually into court opposite to the district attorney and the police department and wins.