Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (25 page)

Mrs. Lee included items that weren’t clear at a glance, such as a tiny bullet stuck in a wall or a blood smear, but would help to train detectives and police officers in looking for subtle clues. What appears to be a suicide, for example, may change when a key item is noted—a baked cake, a load of freshly laundered clothing, an ice cube tray beside the body. Other scenarios included a bound prostitute with a sliced throat, a burned corpse, a man hanging in a wooden cabin, a woman in a bathtub with the water flow hitting her face, and a family murder-suicide. Detectives training on these models were forced to look carefully in the same way they would have to look at an actual crime scene. (Some of the models are still used for this purpose.)

The AAFS increased its membership during that decade from ninety to more than four hundred members. While there were few women in the forensic sciences, those who were involved became active participants in this organization, and its reputation for integrity, along with its collection of impressive professionals injected forward momentum. It would prove to be a major force in the establishment of forensic science.

BIOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

In late spring of 1948, four-year-old June Devaney was grabbed inside a children’s ward of Queen’s Park Hospital in Lancashire, England. Her body was found on the grounds within two hours, raped in a way that suggested irrepressible mania. The local police requested the help of New Scotland Yard, and among the clues were fibers on a windowsill, blood and hair from a wall, fibers on her body, and a pubic hair on her genitals. In addition, there were stocking prints in the ward, along with more fibers. During the investigation, a bottle was found that had been removed from its usual place, and on it were fingerprints.

The police began systematically to take fingerprints of local males for comparison to those found on the bottle. Within a month they had checked more than two thousand people associated in any manner with the institution, but they failed to turn up a good suspect. So they set out to get more ambitious and undertake something that had never before been done: They decided to fingerprint every male over the age of sixteen in the town. One by one, they went through hundreds and then thousands of men. On August 12, they found a match with the fingerprints of Peter Griffiths, twenty-two, who admitted after his arrest that he had committed the shocking rape/murder. Since he had a history of mental disorders, his sanity was questioned, but he was nevertheless convicted.

Similarly demanding, another British murder case involved a laboratory experiment for its solution. In 1949, a bundle found in the Essex marsh yielded a man’s dismembered torso. By this time, forensic pathologists were often called to such scenes, and Dr. Francis E. Camps, from the London Hospital Medical School, responded. A painstaking albeit ambitious professional, he tended to dismiss coworkers as “scabs” and to compete with other pathologists, especially Keith Simpson. They squared off more than once in the courtroom, and Camps’s egocentrism often undermined him more than anyone else, but he nevertheless solved some difficult cases.

After an examination, he concluded that the corpse in the bundle had been in the water approximately three weeks, placed there approximately two days after the stabbing death. For identification, Camps removed the skin from the hands to get a good fingerprint impression, and he soon learned that the deceased was forty-seven-year-old Stanley Setty, missing for two and a half weeks—directly after he’d cashed a large check in London. It was clear from the autopsy that one of his wounds had produced a large amount of blood, which indicated that there could be a significant bloodstain wherever he’d been killed. In addition, Setty’s body showed postmortem injuries that suggested he’d fallen from a great height—such as from a cliff or a plane.

Investigators checked the small airports in the area to see if anyone had flown with large parcels. They learned that around that time a man named Donald Hume had hired a small plane and loaded two large packages onboard. Detectives from Scotland Yard entered this plane and identified bloodstained areas inside. In addition, they soon learned that Hume had known Setty.

The detectives found and questioned Hume, but he had a ready response: Two men had hired him to fly the parcels over water and drop them. As preposterous as the story sounded, the investigators knew they’d have to prove it was not so. Seeking another angle, they went to Hume’s apartment. There, the housekeeper said that recently Hume had refinished all of the floors and worn out the cleaning implements.

