Things looked rather bleak for Will Orpet when he went on trial for the murder of Marion Lambert in the summer of 1916.

Read the first part of this story here.

Will Orpet, a University of Wisconsin student, and Marion Lambert, a high school junior, met a year earlier and quickly developed a summer romance that cooled once Will returned to college in the fall. Marion was described as a happy-go-lucky, but naive young girl who was so innocent she honestly believed she could become pregnant from heavy petting.
When Will went back to Madison for school, he began to distance himself from Marion, prompting her to retaliate by feigning (or honestly believing in) a pregnancy. Will sent her a concoction of molasses and water to induce an abortion. In February 1916, Marion learned that Will was engaged and demanded a face-to-face conference.
It was at this meeting, alone in the woods, that Marion ingested cyanide and died. Will’s skulking around and lying to the police investigating her death made him the prime suspect and when he admitted that he was present when she died, Will was charged with Marion’s murder.
The case was widely publicized and when Will went on trial in May, the court had to sift through 1,135 potential veniremen before it found a jury that could be objective in hearing the case.
The general feeling before the opening statements at Will’s trial was overwhelmingly against him, as can be seen in the way he was portrayed in the press: from “a palid, slender youth…of sharply regular features, somewhat vain of his college opportunities and undisciplined as to character” to “a girlish, brown-haired boy…Weak-chinned, delicate, violet-eyed, red-lipped…”
The state opened its case with prosecutor David Joslyn explaining to the jury its theory of the crime.
Will Orpet, wanting to be rid of Marion because of his interest in another woman, used the opportunity of her perceived pregnancy to poison her with cyanide, disguised as an abortifacient.
Joslyn backed up this theory with the circumstantial evidence that Will attempted to establish an alibi placing himself in Madison on February 9 by writing post-dated letters and messing up his bedclothes and lied repeatedly to police when questioned about his whereabouts on the day Marion died.
He pointed out that there was cyanide in the greenhouse where Will spent the night of February 8, and that no container was found near Marion’s body, as one would expect if she had killed herself.
“He took (the poison) into Helm’s Woods with him and administered it to Marion Lambert in liquid form,” Joslyn said. “You can’t swallow a dry powder, especially when death from the fumes comes so quickly as to preclude the act of swallowing.”
Joslyn pictured Marion as a girl “of considerable natural beauty, intelligence, with a disposition whose chief characteristic was unvarying cheerfulness, great modesty, a love of the society of her girl friends, furnishing the life and spirit of each special gathering, entertaining her girl friends at her home constantly, and frequently spending the night with some girl chum.”
Up to the time of her death, he said, she betrayed no thought of death.
The defense countered Joslyn’s picture of Marion as a naive waif in an effort to play up the suicide alternative.
“While the external appearance might have been that of a light hearted girl, while she kept from her parents what she was really doing and what she really thought, the evidence will demonstrate that in the very nature of things she could not have been during the months prior to her death a happy, joyful girl,” responded James Wilkerson, Will’s chief defense counsel. “She carried on a clandestine love affair with young man, which had culminated in anillicit liaison. She was not ‘a mere girl.’”
Wilkerson went on in his opening statement to point out the chief problem with the state’s case: “The evidence will show that there was nothing in what the defendant said or did at his meeting with Marion Lambert on February 9, which indicates that he had the slightest intention of giving her any poison.”
The prosecution and defense agreed that the key to the mystery was whether Marion died by ingesting liquid or crystalline cyanide. If she took cyanide in liquid form, then it was likely that Will gave it to her with the obvious intent that she be killed. If the cyanide was administered in solid form, then most likely Marion had taken it herself.
The defense pointed out that cyanide powder was found in the folds of Marion’s hand, while the prosecution put forward the evidence of several round drops of liquid cyanide found on Marion’s coat. Those drops, Joslyn alleged, were caused when the liquid dripped from the bottle as Marion put it to her lips.
However, the defense was able to establish that drops of cyanide that fell when Marion was standing did not fall in perfect circles, but in teardrop shapes. No matter, the prosecution countered, the drops could have come straight down as Will picked up the bottle of cyanide from beside Marion’s fallen body.
Essentially the testimony came down to deciding which set of chemists to believe — the state’s experts or those representing Will Orpet.
Dr. Ralph W. Webster and Dr. William J. McNally testified for the state that Marion died of liquid cyanide of potassium, and that the spots on her coat were left by drops of the solution.
The prosecution was hampered by the unwillingness of certain witnesses — friends of Will Orpet’s — to testify against him. They were unable to convince Otto Peterson to cross the state line from Wisconsin to tell the jury how he mailed the alibi letters for Will, or his friend from the drug store who sold him the bottle that he used to carry the molasses concoction.
Three defense chemists testified that the poison was taken in powder form and that the cyanide in the greenhouse was not cyanide of potassium at all, but cyanide of sodium, with only a faint trace of potassium.
The greenhouse cyanide ceased to be the prosecution’s murder weapon when the autopsy results were interpreted by the chemists. In order to ingest the fatal dose of cyanide in Marion’s body she would have had to have drunk a quart of the sodium cyanide found in the greenhouse.
The case against Will Orpet fell apart when the defense was able to put two people on the stand who swore that Marion had access to potassium cyanide through her chemistry class, and in fact, the class was working with cyanide in the days before her death. One of the witnesses was Marion’s chemistry instructor who told jurors that he had found her in the laboratory outside class hours — a breach of school regulations.
The implication, correct or not, was that Marion was suicidal and clearly had access to the means of her death.
Dr. McNally sealed the deal when he demanded to be called as a defense witness and testified that further tests on his part determined that the round cyanide stains could not have been made at the time of Marion’s death because of how the poison breaks down when exposed to air. He hinted, but did not overtly state, that the drops were added post-mortem by the prosecution.
The jury deliberated for five hours and took three ballots to acquit Will Orpet. At no point did more than one juror vote in favor of his guilt.
Which leaves us with the question of how Marion Lambert really died. It is not likely that Will Orpet killed her, and despite the defense’s assertion that she was suicidal over the possible loss of her lover, there is scant evidence that she was the kind of girl to kill herself over such a trifle as a summer fling gone bad.
The best solution is the one put forward by Dr. Otto Eisenschimml, one of the defense expert witnesses. Eisenschimml was convinced of Orpet’s innocence, but vexed by the unanswered questions in the case. It took him 40 years to come up with his solution.

In the first place, Marion didn’t commit suicide. In my reexamination of the case, I talked to almost every person still living who had been associated with the girl — her friends, classmates, teachers — and each of them were of this opinion.
Marion was an impetuous girl, and given to dramatic acts, but she never was despondent or showed any suicidal tendencies.
Here’s how I theorize the case:
Marion desperately wanted Orpet to become engaged to her, even though she knew she wasn’t pregnant. So she decided to try as a last resort to frighten him into accepting her. She obtained a small quantity of potassium cyanide from the school laboratory and took it with her when she went to meet the youth in the woods that day.
After Orpet refused to listen to all her pleas, she made her final dramatic effort. She took out the poison and told. him, “If you don’t marry me, I’ll kill myself.” But he just laughed and walked away. So the girl — not realizing the terrible killing power of cyanide — tried to frighten him by taking a slight taste of the poison.
It killed her within seconds. She was dead even before she could spit out the powder.
If this isn’t how Marion Lambert died, how did she?