Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (2 page)

ONE

PRIMITIVE PRACTICES

One of the early attempts to use measured evidence in a court of law occured during the Salem witch trials of 1692. In Salem, Massachusetts, Elizabeth Parris, nine, and Abigail Williams, eleven, had begun to act strangely and they soon accused neighbors and relatives of using witchcraft to assault them. A black slave, Tituba, was arrested and she admitted there was a conspiracy of witches in the area. Other children joined the first two in their convulsions, seizures, and trancelike behavior, and terror over the invasive presence of satanic forces spread throughout the town.

More people were arrested based on “spectral evidence” and forced confessions and were sentenced to death, among them the Reverend George Burroughs. He allegedly bit his victims while in spectral form, leaving a visible mark. To ensure that it was Burroughs and no other who left this impression, his mouth was forced open in court to compare against bite marks on the girls and against the teeth of other people present. The seven judges on the Court of Oyer and Terminer were satisfied that Burroughs could be identified by his teeth as the man who inflicted the torture via satanic means, so he was convicted and hanged with four others. In all, twenty people lost their lives before the governor finally prohibited the court from relying on intangible evidence.

Crime has been part of human society since Cain slew Abel, and identifying perpetrators has challenged the greatest minds to develop reliable techniques for investigation and prosecution. Some approaches, such as torture and mutilation, have contributed little to the advancement of justice, but others have inspired clever and unique methods of apprehension. For centuries, physicians led the way. During Imhotep’s reign in Egypt in 2980
B
.
C
., medical experts performed autopsies for illnesses and wounds, and in 535
B
.
C
., the Greek physician Alcmaeon of Croton studied human cadavers, although the notion of science was not yet formalized.

Several ancient societies recognized the individualizing value of the ridged patterns of fingerprints. The earliest datable prints were left in Egypt about four thousand years ago, while the Chinese used prints to authenticate someone’s craft. In the third century
B
.
C
., fingerprints or thumbprints showed up on official documents for business or court dealings, and in Rome, the attorney Quintillion relied on bloody fingerprints to prove that someone had tried to frame a blind man for his mother’s murder. Yet no written record makes it clear that anyone regarded fingerprints as a way to individualize and identify people. It would be a long time before someone realized that the uniqueness of fingerprints had reliable forensic implications.

Shortly after Socrates drank a fatal dose of hemlock in 399
B
.
C
. and Hippocrates discussed lethal wounds and prescribed arsenic remedies, the earliest murders by poisoning were documented, introducing the first primitive efforts in what would become the field of toxicology. The Alexandrian physicians Eraistratus and Herophilus set precedents for later medicolegal investigations of wounds, poison, and other mechanisms of death. In 82
B
.
C
., the Roman Republic enacted the first law against poisoning and two decades later prosecuted a murder suspect, Cluentius, with the orator Cicero chosen to defend him. Cluentius supposedly had poisoned his stepfather, Oppianicus. Rather than defend Cluentius on the grounds of innocence, Cicero listed the victim’s many known offenses, including multiple murders. Cicero used a clever bit of logic to leave the impression that the death of Oppianicus was just, in a perverse sort of way. Despite incriminating circumstances, Cluentius was not convicted.

The Republic and Empire of Rome endured from roughly 753
B
.
C
., with the founding of Rome, until its collapse in 1453
A
.
D
. Military garrisons and newly built roads had taken the practices and philosophies of Rome to distant lands, and other cultures soon acquired its law and utilitarian culture. In 54
B
.
C
., Julius Caesar became ruler of the Roman world, and he extended Roman rule west to the Atlantic Ocean and as far north as England. His planned reforms upset the aristocracy, so a conspiracy of senators gathered on the Ides of March in 44
B
.
C
. to assassinate him. Members of the conspiracy stabbed Caesar twenty-three times and he fell to the floor and died. His body was carried to a place where the physician Antistius could perform an autopsy. He determined that the single stab wound that had entered the heart had been the fatal one, announcing this before the forum, the arena that is now the basis for the word
forensic
.

After Caesar’s death, a civil war arose among the various political factions, which ended with the establishment of the Second Triumvirate, and three men initially shared control over the Empire. Caesar’s great-nephew, Caesar Augustus, emerged the victor. During this era, medicolegal medicine made few strides, apart from the Emperor Justinian’s recognition that physicians could be “expert” witnesses.

The five centuries between 500 and 1000
A
.
D
. are referred to as the “Dark Ages.” Many of civilization’s gains receded as trade and intellectual life declined. Christian scholars preserved the Church’s teachings, along with the Latin language, but they guarded the skills and knowledge among an elite few, the self-endowed arbiters of God’s truth.

During the Middle Ages in Western lands, the only real methodology practiced as a “science” was alchemy, which originated in ancient Egypt and integrated nature religions with primitive psychology, Greek Rationalism, astrology, and Egyptian chemistry into a mystical approach to “soul refinement.” Egyptians believed that certain rituals ensured the right kind of life after death, which entailed preserving the corpse so the body could be transformed. Mummification supposedly bathed the corpse in “god-liquid,” which had to be done during the right alignment of constellations—the moment favored by magic. Alchemists adopted this idea and adapted it into a Christianized notion that the soul could be ritualistically purified.

Relying on the opportune “inner moment” and specific chemical formulas, alchemists strove to produce a “Philosopher’s Stone,” which supposedly connected mind and matter to transform base metals into gold and opened up the soul to achieve unity with the infinite. An alchemist might busy himself crushing, heating, and dissolving substances in a laboratory while making careful records of the changes in both the physical substance and in himself. While “science” transformed via physical components, alchemy traveled a parallel inward route.

