0:03 [SPEAKER_00]: August 1898, Dover Delaware, the heat of the day has broken in the air smells of cut grass and warm earth. 0:14 [SPEAKER_00]: On the porch of the pinning ten family home, Mary Elizabeth Dunning opens a package from the afternoon mail. 0:22 [SPEAKER_00]: A box of chocolate bond bonds, a cane brick 0:33 [SPEAKER_00]: She passes the candy around, her sister Ida takes one, her daughter takes one, friends gathered on the porch reach in, the evening is warm, the chocolate is sweet. 0:49 [SPEAKER_00]: Within hours, everyone who ate the candy is violently ill, cold sweat, swollen faces, within days, two of them are dead. 1:02 [SPEAKER_00]: The package had traveled 3,000 miles from San Francisco, carrying arsenic, laced throughout the chocolate, 1:13 [SPEAKER_00]: Someone had weaponized the United States male, and the woman who did it had never set foot in Delaware. 1:23 [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back friend to hometown history. 1:26 [SPEAKER_00]: The podcast that takes a stroll down the main streets and back alleys of the past, to uncover how local stories shaped the world. 1:35 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters. 1:40 [SPEAKER_00]: mailed from San Francisco to a congressman's daughter in Dover Delaware became one of America's first murders by mail and changed the law forever. 1:56 [SPEAKER_00]: Dover Delaware in the 1890s was a town older than the 2:07 [SPEAKER_00]: The same public square where 30 men had ratified the United States Constitution, back in 1787, making Delaware the first state in the Union. 2:18 [SPEAKER_00]: It was a place where history lived in the brickwork. 2:24 [SPEAKER_00]: The streets were lined with federal-style homes, and the courthouse stood just steps from where Caesar Rodney had once ridden to cast his famous vote for independence. 2:36 [SPEAKER_00]: Among the most prominent families in town was that of John Brown Pinnington, a former United States congressman who had served in the 50th and 51st congresses for 1887-1891, and a former Attorney General of Delaware. 2:55 [SPEAKER_00]: Pennington was one of the most respected men in Kent County. 2:59 [SPEAKER_00]: He had practiced law and dover for decades, and his home near the green reflected the standing of a man who had shaped Delaware's legal and political life for a generation. 3:12 [SPEAKER_00]: His daughter, Mary Elizabeth Pennington, was born January 14th, 1863, and raised and 3:22 [SPEAKER_00]: sources describe her as beautiful, devout and kind-hearted. 3:27 [SPEAKER_00]: On February 12th, 1891, she married John Preston Dunning, an ambitious newspaper reporter. 3:36 [SPEAKER_00]: On paper, it looked like a good match. 3:40 [SPEAKER_00]: It was not. 3:42 [SPEAKER_00]: The couple moved to San Francisco for Dunning's position as an associated press correspondent 3:53 [SPEAKER_00]: But John Dunning had a talent for self-destruction. 3:58 [SPEAKER_00]: He drank, he gambled. 4:00 [SPEAKER_00]: He carried on at least three extra-marital affairs. 4:05 [SPEAKER_00]: He embezzled roughly $4,000 from the associated press to cover his gambling losses in the AP fired him. 4:15 [SPEAKER_00]: It was quite a fall for a man who had once been trusted to report 4:22 [SPEAKER_00]: 3,000 miles away, and a city stunning had made into a personal wreck. 4:28 [SPEAKER_00]: Lived a woman named Cordelia Botkin. 4:32 [SPEAKER_00]: Born in 1854 in Polk County, Missouri, she had married Welcome Botkin, in 1872 in Kansas City. 4:42 [SPEAKER_00]: By the 1890s, she was estranged from her husband and living alone at 927, Gary Street, 4:52 [SPEAKER_00]: According to accounts, she was vain, posing for over 100 photographs of herself. 4:59 [SPEAKER_00]: She spent her days drifting through the city's hotel lobbies and saloons, a woman with time and no purpose. 5:07 [SPEAKER_00]: Around 1895, Dunning met Cordelia near Golden Gate Park. 5:14 [SPEAKER_00]: There a fair began almost immediately. 5:18 [SPEAKER_00]: She was roughly 41 years old, though she told him she was 29. 5:23 [SPEAKER_00]: He was about 32. 5:25 [SPEAKER_00]: For the next three years, the two carried on openly, in San Francisco, attending the theatre, dining in public, and drawing attention from friends and acquaintances who would later testify against her. 5:43 [SPEAKER_00]: In 1896, Mary devastated by the infidelity and financial ruin, packed up and returned to Dover with their young daughter to live with her father. 