Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (30 page)

Bass transported the remains he had back to his anthropology lab at the university. There he attempted to boil the flesh from the bones, but it did not smell like what he was used to from bodies discovered in the wilderness. The clothing, too, did not fit the scheme of a man recently deceased and Bass soon realized from the age of the material and its fashion that he had made a rather dramatic mistake: The corpse was that of Colonel Shy himself and he had been dead and buried some 113 years. Bass had been correct about the age estimate—Shy had died at the age of twenty-six—but not about the time since death. Because Shy’s body had been embalmed with arsenic, boiling it had produced the odd odor. He then heard what the police had found inside the coffin: a jawbone, several bone fragments, and a full set of teeth. Assembled, this collection of gruesome items proved to be the missing head. The man’s remains had seemed recent because he’d been well-preserved in the cast-iron coffin. Apparently, vandals seeking Civil Wear artifacts had disturbed the grave, so the remains, exposed to the air, had begun to decompose more rapidly.

Bass, who had begun his professional work for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., cataloging the bones of Native Americans, knew that something had to be done to provide a scientific basis for estimating time since death from human remains. He requested a three-acre piece of land from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville so that he could study decomposing human bodies. He knew that if professionals in this field were to learn about decomposition rates, they’d have to find a way to study them quite rigorously in various actual conditions under measured controls. Thus, in 1980 near the university, he broke ground for the project, which he called the Anthropology Research Facility. Law enforcement eventually renamed it the Body Farm.

In 1981, Bass laid out the first body, an unclaimed cadaver. He meticulously documented the conditions for its decomposition, and as he acquired more specimens, he placed them in other contexts: submerged in water, buried in earth, left inside buildings, locked in the trunks of cars. As they decomposed, they provided information about what happens to corpses under different conditions. From insect analysis to the nuances in odor at different points during the death process to death-related bacteriology, there seemed no end to the types of experiments that could be done to assist law enforcement. The researchers expanded in number and specialization, and the Body Farm became a center for training and consultation in difficult cases, including for the FBI.

But the most dramatic forensic discovery was just on the horizon, growing out of the work done in molecular biology over the past century.

TWELVE

CODE SECRETS

In 1980, Dr. Ray White, a biologist working at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Utah, devised an easier way to find genes with a technique that was called restricted fragment length polymorphism (RFLP). He was able to use a restriction enzyme to cut repeated patterns of DNA and determine how often they showed up in the same pattern. In certain spots, this sequence varied from person to person, and the segments were used as markers for specific genes. Soon, this technology would have a new application, similar to another one about to be developed.

In Mendocino, California, Kary Mullis was troubled by his work with sickle cell anemia and the difficulty he’d experienced in using the small amounts of DNA typically available. In a flash of inspiration, he envisioned the ability to select specific segments of the DNA molecule and clone or replicate them millions of times until there was enough to work with. Tests could then be applied to the copies. The tools were already available for accomplishing it, so he set out to bring the idea into practical reality, calling it polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. Scientists quickly applied it in the field of medicine, but no one just then thought about its possibilities for crime investigation.

During this time in the field of document examination, a forgery succeeded in embarrassing a number of handwriting professionals, yet when the fraud was exposed, the incident ultimately proved a triumph for other types of examiners in this field. A German publishing company, Gruner & Jahr, was offered a collection of sixty handwritten notebooks—reportedly the lost diaries of Adolf Hitler, removed from Berlin after World War II on board an airplane, which had crashed. Nazi document collector Konrad Kujau said that farmers had discovered them, and the notebooks went through several hands until he acquired them via a general in East Germany. Kujau had brought them to journalist Gerd Heidemann, who was on the staff of
Stern
, a newspaper owned by Gruner & Jahr. He acted as Kujau’s agent and the publisher agreed to pay $2.3 million for the lot, including a heretofore undiscovered third volume of Hitler’s two-volume book,
Mein Kampf
. Experts read them and concluded that Hitler had been oblivious to “the final solution,” used to exterminate millions of people. It seemed that the history books would have to be significantly revised.

Stern
began serializing the documents, selling publication rights to
Newsweek
in America and to the London
Times
. It was the owner of the
Times
, after having serious doubts, who insisted that tests be performed to establish the authenticity of the diaries, but even after the initial round of testing, the answer was still unclear.

Three experts accepted the task of comparing the black notebooks with their special seals against samples of handwriting affirmed as Hitler’s: Max Frei-Sultzer, the former head of the forensic science department for the police in Zurich, Switzerland; Ordway Hilton, a specialist in document verification; and the third man worked with the German police. All agreed that the same person had written all of the texts, and this author’s handwriting was consistent with that in the comparison samples. They stated that if the exemplars were indeed Hitler’s, then the diaries appeared to be authentic.

