The Sunday Gentleman (54 page)

Often, employing the same methods. Dr. Locard is able to disprove a crime. Not many years ago, a spinster businesswoman named Lea Camelin was found on the floor of her train compartment, gagged and drugged with ether. Recovering, she explained that near Brotteaux, two men had attacked her and stolen her wares. Dr. Locard, studying the bottle of ether, found only one set of fingerprints on it. He was not surprised to learn that they were Miss Camelin’s own prints. She had invented the assault because, she confessed, she was unhappy and wanted to commit suicide, but since she was Catholic she had to make the suicide look like murder to be buried in hallowed ground.

When a French general, on a hunting party in occupied Germany, was shot through the head, the military authorities requested Dr. Locard to find the murderer. Dr. Locard studied the general’s skull, hair, and the fatal bullet. Then Dr. Locard proved that the killing was not a murder, but an accident. Someone had shot at a wild pig, and the bullet had ricocheted off the pig and penetrated the back of the general’s skull. The proof was simple. The coarse pig bristles were still imbedded, along with the general’s hair, on the bullet.

Above all, however. Dr. Locard relishes an exotic case. It may deal with murder, or with a lesser crime, but if it is sufficiently weird. Dr. Locard will give it all of his energies. For instance, he glows when he recalls the events that led to the capture of Dr. Pierre Marain, of Venissieux. The good doctor, experimenting with quack cancer cures, used his wife as he would a laboratory mouse. When the robust lady died suddenly, and Dr. Marain prepared to collect handsomely under her will, the police became suspicious. Dr. Locard moved in on the case, and located two wills. In one, dated 1913, the deceased had left her money to her church. In the other, dated 1917, she left this money to her husband. Using intelligence, and ultra-violet rays, Dr. Locard went after the second will and proved that the 7 in 1917 had formerly been a 1, which Dr. Marain had forced his wife to alter. Then, even more sensationally, an invisible sentence in the will—“I died murdered by my husband”—was brought to light. It had been written, apparently, with a hairpin dipped in milk. This ended the career of Dr. Marain.

Sometimes Dr. Locard has his fill of gore, and then he enjoys nothing more than relaxing over some case that requires only giving his authoritative opinion. Recently, a rich Parisian, whose hobby is collecting authentic strands of hair from the heads of historical personalities, nervously appeared with a single hair enclosed in a velvet box. He had bought this tiny hair for 20,000 gold francs. It was the prize of his collection, a hair purported to be from the head of Napoleon Bonaparte. Now that he owned it, the collector wanted a certificate of authentication to show his friends. Dr. Locard studied the strand of hair intensively, and came up with his report. The hair did not come from Napoleon. It came from a cow.

But Dr. Locard is not infallible. Even though, in forty years, he has rarely fumbled, he has once or twice failed in a tricky experimentation, or found himself stumped by a brilliant swindle. Dr. Locard and the Sûreté eventually trap most swindlers. But occasionally, a gang will come along that operates successfully for years.

“The slickest couple I’ve ever run into,” says Dr. Locard, “pulled off their fanciest job in the Rue de la Paix in Paris. A gentleman with an appearance of extreme wealth visited a famous jeweler in the Rue de la Paix and shopped for a diamond. He selected a small but rare item, priced at $4,000, but insisted that he also wanted a matching diamond, and would pay a higher price for the second. The jeweler said the diamond was an oddity, and would be difficult to match; however, he would do his best. In three days, the gentleman reappeared, explained that he was eager to get the matching diamond since he wanted to present the pair soon as a birthday gift, and even though he’d paid only $4,000 for the first, he offered to pay as high as $15,000 for the second one. The jeweler again said he would do his best. After only two days had passed, the gentleman appeared a third time, demanding the second diamond. The jeweler confessed that he had had no luck yet. Providentially, two weeks later, a young lady, whose clothes were good but shabby, wandered in, red-eyed, with a story that her husband had left her, and that since she had no money, she would have to sell her diamonds. She brought out several. The jeweler examined them, and to his amazement and delight, he discovered one stone that was the exact twin of the diamond his client was trying to match. The young lady asked $10,000 for it, and would not take a sou less. Although the jeweler had sold a similar diamond for only $4,000, he reminded himself that he could get $15,000 for this twin. Here was an easy profit. Quickly, he bought the diamond, cheerfully paying the $10,000.