5:55 [SPEAKER_00]: And then something strange started happening. 5:59 [SPEAKER_00]: A anonymous letters began arriving at the Pinnington Home, postmarked San Francisco, detailing Dunnings Affairs, signed only a friend. 6:12 [SPEAKER_00]: John Brown Pinnington intercepted most of them. 6:16 [SPEAKER_00]: He saved everyone. 6:19 [SPEAKER_00]: That decision would prove critical. 6:23 [SPEAKER_00]: Early 1898, the Spanish-American War was coming and the associated press needed more correspondents. 6:33 [SPEAKER_00]: Despite everything, the AP rehired stunning on March 8, 1898. 6:40 [SPEAKER_00]: He departed San Francisco for Puerto Rico. 6:46 [SPEAKER_00]: Before he left, he told Cordelia Botkin the affair was over. 6:52 [SPEAKER_00]: he was going back to his wife. 6:55 [SPEAKER_00]: According to trial testimony, Cordelia pleaded with him to remain with her and wept bitterly when they parted. 7:04 [SPEAKER_00]: But grief turned into something else. 7:07 [SPEAKER_00]: Something cold and patient. 7:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Here's where it gets interesting. 7:14 [SPEAKER_00]: What the record show is a woman who did not act on impulse, Cordelia Bakken planned a murder, the way a clerk files paperwork, one step at a time, over the course of weeks. 7:28 [SPEAKER_00]: On July 27th, 1898, she visited an acquaintance named Amora Roof in Stockton, California, asking about the effects of poisons on the human body and whether a person had to sign a name when sending a registered package. 7:49 [SPEAKER_00]: These were not idle questions. 7:51 [SPEAKER_00]: She walked into the hour-druck store at one thousand two market street and purchased two ounces of arsenic, the clerk, Frank Gray, later testified she said she needed it to bleach a straw hat. 8:10 [SPEAKER_00]: He offered alternatives she refused 8:14 [SPEAKER_00]: On July 31st, she visited George Haas and Sun's Confectionary in the Failing Building, 810 Market Street, and bought a fancy unmarked box of bombons. 8:29 [SPEAKER_00]: She asked the clerks to leave room in the box because she had another article to add. 8:37 [SPEAKER_00]: She bought a Cambridge Hingertchiff at the City of Paris Department store on Union Square and forgot to remove the tag. 8:46 [SPEAKER_00]: She wrote a note with love to yourself and baby Miss See. 8:52 [SPEAKER_00]: Then she mixed the arsenic into the chocolates. 8:56 [SPEAKER_00]: The grains so large they were later described as the size of coffee grounds. 9:02 [SPEAKER_00]: On August 4th, 1898, we're dealing a Bachan male to the package, from the ferry post office in San Francisco. 9:12 [SPEAKER_00]: Post-racler John Dunningon, later we called, noticing the address, Miss John Dunning, Dover, Delaware. 9:21 [SPEAKER_00]: The package traveled 3,000 miles by rail, from California to the front porch of a congressman's family. 9:30 [SPEAKER_00]: August 9th, 1898. 9:33 [SPEAKER_00]: The package arrived at the Pinnington home. 9:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Harry Pinnington's grandson picked it up from the post office. 9:42 [SPEAKER_00]: That evening, after dinner, Mary opened the box on the porch. 9:48 [SPEAKER_00]: The note signed Miss C made her think of Miss Corbilly, a California friend. 9:55 [SPEAKER_00]: She offered the candy to those around her. 9:58 [SPEAKER_00]: Several family members and friends shared the chocolates, including her sister, Ida Dean. 10:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Mary's young daughter and friends Josephine Bateman, an Ethel Millington, bit into one of the chocolates. 10:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Detected a crystal substance and sped it out. 10:20 [SPEAKER_00]: She escaped the worst. 10:22 [SPEAKER_00]: The others were not so fortunate. 10:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Within hours, everyone who had eaten the candy fell ill. Sweating, swollen, wretched, doctors were summoned. 10:37 [SPEAKER_00]: At first, they suspected the corn fritters from dinner. 10:42 [SPEAKER_00]: But Mary Elizabeth Dunning and Ida Harriet Dean, who had eaten more candy than anyone else, only grew worse. 10:52 [SPEAKER_00]: Within days of eating the candy, both Mary Elizabeth Dunning and her sister Ida Harriet Dean were dead, arsenic poisoning, Mary was 35 years old, Ida was 44, four other people who ate less candy survived, including Mary's young daughter and Harry pinning ten, who 11:21 [SPEAKER_00]: John Brown-Pinnington, a 72-years-old, and he had just lost two daughters. 