The Man Who Poisoned A Dynasty: The Story of Bennett Clark Hyde

In 1909, a major philanthropist in Missouri died. He was 81 and had a number of health issues. His death might have been natural…. Except…. In the same house a family member had died just weeks before, and another would die weeks later. Fingers pointed to one man. The trials that followed divided a family and left a legacy of doubt that haunts Missouri to this day.

More about the show:
🌐 https://thehistoryofmurder.com

Team & Contributors

Executive Producer- Clare O'Donohue 
https://clareodonohue.com

Executive Producer - Margaret Smith

Editor – Steph Kelly
https://stephkellyedits.com

Social Media Manager & Design - Mikayla Bogus
https://mikayladesign.cargo.site

IT Manager - Conor Sweeney

The History of Murder Logo - Bernadette Carr
https://www.bcarrdesign.com

Theme Song “My Carnal Life I Will Lay Down” - Rob Brereton
https://robertbrereton.com

Ralph Monaco
Monaco Sanders, Racine, Powell, & Reidy, LLC

Voice of Thomas Swope - Ed Moran 

Voice of Bennett Clark Hyde - Nick Rowley
http://njrowley.com/

Voice of Pearl Keller - Kelly Haran

This was truly a team effort, and we’re grateful to everyone who played a part.

Help keep us around by …. 

Buying Merch 
https://buy.thehistoryofmurder.com

Joining Our Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/thehistoryofmurder 

And Supporting Us Directly
https://buymeacoffee.com/thehistoryofmurder

Transcript

Clare (00:06.286)
Independence, 1909. It was a time of massive industrialization in the United States and wealthy men getting wealthier. One of those men was intent on giving a large portion of his estate to charity. But before he could, he died. And even though he was almost 82 years old and died in his own bed with a doctor in attendance, there were lot of questions especially because other members of the family in that household also died under suspicious circumstances. It's the History of Murder and I'm your host, Clare O'Donohue.

Clare (01:00.942)
53-year-old Maggie Swope lived in a pretty spectacular sandstone mansion on Pleasant Street in Independence, Missouri. The house was huge, extending nearly a city block. There were 26 rooms, including a ballroom, library, and music room. There was even an elevator that could take residents to the third floor. As perfect as it seemed, it became a place where multiple family members lost their lives in mysterious ways.

According to Ralph A. Monaco, a Kansas City attorney and author of The Strange Story of Colonel Swope and Dr. Hyde, the tragedies the family would face and her role in it would have been unthinkable for a woman like Maggie Swope.

Ralph:
She was from the Southern culture. They were frequently known as FFV, First Family of Virginia, First Family of Virginia, that, they were the original folks who settled in Virginia and they were somewhat related to the famous Robert E. Lee family of Virginia.

Clare:
Logan Swope, Maggie's husband, had made his money in real estate, but he had died eight years before. It would have been lonely as a widow to live in such a huge house, but Maggie was not alone. Aside from the two children who had married and moved out, five of her children were still living at home.

Ralph:
So did their business manager, family manager, Colonel Moss Hutton. They also had family members from Tennessee and Kentucky who would often frequent and visit, and they would stay at the house. So it was a moving of front door opening and closing of a lot of family members.

Clare (02:43.286)
One of the more recent residents of the house was Thomas Swope, Maggie's brother-in-law.

Ralph:
She did not want him living alone as he had been for years in the New England Life building that he owned and lived in downtown. And she wanted him closer to her so that they could really kind of care for him as he needed somebody to monitor his activities. He had suffered throughout his entire life with dyspepsia. All fear is burning in his stomach. He took a daily regimen of a concoction that Dr. Hateful, Hatred, that's his name from, he was a Brazilian physician who was not a Missouri physician, but he was licensed in Kansas across the river and his medication included strychnine to help deal with dyspepsia.

Clare
Thomas was born in 1827 in Kentucky. He was smart. He graduated college at 20 and went on to Yale Law School, though he didn't practice law. Instead, he focused first on mining, then on real estate. He moved around a bit, eventually landing in Missouri and bought and sold property. 

Ralph:
Through his efforts after the Civil War, he got into manufacturing bricks and made a fortune. Maybe it's easier to say that as an individual who never married and never had any children, he would be one to be able to save money. And he did. And he was very, very wealthy.

Clare (04:14.466)
Somewhere along the way he picked up the title Colonel, though he never served in the military. He was considered mild-mannered in his youth, but got increasingly cranky as he aged. By the time he lived with Maggie, he complained that no one came to see him. But he also complained when people did visit.

Ralph:
He had few friends and most of the associates he had were directly related to his immediate family, his brother, his brother's widow, her kids. He had a business manager named Sylvester Spangler that helped him at his office downtown Kansas City. And then the Swope family had their cousin Moss Hutton, who was also very much a part of Colonel Swope's life. But that was really it. He was hard to get along with and he was setting his ways.

