A true crime, but not like any other crime posted about in this thread...
And even worse this was a mass-murder with victims in different states and the case stretching from before WWI deep into the Great Depression.
Marie and Pierre Currie discovered Radium in 1898.
The long & short of this is that radium is well... radioactive or gives off radioactive rays.
And it was found that radium could be used to create fluorescent paint and before WWI a company was started to paint the the hands & numbers of watches.
As you can imagine fluorescent watches were popular for both with consumers and the military. Soon other watch-dial painting companies popped up.
You can also imagine the handling of radium was neither careful or the danger of it understood by most. However a few did have an inkling radium was very dangerous.
The employees of these watch-painting companies were typically women.
The women would be given a small container of radium-infused paint (prior to becoming a "paint" the radium would arrive at the business in powder form and then had to be mixed).
To apply the radium paint, the women would be issued a fine-haired brush.
In order to maintain a "point" on the paintbrush, the women were encouraged to place the point of the brush between their lip. Then they dipped the brush into the paint and the paint the watch dial.
Lip, dip, paint.
And every time the women placed the tip of the brush into their mouths they ingested a little bit of the radium.
And it bears repeating that there was a small group of people who knew radium was extremely dangerous.
And slowly women began to get sick. First in New Jersey. Then in Illinois.
Radium has a similar structure to calcium. And calcium is of course can be absorbed into our bones.
Radium also has the ability to be absorbed into our bones.
And yeah having bones loaded with radium would be a very bad thing indeed.
There are painful deaths and then there are really painful deaths. Dying by radiation poisoning through radium is one of the worst ways to die.
The women didn't die quickly. Sometimes it was over the course of a couple years. But sometimes it took even longer.
For some women it started with a loose tooth or two or every tooth in their mouths becoming loose. The radium was drilling holes into their jaws. And when a tooth was lost, the socket where the tooth resided wouldn't heal. It would be non-ending infection of pain and pus.
For other women it caused bone cancer with huge tumors forming in various parts of their bodies.
As you can guess the companies themselves tried to claim that it had nothing to do with their occupations as radium dial painters.
The women fought back legally. The companies also fought back through a multitude of methods–Some legal, some completely underhanded.
The New Jersey dial painters finally won their case in the late 1920's.
The Illinois dial painters didn't win theirs until 1939.
I would like to say the women and families of these women won boatloads of cash in court, but that was not the case. What they did collect (especially those in Illinois) was mere pittance for all the suffering they had to endure.
There's more to this story and if you're interested I would suggest the book, "Radium Girls".
An interesting side-note, in the New Jersey case a woman's body was exhumed as part of the investigation into the radium company's misdeeds...
It was said, that after they removed the casket from the ground and opened the lid, that her body had a "soft glow" to it... And this was several years after being buried.
The radium isotope used in this plant has a half-life of over 1,600 years.
So even today if one were to exhume any of those women they would find skeletal remains that still had a slight fluorescent glow.
In 1898
