Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (18 page)

That was the year in which Alphonse Bertillon experienced his final humiliation before he died three years later. On August 21, a thief stole Leonardo da Vinci’s famous
Mona Lisa
from the Louvre. He left fingerprints behind on the discarded case, and while Bertillon did keep track of fingerprints by now, his card system was still based on body measurements. Over the years, he had collected tens of thousands of cards in his system, which meant that with only a fingerprint as evidence, he and his staff had to search through each and every card, which took weeks. After the thief was finally arrested, thanks to a tip, and identified as Vicenzo Perrugia, it turned out that his card was in Bertillon’s file as a repeat offender. It had simply been impossible to locate amid all the others. Thus it was that Bertillon (and everyone else) learned that his system, while innovative for its time, was too unwieldy to be of use. His successor lost no time in replacing it with fingerprinting.

At the time, most police officers did not rely on microscopes, but in 1912 that trend shifted. The microscope was the first scientific device to be used in a U.S. murder case, when a Massachusetts-based homicide was solved with the analysis of threads on a coat. Millionaire George Marsh, seventy-eight, had been shot to death on April 11, 1911, and dumped along an embankment in Lynn, Massachusetts. Yet the killer had not touched his wallet or gold watch, indicating the possibility of a personal motive. However, no one could identify an enemy.

At the crime scene, a few yards from the body, an investigator had picked up a swatch of material with a pearl-gray overcoat button fastened to it. Detectives located a landlady who offered information about Willis Dow, whom she had seen studying Marsh’s house with binoculars. Another landlady turned over a coat that he’d left behind, and detectives saw that he’d removed all the buttons, so they had no way of knowing if the one they had found came from his—which would place Dow at the scene of the murder. They sent the coat to a textile school, where Professor Edward Baker microscopically compared fibers from a hole on the coat with the torn piece of a material from the scene. The colors and raw ends appeared to match, and the fabric swatch was the right texture and material to be from the coat. It was likely that when Marsh had pulled one button off, the killer had cut the others to prevent an identification.

Then a Colt .32 pistol was found in a canal near the crime scene and traced to William Dorr in California. It was a long shot, but determined detectives traveled to the West Coast and learned that Dorr was romantically involved with the victim’s adopted daughter—and heir—there in California. That seemed suspicious, especially when Dorr turned out to be “Dow.” They alerted the woman, who might well have been his means for acquiring Marsh’s money, which meant she was in potential danger. With the threads from the coat, witnesses, the gun, and the circumstantial evidence, Dorr was convicted of the murder and executed.

Also in 1911, the Illinois Supreme Court had to confront fingerprint evidence when a case was appealed. The previous year, an intruder had shot and killed Clarence Hiller in his home. There were no eyewitnesses, but Thomas Jennings was apprehended near the Hiller home carrying a revolver. Since his clothing was bloodstained, he was arrested and soon the cartridges from his revolver were matched to unused cartridges found in Hiller’s residence. In addition, four fingerprints had been left on fresh paint on a fence near the window through which the intruder had entered. Four experts testified that Jennings had left his own fingerprints on the fence. Around the same time as the New York–based trial featuring Faurot’s testimony, the jury accepted the expert opinion and convicted Jennings of the crime, sentencing him to hang. Jennings’s attorney appealed the decision on the basis of the admissibility of fingerprint evidence. The appellate court now had a chance to examine this emerging issue. The justices arrived at a momentous decision.

Fingerprints had been admitted in Great Britain, the court said, and the relevant experts, who had written texts on the subject, had concluded that the evidence was reliable. They proved to have extensive experience reading fingerprints, so the court made a historic ruling that there was a scientific basis for the system of fingerprint identification, and that it was in general and common use by law enforcement. Thus, the trial court had been justified in admitting it. “Expert evidence is admissible,” the court stated, “when the witnesses offered as experts have peculiar knowledge or experience not common to the world, which renders their opinions founded on such knowledge of experience, an aid to the court or jury in determining questions at issue.” In this precedent-setting case, fingerprint evidence was deemed to have a scientific basis, and the notion of science gained an early version of its legal codification. Thus, the sentence stood and Jennings was hanged.

