America’s First "Murder by Mail"

The Poisoned Candy Murder That Crossed America: Cordelia Botkin’s Deadly Revenge (1898)

It’s a hot August afternoon in 1898. A thirty-five-year-old woman named Mary Elizabeth Dunning is sitting on her front porch in Dover, Delaware. She’s just hanging out with her sister Ida, Ida’s kids, and a couple of neighbors.

The mail carrier walks up and drops off a package wrapped in plain brown paper.

Elizabeth opens it up. Inside is a beautiful box of premium chocolate creams, a fancy lace handkerchief, and a little note that says: “With love to yourself and baby — Mrs. C.”

She loves candy, so she smiles, grabs a chocolate, and passes the box around. Everyone takes a bite.

Within three hours, that porch turns into a living nightmare.

Violent vomiting, severe stomach cramps, people collapsing in agony. By the time the doctors show up, there’s nothing they can do. Elizabeth and her sister Ida both die a brutal, painful death. The kids barely survive.

When the coroner tests the leftover chocolates, he finds them completely packed with arsenic. Some pieces had chunks of poison inside them as big as a pea.

You know what they say — life is like a box of chocolates… you never know what you’re gonna get. Yeah… they definitely got something they weren’t expecting that day.

The Woman Behind the Package

Let’s back up a bit and talk about the killer.

In the mid-1890s, Cordelia Botkin was living in San Francisco. She was in her early 40s and married to a grain broker, but the marriage was completely dead. Cordelia wanted a fast, exciting life. She spent her time hitting the racetracks, hanging out at gambling dens, and turning heads all over the city.

Then she meets a guy named John Preston Dunning.

Preston is thirty, handsome, and runs the West Coast office for the Associated Press. He’s also a total trainwreck. He drinks heavily and gambles away his money. His wife, Mary Elizabeth, the woman from the porch, finally gets sick of his nonsense. She packs up their daughter and moves back east to Delaware to live with her wealthy father.

With the wife out of the picture, Cordelia moves Preston right into her apartment on Geary Street. They have a loud, messy affair for three years. The whole city is gossiping about them. Cordelia thinks she finally has her big love story.

Until March of 1898.

The Spanish-American War breaks out. The news office needs a top reporter in Cuba, and Preston gets the job. Before he boards the ship, he sits Cordelia down and drops a bomb. He tells her: “It’s over. When the war is done, I’m going back to my wife and baby in Delaware.”

Cordelia smiles. She kisses him goodbye. But the second that door closes? She goes on an absolute warpath.

How She Turned Candy Into a Weapon

First, she tries to torture the wife by mailing mean, anonymous letters to Delaware. The letters detail everything she and Preston did together. But letters aren’t enough. She wants Elizabeth gone permanently.

So Cordelia walks into Haas’s candy store on Market Street. She buys a box of chocolate creams and tells the clerk: “Don’t put the store name on the box.”

Next, she hits up the Owl Drug Store. She buys two ounces of arsenic. She tells the clerk, real calm, that it’s just for bleaching a straw hat.

Then she goes back to her room and gets to work. She carefully opens up the chocolates, stuffs the centers with raw arsenic, and seals them back up. She packs them in the blank box, wraps it in brown paper, addresses it to Preston’s wife, and drops it in the mail.

She literally turned the US Postal Service into a hitman.

The Package Arrives

Four days later, the candy lands on that porch in Delaware. You already know how that ended.

When the news hits Cuba, Preston takes one look at the handwriting on the mail wrapper and collapses. He knows it instantly. It’s Cordelia’s.

The San Francisco police raid her hotel room and build an ironclad case. They find signatures proving she bought the arsenic. Store clerks pick her out of a lineup. And the absolute smoking gun? Sitting right in her room, police find a torn piece of the fancy gold paper from that exact candy box. She was caught red-handed.

The Circus Trial

The trial turns into an absolute circus. Newspapers run it like front-page entertainment. Crowds pack the courtroom every day. High-society women literally pack picnic lunches just to watch the drama. Cordelia shows up dressed like she’s going to the opera, loving the attention.

Her lawyers try a wild legal loophole. They argue that since she never set foot in Delaware, she didn’t commit a crime there. They say she cannot be sent to Delaware for trial. It actually works. This forces the state of California to try her locally in San Francisco. The government has to spend a lot of money to bring Elizabeth’s grieving family all the way across the country by train just to testify.

But the circus didn’t stop in the courtroom. While waiting for her second trial, Cordelia managed to charm her jailers. A massive political scandal broke out when local citizens spotted the convicted murderer walking freely through Golden Gate Park. She was going on shopping sprees and staying in luxury hotels while she was technically a prisoner.

Eventually, the luxury treatment ended. The jury saw right through her story. Guilty of first-degree murder. Life in prison.

Cordelia spends the rest of her days in San Quentin and dies behind bars in 1910.

A Crime That Changed Everything

It remains one of the coldest, most calculated cases of jealousy in American history. One woman, sitting in a California hotel room, executing a double murder three thousand miles away just because she couldn’t let go.

It was a crime that completely changed how American law handles cross-state offenses. It officially went down as the first known case of murder by mail in U.S. history. It changed how people looked at their packages forever.

Ricky’s Historical Tidbits is a show designed to teach you about events or people in history that textbooks either skip or only touch with a paragraph or two. Your time is valuable, so I keep every episode fairly short — most are under 15 minutes. If you found this interesting, I’m sure you know someone who would too. Please share it with them. If you have time, check out my other episodes. Subscribe on whatever platform you’re on so you don’t miss new ones. All episodes are available as video, article, or podcast.