Murder by Toothbrush: The Strange Case of Tita Critescu

1930s Romania may not have been a paradise for most people, but for a young Bucharest actress named Tita Cristescu, life was pretty darned good.  She was well-connected (her father, Gheorghe Cristescu, was a prominent figure in Romanian politics,) she had a successful theatrical career, and was pretty enough to be named “Miss Romania” of 1933.  Tita was engaged to be married to Hotta Cuza, a young Romanian diplomat.  She seemed perfectly happy, and was full of hope for the future.

One January night in 1936, Tita’s parents came over to her apartment for dinner, leaving about 11:30 p.m.  After her parents left, Tita told her maid, Maria, to go to bed.  As she spoke, she took a capsule from a box and swallowed it.  Maria assumed it was one of the “reducing capsules” Tita took every night.  Maria went to bed, but was awakened half and hour later by Tita’s sister, Mrs. Mikai Gregorian.  Mrs. Gregorian, her voice shaking with fear, told the maid, “Get a doctor, at once.  Tita is very ill.”

Maria hurried from the apartment, but by the time she returned with a physician, Tita was dead.  Mrs. Gregorian told the doctor that, while passing by the apartment building, she noticed that her sister’s light was still on, so dropped by for a brief visit.  Tita was wearing a negligee, and was in her usual high spirits.  However, after chatting for a few minutes, Tita suddenly went silent and stared ahead blankly.  She fell onto a chair and said, “Get me a glass of water.  Something is going on inside me.  I am thirsty all of a sudden and I have a dreadful taste in my mouth which is queer because I have just brushed my teeth.”

She gulped down the water, but then dropped the glass.  She turned very pale and gasped, “I am going to be awfully sick.  Get a doctor.”  By the time Mrs. Gregorian awakened Maria, Tita had fallen unconscious.  Several minutes later, she died.

When the police heard all this, their assumption was that, despite Tita’s seemingly ideal life, the young woman had committed suicide.  Actresses, they nodded sagely, were notoriously unstable, and beauty queens were the worst of the lot.  Besides, who would want to kill her? When the autopsy revealed Tita had died from cyanide poisoning, the authorities believed it was “case closed.”  They were ready to label the death as a tragic self-poisoning, and move on.

Tita’s parents were outraged at this verdict.  They were convinced their daughter had been murdered, and they even had what they believed to be an obvious suspect: a wealthy engineer named Liviu Ciulley.  Ciulley, they declared, had been in love with Tita, and was maddened with jealousy over her plans to marry another man.  Police scoffed at this theory.  They pointed out that Ciulley had been married for ten years, and had shown no signs of wanting a divorce.  Gheorghe Cristescu was unpopular among many circles--a contemporary newspaper described him as “a socialist demagogue of the most radical and spectacular sort”--so few people took his claims seriously.  However, the sudden and mysterious death of a beautiful young actress was like catnip to the newspapers.  Tita’s demise became a genuine public scandal.

The publicity forced the authorities to reopen the case, which included questioning Liviu Ciulley.  Ciulley told police that for five years, he and Tita had a secret affair, but more than a year ago, he became tired of the her and broke off their relationship.  He added that in recent times, Tita had financial problems, and was always pestering him for loans.  As a result of this harassment, he was positively relieved to hear of her marriage plans.  Furthermore, he could prove that for more than a week before Tita’s death, he had been with his family in Sinaia, a considerable distance from Bucharest.

Ciulley seemed sincere, and police were able to confirm his alibi.  However, investigators also turned up something that seemed to contradict the suicide theory: The night Tita died, she had asked the daughter of her apartment building’s janitor to wake her very early the next morning, as she had a lot of shopping to do.  The police were not yet convinced of Ciulley’s innocence.

A search of Ciulley’s apartment found nothing incriminating.  When police visited the home and office of his brother, a doctor named Alexandra Ciulley, they initially saw nothing suspicious there, either.  Then, a particularly snoopy detective found a glass syringe hidden under a sheaf of bills.

The detective noted that when he found the syringe, a look of fear suddenly crossed Dr. Ciulley’s face.  “What did you hide that for?” the detective asked.  The doctor hesitated, but after a bit of pressing, said that a month before, he had loaned a syringe to his brother, because Liviu said he needed to give injections to his children, who were suffering from sore throats.  Alexandra continued, “When I heard that my brother was charged with having poisoned the actress, I got frightened.  I knew that he was madly in love with Tita Critescu, and I had a terrible suspicion that he might, in point of fact, have committed the murder.  I was afraid that if the police found the syringe in his flat, they might feel justified in their suspicion that my unfortunate brother had injected the poison into the girl’s reducing capsules and would consider the syringe as decisive proof.  I wanted to remove it before the police found it, and on Friday, January 10, I went to my brother’s flat to hide the syringe somehow.”

Alexandra said that when he went to Liviu’s flat, his brother was not there.  He found the syringe in the nursery, but he didn’t know what to do with it.  He finally threw some parts of the syringe down a narrow street, keeping only the glass cylinder.  Detectives went to the place where Alexandra said he had thrown the items, and sure enough, there they were.  When police confronted Liviu, he calmly replied, “My brother is a fool, trying to destroy evidence that is not evidence or I would have destroyed it myself.”  However, after further interrogation, he was forced to admit that he had lied when he said he no longer cared for Tita.  Things became even worse for Liviu when they found witnesses who asserted that the morning before Tita died, he had made a quick trip to Bucharest.  The following day, after the news of Tita’s death hit the papers, Liviu wanted to visit her apartment, but his wife, who knew of his affair with the actress, went into such hysterics at the idea that she threatened to shoot herself.  (I would have thought that her husband would have been the one she wanted to pump full of bullets, but I digress.)

Police assumed that Liviu had wanted to go to Tita’s flat in order to remove something incriminating, but what?  If the “reducing capsule” had been poisoned, Tita had taken the last one in the box.  Then, it occurred to them that right before she died, Tita mentioned that she had just brushed her teeth.  A second, more careful autopsy revealed that her gums were deeply impregnated with cyanide.  Traces of the poison were found on her toothbrush, and her half-empty tube of toothpaste contained a massive dose of it.

The question of how Tita died was finally answered.  Someone had taken off the cap of toothpaste, used a syringe to squirt a fatal dose of cyanide into the tube, and replaced the cap.  

Unfortunately, the question of who did this dreadful deed was not solved so easily.  Liviu Ciulley was put on trial for murder, but although his actions were certainly suspicious, prosecutors were unable to bring an airtight case against him.  Under oath, his servants denied that he had left his house before Tita’s death.  The jury brought in a verdict of “Not guilty.”

After Ciulley’s acquittal, the police half-heartedly continued their investigation for a time before admitting defeat and placing Tita’s poisoning into the cold case file.  The mystery is still discussed in Romanian true-crime circles--in recent years, rumors have emerged that Tita’s maid, Maria, poisoned her employer out of jealousy—but the young actress’s peculiar murder remains as murky as ever.