However, the handwriting analysis was not the only field of expertise applied to the documents. Forensics tests on the paper and ink proved something else altogether. Paper is classified via its composite materials, differing according to specific additives, the presence or absence of watermarks, and its surface treatments. Specialists can determine the date when a particular type of paper was introduced, based on what was known about paper production from different eras and cultures. They can also analyze ink for its specific components with microspectrophotometry or thin-layer chromatography, to determine whether it’s made from iron salts, carbon particles, or synthetic dyes, and what the various additives might be. From an extensive database kept at the U. S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), examiners can provide a probable origination.

The West German police put the paper under ultraviolet light and subjected it to other tests, finding a component additive in use only since 1954—after Hitler had died. The threads attaching the seals contained material manufactured after the war, and the ink used had not been available at the time the diaries were purportedly written. One test that involved the evaporation of chloride proved that the documents were quite recent.

In addition, content analysis undertaken by historians revealed glaring mistakes, apparently overlooked by the original analysts in the attempt to keep the diaries secret until publication. One distinguished historian of Hitler’s regime, Hugh Trevor-Roper, had even vouched for their authenticity. But clearly he’d been mistaken.

At no point during all of this processing had anyone thought to research Kujau’s background, and if they had, the publisher might not have been so eager to purchase the documents. As a child, Kujau had sold forged autographs of famous politicians for pocket change. Later he’d manufactured so-called Nazi mementos, including an introduction to a sequel to
Mein Kampf
. He had not named the person from whom he’d purchased the documents, and as it turned out, he had forged the samples the experts had used as comparison exemplars of Hitler’s handwriting—obviously quite successfully. This revelation proved both outrageous and humiliating.

When the forgery of the Hitler diaries was exposed in 1984, Kujau tried to flee, but he was arrested and tried in Hamburg. He confessed and served three years in prison.

The duped experts learned that during the course of the two years in which Kujau had worked on the diaries, he’d “authenticate” them by hitting them with a hammer and staining them with tea leaves. His original intent had been to write only one book, but when his agent managed to seal such a handsome deal with this publisher, Kujau wrote more, relying for content on newspapers, medical reports, and reference books that contained transcripts of Hitler’s speeches. He’d even forged a letter from Hitler, in case he needed it, giving him authority to compile the diaries for posterity. But in writing the more recent documents in the effort to further enrich himself, Kujau had reached too far, making himself vulnerable to those scientists who insisted on careful analysis and impeccable provenance.

Also in 1984, a case in England coordinated several forensic areas. Graham Backhouse had complained about harassment for several months, receiving threatening notes in the mail. Then it grew more serious. One morning he asked his wife to go pick up antibiotic for the sheep, so with her car out of commission, she got into his Volvo. As she started the engine, the car exploded. She survived but lost part of her thigh. Then another threatening letter arrived, which thwarted the document examiner, because it had been written and then retraced. The earlier note was easier to read, but there were no exemplars as yet with which to compare it.

The police tried to protect Backhouse, but on April 30, his alarm went off. When they arrived at his farm, he was standing over a body at the foot of the stairs. Covered in blood, he claimed he’d shot his neighbor, Colyn Bedale-Taylor, with whom he’d been feuding, in self-defense when the man tried to attack him with a knife. Indeed, he had a gash across his shoulder and knife wounds on his face to prove it. The police found part of the pipe that had been used for the car bomb on Bedale-Taylor’s property, which seemed to seal the case.

Yet when forensic biologist Geoff Robinson examined the bloodstains where the alleged attack had occurred, he found them to be the wrong shape to support Backhouse’s story. They were round, as if they had dripped straight down rather than flung or cast off from a person struggling or in flight. Doubts about Backhouse’s tale began to surface. In addition, it appeared that he had not tried to defend himself when attacked and had left no trail of blood, though he claimed he’d been wounded while running for his shotgun.

Dr. William Kennard, the pathologist, thought it was odd that the knife used in the attack was still in the hands of the deceased. That seemed impossible. Also, some of the blood on Bedale-Taylor’s shirt was matched to Backhouse, and it had dripped straight down, as if Backhouse had been standing over the body while bleeding.

