Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (3 page)

A handful of civil servants oversaw the maintenance of order and the negotiation of legal disputes, and local authorities were assigned to a three-rung hierarchy. On one rung was a
hsien-wei
, or sheriff, for enforcing the law. Often they had no training, so handbooks such as the
Hsi yüan chi lu
helped them to learn about the elements of a death scene and how to locate and interrogate people who might have information. The process involved questioning the original informant (the finder of the body or witness to a homicide or suicide), other witnesses, relatives of the deceased, and suspects. Male victims received an examination from men, and women from midwives. If a mortally wounded person was in the process of dying, then a
pao-ku
, or “death limit,” would be set that would stipulate, depending on how long it took the victim to die, whether the attacker would be charged with murder or assault.

Examinations were public, conducted with a
wu-tso
, or coroner’s assistant, who also performed the burial, and everything was recorded in complex documents, all signed by witnesses. Standard drawings of body forms, similar to those used today, were used by examining officials to illustrate the wounds.

The inquest procedure was similar to a trial, with suspects openly confronted or placed under conditions of stress that might provoke a confession. The body was often present as well, as were the victim’s relatives. Witnesses might then present information or evidence to assist the process. The guidebook also offered ethical guidelines, such as the need for officials to take care not to stay in the homes of people associated with the victim, lest their judgment be compromised.

Where evidence was minimal, Sung Tz’u provided scenarios to help officials learn to think their way through a potential crime. Contemporary forensic authors like to retell one tale in particular: A group of men was laboring in a ditch when one worker killed another. The victim was later found by the roadside, smitten with about ten sickle wounds. He still had his personal effects, so it seemed likely that the perpetrator knew him rather than it being a thief attacking a random stranger. The victim’s wife indicated that another man had asked to borrow some money and was angry when refused, so a suspect profile was developed. However, during the inquest no one would confess, and further questions turned up nothing more, so the magistrate ordered the men of the village to gather together before him with their sickles. Some eighty men arrived and laid down the implements. In time, the flies came, attracted to blood and specks of flesh, and the sickle on which they alighted revealed the killer. He was the same man who had wanted to borrow money. Confronted with the evidence against him, he “knocked his head on the ground and confessed.”

Sung Tz’u also relied on creative intuition to come up with a solution. In another scenario, he mentions that A wants to rob B, so when they cross water, A drowns B, leaving no marks. How can such a case be examined, he asks? “First, look to see if the body is emaciated, if the thumbnails and fingernails are black in color, whether there is sand or mud under the nails or in the nostrils [and] whether the chest is red . . .” If these conditions hold, then B was inferior in strength and was held under the water. To solve the crime, the examiner needed to learn about A’s motives and to gather B’s belongings as evidence, but the body would yield evidence as well to support the finding of murder, as long as one knew what to look for.

There were special instructions in the handbook for dealing with the killing of children and fetuses, as well as for handling bones, which was a particularly difficult task. Some bodies were admittedly too decomposed to serve as evidence (still true today). Sung Tz’u documented the differences among victims of poisoning, hanging, self-immolation, and other conditions. Thorough, meticulous, and clinical, the manual served death investigators for another seven centuries, with new information added as it was uncovered.

The Chinese also employed a primitive lie test in the form of requiring suspects in a crime to chew rice as they were questioned about an incident. Then they were instructed to spit it out. The assumption was that the offender would be unable to do so because stress would have caused the saliva in his mouth to dry up.

Since China was a closed society, these methods failed to have any impact on Western forensic practices, but eventually advances were made in Europe as well, albeit a few centuries later.

EXPLORING THE BODY

The tight union of Catholicism and politics across Europe hindered physicians from working on cadavers—the “sacred” body—so they could improve on ancient medical findings. Some dissected illegally, while others became inventive within the legal limits. After the Black Death decimated European society, killing some twenty-five million people during the fourteenth century, social classes reorganized, inspiring innovations not seen in several centuries. As a result, a new approach to practical life eroded traditional doctrines, and religion began to lose ground. In
City of God,
St. Augustine urged good Christians to beware of intellectual argument and scientific practices as a danger to their soul. Apparently he thought that using the mind was directly opposed to true faith, and while that attitude dominated Europe for centuries, philosophers like Roger Bacon urged people to rely on their reasoning powers. Sometimes the church condemned such heretics and even executed them, but eventually there were too many voices for the religious faction to halt the momentum.

