Silent Witnesses (13 page)

When questioned the man claimed to have lost his memory, and the local magistrate ordered that he be detained at the Collegno Mental Hospital, where he was listed as Unknown, Number 44170. The magistrate also arranged for the man's photograph to be printed in the local newspapers in the hope that someone might recognize him.

Sometime later, a woman by the name of Giulia Concetta Canella saw the photograph and became convinced that the man was her long-lost husband, Professor Giulio Canella. Canella had been a teacher and scholar of philosophy. In 1909 he had cofounded the
Rivista difilosofia neoscolastica (Neoscholastic Philosophy Review)
and in 1916 cofounded
Corriere del mattino (Morning Post).
He then married Giulia, who was his cousin and the daughter of a wealthy Brazilian businessman. They had two children together.

Canella had disappeared while on the Macedonian campaign during the Great War. The only information his wife had about
him was that during the battle of Monastir Hill he had been shot in the head and seriously wounded. According to his comrades, he had survived the injury but had been captured and made a prisoner of war. The fact that his body had not been recovered from the battlefield seemed to confirm this story. However, there was no record of him being taken prisoner, either.

Giulia asked to visit the asylum, and on February 27, 1927, she was granted a meeting with the unidentified man. Extreme care was taken—it was decided that, to avoid putting the man under unnecessary stress, the initial encounter should appear to be accidental. He was therefore taken for a walk through the cloisters of the hospital; it was arranged that he would pass by Giulia Canella. But he showed no emotion or recognition when this occurred. The same could not be said of Giulia, however—she insisted that there was no doubt whatsoever in her mind that the man she had seen was her husband.

As a result a second meeting was engineered. On this occasion the man told his attendants that he had a vague sense that he knew Giulia and that he felt that his memory was stirring. On the strength of this, a third meeting was arranged. This time Giulia, apparently unable to control herself any longer, broke down in tears. In response the man took her into his arms in a very familiar fashion. The doctors were finally convinced that the patient in their care was indeed Giulio Canella, especially following a fourth encounter, which occurred later that same afternoon, during which he talked about his recollections of his children.

Officially recognized as Professor Canella, the patient was sent back to Verona with his wife in March 1927. Given the
dramatic nature of the reunion, the story unsurprisingly received a lot of press attention, with the Turin newspaper
La Stampa,
for example, running the headline “A cry, a shiver, a hug, the light.”

On March 3, 1927, just a few days after the apparently happy ending, a government employee in Turin received an unsigned letter stating that the man was not Canella at all, but rather a man called Mario Bruneri, a typist from Turin, born in 1886. He was an unscrupulous anarchist and con man who had been wanted by the Turin police since 1922 for acts of violence. He was also wanted in other cities, including Pavia and Milan. His extensive criminal record included theft and fraud, and he had previously been incarcerated for both. Bruneri had been missing for six years, having apparently fled his family in order to live with his mistress.

The records held on Bruneri were quite wide-ranging and included a detailed physical and psychological profile, which perfectly matched the character and aspect of the man now claiming to be Canella. On Sunday, March 6, 1927, the government employee, firmly convinced he had been duped, arranged for the arrest of the man. He was brought back to Turin the same day.

Two days later, Bruneri's relatives were called in to see if they could identify him. His wife, Rosa Negro, was first. She recognized him at once, as did their fourteen-year-old son, Giuseppino, who ran up to him calling out, “Papa, Papa!” Canella replied, “Go little one and find your family as I have found mine.” When asked, “Why deny that your son recognizes you?” he replied with a wink, “It's not for the son to recognize the father, but for the father to recognize the son.” His sisters Maria and
Matilda and his brother, Felice, also recognized him and confirmed his identity.

But even in the face of this overwhelming evidence, the man refused to admit that he was Bruneri or to show the smallest sign of recognition toward his family. Even when one of his mistresses also recognized him, he stubbornly stuck to the story that he was Professor Canella. He even went so far as to fake a fainting fit in order to get out of the situation.

