Walska and McCormick got divorced in 1931. And that’s when things got really weird, even compared to the monkey glands.
The Engineer’s Death Ray
In 1938, Walska somehow wound up marrying Harry Grindell Matthews, inventor of the “death ray.” A mad scientist to rival Voronoff, Matthews was living in a fortified compound in the Welsh mountains, where he stalked around in an eye patch and a long black coat, working on his doomsday weapon, which he declared would be powerful enough to annihilate whole cities. He emerged only to give numerous press interviews, where he attacked the British government for not supporting his work and threatened to sell the secret of the death ray to some foreign power.
Now, at this point you’re probably thinking “I don’t remember any laser beams in my WWII history class.” That’s because Matthews’ invention was pretty clearly a scam. For one thing, he repeatedly refused to demonstrate it for actual scientists or military engineers, preferring to give press conferences where he demonstrated the device’s ability to kill a small mouse. This was impressive enough to the journalists, earning him huge media support, even as physicists protested the mouse demonstration was a perfectly simple experiment that anyone could do. Seriously, it was the equivalent of killing an ant with a magnifying glass, then screaming “Behold, I am become death, destroyer of worlds!”
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