Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (11 page)

He wrote out his ideas and submitted them to the prefect Louis Andrieux, who basically ignored him. When Bertillon persisted, Andrieux told him to desist and even wrote a letter to the young clerk’s father to complain that his son was annoying and was possibly even quite mad. Louis-Alphonse, anxious over Alphonse’s employment opportunities, asked to read the report himself. He was prepared to insist that his son behave more responsibly, but when he read what Alphonse had written, he was impressed. He believed that this system could work, not only in this prison, but might extend well beyond organizing files to become a true phenomenon. Alphonse, he saw, had managed to apply what he and his colleagues had spent their lifetimes trying to prove. He wanted this idea to get the attention it deserved.

Still, the older man could not persuade the prefect to consider it. Alphonse suffered the scorn of his colleagues for his failed attempt to incorporate changes, and he stewed in his anger. He set about writing his own book, which he would call
The Savage Races,
while awaiting a changing of the guard. It happened, and Jean Camecasse became Bertillon’s immediate superior. Louis-Alphonse brought his influence to bear, along with that of an attorney, Edgar Demange, who was sympathetic to the young clerk’s notion. In November 1882, Camecasse made a momentous proposal. He told Alphonse that if he could prove his system in three months by identifying a repeat offender, Camecasse would consider adopting it.

That did not provide much time for a scientist, and it required that a recidivist be arrested during that time frame, but Alphonse believed he could manage it. He had to. He began right away, keeping careful records of each man he measured and adding a full-face photograph and a side profile. He included any identifying marks, such as a scar or missing tooth, and made notations about such things as appearance, posture, and details about his life and crime. He categorized the cards according to the lengths and widths of the criminals’ heads and lengths of two of their fingers. For more than two months, he worked feverishly on the project but failed to find a single person who had been arrested twice. Into the third month, after measuring around two thousand men, one afternoon, he came across a man who gave the generic name Dupont but whom Bertillon believed he recognized as someone else. He looked through his cards under the heading “Medium Heads,” and pulled one with the name Martin, who had been arrested two months earlier. The measurements and photographs, as well as the physical description, were a match. Bertillon confronted the man, who denied that his name was Martin, but after Bertillon persisted and showed him the evidence, he capitulated. Bertillon was able to confirm for his father that the system worked just before the old man died, and the news spread throughout the local law enforcement community that they had a way of identifying recidivists.

Thus, Bertillon introduced a scientific method into criminal investigations. It was much better than simply running down random clues or trusting in an investigator’s memory of faces or voices, and that first year, quite a few criminals were identified. In addition, at times Bertillon was able to give names to deceased John Does whose cards were in his files. He called his innovative technique anthropometry, but it became known as
bertillonage
and quickly became
the
method for identification around Europe. When Bertillon identified an anarchist as a murderer, he earned the Legion of Honor. These were heady days for him and he acquired a great deal of prestige and power.

In 1887, Major McClaughry, the warden at the Illinois State Prison in Joliet, introduced Bertillon’s system into America by translating his book into English and using the method in his prison. The practice quickly spread to other American prisons. At the same time, phrenology was becoming popular in the States as well, with a new wave of supporters. One of the key publishing houses for books and pamphlets on the subject was founded by two brothers, Lorenzo and Orson Fowler in New York. They supported the devices invented to assist in taking the skull measurements, including the automatic electric phrenometer.

While all of this was going on, entomology entered another case. Dr. Paul Brouardel, a physician in Paris, autopsied the mummified corpse of an infant, requesting the assistance of Pierre Mégnin, who was a professor at the Natural History Museum. Mégnin examined the larvae on the corpse, identifying mites, moths, and other biological specimens, concluding that the infant had been dumped where it was found between five and seven months earlier. (Mégnin would continue to collect more data from such cases until he published a definitive book in 1894,
La Faune des cadavers: Application de l’entomologie a la medicine Legale,
showing how entomological data could assist in forensic investigations.)