Clare
One habit he picked up along the way was drinking. And like most things in Thomas's life, he went all in.

Ralph:
In his later years, it's unquestionable that he was a pronounced alcoholic. He drank whiskey. In fact, the old war was that every morning when he went to his office in the New England Life building in Kansas City, he would go to the local tavern down below and order two shots of whiskey because they were two bits a shot and it was happy hour. So every day he would get two shots. Now, when we think of a shot of whiskey, we think of a little (05:42.286) you know, little shot like this. No, these were tin cups. So by noon, he was pretty much corn, as they would say in the euphemism of the 19th century, he was drunk. So if you want to do business with Swope, you better reach him in the morning before he was passed out on his couch.

Clare:
Despite the drinking, Thomas was even more successful than his brother. His assets were valued at 3.6 million, about 123 million now. He had made his fortune during what we call the Gilded Age. It was a period of rapid change in the U.S. from a primarily agricultural economy to an industrial one. The term Gilded Age was first coined by Mark Twain as a way of describing the glittery covering of a corrupt system that included vast income inequality. Like other men of his day, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, having made his fortune, Thomas spent his final years focused on giving back.

Ralph:
It became really singularly the philanthropist of Kansas City. Kansas City has an area called Hospital Hill. All that land that is now Hospital Hill, Truman Hospital, Childress Mercy Hospital, all those area hospitals where UMKC students in med school attend school are all properties given by Swope.

Clare:
In 1893, when there was an attempt to beautify Kansas City with more parks, Thomas opposed the plan, fearing it might lead to more taxes for his vacant lots. An editorial in the Kansas City Star called him someone who was, quote, evading taxes, fighting progress, and getting rich, unquote. Thomas responded with a gift.

Ralph: (07:28.096)
In 1896, Swoop gave to the city of Kansas City. I believe it's the third largest city park in the United States, commonly referred to and named Swoop Park. It's about 1800 acres of land that he donated to the city for a park.

Clare:
On the day it opened, free trains departed from central Kansas City to the park. By 10 a.m., just one line was reported to have carried 4,000 people. While the crowd filled the park and politicians gave speeches, Thomas wandered the celebration anonymously. When he was spotted, he was too shy to give a speech. He wrote down his words and handed them to a reporter.

Thomas:
I have often heard it said that gratitude is a scarce article in this world, but from this time on, I shall reject and ignore that pessimistic sentiment.

Clare:
Thomas became an almost obsessive philanthropist. He donated money to his alma mater, Central College. He gave to the YMCA and the YWCA. He donated land and money to an organization that helped the city's poor. He gave to the Humane Society, the Women's Christian Organization, and many others. But his most personal generosity was in his will.

Ralph:
Probably for the last six to nine months of Swope's life, his singular job was stressing over what he was going to do with his estate. But he carried his will with him everywhere he went because he was spreading over what he's going to do. He didn't want to give it to the lawyers. He thought they would divide it all up. He didn't want to give it to the real estate moguls because they would huckster it all up.

Speaker 2 (09:08.77)
He made individual bequests.

Ralph:
to a sister in Kentucky to a couple other relatives in Tennessee. One of the cousins received a life estate, $50 a month for life. So there were multiple specific bequests, like Moss Hutton, $2,500. $2,500 to spangle his business manager.

Clare:
He had nine nieces and nephews, seven of which were Maggie's children. His intention was to leave them a set amount. Maggie's children would each receive $200,000, about $7 million today, except for one niece, Frances, who would receive less, $135,000 or $4.7 million.

Ralph:
So once all of those specific bequests are paid, then the rest residue and remainder of the estate is then distributed to these nine residuary beneficiaries.

Clare:
The nine residuary beneficiaries were his nieces and nephews. Aside from what they would individually inherit, they would each get a portion of a fund of $1.4 million, about $48 million now. There was a catch. If the beneficiaries did not have direct heirs, a spouse or children, at the time of their passing, their portion of the inheritance would revert to the surviving nieces and nephews. (10:36.194) But despite everyone knowing this is what the will contained, as far as Thomas was concerned, it wasn't finalized.

Ralph:
He knew he wanted to give some to his family. He knew he wanted to give some to charities. But what to do with his, his eduary estate? You know, the rest residue and remainder of his estate. That's his big concern.

Clare:
Sometime in the autumn of 1909, Thomas had fallen on a rock and hurt his shoulder. He usually stayed in his room upstairs, and this gave him an excuse to continue to do so. And apparently, as he lay in his bed, Thomas decided the individual bequests were enough for his nieces and nephews.

