Death by Chocolate: The 1st US Murder by Mail (2024)

Cordelia Botkin was an innovative thinker and a monster. She didn’t invent chocolate or arsenic, but she was the first person to combine the two and use the U.S. Postal Service to commit murder (that we know about).

Botkin lived in San Francisco but wanted to murder Mary Elizabeth Penington Dunning, who resided in Dover, Delaware. It was a classic case of I’d really like to kill that person, but I’m too far away to get the job done.

Cordelia had an affair with John Presley Dunning, Mary’s husband, and was afraid the couple would reconcile. In 1898, John left San Francisco to cover the Spanish-American War for the Associated Press. Botkin was fearful that he would return to his wife in Delaware and not to her in California.

Dunning was a gifted writer and a successful foreign correspondent. He had covered a cyclone in Samoa in 1889, where he was credited with helping pull drowning sailors out of the surf for several hours. He also covered the Chilean Civil War in 1891 and would go on to write about Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War in July 1898.

However, Dunning had significant personal failings, chief among them infidelity, but he was also said to have had drinking and gambling problems. In 1896, Mary had reached her limit with this crap and took their daughter and moved back to Delaware to live with her father, former Congressman John B. Penington.

Cordelia and John’s affair would go on for about three years. Cordelia took to sending anonymous letters to Mary with sordid stories of John’s involvement with an interesting and pretty English woman. She appeared to have two reasons for sending them: to prevent the couple from getting back together and because Cordelia was an evil witch.

This poison penmanship would come back to bite her because John Penington kept the letters, and handwriting analysts would use these malicious missives to help prove Cordelia had written the note that came with the deadly candy.

On August 9, 1898, Mary Dunning received a package from San Francisco addressed to Mrs. John P. Dunning containing a box of candy. She thought it came from a family friend.

As the family sat out on the porch after dinner, veranda if you’re fancy, she shared the candy with her sister, Ida Deane, her daughter, niece, and a couple of neighborhood children who stopped by. All of them became ill. Her sister, Ida Deane, 44, died on August 11. Mary, 35, died the next day. Thankfully, the others survived.

From the August 17, Wilmington Delaware Daily Republican:

“At the coroner’s inquest last evening, Dr. T. R. Wolf. state chemist of Delaware college, testified that he analyzed three pieces of the candy sent to Mrs. Dunning and found that it contained large quantities of arsenic. One piece of the arsenic, he stated, was as large as a pea, and he added that there was enough of the poison in the three pieces of candy to kill four persons.”

The earliest known use of the verb overkill was in 1946. Once more, Cordelia was ahead of her time.

The candy was traced back to Botkin. A clerk remembered her buying the box. A druggist recalled selling her arsenic, which she claimed was used to bleach a straw hat. There was some disagreement between the two jurisdictions about whether she should be tried in Delaware or California. It was finally decided that Delaware police would take the evidence, the remaining candy, wrapping paper, letters, etc., to San Francisco, and they would try her there.

The Cordelia Botkin Trial was a circus. The combination of the hideous murders and the salacious details of Bokin’s and Dunning’s relationship was irresistible to the public. More than 500 people were turned away from the courtroom on the day of closing arguments. The San Franciso Examiner set up a bulletin board on the streets outside where journalists posted summaries of the trial’s progress.

Botkin was convicted of first-degree murder on December 31, 1898, and sentenced to life imprisonment. She was placed in the county jail.

One Sunday in April 1900, Judge Caroll Cook was riding a streetcar when he looked over and saw a woman he was sure was Cordelia Botkin. You can almost hear the wheels spinning in the Judge’s brain, ”How odd, I could have sworn I sentenced her to life in prison for a double homicide.”

The Sunday, May 13, San Francisco Call carried an article about Sheriff Lackmann spending a frantic day getting affidavits from all of the jailers swearing that they were not allowing Botkin out to take self-guided tours of the city or go shopping unescorted. The judge later stated that he could have been mistaken and let the matter drop.

In 1904, Cordelia Botkin was retried, reconvicted, and sent to San Quentin Penitentiary.

John Dunning died of a brain tumor on April 17, 1907, in a Philadelphia hospital at 44.

Cordelia Botkin died in San Quentin State Prison on March 7, 1910, at 56. The cause of death was listed as “softening of the brain due to melancholia.” She never confessed to the crime.

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Wilmington Daily Republican, Delaware, Wednesday, August 17, 1898, Page 3, “The Candy Was Poisoned.”

San Francisco Examiner, Friday, August 26, 1898, Page 1, “Writing on Box of Poison is Mrs. Botkin’s says Dunning.”

San Francisco Call, Saturday, December 31, 1898, Page 1, “Mrs. Cordelia Botkin is Guilty of the Cruel Delaware Murders”

San Francisco Call, Sunday, May 13, 1900, Page 23, “Mrs. Botkin May Have Double In San Francisco.”

San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, March 24, 1904, Page 9, “Botkin Defense Maligns Living and Dead to Account for Poison”

Wilmington Morning News, Delaware, Friday, April 19, 1907, Page 2, “John P. Dunning Dead”

San Francisco Bulletin, Tuesday, March 8, 1910, “Page 11, “Mrs. Cordelia Botkin Dies in Her Cell at San Quentin.”