Four years later, New York’s Court of Appeals faced a similar task with expertise in document examination in
People
v.
Risley
, a forgery case involving an attorney who had changed a record with a typewriter at his office. A mathematics professor offered a probability analysis on whether two words could have been typed on any other typewriter except the one in question. One appellate court allowed the testimony but the higher court reversed the conviction, rejecting the credentials of the witness and his method of analysis. The problem was that the professor was not an expert on the relevant issue: typing. In addition, he had offered only speculative opinion, not opinion based on observed data, and the laws of probability were not conclusive. One judge stated that courts should be “cautious” about scientific proof, and “cannot sanction it until its accuracy has been fully tested and vindicated by experience.”

Over the next two decades, science would come to the forefront of legal proceedings, demanding that judges spell out just when testimony and evidence would be considered “scientific.”

EIGHT

IN LOCARD’S WAKE

Professor Victor Balthazard, a medical examiner, professor, and expert on trace evidence, pointed out in a 1913 article how the markings on fired bullets make them unique, because every gun had imperfections and peculiarities that ended up leaving distinct marks on the bullets. He described a case of homicide in which the victim had been shot several times. The police had a suspect but could not confirm that his gun was the weapon used. Balthazard took photographs of the murder bullets and bullets fired from the suspect weapon, enlarged them, and found eighty-five similarities. The suspect was convicted and Balthazard confirmed for medicolegal societies the instinct of physicians before him who’d performed similar experiments, his pronouncement arriving just as the first North American forensic laboratory based on Locard’s model was established in Montreal, Quebec, with
L’Institute de Medicine Legale et de Police Scientifique.
Around the same time, New York City replaced its British-based coroner system with a medical examiner, requiring death investigators to acquire training in medicine and pathology. Another invention that assisted law enforcement during this decade was Albert Schneider’s vacuum apparatus for the collection of minute particles at a crime scene.

During World War I, Dr. Leone Lattes understood the significance of Landsteiner’s blood group discovery and had shown in Turin, Italy, that these distinctions could be made even on bloodstains that had dried and aged. He used distilled water to make the blood liquid again and successfully applied Landsteiner’s tests, so he set out to write
The Individuality of Blood
, in which he indicated how forensic investigation could benefit.

After the war, Luke May devised a dual-lens microscope that he named a “Revelarescope.” With it, he entered the case of a child abduction in Roy, Washington, and was able to match a knife to cuts on pine needles. He also demonstrated the value of striation patterns for comparisons between specific tools, such as screwdrivers or chisels, and the marks they made. Proclaimed as an American Sherlock Holmes, May worked as a “consulting private detective” out of his Revelare International Secret Service, having participated in an investigation when he was only sixteen. Believing in impartial scientific investigation, he specialized in fingerprint, document, and firearms analysis, and he offered his laboratory services to the police. Later he would write for
True Detective Mysteries
, hoping to educate others in the importance of science. He would also be considered as a participant when America’s first private crime lab did open, but that was still more than a decade in the future.

For forensic purposes, a police anatomist prepared the base for a bust in 1916 from a skeleton recovered in Brooklyn. He placed the skull on some rolled newspaper, placed fake eyes into the sockets, and covered the bone with plastic. A sculptor added sufficient details and this resulted in the identification of a missing woman. U.S. physiologist Thomas Hunt Morgan also demonstrated at this time that chromosomes carry inherited information, which would one day have implications for crime investigation.

EXPERTS AND GUNS

In the field of firearms and ballistics, a 1917 incident that initially seemed to have mostly local significance would figure into a more sensational case during that era. On a cold winter day, March 22, 1915, Charles Stielow, a German immigrant, came across the bodies of his employer, Charles Phelps, and Phelps’s housekeeper, Margaret Walcott. Both had been shot to death with a .22-caliber revolver, and things had been taken from the house that indicated that whoever had killed them had probably eliminated them as eyewitnesses to a robbery. Stielow notified the police, and was then forced to testify in his broken English at an inquest. He claimed that he did not own a revolver. However, a private detective dug around and located a .22 that Stielow once had owned, which made him a primary suspect: Not only had he had access to the right type of weapon to have committed these murders, but he’d also lied. Detectives interrogated him until he finally confessed, believing if he did so he’d be allowed to go home to his wife, but instead he was held for trial. However, he refused to sign a statement, and once in jail, he recanted the confession. Nevertheless, he was tried for murder.

