Sweeney was soon ordered to stand trial for the murders of Wythe and Brown, and the circumstantial evidence against him was damning. The morning after he was arrested for forgery, a slave belonging to Richmond jailer William Rose found pieces of paper and clumps of white powder in the garden just a few feet from the jail wall. Dr. McCaw determined it was arsenic. Taylor Williams, a friend of Sweeney, claimed that Sweeney had asked him for advice on procuring poison. Assuming Sweeney wanted to kill rats, which ran amuck all over the city, Williams suggested ratsbane, a common arsenic-based poison. Richmond Mayor William DuVal, a friend of Wythe, told police he had found what he believed to be arsenic powder in a shed on the judge’s property. Two slave carpenters working there had watched Sweeney grind a chunk of something with an ax into powder.

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At first the case against Sweeney appeared to be open-and-shut, especially since Philip Norborne Nicholas, Virginia’s highly regarded attorney general, would be the chief prosecutor. But just before the trial was set to start on Sept. 1, 1806, Sweeney was astonished to learn that he had two volunteer attorneys: William Wirt, an ambitious and brilliant young trial lawyer looking to make a name for himself, and even more surprising, Wythe’s longtime friend Edmund Randolph.

Wirt craved fame and power and was eager for a high-profile case. In a letter to James Monroe, he admitted he was convinced of Sweeney’s guilt: “The young villain had been in the habit of robbing his uncle with a false key, had sold three trunks of his most valuable law books, had forged his checks on the bank to a considerable amount and wound up his villainies by this act.” Getting an obviously guilty defendant off the hook, Wirt confided to his wife, would “give me a splendid debut in the metropolis.”

Randolph, on the other hand, was trying to reclaim his once-promising career. Appointed by President George Washington as the first attorney general of the United States in 1789, he subsequently served as secretary of state until 1795, when he resigned after being accused of passing along privileged information to the French ambassador to the United States. Two years later, it was alleged that while attorney general, he had “misplaced” $50,000, and the U.S. government ordered him to pay it back. If he could win the Sweeney case, Randolph could jumpstart his legal career and start paying down his government debt.

The key to the prosecution’s case was testimony from the medi­cal dream team of McClurg, Foushee and McCaw who performed autopsies on Wythe and Brown. The effects of arsenic poisoning on the body were well known and relatively easy for trained eyes to detect. In arsenic cases, blood vesicles in the gastrointestinal tract rupture, causing severe inflammation in the stomach. The doctors testified that the stomachs of both victims were inflamed and full of bile, another sign of arsenic poisoning.

Under cross-examination, however, the doctors quickly found themselves hedging their conclusions. Dr. McClurg, always eager to ingratiate himself with important political figures, had given the autopsy results to Virginia Governor Thomas Cabell that summer. And Cabell passed those results along to his brother-in-law—William Wirt—enabling the defense to put together a careful line of questions that revealed the doctors had conducted only a cursory examination of the victims and could not identify the cause of death with any certainty. McClurg was forced to admit that the presence of bile in the stomach also indicated other bowel troubles of the kind he had often treated the elderly Wythe for. He also admitted that the build-up of bile in such a young man as Brown was unusual but not impossible.

What turned out to be most damning was the shocking revelation that the doctors did not examine the lungs or hearts for evidence of inflammation caused by arsenic. Nor did they check for any external signs of poisoning such as conjunctivitis in the eyes or a blackening of the penis. They performed none of the well-known chemical tests to detect arsenic.

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