IN THEIR SEARCH of the Eldert Street apartment, Brooklyn
police officers found several books with Mrs. Gross’s name on the flyleaf. They
were medical books, with information on different poisons. The last was
philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism, which despairingly
contends that, at core, the universe offers no hope of a rational existence.
Geoghan, the district attorney, first dismissed the books as
unimportant, but then neighbors filed in with stories about Mrs. Gross. A woman
who lived two doors down made and filed a statement about a conversation she’d
had several weeks before the chain of deaths began. Mrs. Gross – after learning
that she was pregnant again – had said that she intended to kill her children,
her mother, and herself with rat poison.