“The following day, the jeweler went to call personally on his wealthy gentleman client at the address he had been given. There was no such gentleman at the address. There never had been. The jeweler studied the diamond he had bought for $10,000, and, too late, realized it was precisely the one he had sold for $4,000. When he came to us with his story, we showed him our gallery of swindlers. He identified the couple at once. They had a long record of more flagrant crimes. Of course, we did not catch them, and never have. Perhaps they are trying the same trick today in Rome or in New York.”

Dr. Locard credits most of the successes he has had in his 9,253 cases to the thorough education he received under his old mentor, Professor Alexandre Lacassagne, who taught legal medicine at the University of Lyons. Professor Lacassagne, a short, handsome man with a vast white mustache, preceded Dr. Locard as head of the laboratory in Lyons, until he was killed by an automobile in 1924. Lacassagne became a legend in France for his work in helping such Sûreté stars as Bertillon and Goron solve the first internationally publicized trunk murder, one committed by the pretty Gabrielle Bompard and her hypnotist lover Michel Eyraud.

Dr. Locard dates his own interest in crime from an incident that occurred one afternoon in Lyons when, as a lad of twenty-two, he accompanied Lacassagne on an assignment to treat an injured workman. Returning home, the two were caught in a windstorm, and sought refuge in a hallway. “We had nothing to do but twiddle our thumbs,” Dr. Locard remembers. “I happened to have a Spanish magazine in my pocket. Even then I knew many languages. I gave it to the professor to read. Since he knew only French, he asked me to translate aloud to him. So as we stood there in the hallway, I translated aloud from a Spanish book review about a volume dealing with fingerprinting in South America. It was fascinating. When I had finished translating the review, I began to discuss fingerprinting, and crime in general, with the professor. At that moment, I decided to specialize in criminal investigation.”

Dr. Locard spent time, as a student, in police laboratories in Lausanne, Berlin, Turin, and Rome. He even worked in Paris under Alphonse Bertillon, founder of the world’s first system of criminal identification. “He was the greatest genius I’ve ever met,” says Dr. Locard. “He concentrated fiercely. He did not like to explain things. One had to learn by watching him.”

Dr. Locard officially became a member of the French police on January 10, 1910, and eight years later, he was sent on a trip around the world to study advances made in work on fingerprints, palmprints, footprints, as well as on teeth, hair, and anatomy, in other nations including even faraway China. In 1918, he visited San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. Of his only visit to the United States, he remembers most fondly not the skyscrapers but the case of a New York doctor who solved his mother-in-law problem by slipping typhoid bacteria into her food.

By 1922, Dr. Locard was famous enough to be invited to serve on an international committee headed by General Pershing, to oversee an election in Arica, Chile, an area then claimed by both Chile and Peru. Dr. Locard was assigned to detect ballot forgeries. In the years following, his reputation grew so rapidly that he was appointed editor of the
Revue Internationale de Criminalistique
, a trade paper to which detectives of every land contributed their most noteworthy crime cases and discoveries, written in their own tongue.

During World War I, Dr. Locard was a member of the French secret service. In the Sherlock Holmes tradition, he would amuse Allied dignitaries by glancing at a muddy soldier and the soil stains on the man’s uniform, and then announcing exactly in what area he had been fighting. Once, during this period. Dr. Locard was almost assassinated. Late one night, a French femme fatale, a spy in the pay of the Germans, worked her way into Dr. Locard’s private office and began going through top-security papers. At this moment, Dr. Locard walked in on her. Immediately she hurled herself at him, brandishing a knife. Acting on instinct. Dr. Locard kicked her in the wrist, knocking the dagger to the floor, and then he pinned her to the wall until his men took her away. Today, Dr. Locard keeps the blade on his desk as a good-luck piece and likes visitors to feel its sharpness.

During World War II, Dr. Locard refused to budge from his desk although the Nazis occupied Lyons. He was interrogated three times by the Gestapo. He says they did not rough him up, but they tested all the weapons, even the antiquated ones, in his private museum, and they tapped his telephone. Once, when the Gestapo was about to limit his activities, the chief of the Gestapo came to him with a problem. The chief complained that twice his wallet had been robbed. He was anxious to catch the culprit. If Dr. Locard would help him, he would give Dr. Locard complete freedom to continue his work. Dr. Locard gave the German a powder to spread on his wallet, telling him that it would turn anything that contacted it a deep violet, and that the more one washed and scrubbed at the violet, the deeper its color grew. “A week later, the Gestapo chief noticed that his German chauffeur’s fingers looked like a bishop’s glove,” says Dr. Locard. “After that, I was not bothered by the Nazis.”

