On the twenty-second of May, 1929, at Fort Riley, Kansas, a woman named Zenana Shepard sent her nurse to a closet for a bottle of bootleg whiskey. She said the liquor had a strange smell and a strange taste, and she asked whether enough remained in the bottle to test it for poison. Then she said the sentence that would outlive her by four years and travel all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States: “Dr. Shepard has poisoned me.” The doctor was her husband, Charles A. Shepard, a major in the Army medical corps, and the government would later argue he had salted that whiskey with bichloride of mercury because he loved a woman named Grace Brandon and his wife declined to divorce him. Zenana Shepard died on the fifteenth of June. Her husband was convicted of her murder, and her sentence, the spoken one, did much of the convicting.

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