Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (20 page)

Then it came out that the first time Jane Gibson had seen the defendants, she was not able to identify them. A farmer, George Sipel, claimed that Gibson had offered him money to say he had seen her that night on De Russey’s Lane, as well as two men and two women by the cars parked there. Thus, this star witness lost her credibility.

Mrs. Hall was next on the stand. Simpson went after her for the statements she had made to James Mills that she believed the two missing spouses to be dead. She said it had seemed obvious when they did not return home by that time. Simpson also wondered why she had not mentioned her nocturnal trip to the church and to Mrs. Mills’s house until after a night watchman had reported seeing her enter her house, but he could not turn this into a telling issue.

By the time all was said and done, 157 people had taken the witness stand in this record-breaking trial, and even the
New York Times
had devoted ninety front-page articles to it. Those who believed in fingerprint evidence were certain that Willie was guilty, and along with him his sister. Yet American juries were not yet that impressed with such evidence. The jury took three separate votes before they reached a verdict, acquitting all three defendants.

No one else was ever accused of these crimes, although other suspects have been considered. No murder weapon was ever found, and the alleged handkerchief evidence led nowhere.

SHERLOCK’S MANY FACES

The next “Sherlock Holmes” was a chemist who proved his worth on a kidnapping case. On the night of August 2, 1921, Father Patrick Heslin disappeared from his home in Colma, California, in the company of a stranger who had indicated an urgent need of the priest. Soon a letter sent from San Francisco demanded a ransom of $6,500 for Heslin’s safe return. The correspondent indicated that the pastor had been beaten unconscious and was dying, and described an elaborate arrangement that involved releasing chemicals to kill the priest when a candle burned out. The kidnapper promised another letter, but it failed to arrive. Fearing the worst, local police contacted Dr. Edward O. Heinrich.

As a professor of criminology at the University of California at Berkeley, Heinrich was versed in many areas of forensic science and had consulted in a number of cases that seemed to have come to dead ends, solving them with painstaking criminalistic analysis. He had also worked with August Vollmer, a police chief who had encouraged Sergeant John Larson to devise a machine that would measure deception via raised heart rhythms and systolic blood pressure. They would put it to the test in this case.

Heinrich arrived in Colma to study the ransom letter. He believed, from the decorative style, that the writer was in some trade, such as a baker. The police were skeptical, but Heinrich stood by his opinion. Still, it didn’t offer much in the way of leads, so a considerable reward was posted. A week passed and a lanky Texan named William Hightower entered the archbishop’s office to say that he’d heard from an anonymous source that Father Heslin was dead and buried. He’d found the spot while digging for bootleg liquor, and he was interested in the reward. Since Hightower was a baker, he became an immediate suspect. He dug himself in deeper when he led detectives to the burial spot, even indicating which end of the grave was the foot, and they unearthed the corpse; Heslin had been beaten over the head and shot twice.

Larson brought his lie detector to use on Hightower, who agreed to be hooked up. As he answered questions, sticking to his original absurd story, it was clear that he was lying. Larson believed that Hightower had murdered the priest.

Hightower’s home was searched, and detectives found a canvas tent imprinted with the word
Tuberculosis.
Also, a jackknife removed from Hightower’s pocket had microscopic shreds of white cotton, like that of a cord wrapped around a tent peg and piece of wood found with the body, as well as grains of sand similar to sand from the burial site. The same sand was also in the seams of the tent. Heinrich compared the handwriting on the tent to that in the ransom note and found them to have originated from the same source; they also matched other notes that Hightower had penned. The part of the note that was typed had been done on Hightower’s typewriter. Heinrich surmised that Hightower had wrapped the body in the tent and used the dreaded disease label to keep anyone from looking inside. With this collection of evidence, Hightower was convicted of murder.

