Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (21 page)

During the same year that Hoover rose to power, forensic evidence in the form of questioned document examination was highlighted in a shocking case in Chicago. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb showed the nation that it was not just thugs or petty offenders who committed crimes. They were two rich kids, arrogant and vile, who’d decided to commit the perfect murder just to prove that they could.

Leopold was enamored of the idea espoused by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that no one can dictate morality to a superior man. Nietzsche proposed the idea of the
Übermensch
who made and lived by his own rules. Leopold persuaded Loeb that as intelligent young men with clever minds, they were among these exceptional beings, but they had to prove it with an act that would affront common morality. They started with cheating friends out of their money in card games, shoplifting, and committing arson and burglary—acts that thrilled them. But they weren’t thrilled about the lack of press coverage, so they decided they had to do something much more dramatic. They came up with a plan to murder someone. Since they were smart, they believed they would get away with it and then be able to gloat secretly as the police ran around trying to solve the crime. Just the thought of this scenario made them laugh. They should have taken a cue from Raskolnikov’s fate in
Crime and Punishment
: They weren’t the first to erroneously believe in their own superiority.

On May 21, they went to select their victim, trolling around an exclusive boys’ school. Along came fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks, so they offered him a ride. He climbed in the car and within a block, one of them bludgeoned him with a chisel to knock the boy senseless, and then shoved a rag into his mouth to smother him to death. Afterward they drove some distance away so they could strip him and pour acid on his face and genitals to prevent people from identifying him. Finally they tossed the naked and mutilated body into a culvert where Leopold often went birding, and then returned home to compose a ransom note to Franks’s parents for $10,000. This was part of the game.

But the body was discovered the following day, before the boys were ready. Nearby, investigators picked up a pair of discarded glasses. Since they had a set of unique hinges, the glasses were traced to a local optometrist, who turned over his records. It wasn’t long before the police came to Leopold’s door, but he claimed he’d lost the glasses while birding in that area. While this lie set up a block, it was not the end of the investigation, mostly because the boys badly wanted people to know what they had done. It was some trick, taking credit but not getting caught. Loeb, who had also been questioned because Leopold gave his name as an alibi witness, offered theories to friends and reporters about the crime, suggesting that Franks was a perfect victim.

The police looked into the backgrounds of both young men, deducing that whoever wrote the ransom note was educated, and eventually they found samples of Leopold’s typing, which matched the note. They did not find the portable typewriter in his possession (the killers had been smart enough to discard it), but when they caught the two men in a lie, it wasn’t long before detectives used this to trigger a confession, getting each to turn on the other. The press reported this kidnap/murder for a thrill as being unique in the annals of American crime.

A major news organization tried to entice the famous Austrian psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, to travel to Chicago to offer his opinion, but he showed no interest. The judge listened to celebrity defense attorney Clarence Darrow list the “mitigating” factors, which failed to move him, but he was disinclined to sentence such young men to die, so he responded to Darrow’s argument against the death penalty and gave both culprits life in prison. It’s likely they discovered there that they weren’t so superior after all.

MEASUREMENTS AND COMPARISONS

Even in Egypt, practiced observation made a contribution. The Scottish pathologist Sir Sydney Smith, who recognized the careful approach of Joseph Bell to medical diagnosis, served as the medicolegal advisor to the Egyptian government. During the early 1920s, a body was found, shot in the head and lying in the desert sand. Smith went out to observe the investigation. There were no clear tracks, but Smith witnessed how Bedoin trackers with refined visual skills had been enlisted to assist. They saw tracks and were able to discern that a man who came there had worn sandals, knelt where a rifle cartridge was found, and walked up to the body. Then he’d removed his sandals and run away barefoot. At a certain point, he had come to a car, and now there were four sets of tracks of men wearing boots. These led to an encampment of six men. Many different men were marched across an area of sand to compare their footprints, and the Bedoins identified a man who turned out to own a gun that was matched to a discarded cartridge casing. He also had a motive: The dead man had been having a dishonorable affair with his sister.

