Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (19 page)

The trial began on May 31, 1921, and public opinion was clearly against the defendants, because they were perceived as dangerous men. Yet many foreigners, resentful of American xenophobia, sided with them and the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee called the ordeal a witch hunt, with these men serving as scapegoats for America’s fear of international politics.

Four bullets removed from the murdered payroll guards were delivered to the self-educated ballistics experts for both sides, and their task was to determine whether Sacco’s .32 pistol was indeed the murder weapon. The prosecutor’s experts could not agree, while the defense experts, James Burns and Augustus Gill, exuded scientifically unwarranted confidence in their opinions.

Still, on June 14, Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted of murder and sentenced to be executed. The verdict was likely based on the fact that had little to do with what the experts or multiple witnesses had said: the bullet that had killed Berardelli was so outdated that the only bullets similar to it that anyone could locate to make comparisons were those found during the investigation in Sacco’s pockets. The jury had even used a magnifying glass to examine the bullets for themselves and had finally bought the prosecution’s case.

Right away another expert declared the others to be frauds, and his opinion was sufficient in 1923 to get a hearing for considering a retrial. To bolster their side, the defense team hired Albert Hamilton, who was adamant that the gun in the possession of the two men was not the murder weapon. Hamilton was the same man who had testified so ignominiously in the Charles Stielow trial, and shockingly enough, was still allowed into a courtroom.

For the prosecution, Charles Van Amburgh had reexamined the evidence, using new technology that enlarged photographs for better viewing. He offered photos of the fatal bullets and those known to have been fired from Sacco’s revolver, finding them to be identical. However, he was unprepared for the cunning Hamilton.

The self-styled expert brought in Sacco’s .32 and two new Colt revolvers. There in court, he disassembled them all and then tried to use one of the new barrels to replace the one from Sacco’s gun. Judge Webster Thayer saw what he was doing and demanded he return the original barrel for Sacco’s gun. Thayer then denied the motion for another trial. Hamilton had blown it, both for the defense and for himself.

Eventually, a committee was appointed to review the case, due to the persistent controversy and accusations of a miscarriage of justice. They contacted Calvin Goddard at the Bureau of Forensic Ballistics. In the presence of one of the defense experts, Augustus Gill, he fired a bullet from Sacco’s gun into a wad of cotton and then put the ejected casing on the comparison microscope next to casings found at the scene. He looked at them carefully. The first two casings proved to be no match, but the third one was. Even Gill agreed that these two bullets had been fired from the same gun. The second original defense expert (not Hamilton but Burns) also concurred, and that clinched the case. That same year, Sacco and Vanzetti went to the electric chair. Vanzetti still claimed he was innocent, while Sacco declared, “Long live anarchy!” (Subsequent investigations with better technology in 1961 and 1983 both supported Goddard’s findings.)

EMPHASIS ON EVIDENCE

While all of this was going on in Massachusetts, events of note occurred in other places. In 1921, Attorney General Harry Daugherty transferred the fingerprint files from Leavenworth prison to a location in Washington, D.C., which became a central fingerprint database for the entire country. In 1924, Congress established a national depository of fingerprint records at the FBI, which took custody of over 800,000 fingerprint files from various prisons.

In Australia, also in 1921, Charles Taylor, a food analyst working for the government, had shown a flare for solving mysteries with microscopic analysis. Early one morning, the body of a nude female adolescent turned up in an alley, the victim of a sexual assault. It appeared that she had been killed elsewhere and then placed in the alley, and oddly, she had been thoroughly bathed. A man from the neighborhood indicated that the owner of the wine shop, Colin Ross, had been pacing along the street the night before. When Ross was questioned, he said he had seen the girl and was able to describe everything she had been wearing. He knew her as Alma Tirtschke. Other people recalled that she had been inside the wine shop.

Detectives asked Ross to turn over two blankets, which were sent for analysis. Charles Taylor went over them with a magnifying lens, and on one he found twenty-one strands of reddish hair the same color as Tirtschke’s; several were long enough to have come only from a female. He established with a microscope that the hair was human—in contrast to animal hair—and that it was similar in consistency and structure to the dead girl’s hair but unlike that of other redheads that the suspect said he’d been with. In addition to a witness who claimed that Ross had confessed the crime to her, Ross did not have a chance. The case was a first in Australia for microscopic evidence in a criminal investigation and the first conviction based largely on forensic evidence.