Thomas:
I am rich. I've got more money than I know what to do with. And I would like to do something for the poor people of Kansas City. The rich can take care of themselves. I have no patience with them anyhow. But the poor people, the laboring people of Kansas City, I feel that I owe more to them than to anybody else.

Clare:
His new plan was to leave the $1.4 million to charity. He didn't make a secret of the changes he intended to make in his will. In fact, everybody knew. But he did delay in actually making them as he fussed over where exactly he wanted the money to go.

Clare: (11:57.442)
Before he had a chance to decide, there was a family tragedy down the hall. Thomas' cousin and another resident of the house was 63-year-old James Moss Hunton. He was a much-loved member of the family and Thomas' closest friend. On October 1st, Hunton had become suddenly ill. Halfway through dinner with one of Maggie's sons, he complained of feeling dizzy. His hands were shaking and he began vomiting.

Ralph:
He has a stroke. They called it apoplexy back then. It's unquestioned that he had a stroke.

Clare:
Thomas' nurse, Pearl Keller, kept watch on him even after his family doctor arrived. The family doctor, George Twyman, was described as a gentleman, old-fashioned. He was stumped about how to help Houghton, so he turned to 37-year-old Dr. Bennett Clark Hyde for help.

Ralph:
The standard of care was to do bloodletting.

Clare:
Hyde drew a pint of blood from Moss-Hunton, but then continued to bleed him until a reported two cords were drawn. At that point, Dr. Twyman stepped in to stop him from doing more.

Ralph: (13:07.884)
According to Nurse Keller, they over bled him.

Clare:
To put it in perspective, humans have five to six quarts of blood in their bodies. To take two quarts out would likely lead to low oxygen levels, organ failure, and death. It should be no surprise then that Hunton had a slight spasm and then died almost immediately after the blood was drawn. Cause of death was officially listed as apoplexy. This was, of course, a terrible loss for the family, but it was a particular loss for Thomas Swoop.

Ralph:
The death of Moss Hutton created even more anxiety for Colonel Swope because as I said earlier, his only two friends were really his business manager, Sylvester Spangler, down in Kansas City and Moss Hutton had lived in the Swope mansion. So he lost one of his buddies. And that buddy was also one of his named executors under his.

Clare: (14:06.318)
Upon being told, Thomas was said to have hid his face in his bedsheets and said, 

Thomas:
Oh my God. Poor Moss.

Clare:
Thomas' nurse, Pearl Keller, reported that Hyde had stopped her after the death and said something she found very strange.

Hyde:
I want you to do something for me tomorrow. Now, I am not a businessman, but I can. And now that this man, Hunton, is gone, who was one of the administrators of Mr. Swope's will, I want you, you, have an influence with the old man. I want you to suggest me in his stead.

Clare:
A shocked Pearl told Hyde, No, 

Pearl:
Dr. Hyde, I came here for Colonel Swope in a purely professional way. And the moment I begin to interfere with his private affairs, I am overstepping my bounds. 

Clare
Only two days later, a sudden illness overtook Thomas Swope. The illness was described as violent and baffling and ultimately fatal. (15:05.356)
The doctor in attendance was Bennett Clark Hyde, the same doctor who had bled his cousin. He wasn't Thomas's regular doctor, but he was quite experienced.

Ralph:
Dr. Hyde was the president-elect of the Jackson County Medical Society.

Clare:
and he was family. He had been married to Thomas's niece, Frances, for the last four years. He must have been seen by Frances as a good catch. He was an intellectual, a Shakespeare scholar, and a good singer. At six feet tall with dark blonde hair and a strong chin, he looked as if Hollywood were casting a college professor. One patient called him, quote, the handsomest man I'd ever seen.

Ralph:
He was handsome, singularly a very handsome, articulate man, made a great first impression, could spin a web that no spider ever knew.

Clare: (15:58.604)
He also came from a respectable family.

Ralph:
They had money. They weren't anywhere near the rich and famous of the Swopes or the others of Independence in Kansas City, but they had their own reputation, Baptist minister, a doctor, and that was his pedigree.

Clare:
When he began courting Francis, the family must have been thrilled. Except they weren't. Maggie especially was unhappy. One reason was religion.

Ralph:
They were Presbyterians, first family of Virginia. They looked down on anybody who wasn't Presbyterian. Specifically, Hyde's family were Baptist. She did not want her daughter dating a Baptist.

Clare:
But Maggie had other issues with her daughter's bow, bigger ones, because Hyde had a pass.

Ralph: (16:49.09)
There were countless demons in Hyde's history. John Paxton, Swope family attorney in Independence, had discovered that Hyde had been fleecing older women, widows who had money. He would date them. He would lead them into the false sense of marriage, and then he would take their money, and then he would break off their relationships. This was obviously very disconcerting to Maggie, and it should be.

