Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (13 page)

One of the first cases in which hair was carefully analyzed also involved Lacassagne. In August 1889, the decomposed nude body of a bearded, dark-haired man was found near Le Tour de Millery, France, ten miles from Lyon. It had been wrapped in oilcloth and placed headfirst inside a canvas bag. Dr. Paul Bernard, who had once studied with Lacassagne, examined the corpse with some difficulty, since it was in an advanced state of decomposition and had a terrible odor, but he estimated the victim’s age to have been around thirty-five. He could not be certain, but he thought the man had died by strangulation, since the larynx showed two breaks. Around the same time, a wooden trunk, broken into pieces and smelling distinctly of decomposition, turned up not far away, with a shipping date from Paris that was difficult to read. Investigators speculated over whether it might be associated with the deceased, and a key found near the area where the corpse was dumped fit the lock, so that clinched the connection. They started to work on learning when it had shipped.

The corpse was not identified as a local resident, so the press picked up the story, and it reached the ears of Assistant Superintendent Marie-François Goron at the
Sûreté
in Paris. He looked through his reports on missing persons and came across the name of Toussaint-Augsent Gouffé, a known womanizer whose brother-in-law had reported that he had not been seen since July 27. Gouffé was a forty-nine-year-old court bailiff with an office in the neighborhood of Montmartre, and during the investigation Goron had learned that a strange man had entered Gouffé’s office on July 26 and left in a hurry, without stating his business. Since Gouffé’s financial affairs were in order and there appeared to be no reason that he might flee town or kill himself, Goron paid more attention to the case.

He sent Gouffé’s brother-in-law to Lyon to look at the remains found there, which were stored on an odiferous barge converted into a morgue. The man looked at the black-haired, rotting corpse for as long as he could bear it and stated that because Gouffé had chestnut brown hair, it was not him. The unidentified decedent was finally buried, while Gouffé remained among the missing.

However, Goron thought there were too many circumstances in common for the cases to be unrelated, so he persisted. Then a Lyon cab driver claimed to have picked up a heavy trunk from the railroad station on July 6, along with three men who had asked him to take them to the vicinity of Millery. They’d left the trunk there, returned to Lyon, and were arrested for robbery. Thus, since this all occurred before Gouffé had disappeared, the corpse that had clearly been in the trunk could not be the missing Parisian. But Goron was not convinced that this ended the case, because in his experience, witnesses could be mistaken. He learned that Gouffé had been seen with a man named Michel Eyraud, a known pimp and scam artist, and Eyraud’s mistress, Gabrielle Bompard. Both had also vanished from Paris on July 27. Then the police managed to track the trunk to a shipping agent in Paris whose records indicated that it had been sent to Lyon on July 27. Goron was now certain that the corpse was their missing citizen, especially after the cab driver admitted he had fabricated his tale about the trunk.

Goron asked Dr. Bernard for a sample of the dead man’s hair, kept in a test tube, and immersed it in distilled water. The “black” hair, now free of grime and crusted blood, turned out to be chestnut brown, the color of Gouffé’s hair, so Goron petitioned for an exhumation and invited Lacassagne to make an opinion. (Some sources indicate that Lacassagne is the one who washed the hair.)

Knowing that a bungled autopsy cannot be revised, Lacassagne performed a reautopsy as best he could on November 12, 1889, removing the putrid flesh to examine the bones. He noted with dismay that Bernard, his own former student, had smashed the skull and sliced so ineptly through the flesh that much of it was damaged. It took Lacassagne eleven days to make his way through the putrid remains. His colleague, Dr. Etienne Rollet, had recently published a method for determining the size of a body from the bones, so Lacassagne relied on these calculations to state that the man had once been about five-foot-eight, which matched information on Gouffé’s military record. Under a microscope, Lacassagne compared hair removed from Gouffé’s hairbrush with selected hairs from the corpse. Their thickness corresponded exactly, and another type of analysis showed that no hair dye had been used. In addition, the corpse had a deformity in the bone of the right knee from an accumulation of fluid, which corresponded to a limp that the missing Gouffé was known to have (and his doctor confirmed treatment for water on the knee). Wear on the dentine of the teeth and an accumulation of tartar revealed a man closer to fifty than thirty-five, and Gouffé had been forty-nine. Lacassagne also reexamined the bones of the throat and found the two breaks, which confirmed some type of strangulation as the cause of death, and he believed it had been done manually. On November 21, Lacassagne said to Goron and his associates, “Messieurs, I herewith present you with Monsieur Gouffé.”

