Henry S. Gaw, a 29-year-old white man, was found dead in New York City in the days just after Christmas of 1928, inside the Guggenheim Brothers metallurgical laboratory near 202nd Street and Tenth Avenue. He worked there as a laboratory assistant and was also filling in as a night watchman, alone in a building full of chemicals and valuable materials.
What first looked like a grim accident quickly hardened into something colder: poison had burned his mouth and throat, and the scene suggested he hadn’t simply taken cyanide—he’d been made to.
Investigators focused on the strange details left behind, as if the killer wanted the room to speak. Two beakers of coffee sat out on a table, both tainted with potassium cyanide—one still full, the other partially drained. There were signs of a struggle, and an especially unsettling flourish: strongly scented cold cream had been smeared around Gaw’s face. It felt less like concealment than signature, the kind of gesture that turns a killing into a message. Police began to believe Gaw had been forced to swallow cyanide, and later accounts of the case described the poison being driven into him in a brutal, humiliating way rather than slipped quietly into a drink.
The violence didn’t end with him. Two truck drivers, Elmer Mayhew and Chester McCauley, arrived at the laboratory during the aftermath, expecting an ordinary delivery and instead walking into a crime scene that was still breathing. The intruder played the role of authority long enough to get them inside, then tied them up, robbed them of cash, and left them alive but trapped—two witnesses bound into silence until someone found them. Their descriptions, and the way the man moved through the property like it belonged to him, steered attention toward someone who had worked there before and knew the routine.
That name was James Baker, nicknamed “Texas Jim,” a former employee with a reputation that made him easy to picture at the center of such a theatrical crime. A manhunt followed, driven by the belief that the killer hadn’t just escaped—he’d planned the escape. Baker vanished, and the case lingered with its unanswered question of motive: why kill a low-level employee in such a personal, poisoned way, then take the time to bind and stage two more men instead of simply fleeing?
The break came more than a year later. On February 19, 1930, Baker was arrested in the Detroit area and quickly became a headline again, not only because he was wanted in New York, but because he talked—eagerly, extravagantly—about killing. He was brought back to New York, indicted for Gaw’s murder on February 25, and entered a not-guilty plea on March 6 as the courts prepared for a trial that could have ended in the electric chair. Along the way, he gave accounts of how Gaw died that emphasized force and cruelty, describing the poisoning as something done to the watchman rather than something the watchman chose.
As the trial approached, the case took on a grim bargain shaped by fear of what Baker might do with a witness stand and an insanity defense. His mental state became a battleground: doctors described him as legally sane but not normal, and his attorney pushed hard for deeper observation. With the victim’s mother pleading against an execution and prosecutors weighing the risk of a death sentence later being commuted, the state accepted a compromise. In May 1930, Baker pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for Henry Gaw’s death and was sentenced to forty years to life at Sing Sing, a punishment that traded the finality of electrocution for a long captivity. Not long after, officials reevaluated his sanity again, and he was moved out of the prison system and into a state mental hospital—ending the courtroom chapter of Henry Gaw’s murder, but leaving the crime itself with the lingering chill of cyanide, coffee cups, and a killer who seemed to enjoy being remembered.