At this point, Camps reentered the picture. He went to Hume’s apartment to look for areas of blood that would indicate that Setty had been stabbed to death in this place. Dr. Henry Smith Holden, a chemist and expert in serology, accompanied him. They already knew from tests that Setty’s blood group was O, and despite finding only a few spatters Holden soon found human bloodstains of that type on three floorboards and in several rooms. Camps was not one to give up, so he kept looking and noticed cracks between the floorboards. He was certain he could see blood inside, so he and Holden ripped up the floor. They found what they needed, and when they had scraped together as much blood as they could, it amounted to about a cupful.

But they weren’t finished. Now they had to make an important calculation. In order to compute how much blood had been spilled in order to leave the quantity of coagulated blood they’d found inside the cracks, they replicated Hume’s floor in the lab and poured varying amounts of blood over this model. Keeping careful measure, they determined that three pints of blood had been spilled in that area alone, much more than someone having an accident or nosebleed would lose. Since adult human males have about ten pints of blood, a man losing three would be in bad shape, if not dead.

This result helped to prove Hume a liar. Had he merely brought the parcels containing Setty’s remains to his apartment in preparation for the flight, and Setty had then bled out this much, Hume certainly would have noticed. But he hadn’t said that the parcels had leaked in any way.

Nevertheless, the case proved to be a struggle in court. Camps and Holden had no difficulty showing that a bloody corpse had been in Hume’s home, but they could not prove that he had committed the murder. Thus, he was sentenced as an accomplice, receiving much less prison time. In fact, when he got back on the street and knew the court could no longer touch him, he sold his confession to a tabloid, saying that he had indeed killed Setty, exactly as the scientists had surmised.

Another man who got away with murder for quite a few years—in fact, half a dozen murders—was finally caught with careful forensic analysis, and this much-reported case provided another opportunity for the scientists. The more they could prove themselves in cases that gained public attention, the better.

The landlord at 10 Rillington Place in London’s Notting Hill had an empty flat in 1953 as the result of John Reginald Halliday Christie leaving, so he allowed the upstairs tenant, Beresford Brown, to use the kitchen. Brown noticed a bad smell, so he began to clean. It occurred to him that he might install a new shelf on the wall for his radio. He knocked on the walls to find the proper place and heard a hollow sound. Pulling away the wallpaper, he found the door to a cupboard, closed tightly, and there was a moldy odor coming from within. He shone a light through the crack and then stepped back, uncertain of what he had actually seen. It looked to him as if a naked woman were sitting inside that wall. He had seen her back.

In haste, Brown contacted the police, drawing Chief Superintendent Peter Beveridge to the flat, along with Chief Inspector Percy Law of Scotland Yard. They pried open the door to reveal the decomposing corpse of a woman sitting amid some rubble. She wore only a garter belt and stockings, and her black sweater and white jacket had been pulled high around her neck. Behind her was something equally large, wrapped in a blanket that was knotted to the back of her bra. This corpse was removed and taken to the front room for examination, and it became clear as she was photographed that she had been strangled with a ligature. Her wrists were bound in front of her with a handkerchief twisted into a reef knot.

Next, the police focused on the other object in the cupboard. As they photographed it, they noticed another tall, wrapped object just beyond it. They pulled out the first one and soon discovered that it was another body. Oddly, it had been positioned head down. The blanket was fastened, also with a reef knot, around the ankles and the head was wrapped in a pillowcase.

They guessed before they saw it that the third object was yet another female corpse. This one, too, was upside down, with her head positioned beneath the second body. Her ankles were tied with an electrical cord, which was tightened into a reef knot. A cloth covered the head and was similarly knotted. The officers knew they had a significant case on their hands and they sent the bodies to the mortuary for a thorough examination. Other officers remained at the home to keep looking. They had noticed some loose floorboards in the parlor, so they pulled these up, dug through the loose rubble, and found yet another female body.