THE SEXUAL CRIMINAL

Psychiatry, too, made progress, and one alienist had been at work on a way to categorize criminal behavior and sexual deviance. The early psychiatrists believed that lawyers needed assistance from psychiatry to understand the criminal mind for greater fairness in legal proceedings, but they realized that their discipline offered little by way of standard ideas and treatment. The legal system already viewed scientific experts with a certain degree of cynicism and the physical sciences were much more precise. One of the alienists who undertook to examine mental illness toward the goal of categorizing it was Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, a German neurologist who was director of the Feldhof Asylum in Graz, Austria, and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Graz. He served for many years as a psychiatric consultant to the courts, and he eventually operated his own clinic. Thus, he had a good base from which to collect case histories.

He agreed with his colleagues throughout Europe and America that without a standard diagnostic system, psychiatry could not consider itself equivalent to the field of medicine, so in 1880, he published three volumes collectively titled
A Textbook of Insanity,
in which he outlined an elaborate system for categorizing mental diseases. Since insanity had already been treated as a legal concept in England, this medical use of it would cloud the waters, because it would become apparent in certain proceedings that some people who suffered from psychosis might still appreciate that what they were doing was wrong. Thus, they might be medically insane without being legally insane. That confusion still exists to this day.

The next significant text by Krafft-Ebing, published in 1886, was
Psychopathia Sexualis with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct:
A Medico-Forensic Study
. His approach was to identify a foundational problem, the development of degeneracy, and study it via its peculiar manifestations in sexual deviance. He set up a theoretical framework through which to identify and interpret the various behaviors, relying on such items as heredity, corrupting influences on the nervous system, the evolution of a motive, and a qualitative set of details about the personality. In six chapters, he laid out forty-five cases that focused largely on violent criminals or extraordinarily perverse practices. These were the harmful consequences of a degenerate lifestyle, which itself was often influenced by specific types of temptations. Such persons were not well-equipped to resist; they might be timid, lacking in education, or of limited intelligence. Nevertheless, they were responsible for exposing themselves to situations in which their weakness would undermine their efforts to be good.

Krafft-Ebing found in his extensive study a close link between erotic lust and the impulse to murder. By selecting cases to correspond to a simplified framework that discounted multiple motives, he offered psychiatry a “vocabulary of perversion” and a seemingly viable standard of interpretation. It did not necessarily correspond precisely to reality, since it imposed artificial structure on human experience, but it became a key framework for later systems of categorization.

In the preface to the first German edition, Krafft-Ebing states, “Few people ever fully appreciate the power that sexuality exercises over feeling, thought, and conduct, both in the individual and society.” To that point, he said, the “empirical psychology and metaphysics of the sexual side of human existence rest upon a foundation that is scientifically almost puerile.” His entire purpose for his undertaking was not to offer a psychology of sexuality but to describe the pathological manifestations of the sexual lives of human beings for legal purposes. The subject demanded to be studied scientifically, because the medicolegal expert had to pass judgment, and it would be better for justice that these judgments be solidly based on professional standards. In order to preserve the study for professional reading, he used a title that would be understood only by the learned and wrote the more graphic passages in Latin. Krafft-Ebing did not want the layperson exposed to these lurid descriptions of cannibalism, necrophilia, coprophilia, and lust-murder.

Among his cases were the following: a man whose erotic pleasure lay in gathering pubic hair from the beds of prostitutes, an adolescent who cut pretty girls for sexual pleasure, a prostitute who walked on her hands and got monkeys to undress her, a club for women-haters, and all manner of bondage practices and fantasies. Most notorious were the cases of serial murder that involved cannibalizing the flesh of victims or sleeping with corpses, but more cases were akin to the twenty-year-old boy arrested for stabbing or slapping women in the genitals to ease his lust for female buttocks.

This book was a huge commercial success, despite Krafft-Ebing’s attempt to limit it to a scientific audience, and he became a celebrity to the social elite and their literary circles. He also influenced how novelists developed their criminals.
Psychopathia Sexualis
sold thousands of copies to people who had only a prurient interest in the contents, and many strained to figure out the secretive Latin passages. It was translated into English in 1892 and has gone into many printings, as well as new editions that added cases and refined the concepts. In its current and final version, it presents 238 cases. Krafft-Ebing is credited with clarifying terms such as necrophilia, masochism, and fetishism. After writing his book, he was able to learn how it had assisted others in making legislation and jurisprudence more rational by helping to diminish superstitious ideas about sexual disorders. Krafft-Ebing’s work also helped to draw a line between normal and abnormal, at least within the context of his restrictive Catholic upbringing. He might have shuddered at the idea that his work foreshadowed an approaching age of sexuality.