Robinson then tested the envelope in which one of the letters had come. He found wool fibers consistent with a sweater that Backhouse wore and on a notepad in his house, a document examiner made out the impressions of a doodle found on the other side of one of the notes. Clearly, Backhouse himself had written the harassing notes, planted the bomb (putting his own wife at risk), and invited his victim to his home to kill him and stage the scene. The entire affair was a calculated setup. With the help of experts in biology, explosives, pathology, and document examination, this case turned on its head and the real killer was apprehended. Backhouse got two life terms for the murder and the attempted murder of his wife (for insurance money, it turned out).

THE WORLD HAS CHANGED

Even as the scandal over the diaries cooled down, molecular biology as a forensic tool was coming to life. In 1984, Dr. Alec Jeffreys, a British molecular biologist, used RFLP as the DNA-typing protocol to dissolve an immigration dispute over a boy from Ghana who claimed he had a British mother and wanted to live with her. Jeffreys also resolved another parental issue with paternity testing that affirmed that a French adolescent was the father of a British-born child. For this work, Jeffreys received many public honors and in an article in
Nature
in 1985, he named the process he used “genetic fingerprinting,” stating that an individual’s DNA pattern was unique and would not be found in any past, present, or future person. This put him in demand for more such cases. But the application that would impress the world and change legal history most dramatically occurred in England the following year, although it involved a criminal investigation that had been in process since 1983. (There was in fact a rape case that was resolved with DNA before this one, but it did not generate the same degree of international response.)

On November 23, in the village of Narborough, fifteen-year-old Lynda Mann had traipsed along a path known as the Black Pad, and there she met a man intent on committing a sexual offense. He also killed her. Mann’s body was found near the path the following day, raped and strangled. The only clue the police could collect was a semen sample, which revealed the killer’s blood as type A. Soon the case went cold, but it remained important to the local police, especially when Dawn Ashworth, also fifteen, was found raped and murdered in 1986 on another footpath only a mile from where Lynda Mann had met her demise. The attack had been shockingly violent and aggressive, and the semen from her remains proved that the blood type matched that from the earlier incident, which increased the chances that the same man had killed both girls.

Then a seventeen-year-old kitchen porter was arrested and after a lengthy interrogation of some fifteen hours, he confessed to the second murder but denied involvement in the first. After he provided details for the Ashworth incident that had not been published, admitting that perhaps he had just “gone mad,” investigators felt sure he was good for both. They decided to seek out Jeffreys, whose lab was only six miles from the first crime scene, to ask him to apply his genetic fingerprinting to confirm the boy’s involvement.

Jeffreys had read about the two murders in the newspaper, so he eagerly agreed to test the semen samples. Since the one from the Mann murder was fairly degraded, he was uncertain what to expect. But he put it through the lengthy RFLP process and awaited the results.

In RFLP testing at that time, after the extracted DNA was cut into fragments, the fragments were covered in a gel to separate them into single strands. An electrical current was applied to push the negatively charged fragments through the gel at speeds relative to their length toward the positive pole, with the shorter pieces migrating faster. There they lined up according to size. The pieces were removed from the gel with a nylon membrane called a Southern Blot, and the DNA fragments were fixed to the membrane. This process exposed the A, T, C, and G bases, which could then be treated with a radioactive genetic probe. The single-strand probe would bind to its complementary base, revealing the DNA pattern, and a multilocus probe would bind to multiple points on multiple chromosomes. The probe identified specific areas of the DNA with dark bands, as revealed by an x-ray (autoradiograph or autorad) of the membrane. Then a print of the polymorphic sequences made it possible to compare to prints similarly gained from other specimens. The interpretation of a sample was based in statistical probability. If four fragments were identified, then the probability of each occurring in the population was multiplied by that of the other samples.

In the radioactive membrane, the genetic profile of Lynda Mann’s rapist was revealed, but when this result was compared to the porter’s sample, there was no match. However, the work continued for the next “nail-biting” week on the semen sample removed from Dawn Ashworth, and this was compared to that from Lynda Mann. This time there
was
a match, but not the one expected. The samples matched each other, so the same person had committed both crimes. However, neither sample implicated the young suspect. Despite his confession, he was not their man.

The police who had worked long hours on the case wanted to challenge this finding because it made no sense to them, but they couldn’t. None even understood the process, and Jeffreys was one of the few people in the world who knew what he was talking about. The officers could only admit that they were wrong; thus, their chief suspect became the first person in criminal history to be freed based on a DNA test. Yet there was still the matter of his confession. When asked why he had admitted to rape and murder, he said that he’d felt pressured. Indeed, he’d confessed to a number of other inappropriate incidents as well. Investigators believed that he had probably come upon the body that night, which explained how he knew unpublished details about the crime scene, and they had simply worked him into a confession based on that. (Others have suggested that during the interrogation they inadvertently fed him the details.)