Clare:
A divorcee named Sarah Frank said that Hyde had courted her, promised to marry her, and borrowed $2,200 from her, about $79,000 now, and then essentially ghosted her. Another woman made this same claim, though she said he took the equivalent of $143,000 from her. And that was just the beginning. In 1897, Hyde had been the Kansas City police surgeon, instructed to look after the medical needs of anyone in custody. A black woman named Annie Clements had been detained because she had reportedly taken morphine. With a guard holding her down, Hyde apparently poured mustard oil into her vagina. Then he shouted at her

Hyde:
Annie, get up and get out of here and don't come back no more.

Clare:
To be clear, there's never been any suggestion that pouring mustard oil anywhere would have an effect on morphine ingestion. The only thing it would do was burn, causing Annie intense pain. Once it got out, there were protests from church officials and leaders in the black community. Hyde was quickly charged with cruelty and fired from his post. A few years before that, he was charged with being the leader in a grave robbing ring (18:32.78) when he was an anatomy professor at University Medical College.

Ralph:
He had hired two young black men to rob St. Mary's Catholic Cemetery here in Kansas City. And while they were in the act of digging up a recently buried soul, they turned on Dr. Hyde and said, he did it. He hired us to do it. And of course, Dr. Hyde denied that he was involved. Nonetheless, Hyde said that they needed cadavers to do proper autopsies because back then they didn't have cadavers to do autopsies, not like today.

Clare:
Though the charges were dropped, they made the papers. Maggie was not letting her eldest daughter marry such a man.

Ralph:
She was mortified. She was opposed to it. Put her foot down and says, you are not marrying him. You're not dating that man.

Clare:
And Thomas was apparently in agreement. However, Frances was just as stubborn. In June of 1905, she and Hyde eloped. A Kansas City star headlined the day after, says, a wedding in Fayetteville, Arkansas, proves a surprise to the bride's mother, unquote. There was for a time no communication between Frances and her mother and uncle. 

Ralph:
(19:49.422) Eventually, as time evolved, took her daughter back in. They accepted Dr. Hyde into the family. Whereupon, once Maggie ratified the relationship, Colonel Swope did as well. He bought a house for Frances and her new husband in Kansas City, furnished it with $10,000 of furnishings. Can you imagine? You're talking maybe $200,000 or $300,000 of value today, if not more. So they lived high on the hog.

Clare:
And that position Hyde held as the president of the Jackson County Medical Society, that was probably helped by the donations that Thomas had made to them. And just as Hyde had benefited from Thomas's generosity, his wife would now benefit from Thomas's estate. Though her lesser individual inheritance was likely because of the house and furnishings they'd received, Francis still had a lot to gain. When the will was read, it was confirmed that Thomas had never changed it. The 1.4 million was not going to charity. It would be divided between the nine nieces and nephews. Along with the individual bequests, they stood to inherit nearly 156,000 apiece, the equivalent of just over five and a half million. Unless, of course, one of them died. Then their share would be divided by the others. Just a month later, there was another tragedy at the family mansion. There was a typhoid outbreak in Independence, Missouri. Not all of Independence, just one house.

Ralph:
But what was singular is a typhoid only broke out in the Swope Mansion, nowhere else in Independence. The epidemic became so pervasive inside the Swope Mansion that Dr. Hyde contacted the Scarrett nursing community again, the nursing school, and Nurse Keller came back. So did several other nurses from the Scarrett nursing school, and they became 24 round the clock nursing care. (21:54.36) for the Swope family members who were afflicted with typhoid.

Clare:
One daughter had been given an injection that caused her arm to swell up and made her symptoms worse. The doctor in attendance, Bennett Clark Hyde, had told the nurses to give another daughter a pill to help with her fever, but the nurses threw it out. Family matriarch, Maggie Swill, did take medication that was given to her.

Ralph:
Fortunately, Maggie apparently had vomited so quickly that the pill came out and nurse Kellner drawn a parallel line between what she observed with Colonel Swope. She actually put it in a bag and saved it.

Clare:
Nurse Keller, who had left the family's employ after Thomas's death, was so outraged by the treatment, she told the other nurses she intended to mutiny. 

Pearl:
Girls, just one more thing has got to happen and I will not be here. I will not be here and see these people murdered. 

Clare:
Pearl Keller hadn't just whispered with the other nurses. She and the others had gone to the family doctor, George Twyman. Either Hyde goes or we do. That's what they were reported to have said.

Ralph:(23:06.38)
Now by 1909, medicine had reached a certain level that typhoid was not always a death sentence. It was high mortality rate in the 1850s when Swope first came to Kansas City. But by 1909, they had medication that could treat it.