For expertise, the prosecution hired Dr. Albert Hamilton, who claimed that among his many professed specialties was knowledge of firearms. He testified that test bullets fired from Stielow’s revolver showed an abnormal scratch in the barrel of the weapon, which he then matched to the bullets used in the double homicide. Hamilton even took photographs to further impress the jury, although he had to admit the scratches weren’t visible in the photos. He got around that one by indicating that he’d accidentally photographed the wrong side of the bullets, adding that it took a certain amount of expertise to recognize them. When asked to point out the area on the gun barrel that was uniquely scratched, he said it could not be done because the bullet’s momentum had expanded the bullet in such a way as to fill in the scratch with lead, rendering the scratches invisible. As nonsensical as it sounds in retrospect, the jury believed it and convicted Stielow, sentencing him to die.

The prison warden who observed him believed that he was innocent, so he persuaded people with money to hire an experienced team to launch an investigation on the prisoner’s behalf. They managed to pin the murders on two drifters, who confessed. An attorney, George Bond, looked further into this case, assisted by Charles E. Waite, an employee of the New York State prosecutor. Waite asked firearms expert Inspector Joseph Faurot, the same man who had brought fingerprinting to New York, to test the weapon. Right away, it was clear from the amount of dirt and rust on it that no one had fired it in years: not Stielow, and not Hamilton. Annoyed, they went ahead with the testing.

To prevent damage to the bullets, Faurot fired the suspect gun into water. Then optics expert Max Poser, from the Bausch and Lomb Optical Company, examined them under a microscope and could not see the alleged scratches that Hamilton had “observed.” He then found that the bullets used in the murders had been fired from a weapon with an abnormal land-and-groove pattern—a manufacturer’s defect in which the lands were quite wide—whereas Stielow’s gun was normal, so it could not have been the murder weapon. It was clear from all of this information that, had a genuine expert examined the weapon in the beginning, that person would have excluded Stielow right away.

By this point, the unfortunate man had served three years in prison. He received a full pardon, but it did not escape Waite’s notice that Hamilton’s glib pseudoscience had nearly sent an innocent man to his death. It had also cost the county so much money that they declined to prosecute the real killers, who thus got away with a double homicide.

To prevent such incidents in the future and keep frauds like Hamilton out of the courtroom, Waite devoted himself to making firearms examination into a much more exact science. To achieve this, he set out to develop a base of information by cataloging all weapons ever manufactured since the first Colt revolver, in terms of construction, date of manufacture, caliber, number, twist and proportion of the lands and grooves, and type of ammunition used. He visited one gun manufacturing firm after another around the United States, including Colt and Smith & Wesson, and secured their assistance. It was a monumental task, perhaps more than he’d realized when he first made the decision, but after three years he had data on almost all of the types of guns manufactured since the 1850s. He saw that no type of gun was exactly identical to any other, and he was soon able to tell from which type of gun a bullet had been fired. He’d made a significant achievement, but then he realized that many guns available to criminals had not been made in the States at all but in Europe. Some two-thirds of total available guns were not included in his inventory.

Waite realized that he could either give up his ambition as unfinished or travel to Europe and continue to catalog all the guns he could find. To his credit, he decided to persist. At the end of his year in Europe, he had collected hundreds more models of firearms to test and catalog.

To look at the imprints left during the manufacturing process, Waite needed a good microscope, so he challenged Max Poser to develop a device for studying and comparing bullets. Poser came up with a microscope with fitted bullet holders and measuring scales. John H. Fischer, a physicist, then invented the lighted helixometer probe to inspect with a magnifier inside a gun barrel. The final instrument came from chemist Philip O. Gravelle, whose extensive work in microphotography inspired the comparison microscope, which combined two microscopes into a single unit for side-by-side comparison of two bullets under the same lens. Working together, they founded the Bureau of Forensic Ballistics in New York. A couple of years later, former colonel and army medical officer Calvin Goddard joined the team, but his true moment in history was still a few years away.

CONTRIBUTIONS

Back in Lyon, Locard had just published
L’enquete criminelle et les methods scientifique,
in which he stated that the act of criminality was so intense, it was impossible to act out without leaving a trace, or, as it’s been rephrased, “Every contact leaves a trace.” He was now increasingly concerned about faulty eyewitness identification. In 1920, a woman claimed to be Anastasia, a survivor of the attempt by Bolsheviks to slaughter the entire Russian royal family, the Romanovs. From news reports, people knew that Anastasia had been taken with her parents, her brother, and her three sisters to a building in Ekaterinburg, where they were shot multiple times. Once dead, the bodies were thrown into a mineshaft and an attempt was made to obliterate their identities with acid. However, after the remains were found, it appeared that two bodies were missing—including that of Anastasia. In Berlin, a girl saved from suicide indicated that she was the missing grand duchess. Many people who had known Anastasia were convinced when they met this girl that she had miraculously escaped the slaughter, but others had doubts. In Locard’s
Proofs of Identity
, later published in 1932, he sided with the doubters. The physical features of this girl were too different from those of Anastasia, he said. In the end, he was proven correct, but not until a DNA analysis long after his death.