Once Gouffé’s identity was established, the police set out to find his killer, and it proved to be an ingenious bit of work. Goron had a replica of the steamer trunk built and placed in the Paris morgue for the public to see. Twenty-five thousand people filed past. When no one offered useful information, a photograph was published in newspapers abroad. A Frenchman in London who saw it recalled meeting a father and daughter who had purchased one like it. This information was publicized as well, and Goron subsequently received a twenty-page letter from Michel Eyraud, then in New York. He accused his mistress, Gabrielle Bompard, of the murder, and she arrived in Goron’s office to implicate them both in the grifting scheme. They had killed the man, she admitted, attempting to hang him but finally strangling him with their hands (as Lacassagne indicated). Their trial was brief and both were convicted. Eyraud was executed and Bompard given a prison sentence.

During Eyraud’s execution, peddlers sold tiny replicas of the trunk with lead corpses inside, bearing the inscription, “L’Affaire Gouffé.” This case was widely publicized, turning forensic pathology into a public sensation. The careful unraveling of the mystery and the collective persistence of brilliant minds gave the struggling discipline of forensic science a real boost.

After his involvement in this incident, Lacassagne’s fame spread internationally, so people listened when he introduced new ideas into other forensic arenas. He analyzed bloodstains at crime scenes and studied the criminal psyche. He was also invited to analyze criminal suspects and offer his opinion. In 1897, a tramp from southwestern France named Joseph Vacher was accused of crimes against fourteen people, including eleven murders. The police also believed he had raped as many as forty children. Vacher had been arrested after a seventeen-year-old shepherd was found strangled and stabbed, with his belly ripped open, and Vacher, twenty-nine, offered a written confession in which he claimed to suffer from an irresistible impulse that drove him to commit murder. Having been bitten by a rabid dog when he was a child, he insisted that his blood had been poisoned. As his victims died, he admitted, he drank blood from their necks.

A team of doctors, including Lacassagne, examined the defendant for five months, learning from relatives and associates about his “confused talk,” spells of delirium, persecution mania, and violent history. Indeed, three years earlier he had been treated in an asylum after he killed a woman and had sex with her corpse, and it was also known that he’d removed the genitalia from several children. Lacassagne nevertheless decided that Vacher was faking a mental illness. Because the assailant’s memory was clear about the crimes and because he had run off after committing them, he had demonstrated sufficient awareness to be judged sane and thus responsible for what he had done. In 1898 in court, Lacassagne demonstrated how he believed the defendant had carried out the crimes and Vacher reportedly said, “He’s very good.” Indeed, Lacassagne’s reputation and commanding stance helped to convict Vacher, who was executed two months later by guillotine.

In addition to making analyses, Lacassagne also instigated the earliest criminal autobiographies. He encouraged a number of prisoners to write about themselves, and each week he checked their notebooks, correcting and guiding these men and women toward some revealed insight. He found that their family histories were full of violence, tension, and disease. Interestingly, these prisoners seemed eager to contribute to the new science of the criminal type and some even critiqued the theories. Like criminals today, they seemed aware of what was being said about them.

While Lacassagne made his careful studies in France, Austrian lawyer Hans Gross, a longtime friend of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s, became versed in a variety of sciences from physics to psychology, and would make a contribution to forensic science that would prove to be among the most influential in the field thus far. His enthusiasm for science, deriving in part from his fascination with the marks on a bullet removed from his grandfather, was contagious and he pursued a way to integrate everything he knew into a comprehensive package that would benefit others.

Gross coined the word
criminalistics
and founded the Criminalistic Institute at the University of Graz, offering it for the collaboration of diverse specialists involved in police science. He collected a library (probably including British physician and social reformer Havelock Ellis’s new book,
The Criminal
, about criminal anthropology). In 1891, Gross published
Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter
and two years later
System der Kriminalistik
(translated in 1907 into English as
Criminal Investigation
), the first comprehensive description of the practical analysis of physical evidence such as blood, trace evidence, bullets, and fingerprints in solving crime. Among the topics were the criminal use of deception and disguise, how to reveal a con, the rules of investigation, the requirements for good detectives, the art of microscopy, and the need for recognizing secret hiding places when investigating a crime. He also emphasized the use of minute particles of dust as evidence, because many different occupations left distinct traces.