Clare:
but it was fatal inside the Swope Mansion. Eight people had gotten ill from typhoid, but none more seriously than Chrisman Swope, Maggie's son and Francis' brother. Chrisman was only 31 when he died within days of getting the illness, the third death in the family in two months. Chrisman was unmarried, without children. His portion of the estate would be divided among the others. 

Clare:
And that wasn't all. (23:50.574) Typhoid is spread through food or water that's contaminated, so a pathologist came to the house and checked the water supply. It was fine. He also found that the family rarely ate the same foods, especially the servants, so he could find no specific reason typhoid had taken hold. He would later say, quote, it's as if the infection had been administered to the family with all the precision of a scientific experiment. And in the family there was only one scientist, Bennett Clark Hyde.

Ralph:(24:26.254)
One of the things that Dr. Hyde wanted was a laboratory, but that wasn't uncommon. So Colonel Swoop had actually helped fund about a year earlier, a laboratory for Dr. Hyde to do chemical tests. And one of the things he was testing by the fall of 1909 was typhoid spores.

Clare:
Hyde and Francis had come for dinner just days before the outbreak, and they had brought bottled water with them, insisting they not use water from the family home.

Ralph:
Interestingly enough, Hyde himself contracted a low grade course of typhoid by the end of December of 1909.

Clare:
And about that time, I did something very odd.

Ralph:
Thomas Swope, the oldest of the Swope seven children, had been over to see his mom, see the family. And as he was walking about two or three blocks away from the Swope residence, he said he saw Dr. Hyde dropping a pill and smashing it into the ground.

Clare (25:35.95)
Thomas, Hyde's brother-in-law, rushed to get the family attorney, John Paxton, and together they came back to the spot where the pill had been smashed.

Ralph:
This, this part to me is mind-boggling because it was a lot of snow on the ground. I don't know how long it takes a capsule to dissolve when you smash it into the ground, into the snow, but they gathered up the fragments and put it in a bag.

Clare:
Maggie, never a fan of Hyde, was more than a little suspicious that he was now responsible for three deaths and seven attempted murders. She and Francis were once again not on speaking terms because of Bena Clark Hyde. This time, Maggie was not looking to welcome either back into the fold. Instead, she sent word to Chicago to Dr. Ludwig Hektoen that she would pay him to conduct autopsies on Chrisman and Thomas.

Ralph:
Dr. Hektoen, the leading pathologist in the country who had written the learned at treatise on the proper way to perform autopsies. You never conduct an autopsy at night. You only conduct an autopsy during the day. You never do an autopsy on a frozen cadaver. You never thought of frozen cadaver with water. You let them naturally thaw out. Those are just a few of the rules of the trap practice of proper pathology (27:05.664)on a dead body.

Clare:
Dr. Hektoen came to Kansas City and set up a temporary morgue in Ott's funeral home so he could do an autopsy on Chrisman.

Ralph:
Dr. Hektoen does the autopsy, but under the dim lighting of the basement of the funeral, they dig him up and they carve into him while he's frozen. Then they come back about a week, 10 days later, and here they dig up Colonel Swart. In the dark, at night, on a frozen cadaver, pouring buckets of water into his stomach. Even during the autopsy, when they take off the top of his head, crystals break out, because it's all ice. You got ice cubes in the crystals of the brain and shipped those all back to Chicago for testing. And lo and behold, they determined that it was by poisoning that Colonel Swope died, that William Crispin was poisoned, that they attempted the murder of Margaret Swope by poison, that the little capsules found on the streets of Independence were filled with cyanide poisoning.(28:13.92)A coroner's finding was held and the coroner's jury ruled that there was murder at whose hands they could not say.

Clare:
But everyone knew or thought they knew who was guilty. By March of 1910, 11 indictments were handed down against Hyde. First degree murder in the cases of Chrisman and Thomas, manslaughter in the case of Moss Hunton, and eight charges of using typhoid germs to poison people, the seven who recovered, and Chrisman. The prosecution, like the autopsies, was paid for by Hyde's own mother-in-law, Maggie Swope.

Ralph:
It was much more common in the 19th and early 20th century because they didn't have as many prosecutors. Even though Jackson County had a few prosecutors, they did not have the number of prosecutors that we have today. And these were elected positions for a two-year term. So there was a turnover in the prosecutor's office. And there was concern that maybe the prosecutor wasn't a gifted attorney, but was rather a political electee and that didn't have the capacity to really prosecute a case.

Clare: (29:30.124)
Maggie had hired James A. Reed to prosecute. The defense would be Frank Walsh.

Ralph:
In 1899, Frank Walsh had defended Jesse James Jr., the son of the bandit Jesse James for train robbery. Guess who prosecuted Jesse Jr.? James A. Reed. They had defended and fought against each other in civil matters. So they were no strangers in the courtroom and they were no strangers together as political enemies.

