Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (17 page)

But defense attorney Edward Hall was ready for him. He noted that Barrow’s weight had diminished considerably in the grave, from one hundred forty to around sixty pounds and suggested that this would exaggerate the arsenic concentration in her current state. Willcox, for all his brilliance, had not considered this possibility, and he was forced to concede that the dose of arsenic found in her might not have reached fatal proportions. In addition, the corpse showed arsenic levels in the hair that indicated a long-term administration, but Barrow had shown no symptoms. Could it be that she had absorbed the poison over time from the arsenic flypaper in her room?

Willcox then performed another experiment in which he soaked hair in fluid from the coffin, getting the same amount of arsenic as Barrow had. Thus, he was able to conclude that the source had been the fluid leaking from her body. In the end, his careful work stood up against vigorous challenge, and when Seddon showed just how greedy he was for money, his performance on the witness stand facilitated his conviction.

In 1914, there was yet another famous case that involved both Willcox and Spilsbury. Margaret Lloyd had died in her bath in Highgate, England. A relative of a victim of a similar drowning spotted her obituary and brought the matter to the police, who noted the criminal record of her husband, George Joseph Smith. Indeed, he had not only married Margaret Lloyd under an assumed name, but had married three times and each wife had drowned in her bath. Still, it seemed quite unlikely that someone could have drowned women in a bathtub without them struggling fiercely, and there had been no mark from violence on any of the bodies. The latest victim had indeed drowned, as evidenced by foam in her lungs, but there was no indication of force.

Spilsbury set up an experiment using young women in bathing outfits who agreed to sit in bathtubs and allow him and a detective to try to drown them. After repeated failures, it seemed impossible to make a person drown in this context. But then the detective deduced the answer: Smith had killed them by grabbing them by the feet and pulling them helplessly into the water. The quick action and rush of water made them helpless. In fact, one of the participants went unconscious at once. It seemed clear that Smith had figured out what to do and had done it three times. Then he enriched himself on their money or insurance. The “Brides in the Bath Killer” went to the executioner in 1915 shouting, “I am in terror!”

AMERICA’S ELITE

American president Theodore Roosevelt authorized a federal investigative agency so on July 26, 1908, Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte ordered a force of investigators to report to the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Chief Examiner, Stanley Finch. They were to handle all investigative matters related to the DOJ except specific types of financial frauds. The force was named the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), and the agents busied themselves with such crimes as land fraud, interstate commerce, and involuntary slavery. By the end of the year, the BOI had thirty-four permanent agents.

In 1910, Albert S. Osborn, another American, published
Questioned Documents
to show the forensic value of document examination, although in this field, the court still questioned the subjective nature of even expert interpretation. Nevertheless, Osborn was becoming a noted expert in this area, while Victor Balthazard, a Parisian medical examiner, published the first significant study of hair,
Le poil de l’homme et des animaux
. The following year, U.S. physiologist Thomas Hunt Morgan and his students scrutinized fruitflies and demonstrated that chromosomes carry inherited information—a discovery that would one day have implications for crime investigation.

By now, another fictional detective had caught America’s interest. Jacques Futrelle published “The Problem of Cell 13” in 1906 in which he introduced “the Thinking Machine,” Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, who spent most of his time in his lab thinking about difficult problems and who had been honored by a multitude of universities and scientific institutions for his cerebral skills. “He was a Ph.D., an LL.D., an F.R.S., an M.D., and a M.D.S.” In a series of stories between 1906 and 1912, when Futrelle died on the
Titanic,
he impressed readers with the idea of how science, ingenuity, and logic can solve seemingly impossible dilemmas, including complex crimes. In the most famous story, Professor Van Dusen accepts a dare to be locked inside a cell without tools, to think his way out within a week. “I’ve done more asinine things than that to convince other men of less important truths,” he says, and he succeeds. The fact that his success depends as much on luck and the availability of a rathole and other people as on his ability to think logically may escape the reader. That’s probably due to Van Dusen’s own dismissal of assistance as minimal. While he’s certainly clever, one can easily devise a cell without the rat hole that would likely defy even his impressive wit. Throughout these stories, the professor was all brain and at the time his approach had nearly as great an influence on popular ideas about investigation as did Sherlock Holmes.