Back in America, another fingerprint case grabbed headlines. It was a brisk Saturday morning, September 16, 1922. Around 10
A
.
M
., two teenagers turned onto De Russey’s Lane in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and spotted two people lying dead next to a crab apple tree. The police arrived to find that the male victim had been shot once in the head and the female three times. The feet of both were pointing toward the crab apple tree, and the woman’s head rested on the man’s right arm, as if posed. Her left hand rested on the man’s right knee, and a brown silk scarf, soaked in blood and covered in maggots, wrapped around her throat. The man’s right hand extended partly under the dead woman’s shoulder and neck, and their clothes were perfectly in order. A .32-caliber cartridge case lay near the bodies, as well as a two-foot piece of iron pipe. Scattered pieces of torn paper, which turned out to be letters and cards, lay between them, along with a small card leaning against the heel of the man’s left shoe. A man’s wallet identified the male victim as Edward Wheeler Hall, forty-one, pastor of a local Episcopal church.

Shortly, Albert J. Cardinal of the New Brunswick
Daily Home News
arrived and picked up the card at the foot of the male corpse. It was Hall’s business card. Spectators stripped the crab apple tree of its bark for souvenirs and the card was passed from hand to hand. No one thought to handle it carefully or preserve it as evidence.

The estimated time of death for both victims was some thirty-six hours earlier. In the morgue, it was determined that the woman’s throat had been cut from ear to ear. When people who knew Hall were questioned, it was clear that Hall had been involved in a rather public affair for the past four years with Eleanor R. Mills, thirty-four, a choir singer and wife to James Mills, a school janitor. The reverend was married to Frances Stevens, a wealthy woman seven years his senior. The obvious chief suspects were the spouses of both.

Frances Stevens claimed that she did not know of the affair, although on the night of the murder, Hall had said he was going to visit Mills to see about a medical bill. He was gone two hours when Frances’s fifty-year-old brother Willie, who had a mental deficit that prevented him from living on his own, came out of his room to say goodnight. Frances then went to bed. At two-thirty
A.M.
, she woke and went to the church in search of her missing husband, accompanied by Willie. The church was dark. In the morning, Frances called the police anonymously and learned that no casualties had been reported. She heard about the double homicide from a reporter and suggested that robbery was the motive, since Hall’s gold watch was missing.

James Mills claimed ignorance of the affair as well and also believed robbery had been the motive. He said that his wife had gone out that night and at ten-thirty, he had gone to the church to look for her. She was not there, so he went home and went to bed. The next morning, without reporting his wife as missing, he went to work. At 8:30
A
.
M
., he went to the church and encountered Mrs. Hall, who mentioned that her husband had not come home the night before. He claimed that he asked her whether she thought that they had eloped and she replied, “God knows. I think they are dead and can’t come home.”

Two other suspects were the brothers of Mrs. Hall: William Stevens, known as Willie, was impulsive, explosive, and somewhat reckless. He admitted to owning a .32-caliber revolver, which he had not shot in over ten years. The older brother, Henry Stevens, fifty-two, was a retired exhibition marksman. He lived fifty miles away and claimed to have been out fishing when the murders took place.

Soon after, two bloodstained handkerchiefs were turned in to the police. One had no identifying marks, but the other was a woman’s handkerchief, initialed in one corner with the letter
S.
Henry Stevens admitted it was his. Another discovery was a package of love letters from Hall to Eleanor, and Hall’s diary. Mills sold them for $500 to the New York
American.

Then Jane Gibson, the “Pig Woman,” came forward to say what she had seen. She lived in a converted barn near De Russey’s Lane and raised hogs. She told police that her dogs were barking around nine o’clock that Thursday night and she had seen a man in her cornfield, so she mounted her mule and went after him. She spotted four figures near a crab apple tree—two men and two women. Then she heard a sharp report and one of the figures fell to the ground. A woman screamed, “Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!”