In his forty years of detective work, Dr. Locard has made many lasting contributions to law enforcement. One of his most popular discoveries resulted from his radical theory that the fingerprint is old-fashioned because it is often limited. Dr. Locard argued that the pattern made by any number of two thousand tiny pores of a single fingertip was as valuable as the entire fingerprint. To prove his point, he perfected, in 1929, poroscopy, a technique which required only one-twentieth of a man’s single finger to trap him. Using this method, he solved a dozen cases in the next years. In one instance, a burglar used a candle instead of a flashlight during a robbery. He left no fingerprints, but Dr. Locard discovered that a piece of wax from the burning candle had fallen, bounced off the thief’s finger, and dropped intact to the floor. Through use of microphotography, Dr. Locard made out the criminal’s overall pore pattern on the wax drop. In a week, the criminal was identified and convicted.

While he believes, perhaps more strongly than the majority of his colleagues, in the power of the criminal laboratory. Dr. Locard does not feel that the detective talents and individuality of modern sleuths should be completely buried under test tubes, files, and business machines. Today, everywhere, the machine is winning, but if Dr. Locard has his way, there will still be a few inspired detectives in the world. Toward this end, in a one-man effort to perpetuate such a species, he works the year around with human bloodhounds sent him by other nations. Besides routine techniques, Dr. Locard tries to hammer all kinds of shortcuts and bits of odd information into his students. He reminds them that the most damaging evidence is often found on the bottom cuff of a man’s trousers, since this is a place usually overlooked by the criminal when he brushes himself off.

When searching for evidence to back up his deductions, Dr. Locard prefers one faded bloodstain, one droplet of fat, one speck of dust, to a dozen witnesses. “Certainly witnesses are important,” he tells his students, “but they are too often unreliable. They subconsciously exaggerate, because they are human and want to make themselves look important.” In revisiting the scene of a crime, to search for a body or for hidden wealth. Dr. Locard advises detectives to walk close beside the suspect and hold his arm lightly. “Always hold his arm, because then you will feel his reaction. The trick never fails. And often, without knowing it, the criminal will guide you toward what you are searching for.” Dr. Locard warns his young students that murderesses present the greatest problems. “They react differently than do men. They are always surprised to be accused, they deny everything, they are shocked and affronted and insulted. They appeal to your sentiment, your weakness as males. When you have them, when they can no longer deny the facts, then they blame men for their downfall; they blame a husband, a lover, a father, a brother, a man who misled them.
Cherchez la femme
, gentlemen, but when you find her, beware of her!”

Despite this intense distrust of women, Dr. Locard has been married, has a grown son with the Lyons police, and owns a comfortable house in the suburbs. He has three forms of relaxation. One is conversation. He used to enjoy long scientific arguments with the late Dr. Alexis Carrel, the Nobel Prize winner. He used to discuss crime by the hour with his friend, Nelcher, of the Berlin police, who fled Hitler’s wrath. Nelcher had proved that the Nazis themselves had entered the German Reichstag in 1933, through an underground heat tunnel from Goering’s house, and had used chemicals to start the historic Reichstag blaze that vaulted Hitler into power and set the entire world aflame.

Another of Dr. Locard’s pastimes is his collection of autographed letters dealing with crime. He owns letters handwritten by Vidocq, the celebrated rascal who founded the modern Sûreté, and by Mata Hari. One letter is addressed to Washington, D.C., and is an application for an engineering job. The signature is that of an ex-convict named Latude, who spent a record thirty-five years in the Bastille for the practical joke of having included a bomb in a thoughtful bouquet to Madame de Pompadour.

Dr. Locard’s most passionate form of relaxation is attending the movie theater. He sits in a darkened cinema, laughing, crying, agonizing with hero and heroine. Neither rain nor storm (nor murder) keeps him from his weekly film. Recently, at the end of a busy afternoon. Dr. Locard was called out to a villa which had just been robbed. It was a routine affair. There was only one complication. When Dr. Locard entered, he found that the criminal was still there. The two parties were equally surprised. The criminal smashed Dr. Locard on the jaw with an uppercut, and Dr. Locard went down. “I was unconscious for ten minutes,” he says, proudly. Later, after the criminal had been caught and jailed, and Dr. Locard’s glass chin repaired, the police led their venerable chief to his home and forced him to lay his fragile frame on his bed.