Clare:
They were in for a case that seemed certain, but it wasn't as simple as that.

Ralph:
The case was delayed by two days. They were going to start on Saturday, but they started on Monday because one of the key prosecution witnesses, George Twyman, died. And guess what he died of? Apoplexy.

Clare:
There's no evidence, nor was there any suspicion, that Hyde was involved in that death. But it was another thing to gossip about as the trial got underway. And since it was about one of the leading families in Kansas City, it was one of the most publicized murder trials of the early 20th century. While he had been indicted for several murders and attempted murders, this trial focused on one case, the death of Thomas Swope.(30:49.954)The prosecution knew it was his death, but they had the city clamoring for justice.

Ralph:
When Swope died, they had a large funeral service for the good colonel. One of the buildings that he had given to the city was actually the Kansas City Library that's still downtown. It's not the library any longer. And they laid his body for people to come and view. And his body was on display like in the Rotunda of the Capitol. He was on display with thousands upon thousands of mourners came by grieving because he meant so much to the city.

Clare
For the prosecution, not only was the motive in Thomas's death clear, but the means was as well. They had evidence that Hyde had obtained a deadly poison.

Ralph:
He had ordered cyanide from the pharmacy in Kansas City. And the cyanide that he ordered from Breckline Pharmacy was in capsule forms. Capsules. Hugo Breckline actually calls Dr. and why are you ordering this much cyanide? Dr. Hyde said, I'm trying to kill, first he says cockroaches. Then the story goes, no to kill dogs. Stray dogs that are causing trouble.

Clare: (32:08.942)
Hyde's explanation seemed absurd. Would anyone use capsules of poisons on cockroaches or even dogs? But there was a problem with the evidence.

Ralph:
Breckline's pharmacy burns down on December 20th, 1909. All the records of Breckline Pharmacy, all of the orders of Dr. High may have gone up in smoke.

Clare:
A break for the defense? Nope.

Ralph:
For some ungodly reason, the of hands of the heaven of Providence himself, I suppose. Hugo Breckline had kept his day book of Dr. Hyde's orders in a safe, fireproof safe. So those records were not destroyed in the conflagration. They were still there, and they were admitted into evidence.

Clare:
Also in evidence was the testimony of Pearl Keller. According to Nurse Keller, Hyde and Francis had spent the night before Thomas' death in the Swope household. In the morning, Pearl reported to them and the rest of the family that Thomas appeared a bit better when she brought him his breakfast. According to Pearl, Hyde insisted on giving him some digestive medicine he had. He and Pearl went to Thomas' room, but Thomas declined the pill. He took it a little later, at 8.30 a.m.

Clare: (33:29.462)
Maggie would testify that Pearl's version was correct. She had been in the breakfast room and heard Hyde insist on giving Thomas some medicine. And then he and Pearl had left the room. Hyde's story was very different. He hadn't insisted on anything, nor had he even stepped inside the old man's room that morning. He had given some pills to Pearl the night before, and he didn't know when Thomas had taken one, if he had. And Francis testified on Hyde's behalf.

She said her mother, Maggie, wasn't even there when Pearl reported on Thomas's health. So she couldn't confirm Pearl's version. Pearl would testify that within 20 minutes of taking the pill, Thomas began convulsing. 

Pearl:
He had a most peculiar look on his face. 

Clare:
She ran into the hall and seeing Francis, she called out for help. Francis sent her younger sisters to get high. Pearl went back into the room and heard Thomas say,

Thomas:
God, I wish I were dead. I wish I hadn't taken that medicine.

Clare:
Hyde would later say that he arrived in the room to hear the last words. Thomas, said, did say, my God, I wish I were dead. And he never uttered the last sentence, the one about the medicine. The only person who could break the time was Chrisman. He had reportedly heard the commotion from his room across the hall and had come over to find out what was wrong. Of course, by the time these statements were in contention at the trial, Chrisman was dead.

Pearl's testimony continued. She said that Hyde told her that Thomas was likely dying of apoplexy, the same illness that only 48 hours earlier had killed his cousin. An odd thing, thought Pearl, because of course, a stroke isn't contagious. Hyde must have seen Pearl's doubt because he commented on it at the time.

Hyde: (35:23.062)
It's probably brought on by the shock of his dear friend's death.

Clare:
Thomas's convulsions went on for eight minutes, and then, for a moment, it appeared he might recover. Hyde, Pro would testify, ordered that he be given strychnine, a drug used to quicken a pulse. But Hyde's pulse was already going too fast. A small amount of strychnine would not kill him, but larger doses would. Perhaps, it was later suggested, the amount in the pill Thomas had taken wasn't enough.

