‘DEATH BY CYANIDE: THE MURDER OF DR. AUTUMN KLEIN’
A reporter’s gripping account of the murder of a local doctor by her husband
“DEATH BY CYANIDE: THE MURDER OF DR. AUTUMN KLEIN” By Paula Ward Reed ForeEdge $27.95
Newspaper accounts of murder investigations and trials often are, by necessity, mere sketches of the crime and the legal system. Deadlines and space constraints hinder the reporter’s ability to fully develop the elements and characters of the crime. So the rare book-length literary nonfiction treatment of homicide, in the tradition of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” offers the welcome occasion for a more complete and eloquent rendering.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Paula Reed Ward, author of “Death by Cyanide: The Murder of Dr. Autumn Klein,” covered the April 2013 murder of the 41-year-old Dr. Autumn Klein, UPMC chief of women’s neurology, and the subsequent criminal investigation and trial of her 64-year-old husband, Robert Ferrante, a University of Pittsburgh neuroscientist researching ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and Huntington’s disease. No spoilers here as the book’s title makes clear: A murder was committed and cyanide was the weapon. The perpetrator became obvious early on.
Ms. Ward makes use of all the skills in her journalistic toolbox interviews with family, friends and colleagues; court documents; medical records; personal correspondence and emails; and trial testimony — to scrutinize the crime. She manages to invoke the storytelling skills of a novelist, developing characterization and narrative description to paint a vivid picture, beginning with the book’s opening scene, in which Ms. Klein’s “horrific, guttural groaning” filled the kitchen while Ferrante, in a late-night phone call, describes his wife’s symptoms to the 911 emergency dispatcher following her collapse.
“Have her try to smile,” the dispatcher told Ferrante. “Ask her to raise her arms above her head.” “She could do neither.” Having thus captured the reader, Ms. Ward moves chronologically through the investigation, weaving in the history of Ms. Klein and Ferrante’s lives from childhood, through her college studies and romances, his academic career and botched first marriage that produced two children, their courtship and marriage, and the birth of their daughter. She continues with Ms. Klein’s failed attempts to conceive a second child, and the crumbling of the marriage, including Ferrante’s suspicions of an affair, and other particulars of unraveling romance.
The strength of this book is in its detailed chronicling of the case by investigators and the prosecution after cyanide was found in the victim’s blood, followed by a compelling account of the trial that takes up more than half of its 219 pages. Indeed, the search for motive not for suicide, but for murder plays a large role in this story, one that Ms. Ward tells in jargon-free narrative, other than some minor hard-to-fathom details relating to testing for cyanide. A couple of other glitches include a paucity of quotes from colleagues and friends in the early biographies of Ms. Klein and Ferrante a contrast to the wealth of quotes elsewhere and the author’s occasional brief detours into irrelevant avenues of plot or explanation.
But these are wee blips in an otherwise engrossing saga of murder and deception, and an enlightening portrayal of the judicial machinery that, in Ms. Ward’s hands, becomes a full portrait of the murder case.