11:28 [SPEAKER_00]: The old congressman was not finished. 11:31 [SPEAKER_00]: He sent the remaining chocolates to theater R. Warf, Delaware State chemist at the University of Delaware, who confirmed massive quantities of arsenic. 11:43 [SPEAKER_00]: The autopsy's concluded both women had ingested enough arsenic to have killed a horse. 11:50 [SPEAKER_00]: And then, Pinnington did something that cracked the case wide open. 11:55 [SPEAKER_00]: He pulled out the anonymous letters. 11:58 [SPEAKER_00]: He had been receiving for months. 12:01 [SPEAKER_00]: The ones post marked San Francisco and laid them next to the note from the candy box. 12:08 [SPEAKER_00]: The handwriting matched. 12:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Detective Bernard J. McVeigh was dispatched from Delaware to San Francisco, carrying the candy box, the camper canker chip, the note, and the anonymous waters as evidence. 12:25 [SPEAKER_00]: It was a journey of nearly a week, I railed. 12:29 [SPEAKER_00]: San Francisco Police Chief Isaiah W. Lee's took personal charge of the investigation. 12:36 [SPEAKER_00]: Lee's was one of the most tenacious detectives, the West Coast, in the murder of a congressman's daughter, demanded nothing less. 12:47 [SPEAKER_00]: Dunning was recalled from Puerto Rico. 12:50 [SPEAKER_00]: He looked at thinking and riding on the note, and he said one word, 12:59 [SPEAKER_00]: what followed was quite methodical. 13:02 [SPEAKER_00]: Lee's traced the candy to George Haas and Sons, where Clark's identified Cordelia Bakken as the buyer. 13:11 [SPEAKER_00]: He traced the handkerchief to the city of Paris store, where staff confirmed the purchase. 13:18 [SPEAKER_00]: the forgotten prize tag sealed it. 13:22 [SPEAKER_00]: He traced the arsenic to the owl drugstore, where Clark Frank Ray identified Bachkin. 13:30 [SPEAKER_00]: Every step of her planning had left a witness. 13:34 [SPEAKER_00]: Daniel T. Ames, one of the country's most respected, questioned document examiners, analyzed Bakken's known writing against the note, the package address, and the anonymous letters. 13:48 [SPEAKER_00]: His conclusion, Hordealia Bakken, to the exclusion of all others, had written the question material, 13:58 [SPEAKER_00]: to additional examiners, Carl Eisen Schimmer, and Theodore Kitka, independently confirmed it. 14:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Bachkem was arrested in Stockton, California, without resistance. 14:12 [SPEAKER_00]: The first cross-dura-stictional murder prosecution in American history was about to begin. 14:19 [SPEAKER_00]: The trial began December 9, 1898, in San Francisco, before Judge Carol Cook. 14:27 [SPEAKER_00]: Delaware spent $3,000 transporting witnesses across the country, and the press turned it into a spectacle. 14:36 [SPEAKER_00]: The case posed a question, no American court had faced before. 14:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Could a person be tried in one state, for a crime committed by mail from another, 14:48 [SPEAKER_00]: William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner, a signed reporter Lizzy Levernash to cover the case. 14:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Levernash ingratiated herself with Bachan and filed front page exclusives. 15:04 [SPEAKER_00]: The examiner erected a public bulletin board outside the courthouse to post updates for the crowds. 15:13 [SPEAKER_00]: On closing argument day, more than 500 people were turned away. 15:18 [SPEAKER_00]: It was quite the circus. 15:20 [SPEAKER_00]: Yellow journalism at full volume. 15:24 [SPEAKER_00]: The prosecution built its case on the handwriting analysis, the drug store purchase, the candy store identification, and the forgotten hanker chief price tag. 15:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Dunning took the stand and was jailed for contempt when he refused to name his other lovers. 15:44 [SPEAKER_00]: Claiming he was too much of a gentleman. 15:47 [SPEAKER_00]: He was released when the defense dropped the question. 15:51 [SPEAKER_00]: On December 30, 1898, after four hours of deliberation, the jury found Cordelia Bachken guilty on both accounts of first-degree murder. 16:03 [SPEAKER_00]: They chose life over death. 16:06 [SPEAKER_00]: She was formally sentenced to life imprisonment on February 4, 1899. 