So Hyde had to administer the shot. Pearl made a few comments and Hyde suggested she take a break or ordered her out of the room, depending on who was testifying. She went out for a few minutes. When she returned, Thomas's breathing was shallow. He would last several more hours, but he would never recover.

Oddly, a different scene was playing out downstairs where mourners of the late cousin, James Moss-Hunton, were streaming into the house for his wake, and Maggie was playing host to them. Among them was another friend of Thomas and co-executor of his will. That man would testify that minutes after Thomas died, Hyde had come to him with a request.

Hyde:
Now's the time to get that paper. His will.

Clare: (36:45.088)
It seemed pretty cut and dry, but defense attorney Frank Walsh had something on his side. The autopsies.

Ralph:
Frank Walsh had done a tremendous job of embarrassing Dr. Hectoen, basically showing, okay, you botched up these autopsies. There's no way you were ever going to be able to make any conclusion that's within merit. And well, Hectoen would never concede that point, but expert witnesses that Frank Walsh had called on behalf of Dr. Hyde said, these were botched. You couldn't determine anything.

Clare
Dr. Hektoen, who had defied his own writings on the proper way to conduct autopsies, had an incomplete defense of his actions.

Ralph:
He said, yeah, the standard of care had changed because lighting had improved. The conditions, you know, back when I wrote this 10 years ago, electricity wasn't as sound as it is today. And there's some truth to that, right? There is some truth. That gets you maybe past the lighting problem. It doesn't get past the frozen cadavers.

Clare: (37:54.35)
Though the finding of cyanide was now in question, it was clear that Thomas had strychnine in his system and Hyde had given him strychnine.

Ralph:
They did have strychnine in Colonel Swope, but again, they've been treated with that for years.

Clare:
Hyde wasn't on trial for Chrisman or Moss-Hutton's deaths, but the prosecution presented evidence against him about those cases. So the defense did their best to poke holes.

Ralph:
Dr. Hyde and Frances would go out to the Swope Mansion on Sundays and visit and have dinners and would always remind the family, drink bottled water. And the reason they insisted on drinking bottled water, this was Dr. Hyde's recommendation to the Swope family, is the Coppinger family who had been their servants for years. Their privy was being cleaned out, the lines were being moved because it was draining into the water system of the Swope Mansion and Hyde thought it was contaminating the water system in the Swope Mansion. So he said, while they're cleaning out the water system and moving the privy from the Cochrane to your family cabin, drink bottled water. That's an important component to this typhoid epidemic as we get into it. (39:09.696) No one questioned that Hyde had told them to drink bottled water. They didn't, but he told them to.

Clare:
The bottled water, which had seemed evidence of Hyde's guilt, was now being used to bolster his claims of innocence.

Ralph:
Why would he tell people to drink bottled water if he's going to contaminate their cistern with typhoid? And one of the prosecution's witnesses did admit, who was an expert, Dr. Hill, and said, yeah, I never really did treat the water source in the cistern for typhoid. Well, why not? If you think that's where the source is, why don't you test it? So there were some weaknesses in the typhoid being caused by Hyde.

Clare:
And the two quarts of Moss Hudson's blood that Hyde had taken on the night he died?

Ralph:
The problem with the weighing of the blood was they were using a, well we'll call it really a bucket, but like a bowl to drop for the, holding the elbow up, having the blood drop in, drip into this bowl. And in that process, there was also water accumulated. So we don't know how much the water weighed versus how much the blood weighed. They never really weighed that specifically. They could have bled him (40:23.636) anything they could have done, whatever the standard of care was then, he was not going to survive. And frankly, it's probably unlikely he would have survived the massive stroke that he had even today.

Clare:
The trial lasted six and a half weeks, but it only took two days for the jury to find Hyde guilty of the murder of Thomas Swope. He was sentenced to life. His reaction was common.

Hyde:
This case is not closed. My wife Frances will not forsake me. Frances will know what to do.

Clare:
And she did. Using money she inherited from Thomas, France is financed an appeal. The case went all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court. Hides lawyers argued that evidence about Chrisman or Moss Hunton or the typhoid outbreak should not have been presented at trial, as the case was only focused on the death of Thomas Swope.

Ralph:
So the Supreme Court said, yeah, you know, got all these other stories and it's a little suspect whether they were even relevant to the murder of Colonel Swope. So the Missouri Supreme Court says, you know, we're going to kick this case back. You're going to have to retry this case. And they did. That was in 1911. The Supreme Court reversed 1912. It goes back. The jury is in panel. The case is submitted to the jury. One of the jurors was conflicted. He had just gotten married.(41:44.534) Escaped to the transom, which is that window above the door of the jury room, and was gone. The newspaper counts said that he went mad. You know, probably just want to go back and have his honeymoon. I don't know.