FIVE

INFLUENTIAL SLEUTHS

In 1876, a young man named Arthur Conan Doyle entered the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, noted for its progressive ideas about medicine, to pursue his medical studies. During his second year he clerked at the Royal Infirmary for an impressive figure, Dr. Joseph Bell, a lean, fortyish professor with an aquiline nose and piercing eyes who was also the personal surgeon to Queen Victoria when she came to Scotland. An amateur poet as well, Bell instigated systematic lectures for nurses and edited the
Edinburgh Medical Journal
from 1873 until 1896. He was a firm proponent of science, applying the methods of observation and clear thinking wherever he saw the need.

As Bell walked energetically around the lecture room, he impressed upon his students the importance of performing a close and critical study before diagnosing any situation. He apparently possessed the ability to make accurate judgments in his outpatient clinic from mere observation and he urged his pupils to develop this skill. To demonstrate, he would select someone he did not know and describe details about that person’s occupation and recent activities from deductions derived from subtle clues, such as the type of clothing worn, the posture or style of walking, or the presence of calluses or stains on certain fingers. Convinced that the nuances mattered, Bell relied on his eyes, ears, nose, and hands to diagnose diseases. Nothing was more useful to medical work, he asserted, than finely honed sensory observation, guided toward a specific purpose. Later, he would use this skill in a forensic context, but not while Conan Doyle was at the school, unless he consulted behind the scenes in the Chantrelle case, as some scholars suggest.

Eugene Marie Chantrelle was a French immigrant in Edinburgh who had married a sixteen-year-old girl, apparently to dominate her and feed his own ego by making her feel worthless. He liked to brag that he could poison her and in 1877, he insured her life for a considerable sum, to be paid in the case of accidental death. It seemed that she then died from exposure to coal gas leakage, but a noted toxicologist, Henry Littlejohn, thought her symptoms were consistent with poisoning and after his examination he found a high quantity of opium in her vomit. As well, the gas leak was the result of deliberate sabotage, so Chantrelle was arrested. With Littlejohn’s assistance, he was then convicted of murder. In light of earlier scandals, this proved to be a positive case for toxicologists.

Since Joseph Bell was a close associate of Littlejohn’s, some scholars surmise that he helped with the analysis. He insisted in the classroom that a physician’s duty was to consider minutia that most people would view as trifling and to understand the wealth of information it provides. Apparently Conan Doyle absorbed this lesson well.

He’d gone to Edinburgh from Southsea, England, when he was eighteen and remained there (with a brief excursion as a ship’s surgeon) until he finished his studies in 1881. Sometime after he left Edinburgh, as he started his own medical practice back in Southsea, he pondered writing a novel. He’d already published a number of short stories, but he sought a more marketable and enduring enterprise, especially as he’d recently gotten married and hoped to raise a family. He thought of writing about a detective, and was not the first author to have done so, although few had paid much attention to what was considered by that time the science of investigation. Conan Doyle certainly knew about anthropometry, the analysis of blood, the early attempts to examine hair and trace elements, ideas about fingerprints, and the improvements in both photography and microscopy. He adopted Bell’s approach to give his detective the keen powers of observation and deduction, but he added his own interest in the latest cutting-edge technologies. In fact, the fictional Holmes sometimes describes inventions of his own that predated the actual scientific discoveries.