Forensic medicine had long had to deal with the size and nature of bullet wounds, specifically to determine whether someone had been shot accidentally, homicidally, or by his own hand. Exit wounds had to be distinguished from entrance wounds, and distances had to be measured between a weapon and a wound. Unburned particles of powder that move through the gun barrel toward a person leave certain telltale effects on skin and clothing, as do gases that penetrate the wound. Pathologists had these formulas nearly worked out when the advent of smokeless powder during World War I forced changes in the analyses. Despite the attempt to approach wound analysis with scientific precision, and the provision of laboratories with comparison microscopes and other devices that offered new technology, certain cases brought personalities together that defied the ability to remain detached. One such case in 1926 was the shooting death of Bertha Merrett.

John Donald Merrett lived with his mother, Bertha, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and on the sly he was stealing from her accounts. On March 17, he reported to a woman who worked as a maid in his home, Rita Sutherland, that his mother had just shot herself. (By some accounts, Rita actually found Mrs. Merrett.) Bertha was lying on the floor of the library with a wound to her head, but she was still alive. Taken immediately to the hospital, she was treated. In the meantime, Donald went out with his girlfriend, checking only to see if his mother was dead. Rita thought it strange that Mrs. Merrett had just been writing a letter and would then have shot herself. Donald told her it was due to “money worries.”

Bertha managed to survive for a few days, and during this time she affirmed to a friend that she had heard a loud noise near her head and her son had been standing close by while she was signing papers, yet no one in authority questioned her for details. She was a “suicide case,” which was illegal, so whatever she said was discounted as the product of a deranged or disoriented mind. Once she died two weeks later, her testimony was lost. But the son’s behavior afterward, and the fact that he had inherited his mother’s estate, alerted officials to the possibility that Bertha Merrett had been murdered. While Dr. Henry Littlejohn, who performed the autopsy, found that the entry wound and trajectory path of the bullet were consistent with suicide, other physicians were not convinced. Still, no one had evidence of foul play, so the case appeared to be closed.

Littlejohn had seen five hundred cases of suicide by shooting, so he had the experience to make a call, but he thought the circumstances, along with reports he heard about Donald, were suspicious. In addition, he’d found no powder burns under the skin, which was unusual for a close shot. He decided to discuss the matter with his former student, Sydney Smith, who had published
Textbook in Forensic Medicine
the year before. In it, Smith had stated that ballistics was a branch of forensic medicine, not something to be left in the hands of gunsmiths. Smith had done numerous experiments that measured shooting range and had observed under different conditions how bullets enter skin. In this case, he advocated using a suspect weapon and its ammunition to make comparison shots under conditions as close as possible to the original crime. Each weapon, he said, produced a characteristic pattern.

Smith asked Littlejohn to get the Spanish pistol used in the Merrett murder, along with its cartridges, and urged him to make some comparison shots from various distances. He could then examine these in the context of the powder marks left on the skin. Littlejohn fired the pistol at white cards from several different, carefully measured, distances. He then washed the sheets of paper, in case the doctors attending Mrs. Merrett had done so with her, and found that with close-range fire some residue stubbornly remained. There had been none on the victim.

Another doctor, John Glaister, assisted, and he and Littlejohn repeated the experiments with skin taken from an amputated human leg. When the Spanish gun was shot at close range, no amount of wiping would remove the powder burns. It was clear evidence that the gun had not been held close to the victim’s head, and thus the death should not have been ruled a suicide.