Clare: (41:58.006)
The judge declared a mistrial.

Ralph:
Let's do round three.

Clare:
The third trial ended in a hung jury. Nine voted for acquittal, three for conviction.

Ralph:
Maggie had spent about a half a million dollars, according to some sources, on trying to pin the tail on the donkey's ass of her son-in-law. She was unable to get him convicted and she had spent a large amount of the fortune of the Swope family. And by 1917, when the case came back up, the prosecutor did not move forward with the prosecution.

Clare:
Hyde was a free man. The money that had meant so much to him had largely been spent defending him. In today's money, Francis had spent about seven million of her $11 million inheritance on his defense. Francis and Hyde had three children born during the trials. One died when he was only four hours old. After his final trial ended, Hyde and Francis and their children (43:01.248) lived in the house Thomas Swope had bought for them, but they did not go back to their old life. Though the law had not found him guilty, society had.

Ralph:
He did have no ability to practice medicine. He had grown melancholy, despondent, depressed.

Clare:
Hyde's reputation was in shatters and his medical practice had disappeared. His temper, though, was flourishing. He wrote a letter to a fellow doctor at Jackson County Medical Society for raiding the man. Hyde was expelled from the society he had once, with Thomas' help, been president of. He and Francis were living on the remainder of her money and Hyde grew increasingly frustrated by his dependence and his reputation in society. They divorced in 1920. Francis cited cruelty and violence as the reason.

Ralph:
Back then to get a divorce, you had to have cause. And one of them, you know, is adultery, that is the commandment he didn't violate. Another was abandonment, habitual drunkardism. They didn't have those. So they had to have some one of the statutory elements. And do I believe it that he could have been abusive? Absolutely. I mean, there was a record of him being abusive to patients. We know how they abused financially women that he dated before he married Francis. We know that he helped pay for digging up.
(44:28.354)dead people to do autopsy. So yeah, I believe it's possible.

Clare:
Despite all the evidence presented in his trials and Hyde's behavior afterward, Frances did say during the divorce proceedings that she still believed in his innocence. Hyde filed both libel and slander suits against William Rockhill Nelson, the owner and publisher of the Kansas City Star newspaper, for having suggested that he had committed murder and attempted murder against members of the Swope family. The suits were unsuccessful. The question remained. Did he?

Ralph:
I don't know, I mean, I'm really torn. Sometimes I read it and think, my God, there's too many coincidence. You know, it's when there's smoke, there's fire. Do I have a legal opinion behind a reasonable doubt? Yes. A legal opinion behind a reasonable doubt would never be convicted. If you're going to prove that there's a murder, you've got to connect the dots. You've got to show that the poison is what caused the death. And you got to show that the poison was administered by the good doctor that they couldn't prove that that was a pill that Dr. Hyde gave to nurse Keller, that she gave to him, is what caused his death. In a civil setting, if they had sued Dr. Hyde for wrongful death, where the preponderance of the evidence test, 50 % or more, is the standard of proof. Yes, they could probably have found Hyde culpable for the civil deaths of Colonel Swope, William Crispin Swope, personal injury claims of Margaret and the other Swope families. But beyond a reasonable doubt, no.

Clare (46:02.157)
Years later, Hyde was interviewed by the Kansas City Star

Hyde:
Don't pity me. Whatever you do, don't pity me. I have never pitied myself. I have been crucified, yes. I have suffered as no man has ever suffered, but I... only ask for justice. Simple... justice.

Clare:
Hyde returned to his hometown of Lexington, Missouri and spent time as a truck driver and mechanic.

Ralph:
He reopened an old office building where he did practice some medicine, very shabby office where he tried his trade. I don't know who went to him.

Clare: (46:37.166)
He died in 1934 at the age of 62 from a cerebral hemorrhage. Neither his former wife nor his grown children attended the funeral. Frances lived a comfortable life, raised her two children and died in 1964. She did not remarry, though she did reconcile with her mother, Maggie, shortly after the divorce. Maggie, her fortunes diminished over time, lived until 1942. Her estate was worth only $3,000 at the time of her death, just over $54,000 now. The house on Pleasant Street was sold in 1923 and used as a school, then a charity workshop where quilts and clothes were made and given to those in need. It was demolished in 1960. 

Clare:
Thomas Swope's legacy remains in Kansas City. On April 8th, 1918, more than eight years after his death,he finally got his last wish. He was buried in Swale Park in a granite mausoleum that overlooks the comings and goings of the thousands of residents who to this day visit the zoo, the theater, the golf course, or just enjoy the scenery. It seems exactly what he would have wanted.

Clare: (48:00.952)
What do you think about this case? Please comment below. And if you liked this story, please subscribe to the channel, hit the like and notification buttons, and let us know if there are cases you'd like us to cover.