At five minutes to one on the morning of October 26, 1911, a 26-year-old Chicago patrolman named Arthur Bissonette died at Mercy Hospital of what his doctors first took for acute gastritis. Five minutes later an undertaker from Cottage Grove Avenue, Charles Boysen, arrived to take charge of the body. He had been sent by Bissonette's landlady, a stout widow in her forties named Louise Vermilya, who had tried hard to keep the sick man out of the hospital and who had, for years, made a habit of turning up at deathbeds around the neighborhood to help Boysen lay out the dead. Bissonette had eaten his last meals at her table. So had his father, who was now ill himself, and who told detectives that he had watched Mrs. Vermilya shake something she called white pepper over the food before she served it.
The coroner's physician, Dr. Joseph W. Springer, took Bissonette's stomach for analysis and found arsenic. By November 1, Coroner Peter Hoffman had a list of nine deaths in or around the woman's household that he wanted explained, and Springer was telling reporters that Chicago was on the verge of one of the greatest poison mysteries in its history. The papers spelled her name two ways. The Chicago dailies, closest to the case, wrote Vermilya; the New York Times and most later books wrote Vermilyea, and that is the form the case has traveled under.
The list ran back eighteen years. Her first husband, Fred Brinkamp, a farmer of 66 who had married her when she was sixteen, died after a brief illness at Barrington, Illinois, and left her what the papers called a small fortune. Two of their daughters, Cora, 8, and Florence, 4, died at Barrington. Harry G. Vermilya, 25, her stepson by her second marriage, died on September 20, 1901, at 395 West Diversey Parkway of what was recorded as heart failure after malaria; the coroner had evidence he had quarreled with his stepmother over property at Crystal Lake. Lillian Brinkamp, 26, died January 21, 1906, at 2916 Groveland Avenue, of heart trouble. Charles Vermilya, 59, a collector for the Chicago and North Western railroad and her second husband, died of acute gastritis after six days at Maplewood on August 1, 1909, leaving a $1,000 policy. Frank Brinkamp, 22, her son, died October 30, 1910, at his aunt's house, officially of pneumonia; on his deathbed he told people he suspected his stepmother, and $1,200 in insurance came to her when he was gone. Richard T. Smith, a conductor on the Illinois Central who boarded with her, died March 11, 1911, after two days of acute gastritis; Smith had carried life insurance in her favor, and he had owned an automobile that the coroner could not account for. Then Bissonette.
There were survivors too. Boysen, the undertaker, had fallen violently ill after a meal at her flat on December 10, 1910, and recovered. Bissonette's father lived. At least three other people were reported to have been sick after eating at the house. The woman who steered the police to the pattern was Minnie Mystock, who worked in a bakery at 2902 Cottage Grove Avenue and had been interested in the young policeman herself. Mrs. Vermilya told the detectives Bissonette had been her fiance and a heavy drinker. He was engaged to a Lydia Rivard in Minnesota, and the men at the 22nd Street station knew him as temperate.
She was formally charged with Bissonette's murder on November 3, but the police did not lock her up at once because she was ill, and they posted a guard at the flat instead. On the night of November 4 she got arsenic into her own food in front of the guards. It came out afterward that a tin of pepper on her table stood beside an identical tin holding enough arsenic, one report said, to kill a hundred men, and that the officers and matrons watching her had been seasoning their own meals from the wrong shelf. After that the watchers' food was cooked at a restaurant under a policeman's eye and carried in by a guarded waiter. Her physicians expected her to live, and she did, but the dose left her legs useless, and for the rest of the case she was carried into court in a wheelchair. She was arraigned before Municipal Judge Walker on November 6 and moved to the Cook County jail on November 7. A grand jury indicted her for Bissonette's murder on December 19, 1911, on thirteen counts, and she was ordered held without bail.
Reporters searching for a type settled on Belle Gunness, the Indiana murder-farm widow of three years earlier, and wrote that the two women might have been sisters: the same broad shoulders and heavy forearms, the same florid coloring, the same appetite for the business of death. An undertaker at Barrington, E. M. Block, said he had never seen a woman so anxious to work around bodies, that she would claim to be his employee and reach a house of death almost before he did. Detectives said the most cherished object in her flat was a large photograph of a well-filled cemetery. None of this was evidence, and the case that reached a courtroom was narrower than the one in the newspapers.
On March 7, 1912, the state dropped the Bissonette charge. The policeman, it turned out, had been taking a patent medicine that contained arsenic, which gave the defense an innocent source for what Dr. Springer had found. Prosecutors rearrested her the same day for the death of Richard Smith and obtained a new indictment on March 11. The Smith trial went to a jury before Judge Sullivan in early April. Smith's brother Joseph testified that Richard had made out his insurance to the landlady. She testified that the pepper box was not hers. After eight hours the jurors told the judge they could not agree; the first ballot had stood nine to three for conviction, and nobody had moved. On April 8, 1912, Judge Sullivan discharged them. She was released on $5,000 bail, the low figure explained by her failing health and by the prospect of a summer in an unventilated jail, and the state never brought her back before a jury. Assistant State's Attorney Baker eventually dismissed both indictments, the Smith case and the Bissonette case, the dismissal reported in April 1915 with a note that claims of manufactured evidence had figured in the decision.
What happened to her afterward is not settled. Modern summaries often say she killed herself in December 1911 with the same poison she was accused of using, which cannot be right, since she was tried the following spring. The date on which she died is given as December 31, 1913, in some accounts and as 1915 in others, including the cemetery record; the reports of the dismissal describe her as out on bail as if still living in April 1915. She was born Louesa Woolf in Cook County, most likely in July 1868, though that too rests on a single unverified source. Nine deaths were laid to her in the coroner's office. Two were charged. One went to a jury, which split. Nothing was proved in court, and the figure of nine is the total the police and the coroner assembled in the first week of November 1911, not a finding.