Meanwhile at the mortuary, the autopsies revealed more information. The first woman found had been dead about a month from strangulation and possible carbon monoxide poisoning. It was surmised that she had been under the effects of the poisoning when she was strangled with a smooth surface–type cord. She had been sexually assaulted at the time of death, or shortly after. Some four to eight weeks before her, the second victim had been strangled, sexually assaulted, and gassed as well. A white vest had been placed between her legs in a diaperlike fashion. The third woman, a blond, had been six months pregnant. She had been drinking shortly before death, which had taken place eight to twelve weeks earlier, also by asphyxiation.

The body from beneath the floorboards was an older woman, in her fifties. She had been dead three to four months. Unlike the others, there were no signs of coal-gas poisoning or sexual intercourse. She had been strangled, probably by ligature. She turned out to have been Ethel Christie, the wife of the former tenant. The others were prostitutes whom Christie had brought home to his near-empty flat: Hectorina McLennan, twenty-six; Kathleen Maloney, twenty-six; and Rita Nelson, twenty-five.

The police went through the entire flat, aware that a few years earlier, in 1949, a double murder had been committed at this address in an upstairs flat: the pregnant wife and infant daughter of Timothy Evans had been strangled, and Christie had been implicated but exonerated. Evans had confessed, then retracted his confession and accused Christie of a botched abortion, but nevertheless was found guilty of both murders and executed. They could only wonder, with these discoveries, if Christie had indeed been innocent. Further inside the kitchen cupboard, investigators found a man’s tie, fashioned into a reef knot. In another area of the flat, they located potassium cyanide and a tobacco tin containing four clumps of pubic hair—three of which proved to be from the cupboard victims.

Once searchers had gone through the house, they focused on the back garden. In plain sight, they noticed a human femur supporting the wooden trellis. More bones and some hair and teeth were found in flower beds, while blackened skull bones with teeth and pieces of a dress turned up in a dustbin. Nearby was a newspaper fragment dated July 19, 1943. Investigators determined that, although only one skull was found, there were two sets of remains in the garden. That made a total of six victims, all female.

Anthropologists reconstructed the skeletons and, from a tooth crown in one skull determined that the woman had been from Germany or Austria. She was young, around twenty-one, and about five-foot-seven. The other was between thirty-two and thirty-five, and only about five-foot-two. Both had been in the garden at least three years and possibly as long as a decade.

Detectives eventually learned that Ruth Margarete Fuerst had arrived in England from Austria and had been missing since August 24, 1943. She was about five-foot-eight. The other victim seemed likely to be a Muriel Amelia Eady, thirty-two, who had worked at a factory with Christie. She was short and had dark hair, similar to hair from the garden. She had been wearing a black wool dress when last seen, and black wool was retrieved from the soil.

Mold was growing in the nostrils of the most recent victim found in the closet, and the last one to be removed was so encrusted with it that analyzing her time of death had been difficult with normal methods. Pathologist Francis Camps sent the mold samples to experts to learn their expected growth rates in a damp London cupboard. The biologists studied these samples and indicated that the mold had made a normal growth progression. They affirmed the initial hypotheses about the postmortem intervals.

Yet even before they delivered their results, Christie was found wandering the streets and he confessed to the murders. However, he said that his wife had died from an accidental overdose. Toxicologists proved that Christie’s claim about Ethel was an outright fabrication; they also demonstrated the presence of carbon monoxide in the bodies of the three victims from the closet. In addition, this case showed medical professionals a heretofore unknown fact—that spermatozoa could be preserved for weeks in a corpse. Christie clearly had had sexual contact with the three younger victims.

Breaking down when confronted, Christie described how he had used a homemade contraption that dispensed a poisonous coal gas, filtered through Friar’s Balsam. He would persuade the women that he could perform some medical service and assured them that the procedure required them to breathe the carbon monoxide gas. As they passed out, he raped them while strangling them and from some he collected pubic hair in a tin. He killed two before December 1952, placing them in the garden; then he murdered his wife before strangling three more victims. While in prison awaiting trial, he unashamedly sold his story to the
Sunday Pictorial
, including his part in the deaths of Tim Evans’s wife and baby. This raised a controversy over the justice system hanging an innocent man.