Fingerprints were ordered to be taken from the man, so they could be to compared with Bruneri's criminal record. They were sent to the central police archive in Rome. While initially no match could be found, a second, more intensive search proved successful, and the Scientific Investigation School of Rome wired back a telegram confirming that Bruneri and the man claiming to be Professor Canella were one and the same person. On the basis of this information, Canella/ Bruneri was jailed in the Collegno Mental Hospital while awaiting trial.

At this stage Professor Lattes became involved. He pointed out that the truth could quite easily be established regardless of the fingerprint evidence simply by comparing “Canella's” blood with that of his parents and children. Blood groups are hereditary; if, say, both parents turned out to be group A, and “Canella” was group B, then he certainly could not be their son. Equally, if he were group O and the children were group A or B, then it was impossible for him to be their father. “I need merely one tiny drop of the blood of each individual concerned, and I can almost certainly establish beyond all doubt whether ‘Canella' is really the thief Bruneri,” Lattes asserted.

However, Lattes was not to be given the chance to test his theory—both “Canella” and the family refused to give blood. The case dragged on, leaving opinion in Italy still divided about the man's true identity. He died on December 12, 1941, still claiming to be Professor Canella. Although blood analysis was not, in the end, used to establish the truth in this case, the large amount of publicity that it received still helped to raise public awareness of serology and to enhance Lattes's own reputation.

German serologist Fritz Schiff (1889–1940), working in Berlin, made the next significant advance. Although he was well aware of Lattes's methods—having had his book,
The Individuality of Blood,
translated into German—he had some serious reservations about them. Lattes's theories depended on Landsteiner's discoveries. As we have seen earlier in the chapter, these relate to the way different blood types cause each other to agglutinate, or “clump.” Landsteiner identified antibodies in the serum of blood and antigens in the red blood cells. The agglutinogens (antigens) in red blood cells can be of two types: antigen A and antigen B. The corresponding agglutinins (antibodies) in the serum are called antibody
a
and antibody B. These are distributed in the various blood groups in the following way:

Group A: Antigen A in the cells, antibody B in the serum.

Group B: Antigen B in the cells, antibody
a
in the serum.

Group O: No antigens in the cells, antibodies
a
and B in the serum.

Group AB: Antigens A and B in the cells, no antibody
a
or B in the serum.

So the antigens in cells of group A show clumping when mixed with the antibody in the serum of group B, because the group B serum contains its corresponding antibody. The antibody therefore attaches itself to the antigen, creating the clumping effect.

Group A antigens also clump in O serum, since it contains antibody
a.
But group O blood cells can be mixed with all three other serums without clumping, as group O cells contain no antigens of either type. Group AB can receive blood groups A, B, or O, as it contains no antibodies in its serum and cannot therefore attach to any antigen. However, if group AB were to be given to either blood type A or B, clumping would occur, as the antibodies in both serums A and B would attach themselves to their corresponding antigen found in the AB cells. Given all this, it was theoretically easy for a serologist to determine the blood group of an unknown sample by a simple process of elimination.

Unfortunately, in group O blood, the B antibody loses its strength much more quickly than the
a
antibody. When this happens, the test might easily mistake group O blood for group B. Equally, the B antibody could degrade and vanish from a group A sample, making it appear to be type AB. The realization that this complication could occur cast severe doubt on the reliability of Lattes's system of blood testing.

However, Schiff saw a potential solution. Although the antibodies in serum degrade, the antigens present in red blood cells retain their strength. Schiff theorized that if the cells from an old bloodstain were added to a fresh serum, they ought to produce some effect, even if they had lost their ability to agglutinate properly. They ought, in fact, to attract and absorb some of the serum's
antibodies. Therefore, if a method of measuring exactly how much antibody was absorbed by the blood cells could be found, then the group of the old bloodstain could still be determined. It was a matter of measuring the effectiveness of the serum before and after the cells had been added to it. Having had this idea, Schiff worked hard at the problem but was unable to solve it himself. It was a young forensic scientist named Franz Josef Holzer who did that.