The point of a Thinking Machine was twofold: to be able to think one’s way through any problem, no matter how impossible it may seem, and to prove the superiority of reason as a human faculty. The scientific enterprise emphasized an objective, reasoned and systematic approach to the problems of reality and how things worked. A good mind and sharp focus, along with the ability to bracket emotional attachment to ideas or results, was the hallmark of the laboratory scientist. The ideal was for them to pursue their work like machines. That this understanding minimized the passion that drove nineteenth-century scientists to apply their work to investigation apparently escaped those in the new century who hoped to make their mark in the field. In fact, the character Van Dusen was portrayed as a man much in demand internationally by institutions wishing to gain his sponsorship, because they wanted to align themselves with his form of rarified thinking: Fictionally speaking, his was the “foremost brain” in the sciences. But along with it came a “crabbed” personality, marked by disdain, arrogance, intolerance, and impatience.

CRIME LAB

Lacassagne and Villebrun both influenced another young Frenchman, who grew up in Lyon avidly reading translations of Hans Gross, as well as the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Whenever he was able, Edmond Locard interviewed professionals in different fields, even traveling abroad to find them. Born in 1877, he was utterly fascinated with criminal identification, believing that the future of criminal investigation lay in fingerprinting. However, while he recognized the value of ridge patterns on the fingertips, he knew they could be smudged or fragmentary—and even faked with sticky tree sap—so he examined the number and shape of the numerous pores that lay along the ridges, believing they might be more useful. There were between nine and eighteen per millimeter, and their patterns were as individual as the ridge patterns. Locard was convinced that only a few millimeters of a print was required to prove identity, and he called his new science poroscopy. But his initial fame came from another type of analysis, for which he received attention in 1912.

Locard had made numerous failed attempts to interest the police in Lyon with establishing a crime laboratory, so he devised a private lab of his own, in honor of his hero, Sherlock Holmes. In 1910, he acquired rooms in the attic of the Palais de Justice and then sought opportunities. In preparation to perform “police science,” he purchased a microscope, reference books, and measuring devices, and studied various forensic techniques, especially the analysis of trace evidence. He believed that in any criminal encounter, offenders left traces of their presence, as well as carried some evidence away on their person. It might be so slight as to be nearly invisible, but Locard believed that a thorough inspection with the right tools could produce it. He once said “To write the history of identification is to write the history of criminology.”

Few people listened to him until he took on a case the following year. Counterfeit coins were being used around town to buy goods, and the police thought they knew the identities of the culprits, but they had a difficult time nabbing them. Finally, three suspects were arrested and brought in. Locard got wind of the arrest and asked if he could examine their clothing. No one understood why he wanted to proceed in this manner, but since they had nothing else, they gave him permission.

Using a pair of tweezers, he went over one man’s clothing to remove specks of dust from around the pants pocket area. He then turned his attention to the shirtsleeves, brushing dust off them onto clean sheets of white paper. He then examined these samples with a microscope. Under magnification, it was evident that the dust contained characteristics that revealed its origin. Specifically, Locard looked for minute traces of metal and found them. Chemical tests applied to the dust grains affirmed what he observed, and the proportions of tin, antimony, and lead from the dust matched those in the counterfeit coins.

It only remained to find the same traces of metal on the clothing of the other two suspects, which he promptly did. That kind of evidence pressured the men to confess. Locard gained valuable publicity for his scientific identification of suspects. Within a decade, he would publish a book about the many cases on which he was consulted,
Policiers de roman et policiers de laboratoire
(
Police in Novels and Police in the Laboratory
).