In addition, Conan Doyle knew about the French detective Vidocq, and had long been influenced by the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, who’d created his own genius detective, M. Auguste Dupin. Poe had set up the “tales of ratiocination” to involve readers in thinking through the mystery at hand along with the investigator. Both were required to use logic and deduction to make the right sort of sense of the clues. As well, Poe employed a sidekick as the detective’s chronicler, who provided readers with appropriate background information. Dupin worked alone rather than under the auspices of the police, and was often at odds with them on cases. The first such tale, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” had been published over four decades earlier in 1841, and it introduced the element of pitting the detective against a seemingly impossible puzzle, which only the combination of keen observation, an open attitude toward the seemingly improbable, and a sense of deductive intuition can finally solve.

Also in Russia in 1866, Fyodor Dostoevsky had created Inspector Porfiry in
Crime and Punishment
, who must solve the murder of an elderly pawnbroker and her stepsister, apparently committed by someone who had not even bothered to rob them. Given all the people who had business with the victims, the task of narrowing leads is prodigious, and eventually it falls to psychology rather than physical evidence analysis to solve it. Porfiry discovers that a student named Rodión Raskólnikov has published an article on the idea that extraordinary men can commit crimes without moral accountability. Porfiry pressures Raskólnikov, and his inability to actually be the remorseless extraordinary man finally triggers a confession.

Thus, Conan Doyle set out to follow in a tradition already pioneered by others, adding some ideas to his stories that he’d mentioned in his notes. There were as yet no texts on criminology or criminalistics, although there had been some in fields like entomology and toxicology, and aside from the authors who had utilized Vidocq’s methods in their fiction, there were few descriptions in print about specific forensic procedures. In 1886, with the keen-eyed observer in mind, Conan Doyle completed a story about what he called a “consulting detective” named Sherlock Holmes, who resided at the fictional 221B Baker Street in London. Holmes’s companion, Dr. John Watson, duly chronicled the master sleuth’s cases. The first of what would become a series of tales was
A Study in Scarlet
. Initially titled
A Tangled Skein
and featuring “Sherrinford Holmes,” this tale was rejected numerous times before Ward, Lock & Co. published it in 1887 as part of
Breeton’s Christmas Annual
, and now it starred Sherlock Holmes. It attracted little attention but when it was published on its own in 1888, it received greater exposure.

The story opens with a murder that stumps detectives at Scotland Yard, so they call Holmes in as an independent consultant. He realizes that the official hypothesis about the incident is clearly wrong and initially interprets it as having a political motivation. This first tale was cognizant of the developments in physical anthropology, as Holmes emphasizes from items at the scene significant revelations about a perpetrator’s physical stature and appearance. In fact, as a starting point, he notes a fingerprint. During this era, many experts believed that fingerprints might identify people of certain races. To continue, five letters have been scrawled on the wall by a blood-covered index finger. From the position he deduces the offender’s height, and from other details of the lettering (shape, breadth of the lines), he deduces his stature and likely nationality. Given how much blood it required to write the message, Holmes supposes the man has a “florid” complexion. He also has small feet, smokes a specific type of cigar, and has fingernails of a certain length. As he gains more information, Holmes reinterprets these clues to decide that the crime is actually personal in nature.

His next case, published in 1890 as
The Sign of Four
, involved reading “footmarks,” which showed everything from the height and weight of the perpetrator to his psychological state. Conan Doyle poses a person’s physical make-up as an encoded text that only the most astute investigator knows how to read. In fact, Henry Faulds’s article describing fingerprints found on Japanese pottery as a racial identification had recently been published in the science weekly,
Nature,
so it’s likely Conan Doyle was aware of it.

Fans of Sherlock Holmes wanted more, so he penned more, and the series would successfully run, gathering many more readers, until 1927. Among the reasons why the Holmes character endured was the technical expertise in the tales and the surprises that emerged from careful analysis, as well as the explanations Holmes offered of the thinking process. Once readers could see how he arrived at his deductions, they believed anyone with a capable eye could do what he did, so he became a role model. As the various scientific disciplines merged with crime investigation during this time, Holmes became the prototype of the brilliant freelance detective.

In the more realistic world of crime, the science of identification continued to develop, but it would have to compete for media attention with a series of incidents that placed an international spotlight on the weaknesses of British law enforcement.