Holzer used dimpled microscope slides containing eight “wells” in his investigations. He filled the wells with drops of group O serum (chosen because the serum contains both
a
and B antibodies and so would react with both group A and group B cells), diluted to varying degrees with salt solution—each well contained a solution twice as dilute as the previous one. He then dropped exactly the same quantity of fresh blood cells into each well and observed how much each serum mix agglutinated them. Having recorded his findings, he then repeated the test, this time using an unknown bloodstain, and then rechecked each serum to see how far it had lost strength. Once again, it was then a simple matter of elimination.

A few years later, in 1934, the United Kingdom saw its first murder case involving forensic serology. Although the analysis of blood was not absolutely essential to the case, it nevertheless played an important role, and the bizarre and horrible nature of the crime makes the story worth repeating. The pathologist involved was the noted Sir Sydney Smith (1883–1969), a New Zealander who had come to Britain to study medicine at Edinburgh. While there he became fascinated with the life and work of Dr. Joseph Bell (1837–1911), who had lectured at Edinburgh University. He had been a pioneer in forensic science,
and it was his incredible powers of observation and deduction that had inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the creation of Sherlock Holmes. Through the application of Bell's methods for interpreting a crime scene, Smith had subsequently managed to unravel the complicated case of the death of a young officer in Egypt and to show that it was indeed suicide and not murder as had been suspected by some. By 1934 Smith was Regius Professor of Forensic Medicine at Edinburgh University. It was during this year that he achieved public recognition for his work in connection with the murder of eight-year-old Helen Priestly.

Helen lived with her father and mother, John and Agnes, on the second floor of a drab and overcrowded tenement block, 61 Urquhart Street in Aberdeen, Scotland. The flat comprised only two rooms, making for squalid and cramped living conditions. Helen was, by all accounts, a rather difficult child and prone to misbehaving.

On Saturday, April 21, 1934, Helen's mother sent her out to buy some bread from the local co-op, just a few hundred yards away. She arrived there safely and bought the bread, the baker noting the time of the sale as 1:30
PM.
However, after leaving the shop, Helen simply vanished. When it was realized that she was missing, a search was quickly organized. The streets and back alleys were scoured by local residents and the police. No trace of Helen was found anywhere.

It was then that a nine-year-old friend of Helen's, a boy called Dick Sutton, came forward with information that completely changed the shape of the investigation. Dick claimed that he had witnessed Helen being dragged down the street by a scruffy-looking man in a dark coat, who had then forced her into a
streetcar. The police quickly circulated a description of the man and widened their search to the outer suburbs of Aberdeen. They also appealed for information on local radio and in local cinemas.

At 2
AM
John Priestly and his friend and neighbor Alexander Parker returned home, both exhausted after searching long and hard for Helen. At 5
AM,
after just a few hours' sleep, Alexander decided that he would continue with the search but that he would leave John Priestly to sleep a little longer. As he made his way downstairs, he noticed a large blue burlap sack stuffed under the stairs. Given the situation, he was a little suspicious and decided to investigate. When he opened the bag he made a horrible discovery: curled up inside was the body of Helen Priestly. It was later discovered that she had been strangled. Her underwear was missing and there were bruises and other injuries on her thighs and genitals, indicating that she might have been raped.

Parker was questioned by the police. He was certain that the bag had not been there when he had returned home with Helen's father at 2
AM.
This led the police to believe that the murderer must have gone to Helen's home between 2
AM
and 5
AM
and left the body there to be discovered. However, it was soon realized that there was something wrong with this theory—during the night of the search it had rained heavily, yet the bag was still dry. So how did it get there? And how was it that, even with numerous people out on the streets for the search, nobody had been seen carrying the bag to the house?