The blue-red dead spots
In the summer of 1962, the naked body of a young woman was found lying on the kitchen floor of an apartment in Vienna. She was holding a gas lighter in her hand. Next to her lay a broken glass and there were traces of liquid with a shoe print in it. A neighbor had called the police because he had noticed the smell of gas in the building. The police assumed it was suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, as the oven was open and the gas tap was turned on. But one thing puzzled the medical examiner Dr. Norbert Wölkert and the court chemist Dr. Gottfried Machata. Why did the corpse have blue-red livor mortis? When a person dies of carbon monoxide poisoning, the corpse shows bright red lividity. This is because the gas binds 200 times more easily than oxygen to hemoglobin in red blood cells. The blood consequently becomes arterial and takes on a bright red color. The oxygen supply stops immediately, causing the person to lose consciousness and suffocate. However, the dead body did not have bright red livor mortis, but blue-red livor mortis. The autopsy of the woman’s body revealed that she had suffocated while vomiting, as is often the case with carbon monoxide poisoning. However, laboratory tests ruled out death from such poisoning, as no carbon monoxide was found in the blood of the deceased. So what had caused the suffocation? The court chemist Dr. Gottfried Machata used a desiccator to clarify this question. He placed the deceased’s lung, which had been removed during the autopsy, into the desiccator and sealed it with a lid that had a rubber stopper. Over the following hours, the air escaped from the lung and was trapped in the desiccator. An analysis was then carried out in a gas chromatograph. This revealed that the young woman’s last breath contained the organic solvent trichloromethane, better known as chloroform. From this, it could be concluded that the woman had first been anesthetized and then killed. The investigators confronted the dead woman’s husband with this finding. He confessed that he wanted to travel with his mistress. This led to an argument with his wife, whom he murdered with chloroform. To disguise the murder as suicide, he turned on the gas tap. To ensure that no one would suspect the staged suicide, he also murdered his mother-in-law, who would never have believed that her daughter had committed suicide. He also knocked her out with chloroform and then put her upside down in the bathtub. Then he ran water into the tub so she drowned. So, what looked like a suicide turned out to be a sneaky double murder, which was only found out because of the blue-red spots.
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