As Locard gained a reputation for detecting what the eye could not see, he was invited into more challenging cases. In one, Émile Gourbin, a bank clerk, was a suspect in the strangulation murder of his girlfriend, Marie Latelle. However, he had an alibi. At the estimated time of the murder, midnight, he’d been with friends, playing cards, and his friends all affirmed this. The location of the game was miles from the crime scene and they had been occupied until 1:00
A.M.
, at which time Gourbin went to bed. Either the time of death was in error or he was innocent. The police were stumped; they were certain he was the killer but could not budge his story. They needed undeniable physical proof.

When Locard examined the victim, he saw impressions deep into her neck, so he went to Gourbin in the holding cell and scraped under his fingernails. Under the microscope, he found in the debris tiny flakes of skin and noted that they had a pink tint. He tested them and found ingredients common to cosmetics. Looking to form a link with the victim, he examined her face powder under the microscope and found the same type of makeup as he’d removed from under Gourbin’s fingernails. When he learned that the makeup had been custom-made for the victim, he proved that the substance was therefore unique, indicating that Gourbin had scratched the victim’s skin.

The evidence impressed even Gourbin. He finally admitted that he had advanced the clock at his friends’ house in order to dupe them and have an alibi. He had gone out to meet Marie after the others were in bed and when she refused to marry him, he had strangled her in a rage. The prosecutor insisted that he had clearly intended her death and the jury agreed.

Once Locard proved himself again and again, he received more staff and more funding. With greater resources, he went on to prove the value of dust and fibers for revealing what people have brushed against in their daily worlds, and in his manual he prescribed standard methods for handling such fragile evidence. It had to be done with care, and with tweezers and clean paper. Dust or dirt packed on to shoes should be removed carefully, layer by layer, with distinct substances kept separate from one another on sterile paper.

Another case gave him the opportunity to utilize his ideas about poroscopy. In June 1912 in Lyon, someone entered an apartment and removed four hundred francs and several valuable jewels. Fingerprints were left on a rosewood box that had contained the jewels. The Vucetich method from Argentina was applied and one of the prints was matched to a man named Boudet, who had a criminal record for burglary and theft. Another print matched his partner, Simonin. Confronted with the evidence, they nevertheless refused to confess.

Locard saw his chance, so he made enlargements of the prints to reveal the pattern of pores along the ridges. During the judicial sessions, he showed these photographs to the jury and explained how individual pore patterns were. He had found over nine hundred pores on the fingerprints left on the box and that number matched Boudet. The jury was impressed with Locard’s meticulous work and found both men guilty, sentencing them to hard labor.

When Locard published his
Traité de Criminalistique
, he claimed to have solved seven cases that year by examining the fingerprint pores. He tells the story of a woman going to market with female underclothing who was knocked out with ether while riding on the train. When she revived she claimed that two men had stolen her merchandise and all her money. They had left the bottle of ether behind, from which the police managed to lift fingerprints. But they found that the fingerprints matched the victim and there were no other prints on the bottle. When confronted the woman admitted that she had attempted to commit suicide but had wanted to make it appear to be murder to save her family the shame. Yet while Locard continued to support poroscopy, it failed to catch on anywhere else. Nevertheless, his voluminous work on forensic investigation left a significant legacy in its own right.

ESTABLISHING SCIENCE

Even as the young scientist won fame in France, in 1911 the first fingerprint evidence was admitted into an American court. Charles Crispi, a.k.a., Caesar Cella, a burglary suspect, was arrested and sent to trial based on a match between his file and a fingerprint found on the window of a garment shop that had been burglarized. Detective Sergeant Joseph A. Faurot, a member of the New York Police Department since 1896, had long bought into the fingerprint theory and had hoped for a case to prove its worth in court. He’d been privileged to study this method at Scotland Yard and he sought to encourage its adoption across Manhattan. He testified that Crispi’s print matched the one at the scene, so the judge asked him to demonstrate. He had jury members touch a window and a glass tabletop, asking one person to touch both, and then told Faurot to identify who it was. In less than five minutes, Faurot made the correct identification. Before he could go further with his proof, however, the burglar confessed, so the judge gave him a reduced sentence. Yet even without a dramatic resolution in court, Faurot’s testimony provided fertile material for the press.