Then on October 12, 1923, the number 13 train was blown up inside a tunnel in Siskiyou, Oregon, and four men were killed. Daniel O’Connell, chief of the Southern Pacific police, arrived to investigate. He learned that the fatalities were the result of a botched robbery by three masked men. They had shot the engineer, fireman, and brakeman, while leaving the mail clerk to burn alive in the exploded car. Investigators believed there were no productive leads from a battery linked to a detonating device, a pair of shoes, and a pair of greasy denim overalls found at the scene, but they arrested a mechanic, holding him on the most fragile circumstantial evidence: He might have provided the battery and he wore greasy overalls.

Heinrich was called in for a consultation and he examined the detonating device and the overalls from the scene. From these, he deduced that the clothing had been worn by a left-handed lumberjack who worked in the Pacific Northwest, was white, between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five, less than five-foot-ten and weighed around 165 pounds. He also had small feet and light brown hair. Fingernail clippings indicated he was fastidious. This description did not match the suspect.

To explain how he had arrived at the profile, Heinrich pointed out that the overalls were stained with pitch from fir trees, and their size, with the shoes, had provided the suspect’s height and approximate weight. Wood chips in the right pocket indicated the position he took when cutting a tree; the overalls buttoned on the left, so he was left-handed; and hair caught on the overall button indicated his race, age, and hair color. Buried deep inside the bib pocket, overlooked by everyone else, was a receipt for registered mail. A magnifying lens offered a number, which led to a letter that implicated three D’Autremont brothers from Eugene, missing since the incident, and one of whom was a left-handed lumberjack the right size and age. Evidence from their personal effects matched evidence on the overalls, and handwriting on a gun receipt also confirmed their association with the crime. After a long manhunt, one brother was convicted while the other two confessed.

Heinrich also proved that Charles Schwartz, a man suspected to have burned in a laboratory explosion in 1925, was not the deceased; instead, a look-alike had been murdered and substituted in a staged death. He used an x-ray to indicate that the victim had been bludgeoned to death, but a missing molar that matched dental records contradicted Heinrich and affirmed that the victim was Schwartz. When Heinrich sought photographs of Schwartz, his widow reported that someone had entered her home and stolen them all. But then she found one that had been left at a photo studio, which she delivered. Heinrich noted that the corpse’s earlobe, still intact despite the fire, was the wrong shape to be Schwartz’s, and upon closer inspection, he realized that the missing tooth that identified Schwartz had in fact been yanked out recently and rather violently. The eyes, too, had been gouged out rather than burned in the fire, and chemical tests indicated that the fingertips had been burned with acid. To Heinrich, this was further evidence of a clever con artist who had thought of all the angles.

It turned out that Schwartz was in fact a long-time confidence man, living off his wife’s money and lying about practically everything. He had befriended a missionary who resembled him, then killed the man, set an explosion in his laboratory to burn the body, and fled. Investigators lured him out of hiding by hinting in the papers that his wife had received a large insurance payment, but when he sensed the police closing in, he shot himself.

One other California-based case for Heinrich introduced a new type of evidence. John McCarthy, foreman for the Vallejo Street Department, entered his home on December 19, 1925, where he was shot in the chest. Before he died, he said, “I fired Colwell.” The police believed he was referring to Martin Colwell, fifty-nine, a local ruffian with a criminal history. McCarthy had dismissed him from a street labor gang and during his drunken binges he’d been overheard making threats against McCarthy. Colwell was arrested with a .38 revolver in his pocket, while a .38 bullet that had passed through McCarthy was recovered in his home. One chamber in Colwell’s gun was empty and he had three more bullets on his person. A box of ammunition found in his home was missing four, but Colwell said he’d been drunk at the time of the incident.