The first phase was the
nigredo
, or the black phase, wherein the alchemist surrendered to “dark” aspects of himself in order to learn and develop better awareness. In conjunction with this, he might break down complex physical substances into their most primitive and base forms. During the
albedo
(white) phase, the alchemist strove to purify himself and the physical materials for the yellow phase, the
citrinitas,
which helped make a transition to the red phase, the
rubedo.
Just as the sun rises in redness, so came enlightenment, rebirth, and the emergence of the Philosopher’s Stone, the ultimate transformative substance that would perfect the soul and provide unlimited wealth. While no one claimed to have achieved this “Great Work,” scholars who study this period believe that alchemical experiments with physical substances became a basis for some areas of chemistry. But before toxicology developed, death investigation itself became a more formalized practice, in both the West and the East.

DEATH INVESTIGATORS

Prior to the
Magna Carta,
England’s
Charts of Privileges
listed the office that would evolve into coroner in 925
A
.
D
. People taking up these duties were appointed throughout the country, and in September 1194, the judicial circuit in medieval England, under the rule of King Richard and in attunement with legal reforms, officially recorded in the
Articles of Eyre
that “crowners” would be elected to deal with certain judicial functions. They were the
custodes placitorum coronœ,
or the keepers of the king’s pleas. Those who held the office, soon to be called coroners, collected taxes, but they also summoned inquest juries for people who were seriously wounded or who had died from “misadventure.” Since these officials were there to protect the king’s interests, they could confiscate animals or objects implicated in accidental deaths and take over goods found in accidents or wrecks, although they could not themselves render verdicts.

An inquest involved the gathering of seven to eleven “good” men, who voted on a verdict, although the coroner’s evidence was a strong factor in their decision. While coroners weren’t physicians, they acted as unofficial medical examiners and could also issue orders for arrest.

One’s manner of death had implications for taxes, because in certain types of deaths the king confiscated the property. This led to potential corruption by coroners: For a fee, the coroner might “define” the cause of death as something that would benefit the relatives. Eventually the office, which remained political, evolved into that of a death investigator, and by the thirteenth century, coroners examined all dead bodies to determine the nature of wounds or diseases and a person’s manner of death. In the interests of community health or justice, they summoned physicians to perform autopsies. This relationship could produce tension between coroners and physicians, because the latter were often not paid a fair price (or any) for their services.

Since there was little by way of systematic medical procedures, coroners generally relied on what the circumstances indicated. Thus, people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, or erroneously identified by eyewitnesses, could be imprisoned for acts they did not commit. It seems also to be the case that few doctors offered neutral testimony whenever they were involved; instead, they took sides in the adversarial arena. Indeed, there was no official body of practitioners who called for objective methods or practices.

In some areas, the law required that the person who found a body was to alert four people nearest to the body’s location. They would let an official know, who would then notify the coroner. That person would view the body and assemble a coroner’s jury, who would decide on whether death had been the result of natural causes, an accident, or otherwise. Reports were drawn up to record where the body had been found, whether the person had been killed on that spot, how the person had died, where he or she was last seen alive, and the location of the wounds. Medical experts might assist the judiciary in arriving at a decision, although that practice had already begun in Italy during the thirteenth century when a specialty in legal medicine was offered at the University of Bologna and Pope Gregory IX had recognized the contribution of physicians in the legal process. (Pope Innocent III, too, had appointed doctors to serve in the courts.) Bologna instituted an official medicolegal officer and people in these positions attested to the seriousness of wounds, especially those that did not cause immediate death. By the end of the century, the Iberian Peninsula followed this practice, and certain physicians developed greater expertise in medical-legal matters.

WASHING WRONGS AWAY

When the death investigator in thirteenth-century China came to examine the corpse of a person who had recently died from apparent homicide, he would make every effort to ascertain that the death was indeed unnatural. Among his questions might be queries about this person’s known enemies but also anyone who might gain from making those individuals suspects in such a crime. Experienced investigators knew that a situation was not necessarily what it seemed and even natural deaths might be exploited to gain revenge against someone.

While ancient Rome grounded the European practice of law, China made the earliest strides in murder and manslaughter investigations, recording facts about the process of death and inventing mechanisms for crime detection. In 1247
A
.
D
., Sung Tz’u, a Chinese lawyer, offered advice in one of the oldest extant works of forensic techniques,
Hsi yüan chi lu
(
The Washing Away of Unjust Imputations
), basing his ideas for solving cases and calculating decomposition rates on strict observation and logic. “Among criminal matters,” the book opens, “none is more serious than capital cases; in capital cases nothing is given more weight than the initially collected facts; as to these initially collected facts nothing is more crucial than the holding of inquests.”

Sung Tz’u was a national university Ph.D. graduate and a Judicial Intendant, and he derived his ideas and descriptions from death investigations dating from as early as 907
A
.
D
. By 995, a procedure had been decreed that in the event of a death, an inquest—
Chien-yen
—was to be carried out, and if it appeared complicated (murder, abuse of prisoners, disease), then a high official would do a
fu-chien
, or further inquest. This involved an examination of the deceased, and until the inquest was complete the family would not receive the remains. If the official made a mistake in judgment regarding the cause or manner of death, he could be sanctioned with a prison sentence.

In this handbook on autopsies, the author described how causes of death such as drowning and strangulation alter the appearance of a body, documenting wounds and discolorations. Obvious suspects perpetrated most crimes, but to address the more mysterious incidents, systematic observations were offered to assist death investigators in making their judgments. Thus, they learned to distinguish deliberate deaths from suicide or accidental deaths, and to spot staged homicides.