The attempted murder happened on an ordinary spring day at the Carmel artist colony in 1914. The novelist Alice MacGowan went to get something to eat from the cooler on the back porch of her home overlooking the bay. When she took a bite of leftover chili con carne, something tasted off. Assuming it was spoiled, she spat it out.
Also in the cooler was an unfamiliar tin of marshmallows. MacGowan thought it was a gift from a friend who didn’t want to disturb her while she was working. Since she didn’t like marshmallows, she gave the box to Aki, a Japanese man she had hired to work around the house. When he bit into the candy, he became violently ill—in some accounts, he fell down in convulsions.
A doctor determined that Aki had been poisoned. The marshmallow had been hollowed out and filled with strychnine. Aki, who soon recovered, had ingested tainted candy meant for MacGowan. And not only that: a toxicologist confirmed that the chili con carne and some mayonnaise in the cooler were also laced with strychnine—enough “to kill the entire literary colony,” reported the San Francisco Call.
MacGowan, a successful novelist, was well-liked. The residents at the colony were baffled that someone would try to kill her, and so was McGowan herself. When asked about the crime, she said, “My death could be of no possible interest to anyone. I would not believe at first that poison had been placed in my food. Since it is certain that was done, I am utterly unable to conceive the reason why.… I did not know I had an enemy; even now I do not believe I have one.”
The case made national news, reaching as far east as Washington, D.C., and New York. To make matters worse, two unnamed women living in the colony received anonymous letters threatening their lives. “‘Look out or you’ll be poisoned,’ is the tenor of these missives,” wrote the San Francisco Call.
What followed was one of the strangest summers in the history of the colony. While novelists played detective and the press salivated for scandal, a shadow settled over the little town on the Central Coast. Attempted murder as well as theft gave way to actual murder, all targeting female artists who lived alone. As the critic Van Wyck Brooks, who lived in the area, writes in his 1965