16:13 [SPEAKER_00]: In the county jail, Bachan received extraordinary privileges. 16:18 [SPEAKER_00]: According to accounts, she exchanged favors with guards for freedom to leave the grounds. 16:26 [SPEAKER_00]: In May 1900, Judge Cook himself spotted Bachan, writing a San Francisco street cart in elegant clothing. 16:35 [SPEAKER_00]: Her conviction was overturned on appeal for improper jury instruction 16:42 [SPEAKER_00]: In 1904, she was retried, convicted again, and resentenced to life. 16:50 [SPEAKER_00]: After the 1906 earthquake destroyed the County Jail, Cordillo was transferred to St. Quentin. 16:57 [SPEAKER_00]: She applied for parole in February 1910, denied 17:03 [SPEAKER_00]: What the records tell us is that this case consumed everyone, it touched. 17:09 [SPEAKER_00]: John Preston Dunning, his career destroyed by the trial revelations, died in 1907 in Philadelphia, Pinyless, and at 43. 17:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back in divorced Cordelia, on March 9, 1899, and died in 1904 in Stockton. 17:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Their son Beverly Brown Bakken died April 30, 1905, in Byron, California. 17:40 [SPEAKER_00]: Cordelia was allowed to view his remains, under guard, escort. 17:46 [SPEAKER_00]: John Brown, Pinnington, lived long enough to see the first conviction. 17:51 [SPEAKER_00]: He died June 1, 1902, at 76. 17:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Daniel T. Ames went on to publish Ames on Forderry in 1900. 18:11 [SPEAKER_00]: The botkin case helped launch forensic handwriting analysis as a recognized courtroom discipline. 18:19 [SPEAKER_00]: Cordelia Botkin died March 7, 1910, at San Quentin, 8, 55, or 56. 18:29 [SPEAKER_00]: The official cause of death, softening of the brain, due to melakolia. 18:35 [SPEAKER_00]: She was buried in an unmarked grave at Oak Mount Cemetery in Hillsburg, California. 18:43 [SPEAKER_00]: She outlived her victims' husband, her own husband, and her only son. 18:50 [SPEAKER_00]: She died alone and broken. 18:54 [SPEAKER_00]: The Dover Green still stands at the heart of Delaware's capital, just as it has since 19:05 [SPEAKER_00]: The old state house built in 1791 still opens its doors to visitors. 19:12 [SPEAKER_00]: And at the old Presbyterian cemetery on South Governors Avenue, the graves of Mary Elizabeth Dunning and Ida Harriet Dean can still be visited at 316 South Governors Avenue. 19:27 [SPEAKER_00]: The Pinnington Family Home now known as the Patton House, 19:36 [SPEAKER_00]: Dover has hosted walking tours of the Pinnington Mansion grounds, and Mary's Grave Stone over the years. 19:45 [SPEAKER_00]: At one event, the organizers sold boxes of candy with assurances that none were poisoned. 19:52 [SPEAKER_00]: Historians believed the Bach in case was among the first murder by male prosecutions in American history, and it was the case that proved the male could be a murder weapon. 20:04 [SPEAKER_00]: It was also the first cross-dressed fictional prosecution of its kind, a person tried for a crime, committed in a state she had never set foot in. 20:15 [SPEAKER_00]: The legal questions it raised about interstate criminal jurisdiction still echo in courtrooms today. 20:24 [SPEAKER_00]: Every time a dangerous package enters the mail system, from the Unibommer to the 2001 anthrax lotters, the question Cordelia Bakken first posed in 1898, resurfaces. 20:39 [SPEAKER_00]: How do you stop someone from weaponizing the mail? 20:43 [SPEAKER_00]: Daniel T. Ames is forensic handwriting testimony, helped establish question document examination 20:54 [SPEAKER_00]: The case that began with a box of candy on a Delaware porch ended up shaping how America investigate crimes that cross state lines. 21:07 [SPEAKER_00]: That's the story of a box of poison chocolates that traveled 3,000 miles to kill a congressman's daughter on her own front porch, and the jealous woman who proved the male could be a murder weapon. 21:22 [SPEAKER_00]: If you found this story as chilling as I did, share it with someone who thinks they know how dangerous a package can be. 21:32 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters. 21:34 [SPEAKER_00]: Every hometown has a story. 21:36 [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight it's a box of candy on a porch in Dover, Delaware, in the 3,000 mile trail of arsenic that changed American law. 21:48 [SPEAKER_00]: Good night, friend.
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