The Gross Family Murders

Frederick Gross, "Boston Globe," May 11 1935. (All images via Newspapers.com)

Frederick Gross was not a man blessed by the gods. Born into a working-class family in Philadelphia, a carriage accident in his youth had necessitated the amputation of one leg, thus limiting his opportunities in life. He found steady work as a bookkeeper at a Manhattan chemical firm, but his pay was not nearly enough to enable his wife Katherine and their five children to live in anything approaching comfort. The large family (plus Katherine's mother, Olga Bein,) were crammed together in a tiny Brooklyn tenement flat, where the best you could say was that they managed to survive. On the positive side, Mr. Gross appeared to cope well with his difficult lot in life. Unlike so many men in his situation, he did not seek escape through drink, or gambling, or other women, or domestic abuse. He impressed everyone who knew him as a quiet, intelligent, kindly man who was devoted to his family.

He was, in short, the last person people pictured as a serial murderer.

Frederick Gross' life began its tragic twist in late March 1935, when his nine-year-old son Freddy became sick. At first, it was assumed the boy was merely suffering from one of the unremarkable ailments common to childhood. However, overnight, Freddy's condition took a sudden turn for the worse. He began vomiting, and had trouble breathing. By the morning, he was dead. This was immediately followed by the equally frighteningly sudden illness and death of three-year-old Leo. "Bronchial pneumonia," said their doctor. No sooner had Katherine Gross buried her sons than she, too, sickened. Mrs. Gross passed away on April 4.

The Grim Reaper was not yet finished with the Gross family. April also saw the deaths of seven-year-old Katherine and eighteen-month-old Barbara. Mrs. Bein and five-year-old Frank were languishing in the hospital. The oddest thing about these illnesses and deaths was that all the sufferers became nearly bald.

It finally occurred to authorities that something very unusual was going on with this family. Police ordered that tests be done on Olga and little Frank. Their suspicions were correct: the patients had been poisoned. The bodies of Mrs. Gross and Freddy were exhumed. It was revealed that they too had been poisoned, and with the same deadly substance: thallium.

Naturally enough, the top suspect in all these murders was the only member of the Gross family to remain alive and well: the seemingly loving husband and father, Frederick. He was arrested and subjected to a harsh twenty-eight hours of questioning. Police were certain Gross had annihilated his family. Now they just had to get him to admit it. However, he vehemently maintained his innocence. He insisted that he had no idea how all his nearest and dearest wound up full of thallium. "I have done nothing, and I am not afraid," he said.

"New York Daily News," May 12, 1935

Despite their failure in getting the accused to confess, police believed they had found the method used by Gross to murder his family. It was learned that Gross's firm kept a supply of thallium on hand for use as a rat poison. Shortly before the string of deaths began, Gross' company had offered its employees a supply of cocoa at discount rates. Gross had bought four tins. Something as strongly-flavored as chocolate would, detectives reasoned, have been a perfect vehicle for disguising poison. One of the remaining cocoa tins found in the Gross apartment was analyzed. To the surprise of no one, it was found to be heavily doctored with thallium.

Police also believed they had the motive for all these killings: poverty. Gross' income of $20 a week was simply not enough to support all these dependents. At the time the poisonings started, the family was heavily in debt, and two months behind on rent. Katherine Gross was expecting another child, which would have created yet another strain on the household's already desperate financial situation. Investigators theorized that the struggle to make ends meet finally became too much for the head of the household, leading Gross to feel he had no choice but to exterminate his family.

"Chicago Tribune," May 12, 1935

All this, however, remained mere conjecture. Gross was still stubbornly insisting that he was innocent. Although police remained equally adamant of his guilt, they were having a surprisingly difficult time proving it. No one had seen Gross purchasing or stealing the thallium. No one had seen him doctoring the cocoa; in fact, all the family's food and drink was prepared by Mrs. Gross or her mother. Nobody in the household was insured, so Gross did not profit financially from this string of fatalities. It was also significant that despite the damning circumstantial evidence, no one who knew Gross--including his stricken mother-in-law--could believe he was a murderer. Friends and his surviving relatives all maintained that he was a gentle, kind-hearted soul who had loved his family. There was no way he would ever have done anything to harm them.

Investigators, increasingly puzzled and frustrated by their inability to solve what had initially seemed to be an open-and-shut case, began exploring other theories. In particular, they found their attention drawn to the late Mrs. Katherine Gross. Police learned that she owned two medical books which gave detailed information on various poisons, including thallium. She also had a copy of Schopenhauer's "Studies in Pessimism"--not a book you would choose to keep your spirits up, but excellent reading to persuade you that life was not worth living. Most tellingly, friends of the family told investigators some rather chilling things about Mrs. Gross. A neighbor testified that several weeks before the deaths began, Katherine had confided that she was desperately unhappy about being pregnant again. She was going to use rat poison to kill her children, her mother, and herself. When the appalled neighbor asked if she was serious about making her own children suffer so, Katherine replied, "There's no suffering to what I've got. It's sure death." In any case, Mrs. Gross added, she'd sooner see her offspring dead than continue to endure such wretched poverty. Frederick, she went on, would be much better off without all of them. "I have the best husband any woman could want. But rather than drudge along like this and live in poverty I'd do anything." Other witnesses also related hearing Mrs. Gross talk of suicide. "I'm tired of living," she allegedly said. "Life is too hard. I wish I were dead and the children with me." Katherine was, in the words of one neighbor, "always sick and complaining."

Investigators were beginning to wonder if Mrs. Gross was the victim of her very own crime.

Meanwhile, further chemical tests done by the city's top toxicologist, Alexander Gettler, revealed something quite interesting: Mrs. Gross had not died of thallium poisoning. As had originally been believed, she succumbed to encephalitis. Gettler noted that the Gross children had received different levels of poison. The two boys who predeceased their mother had much higher levels of thallium in their systems than the girls who succumbed after Mrs. Gross's death. Gettler believed that the girls had been poisoned while their mother was still alive, leaving them to be killed more slowly, by a lower amount of thallium. Gettler found more that was surprising. His tests of the cocoa tins showed they had never contained poison, after all. In short, while Olga Bein and the Gross children had indeed been poisoned by thallium, there was absolutely nothing to indicate that Frederick Gross was responsible.

Faced with this new expert evidence, police had no choice but to dismiss all charges against Gross in May 1935. District Attorney F.X. Geoghan sighed, "[Gross] is either the most cold-blooded murderer or the most innocent man in the world." The first thing the freed man did was to go to the hospital to visit his one remaining child, Frank. The youngster scolded his father for not visiting him before.

"New York Daily News," July 25, 1935

"I told the boy I had to work," Frederick said to reporters. "He doesn't know anything about the trouble and I don't want him to know at all, if I can help it. I'm going to try to get some money together and send him off to camp this summer to get built up. Then maybe we will move out of the neighborhood, so we can get away from all this."

Gross added that Mrs. Bein had agreed to keep house for him and help him raise his motherless little boy. He vowed to give his surviving family members the best life possible. He had his old job back, and the neighbors--who had never lost their faith in his innocence--welcomed his return. Frederick said he was also determined to learn who had annihilated his loved ones. He rejected the idea that his Katherine was responsible. "My wife is gone and unable to protect herself. But I can protect her name. I know she did not commit suicide and..."

He could not bring himself to even finish the sentence.

The mystery of who poisoned Mrs. Bein and the Gross children--and why--remains, in the words of one of the investigators, "incapable of solution."

Officially, at any rate.