URGENT INVESTIGATION

In the same year that Holmes emerged into public awareness, Eduard Charles Godon, a dentist who had established the Paris Odontological Society in 1882, recommended using dental records to link unidentified remains with missing persons. In 1888, Bertillon took over the new department of identity in Paris, introducing the profile angle into mug shots (
photographie métrique
), which offered the jaw, ear, and more of the face for identification. He also required more precision for crime scene photos, insisting on getting images before the scene was disturbed and photographing them in a way that one could reconstruct how evidence was placed at the scene. He had mats printed with metric frames to mount on the photos, and for some he included both front and side views of specific objects. Yet even as he managed all of this, Scotland Yard was about to face its greatest challenge.

Its criminal investigation department had been created a decade earlier, and Superintendent Charles Vincent soon released rules for dealing with murder cases, which stated that “the body must not be moved, nor anything about it or in the room or place interfered with, and the public must be excluded.” But for the spate of murders they had to process in the Whitechapel slum toward the end of 1888, they were hardly prepared.

On Friday, August 31, just after 1:00
A.M.
, Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols offered herself for lodging money, but her potential customer slit her throat instead, using two quick strokes, slashing her abdomen, and dumping her in the street. Only three weeks before this incident, a prostitute named Martha Tabram was stabbed thirty-nine times, but the detectives did not think the two murders were related.

The next “official” victim was Annie Chapman, discovered killed in the morning hours of September 8. Her dress covered her head and her stomach was ripped open, with her intestines exposed. Her throat had been cut with what appeared to have been a sharp and narrow surgical knife, but, oddly, several coins and an envelope had been arranged around her. An autopsy revealed that her bladder, half of the vagina, and the uterus had been removed. Since these items were not at the scene, investigators believed that the killer had taken them.

There were no collective clues from these victims that pointed to a man the women might have tangled with, and thus no clear leads. Prostitution was a high-risk business, but this kind of slaughter was unusual. At least two of the women had been attacked quickly and out in the open, but no witnesses came forward to offer descriptions. But about three weeks later, a note arrived to the Central News Agency on September 27 that began, “Dear Boss,” and was signed, “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper.” Its author claimed that he “loved” his work and would continue to kill. On September 30, there were two victims on the same night, both murdered outside.

Despite the “rules” for investigation, it seemed clear that there was little regard to the careful handling of bodies and their effects, or of even preserving the crime scenes. Indeed, some evidence was poorly handled and untrained mortuary workers sometimes removed the victims’ clothing. They failed to label or preserve anything for potential use in an arrest and trial. Even Sir Charles Warren, in charge of the Metropolitan police, rubbed away a message at the crime scene, apparently written after one of the murders, for fear it might incite an uprising. He could at least have taken a photograph first.

Two weeks after the “double event,” the leader of the Whitechapel Vigilante Committee received a letter and a box “from Hell.” Inside the box was half of a kidney preserved in wine. The note’s author indicated that he’d fried and eaten the other half, which was “very nise.” It was believed that the killer sent this note, signing off with, “Catch me if you can.”

But the police faced another problem: They were receiving numerous correspondences that claimed to be from the killer but were clearly faked. It was difficult for them to pull an authentic letter from the lot to assist with leads. They had never before been faced with such an investigation.

On October 3, as the New Scotland Yard was being constructed to house a growing metropolitan police squad, someone deposited the headless, limbless corpse of a woman inside a vault in the unfinished foundation. A police spokesman told journalists that it was not considered part of the murder spree.

Twenty-four-year-old Mary Kelly was the final official victim. This time the Ripper had accompanied her into a room and after slitting her throat, mutilated her remains. When police arrived the following morning, they found the room spattered with blood, brains, and pieces of internal organs. Dr. Thomas Bond, a surgeon who assisted in the autopsy, stated that the murders had escalated in brutality and were sexual in nature, with an intense element of rage against women or prostitutes. Bond listed certain traits to be expected from this man, including that he was physically strong, calm under pressure, and daring. In ordinary life, he was likely quiet and apparently inoffensive, middle-aged, and neatly attired. It seemed likely that, to hide blood on his clothing, he would wear a cloak. To get people to provide more clues, Bond suggested that the police offer a reward.