She Held the Sealed Sample - Why They Needed Her Silent

She Held the Sealed Sample - Why They Needed Her Silent

A sealed tin cup, numbered forty-one, sat upright in a dead woman’s left palm - its seal never broken and its contents never revealed. The woman, Gloria Stein, was a fifty-two-year-old chief assay technician found dead of arsenic with no sign of struggle; who would have wanted her silence and why would a twenty-five grain discrepancy in assay figures be worth murder?

In this episode, we present the facts recorded around that night and the discrepancy Stein discovered between her private notebook and the official ledger. You will hear how Stein’s routine, the altered figures for cup forty-one, and a director who finished her entries create a single pressing question: what did cup forty-one prove that someone needed kept sealed?

Person: Gloria Stein
Date: April 8-9, 1893
Cause: Arsenic poisoning
Item: Tin cup forty-one (seal unbroken)
Position: Chief Assay Technician, Harwick Assay Office

- Stein recorded cup forty-one as sixty-three grains of silver per ton on April 7 in her cross-reference notebook.
- The official ledger, completed by bureau director Philip Harte, listed cup forty-one as thirty-eight grains per ton.
- Stein had been Chief Assay Technician at the Harwick Assay Office for eleven years and re-weighed samples two or three times.
- Dr. Robert Voss estimated time of death between 10:00 p.m. and midnight on April 8, about 24 hours before the body was found.
- Gregory Morgan, a fifteen-year-old delivery boy, discovered Stein at 5:40 a.m. on April 9 and did not touch the body or the cups.

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