The gun and bullets were sent to Heinrich. He test-fired one of Colwell’s bullets, several from his ammunition box, and others from an unrelated batch that were similar in caliber. Examining the bullets under a microscope, along with the bullet that had killed McCarthy, Heinrich found convincing similarities that led him to believe that Colwell had fired the bullet that killed McCarthy. However, prosecutors were concerned that this would prove insufficient in court, so Heinrich produced pictures from a stereoscopic microscope that showed the tiny scratches from the gun on the bullets in a side-by-side comparison, as a single three-dimensional image. He experimented over and over until he was able to click his two cameras simultaneously to produce the image. No court officer had ever before seen such an image, where the photographs of two different bullets seemed to perfectly merge. Heinrich called this a bullet fingerprint, and it was clearly a precedent in an American court. Yet the defense had a strong witness as well and despite the impressive photos that proved the bullets had come from the same gun, the jury hung.

The case went back to trial in just over a month, and the jury members asked to look into the microscope to see for themselves what Heinrich had observed. He arranged for a demonstration, allowing each member to look through the lenses. They then asked Heinrich to reshoot the photograph for them. He accepted the challenge and had a darkroom set up near the courtroom. He managed to replicate his feat and the jurors were finally convinced. They sent Colwell to prison for life. Heinrich’s approach inspired refinement of the equipment so that future scientists could offer similar results.

By this time, August Vollmer had founded a crime lab at Berkeley and persuaded the University of California to offer courses in criminal justice. He became known as the “father of modern policing,” encouraging innovations and requiring police officers to get college degrees.

LIES AND SCIENCE

Throughout human history, it’s been a common assumption that liars can be unmasked by their own bodily changes during deception, such as agitation, a flushed face, and decreased salivation. To take advantage of this evidence and to make lie detection scientific, in 1917 psychologist William M. Marston invented a measuring device. He claimed to be able to detect verbal deception through an increase in systolic blood pressure. It caught the attention of the FBI and the Department of War, who thought the device might be useful for the interrogation of prisoners of war. But to Marston’s chagrin, in 1923, his invention inspired a far-reaching court decision in
Frye
v.
United States
that not only became the benchmark for the admissibility of scientific evidence but also proved to be bad news for the polygraph’s future.

The defendant, James T. Frye, was convicted of murder, and he appealed on the basis that the court had not allowed an examiner to testify about the results of the “systolic blood pressure deception test,” which he had passed. The federal circuit court examined the case and upheld the conviction, articulating the “
Frye
Test.” The court decided that “just when a scientific principle or discovery crosses the line between the experimental and demonstrable is difficult to define. Somewhere in this twilight zone, the evidential force of the principle must be recognized, and while courts will go a long way in admitting expert testimony deduced from a well-recognized scientific principle or discovery, the thing from which the deduction is made must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs.”

Novel evidence, such as this device, which had not yet gained recognition among the relevant professional community, was thus excluded in court until a pool of experts could prove its value. At that time, the polygraph was new and had not gone through objective testing. Experts had no ground for claiming its reliability or validity, even though the test was being utilized.

Marston would continue to work on his invention, later introducing it in December 1941 through the character of Wonder Woman (through whom he also hoped to persuade young women to see how femininity could also be strong). This character utilized both a lie detector device and a “truth” lasso.

Even as Marston’s device was blocked from the courtroom, another recruit to the Berkeley police, Leonarde Keeler, also built a portable lie detector. His first case involved a request to exonerate a co-ed accused of stealing and lying about the crime. He then tested everyone else in the sorority house and identified the thief as the house mother. She confessed.

To the systolic blood pressure measurement, Keeler added a way to also measure the skin’s resistance to electricity, because during deception it was believed that resistance levels drop. Keeler continued to refine his device, hoping for a case to bring it positive publicity.

GREATER STAKES

During World War I, John Edgar Hoover, a Department of Justice lawyer, had been appointed assistant director for the Bureau of Investigation. After a shake-up in that institution in 1924 based on a scandal, Hoover took over as acting director. At that time, there were over four hundred special agents manning nine field offices around the country. Hoover had a vision for an elite force of professionals, so under his leadership, the department became more disciplined and was eventually renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or the FBI.