Yet the defense attorney had cunningly engaged the service of celebrity expert Dr. Bernard Spilsbury, who had consulted with Robert Churchill, a gunsmith and impressive international ballistics expert. Spilsbury launched into a long explanation in defense of the claim for suicide. Yet rather than use the suspect pistol to conduct their tests, they had used one of similar caliber, concluding that any residue left on the victim from her self-shooting could easily have been wiped off at the hospital. Churchill explained the awkward trajectory path behind the ear as the female tendency to look away from a gun. Spilsbury said that he’d conducted a second set of tests using the Spanish pistol, but he’d substituted different ammunition and had fired at only the white cards. Even so, he got much more blackening with the original gun, which suggested that Littlejohn’s experiments using the right ammunition and original gun had more validity. Still, he didn’t change his opinion and Spilsbury’s presence alone was persuasive, as he’d become one of history’s first true celebrity expert witnesses. That meant his involvement could potentially add more weight to a case than it deserved.

The jury found that the case against Merrett was not proven, so while he had to serve time for a forgery conviction, he was released within a year. Nevertheless, twenty-five years later, he confessed to the murder, vindicating Littlejohn’s claim that comparison tests done with a suspect weapon were the best means for making such determinations. Not only that, he is likely the person who killed two other people before finally taking his own life.

Another British ballistics case in Essex, England, involved George Gutteridge, a police officer, who was shot four times on September 27, 1928, and left on the road. Then human blood was found on a stolen car abandoned in London, and a cartridge case was located inside. Frederick Guy Browne, an ex-convict who operated a garage, was arrested. The police searched him and found twelve Webley revolver cartridges and a Webley revolver, which was loaded with ammunition that matched the discarded cartridge from the abandoned car. Browne had an association with William Henry Kennedy, another ex-con, who was arrested in a different crime and who attested to being with Browne when Browne shot Gutteridge as he attempted to apprehend them in the stolen car.

The imprint on the breech shield of the cartridge was compared against the revolver, offering a good match, but investigators decided to firm up the evidence. They microscopically examined around thirteen thousand revolvers to ensure that no other revolver had identical breech marks, and they found none. In addition, the ammunition in the revolver was a rare type, matching the bullets removed from the body, and the black powder discharge had a characteristic pattern that was also found on the body. The jury that heard this evidence convicted both men and they were hanged.

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre on a snowy February 14, 1929, led to the opening of the first private scientific crime detection laboratory in America. Seven men from George “Bugs” Moran’s gang were waiting that morning around 10:30
A.M.
in a redbrick warehouse for the S-M-C Cartage Company on Chicago’s North Side. Three men in police uniforms and two dressed as civilians arrived in a police car and went inside. Moran happened along just then, late for the meeting, but when he spotted the police, he fled. It had been a set-up, and he suspected rival gangster Al Capone.

Area residents heard the blast of machine guns for several minutes, and then in the silence a dog howled. The police drove off and a few brave souls ventured into the building to see what had happened. They found seven bullet-ridden corpses on the warehouse floor, all shot in the back.

The uniforms made people believe that the police had staged this outright massacre against the unarmed men, and the incident became a scandal. Since the shooters had left behind seventy cartridge casings, allowing the weapons to be identified as .45-caliber Thompson submachine guns, it seemed possible to try to find the right weapons. Calvin Goddard arrived from New York as an independent investigator and fired each of the eight machine guns owned by the Chicago police. He then compared the results to evidence collected at the scene. No casings matched. That result was proof that a group of men had impersonated police officers to commit the murders. But it was difficult to discover who it was, and ten months passed before the police solved the crime.

A raid on the home of one of Capone’s hit men produced two machine guns, which were sent to Goddard. He test-fired them and proved with microscopic analysis they were the weapons used in the warehouse bloodbath. That sent at least one of the St. Valentine’s Day killers to prison and proved that the incident was part of a gang war between Capone and Moran. Evidently the men had been lured there to meet a nonexistent truck full of hijacked whiskey.

Goddard’s careful work inspired two businessmen who had been on the coroner’s jury to persuade him to run a private crime lab associated with Northwestern University in Chicago. He accepted, bringing ballistics, fingerprinting, blood analysis, and trace evidence under one roof. Luke May was invited to be a participant as well. This lab became a prototype for others around the country. When the FBI set up its own Criminological Laboratory in 1932, the agents consulted with Goddard.