By now, many forensic cases were getting significant media attention. Since the mid-1800s, newspaper moguls had learned how well blood, scandal, and sex sold papers, and reporters sought out such cases. As sensational crimes garnered media coverage, it brought publicity to the innovations in forensic science and to specific figures who seemed to stand out from the pack of law enforcement officers.

One such case occurred in Camden, New Jersey, in 1920. Sixty-year-old David Paul, a bank messenger, had the task of delivering a satchel of money from his employer across the bridge to another company in Philadelphia, but along the way he disappeared. No leads were developed and more than a week later, hunters found Paul’s body near a stream, buried in a shallow grave. An autopsy showed that he’d been beaten and shot. But there were some odd features to this murder: Although the ground was dry, Paul’s clothing was wet, and it appeared that while he’d been missing for nine days, he’d been killed between twenty-four and forty-eight hours before he was found. However, aside from tread impressions made by car tires found near the victim, there were no other items of physical evidence to gather.

Investigators hypothesized that Paul may have decided to take the money and run, but had been killed in the process. Perhaps he’d had accomplices who then killed him. A few detectives thought that perhaps he had been kidnapped and held some place against his will before he was ultimately murdered. In any event, the satchel of money had disappeared and Paul’s whereabouts for nine days, along with the solution to solving his murder, remained a mystery.

But the chief detective on this Burlington County case, Ellis Parker, was a persistent and often clever man, albeit rumpled and somewhat odd. He was convinced that the medical examiner’s estimation was flawed. He returned to the crime scene to ponder the puzzle and came up with a better theory. He traced a pair of glasses from the scene to Paul’s neighbor, Frank James, who appeared to be in cahoots with another man, Raymond Schuck. They’d been seen together spending large sums of money. However, both had alibis for the estimated time of Paul’s murder.

At a dead end but not yet ready to concede defeat, Parker then looked at tanning factories along the river, and the water yielded a high content of tannic acid, a strong preservative. If the body had been submerged in it, he surmised, decomposition would have been significantly retarded, foiling the medical examiner’s typical methods for determining time of death. Parker used these facts to confront James, who broke down and confessed that he and Schuck
had
dumped the body in the water but later retrieved and buried it. Thanks to Parker’s persistence, both were convicted and sentenced to death. Parker became yet another man dubbed as the American Sherlock Holmes, in part due to his shrewd ideas and fascinating series of cases. He’d know more than a decade of accolades before he ended up undermining his career in a prominent case still to come.

BACK TO BULLETS

Another incident in 1920 highlighted ballistic analysis once again. On the afternoon of Friday, April 15, 1920, in South Braintree, Massachusetts, two men approached a couple of security guards who were delivering the payroll money for the Slater and Morrill Shoe Factory, and opened fire. According to witnesses, one of the men shot both guards mortally, and the other pumped several more bullets into them. They then took the payroll boxes containing nearly $16,000 and sped off in a black Buick. People nearby said they appeared to be Italian, and one man reportedly sported a handlebar mustache.

Investigators on the scene recovered six ejected shell casings from the sidewalk around the dead men and were able to trace them to three manufacturers: Remington, Winchester, and Peters. They also found the apparent getaway car, abandoned, and they linked it to an earlier robbery. The mastermind appeared to be an Italian thug named Mike Boda, but when they located his hideout, he was gone, supposedly on his way to Italy. Yet two of his associates, Italian laborers who were part of an anarchist organization, fit the general descriptions of the robbers: Nicola Sacco, twenty-nine, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, thirty-two. Sacco even had a handlebar mustache. They denied owning guns, but a search turned up illegal pistols on their persons. Sacco’s was the right caliber for the murder weapon—a Colt .32 automatic. He also had two dozen bullets on him made by the three manufacturers whose bullets had been matched to the shells. Both men were promptly arrested. Vanzetti was found guilty of the robbery that had occurred before the double homicide, and Sacco was later tried with him for the murder of Alessandro Berardelli, one of the shoe company’s security guards.