Gibson turned her mule away, heard a volley of shots, and saw another person slump to the ground. Then she heard a woman shout, “Henry!” She had also seen an open touring car parked on Easton Avenue, close to the crime scene, and the Halls owned such a car. A car coming into the lane behind her illuminated the people and she saw a woman in a long gray coat, and a man with a dark mustache and bushy hair walking together toward the abandoned farm. A little later, she said she heard a woman ask, “How do you explain these notes?” She also said she had seen a woman run away after the man was shot and the other two caught her and dragged her back, shooting her three times. Some time later, Jane went back to fetch a moccasin she had lost, and saw a big woman with white hair weeping over one body. Yet several people contradicted her, claimed she was a liar, and generally discredited her.

Four years went by with no breaks in the case until July 3, 1926, when Arthur S. Riehl, who had married Louise Geist, the maid who had worked for the Hall family, filed for annulment. He discovered that she had withheld information: She had told Mrs. Hall on September 14 that Hall had plans to elope with Mrs. Mills. She went with Mrs. Hall and Willie Stevens that night, driven by the chauffeur, and received $5,000 for keeping quiet about what she knew. Louise insisted that her estranged husband’s tale was a pack of lies.

On July 28, warrants went out for the arrest of Mrs. Hall. She hired Robert McCarter, a well-known trial lawyer, to represent her, and he teamed up with Clarence E. Case as assistant chief defense counsel. The state appointed state senator Alexander Simpson as prosecutor. He interviewed Jane Gibson and announced his intention to proceed. Shortly thereafter James Mills admitted that he had indeed known about the affair and had threatened divorce.

Arrest warrants were then issued for Willie Stevens and Henry Carpender, cousin to Mrs. Stevens, who lived close by. Simpson contended that Mrs. Hall had been caught up in a murder, but did not commit it. The grand jury indicted Mrs. Hall, her two brothers, and Henry Carpender, and they were arraigned. Each pleaded not guilty.

The trial for Frances Stevens and her two brothers for the murder of Eleanor Mills was scheduled for early November. Both bodies were exhumed and new autopsies performed, which turned up evidence that Eleanor Mills’s tongue and larynx had been cut out. That got the media’s attention and the trial in Somerville, New Jersey, attracted reporters from all over. The evidence included Willie’s fingerprint on the calling card found at Hall’s feet, Mrs. Hall’s admitted anonymous call to the police to inquire about “casualities,” a brown coat of hers that had been dyed black after the murders (she claimed to have worn a gray one), and the fact that one of her private detectives was said to have tried to bribe a key witness.

Many witnesses came and went, quite often discredited. Three fingerprint experts testified that the left index fingerprint of Willie Stevens was on the calling card found at the scene. The most impressive witness was Joseph Faurot from New York City’s police department, the detective who had assisted so ably on the Stielow investigation. He offered transparencies of Willie’s fingerprint to compare to the print on the card, claiming there was no doubt that Willie had touched the card.

But his testimony was interrupted by news of the failing state of the Pig Woman. Her physician said her blood pressure and rising temperature would make courtroom appearances detrimental to her health, so the trial was adjourned for a few days.

The main piece of physical evidence, the calling card with the print, came under much fire, because the card had been exposed to the elements for thirty-six hours, had been passed from hand to hand, and had not been carefully handled as evidence. The defense attorney called it a fraud, without explaining why Willie’s print was on it.

Then the Pig Woman was carried into the courtroom on a stretcher, with her mother shouting from the front row, “She is a liar! Liar, liar, liar!” Nevertheless, Gibson told her story—yet a third version—claiming that Mrs. Hall, Willie Stevens, and Henry Stevens were there on De Russey’s Lane that night. (She seemed to have forgotten that in her earlier statements, she had seen only two people out there with the victims.) She had seen Henry Stevens and another man wrestling with a gun when it went off. Then she told how Mrs. Hall’s detective had warned her to keep her mouth shut.

When the defense came on, they presented enough witnesses to make Henry Stevens’s alibi credible. Since Gibson had heard the name
Henry
, and Stevens was a marksman and a relative, he had been railroaded. Also, Henry Carpender was known to relatives as Harry, so Mrs. Hall would not have called out “Henry” to address him. With Henry pretty much cleared, Willie was next. He surprised most of the audience by holding his own with the prosecutor.