Gross urged investigators to be calm and to refrain from violating the crime scene. Before anything is touched or lifted, it first must be fully described, sketched, or photographed. The important thing, he stated, was to collect accurate data before making a judgment. Even the smallest items might influence the solution, and thus everything transported for further study must be carefully handled so as not to damage or contaminate it. If there were body parts or fluids, they should be placed into separate containers to keep them from mingling. Even in the mortuary or lab, he added, rules should be established and strictly observed. For the detective who had to devise a reconstruction, he must not only record what clearly occurred but also note what did not happen. A “burglar” broke in, for example, but the watchdog did not bark.

As the nineteenth century drew near a close, thanks in part to careful men like Gross and Lacassagne, some detectives were taking pains to preserve crime scenes, handle evidence, and analyze an offender’s modus operandi. Nevertheless, certain incidents challenged even the best investigators. Some criminals were aware of the contributions of science, and the most inventive offenders sought ways to conceal their crimes from the investigative probe. Even before the century turned, there were still a few sensational cases to challenge the latest forensic ideas.

SIX

CHALLENGES

Robert Buchanan, a practicing doctor in New York since 1886, was involved with the wealthy and much older Anna Sutherland, a brothel madam, who married him and put him in her will as primary beneficiary. In 1892, after they argued over how Buchanan wanted to run his life and whether he would remain in Anna’s will, she mysteriously died and Buchanan was suddenly quite rich, to the tune of $50,000. The physician who looked at the corpse noted the dilated eyes, so he decided on a brain hemorrhage as the cause of death.

But then a local reporter, Ike White, sniffed around and learned from Anna’s former business partner about suspicious behavior on Buchanan’s part—notably that he had remarried his first wife soon after Anna’s death—suggesting that he might have poisoned his inamorata. One of Buchanan’s acquaintances even suggested that he’d learned from the proceedings of a recent trial how to administer a morphine overdose. Yet, aware of how morphine constricted the pupils of the eyes, Buchanan had been quite clever. Hoping to prevent doctors from seeing the signs of a morphine overdose, he’d used atropine to dilate Sutherland’s pupils. White knew about such treatments, so to confirm his suspicion he interviewed a nurse, who recalled seeing Buchanan put something into his former wife’s eyes when she was ill. White printed his speculations, and under public pressure, the coroner exhumed the body. The second autopsy confirmed that the woman had died from a morphine overdose. Professor Rudolph Witthaus, a toxicologist, also affirmed that atropine could dilate the pupils, so Buchanan was arrested.

His trial began on March 23, 1893. Witthaus testified that he had done a color reaction test to confirm the presence of morphine in a lethal amount in the deceased’s tissues. The prosecutor picked up from this and demonstrated the atropine technique by killing a cat in court and dropping the chemical into its eyes. It was an unprecedented and dramatic demonstration, and the jury members nodded in approval.

However, such tactics were no longer sufficient. The defense attorney showed with its own expert’s exhibit that the color test that Witthaus had used was flawed. Professor Victor Vaughn proved that a cadaveric alkaloid acted just like morphine. That, too, impressed the jury. In addition, in Vaughn’s support was the historic discovery two decades earlier by Italian chemistry professor Francesco Anselmo who had first learned how alkaloids in corpses mimicked certain poisons, such as morphine and delphinine.

In fact, a decade earlier in 1882, this issue had been raised in a British court. Dr. George Lamson stood accused of poisoning Percy John, his brother-in-law, to collect insurance money. The suspect substance was aconite, for which there was still no definitive test. Lamson had visited Percy at school, giving him treats, and two hours later the boy died. Lamson readily surrendered to arrest, believing the pathologist could never detect what he had done, and that was indeed the case. But the
lack
of results from other tests made the doctor suspect aconite and an investigation turned up Lamson’s recent purchase of the substance. His defense attorney raised the issue of cadaveric alkaloids, but it appeared to have little influence as Lamson was convicted and sentenced to die. Still, the presence of these substances placed the reliability of the color test in doubt.

Back to Buchanan’s trial. While the defense ably proved that they could get the same red color with their tests when morphine was not present, the attorney foolishly decided to put Buchanan himself on the stand. His obsequious manner was so annoying and his story so riddled with significant holes that reasonable doubt soon dissolved. The jury ignored the toxicological arguments altogether and convicted him, based on a combination of circumstantial evidence and his own self-undermining remarks.

Nevertheless, the toxicologists involved realized that to be more effective in court, they would have to devise a more definitive demonstration for morphine detection—especially when Buchanan’s attorneys launched an appeal based on “tainted” scientific evidence. So Professor Witthaus went to work on the problem of the color test’s results and tracked its source to impurities in the chemicals used. He was relieved to discover that the test itself was not flawed, and when the appeal was heard, he was ready with his explanation, so the appeal failed, and Buchanan was electrocuted. Witthaus set about updating the color reaction tests to ensure that other toxicologists would not be humiliated in such a manner again.

