The Death of Iron Mike Malloy

The durability of carbon monoxide in a dead body was a question Gettler fixed upon that year. German scientists had reported two years earlier that bodies exhumed after three months in the ground still contained carboxy hemoglobin. Was that its limit Gettler wondered? Or was the compound even longer lasting? He'd filled sixteen bottles with blood from people, including Malloy, who had died of CO poisoning. In no case was the carbon monoxide increased by putrefaction, he noted,. reaffirming the fact that after death a human body neither made nor absorbed the gas.