BLOODY MURDER

On August 4, 1892, the bodies of Andrew Borden, seventy, and Abby Borden, sixty-four, were found in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts, hacked to death. Abby’s body lay on the floor of the upstairs guest bedroom, slain with a sharp instrument that had inflicted multiple blows to the back of her head. A thick bunch of artificial black hair, hacked off her, lay nearby. Downstairs, Andrew’s corpse, with blows to the face, was half sitting and half lying on the living room sofa. There were blood spatters on the floor, the wall, and the picture over the sofa, but his clothing was strangely undisturbed. Uncharacteristically, his expensive overcoat lay rolled beneath his head. Being a frugal man, it was unlikely that he would have used it as a pillow, especially not on a hot day.

Andrew’s youngest daughter, Lizzie, had discovered his body. A thirty-two-year-old spinster, she lived in the small house as well. She immediately called to Bridget Sullivan, the maid, who had gone to her third-floor room to rest and sent her for the doctor.

A neighbor, Mrs. Churchill, arrived and asked Lizzie about Abby. Lizzie said she was out visiting, but mentioned that she’d heard her return and go upstairs. Oddly, Lizzie offhandedly remarked, “I don’t know but they killed her, too.” Mrs. Churchill was nearly up the stairs when she spotted the body on the guest-room floor.

That someone could have just come in and killed these two elderly people in the middle of the day in a house in the center of town seemed odd, since it was the family practice to keep the doors on the first floor locked. Yet on that day, Lizzie claimed to have been in the barn loft for twenty minutes, leaving the back screen door unlocked—by coincidence the very time that a maniac happened by. No footprints were found around the house on the grass, and no neighbors or workers in the yard next door saw a stranger coming or going in the Borden yard, although a witness reported seeing an agitated young man out in the street, near the Borden fence.

While a search was underway, Sergeant Philip Harrington noticed that Lizzie seemed calm and unemotional, with no stated interest in catching the killer. He had the impression she knew more than she was saying. He saw Dr. Bowen, the physician for whom Lizzie had sent, in the kitchen with scraps of paper on which there was some writing. Bowen said, “It’s nothing,” but Harrington recalled that one document was addressed to “Emma.” Bowen then took the lid off the kitchen stove and tossed the scraps into the fire. Harrington noticed a cylindrical object in the ashes, about a foot long and two inches in diameter. He thought it might have been paper scrolled up.

Another investigator noticed a pail of water in the wash cellar that contained several small bloody towels. He asked Lizzie about this and she said she had explained it all to Dr. Bowen, who said they were menstrual rags, but no one checked to make certain of this. Lizzie said the pail had been there three or four days, although Bridget claimed she had not seen it before that morning. No investigator followed up to clarify this significant contradiction.

Dr. William Dolan, the medical examiner of Bristol County, took possession of all the evidence. At 3:00
P
.
M
., he had the bodies moved into the dining room, where he conducted the autopsies on undertaker boards on the table. He removed the stomachs to help determine time of death, and sent them to Edward S. Wood, professor of chemistry at Harvard Medical School.

Based on the comparative temperatures of the bodies, the varied condition of the blood on each, and an examination of their digestive systems, it was determined that Andrew Borden had died at least one hour after Abby. He was hit in the face, and one eye was cut in half, his nose was severed, and there were eleven distinct cuts. He had been struck from above the head by blows delivered vertically with a sharp implement. Abby had been hit eighteen or nineteen times, probably with a hatchet or ax, with one misdirected blow striking the back of her scalp. The pathologist decapitated the corpses to take the skulls for flesh removal to better see the damage.

Dr. Frank Draper examined the skulls, measuring the location and length of the wounds. The first wound on Andrew had penetrated the nose and upper lips to the tip of the chin, measuring four inches. One of the wounds at the top of the skull gave an accurate measure of the blade, three and a half inches. Besides Abby’s many wounds to the back of her skull, she bore a bruise on her shoulder blade that proved to be the shape and size of an ax head.

However, a microscopic examination of the hatchets and axes from the Borden basement produced no blood or hair, except apparently from an animal. They did find a hatchet head without a handle and while the worn blade fit into the skull wounds of Andrew Borden, a new, identical hatchet did not. The head had been forcibly rubbed with ashes, for the crevices in the blade were tightly packed, and investigators surmised that this was an attempt to remove blood and flesh. Yet traces of silver nitrate found behind Abby’s ear indicated that a new hatchet had been used.

Lizzie was arrested, and her contradictory answers at an inquest coupled with the grand jury testimony, resulted in jailing her until she could be tried. Implicating Lizzie, blood was found on the sole of one of her shoes and there was a small spot of blood on one of her underskirts, one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter, more extensive on the outside than in. (Apparently there were also bloodlike smears on her skirt that no one tested.) Lizzie said she’d scratched a flea bite. She handed over a dress she said she had worn on the morning of the murder, and it had no blood on it, but some people who had seen her believed it was not the right dress.

The day before the murders, Lizzie had also gone to a drugstore and asked to purchase prussic acid to rid a sealskin cape of bugs. The pharmacist refused to sell it without a prescription. That night, she visited a friend, Alice Russell, and remarked on a strong sense of foreboding that someone was trying to harm her father. She mentioned a man who had argued with her father recently about property. Alice also observed Lizzie burning a “useless, faded” dress in the kitchen stove three days after the murders. Alice’s testimony about this incident at a hearing prompted Judge Blaisdell to charge Lizzie with the double homicide.

It was no secret that Lizzie had despised her stepmother. She and her older sister, Emma, had been annoyed a couple of years earlier when Andrew had turned property over to Abby’s sister, which the daughters viewed as their birthright. In addition, Andrew was a wealthy man, yet he forced the family to live frugally, and Lizzie was resentful. Also, Bridget Sullivan claimed to have heard a loud laugh coming from the head of the stairs on the fateful morning as she let Mr. Borden in the front door. At that time, Abby Borden was lying on the guest-room floor, so whoever stood on the landing could certainly see her.

At Lizzie’s two-week trial, the prosecution, led by Hosea M. Knowlton, made the following points: No witnesses saw anyone enter or exit the Borden home that morning; no “intruder” could count on the coincidence of Bridget being upstairs, Lizzie being outside, and an overnight visiting relative, John Morse, who was out that morning, not returning; no intruder could have hidden himself in the house between the murders without someone knowing—and not without dripping blood wherever he was hiding. Abby was considered the primary target, killed during a rage, and Andrew was then dispatched to avoid his accusations. Lizzie had motive and exclusive opportunity, had even hinted at the possibility that something would happen to her father just the night before, and exhibited guilt in some of her remarks, inconsistencies, and actions. Basically, a circumstantial case against Lizzie was developed without the definitive identification of a murder weapon or physical evidence. Also, the case was hampered by the inability of the investigators to produce a corroborated demonstration of time and opportunity for the murders. They were not allowed to say that she had attempted to purchase prussic acid and could not introduce the significant inconsistencies in her inquest statements. In addition, they accepted without question the explanation of blood on garments and towels as menstrual blood.

In fact, a great deal of testimony about blood came in to the trial, from counting and interpreting the many blood spatters to using an analysis of the different conditions of the blood on the two victims to indicate how long apart they had been attacked.

Most damning was evidence that the dress turned over to the police by Lizzie as the one she had worn on the morning of the murders was not the same dress. Coupled with testimony from Alice Russell that she was with Lizzie after the murders when she burned a dress stained with “brown paint,” this information made things look desperate for the defendant, although Lizzie’s dressmaker stated that when she had made the dress the house was being painted. However, since the dress had been made only a few months earlier, Lizzie’s claim that it was faded made little sense.

Crucial to the case was the presentation of evidence that supplied a motive for the murders. Prosecutors called witnesses to establish that Mr. Borden had intended to write a new will. An old will was never found. The new one would leave Emma and Lizzie each a paltry $25,000, with the remainder of Mr. Borden’s half-million-dollar estate going to Abby.

The expensive defense team, led by Andrew Jennings, called witnesses to describe a mysterious young man in the vicinity of the Borden home that morning and Emma Borden to verify the absence of a motive for Lizzie. Emma even stated that she had urged Lizzie to burn the dress as per the family custom for useless garments. The team emphasized that no blood had been found on Lizzie, ignoring the testimony that it would not necessarily be the case that she would get blood on her from the way these murders were committed. (She could have covered herself with a garment and stood by the door frame in such a way as to reach in and slam the hatchet into Andrew’s head. She might even have used Andrew’s coat, and then rolled it and placed it under his head. No one checked the blood patterns on it to demonstrate that they were from wound leakage and not spatter.)