New banking systems and increased trade encouraged a new optimism across Europe, along with exploration and discovery. During the Renaissance, which started in Italy around the middle of the fourteenth century, educated men like Leonardo da Vinci studied the humanities, turned to experimentation, and explored the biological structure of the human body to learn more about its functions. The Catholic Church continued to resist this trend, and while some scientists capitulated and denounced their own ideas, the plethora of discoveries about geology, astronomy, chemistry, and biology eventually reached critical mass. When Johann Gutenberg perfected movable type in 1453, he changed modes of communication and helped others to educate the masses. A new respect for the scientific method, based in theoretical mathematics, inspired discoveries such as the behavior of gravity and inventions such as telescopes, which assisted Galileo to confirm that Earth and other planets revolved around the sun.

Philosophers challenged the Church with humanistic ideas, while Luther birthed the Protestant revolt. Scientific progress soon became a fashion. Seafaring ventures brought diverse cultures and whole continents in contact with one another and Europeans settled other lands. Industrialism had its foot in the door of heretofore agrarian societies, gradually easing daily life with modernizing devices.

During this time in Europe, autopsies were performed for forensic purposes and the early anatomists who dissected corpses noticed how conditions such as rigor mortis (the state of muscle rigidity) or algor mortis (the body’s cooling temperature) worked, and to the list they also added the progression of coloration changes in a decomposing corpse, known as livor mortis, or lividity. A few physicians published early medical works about this subject, along with treatises more specific to investigation, such as the 1452 publication on gunshot wounds by Hieronymous Brunschwygk and the 1507 Bavarian text about the participation of physicians in legal cases,
Constitutio Bambergenis Criminalis.

In France, Charles V decreed in the Carolingian Code of 1533 that courts utilize evidence from autopsies in specific types of cases, such as infanticide, homicide, and apparent poisoning. The Code authorized funds for medicolegal training, paid practitioners to apply medical science to matters of law, and urged them to use their knowledge to improve public health. Some who offered testimony also reported their cases to their colleagues in the medical community, and in 1560, the first scientific society was organized in Italy. The Netherlands, too, got into the act, by building an anatomy theater at the University of Leiden for public teaching via autopsy.

One of the more “scientific” practitioners of this era was Ambroise Paré, who toward the end of the sixteenth century acted as surgeon and medical advisor to King Charles IX of France. He studied injuries from firearms and had an interest in poisons, a popular means for disposing of someone. Yet he also kept a skeptical stance and was keen to debunk popular superstitions. In one situation, he decided to prove that a certain “cure” based on gallbladder stones cultivated from animals was a waste of the king’s money. The palace cook, imprisoned for theft, was selected as the guinea pig. Paré fed the man some poison and then gave him the fake cure. But, as expected, the cure did not work and the cook died in agony by the end of the day. Still, despite the lack of ethics shown, it was a primitive demonstration in science.

By century’s end, Battista Codronchi offered
De Morbis Veneficiis,
a study of poisoning deaths, while seven years later, Fortunato Fedele published
De Relationibus Medicorum,
and in Rome, Paolo Zacchia addressed these matters in the
Quaestiones Medico-Legales.
Frenchman Francois Demelle published the first study on handwriting analysis in 1609, while in 1628, William Harvey explained blood circulation, indicating for the first time that blood stayed in the body rather than being used up and renewed as was formerly believed. Toward the middle of that century Germany’s University of Leipzig offered a course in forensic medicine, and around that same time, Italian biologist Marcello Malpighi described pattern ridges of fingerprints, although the discovery would not be forensically significant for two more centuries.

Also in the seventeenth century, French philosopher René Descartes divided all reality quite distinctly into two substances, mind and matter. He determined that the material world operated like a machine, and this mechanistic view soon became the dominant scientific perspective. Descartes used analytical geometry to draw pictures of the way time and distance worked together, and shortly thereafter Isaac Newton made this the foundation for formulating his ideas, among them the laws of motion. Newtonian mechanics defined scientific reality throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. Thus, matter was viewed as essentially passive and all events were the result of a definite cause. Predictions about the physical world could be offered with confidence because the laws of the universe were thought invariable, and those ideas laid the basis for technology. Through accurate measurements, the physical world could be controlled and predicted and science was based in rationality, objectivity, and exactness. Rational knowledge derived from how people experienced and thought about objects in the environment through comparison, measurement, and classification. Intellectual distinctions and the assignment of incompatible opposites made the logic of science possible.

SEEING BETTER

Most significant at this time was the work of Anton Van Leeuwenhoek, who invented the world’s first powerful precision microscope. The ancient Romans had used magnifying glasses, and Italian nobleman Salvino D’Armate, who also made concave lenses, donned the first wearable eyeglasses in 1284, but it would be three centuries before true microscopy was born. In 1590 in Middelburg, Holland, spectacle makers Zaccharias Janssen and his son, Hans, devised a combination of lenses by putting two different lenses at either end of a long tube to produce an even larger image via the first telescope. However, the image came through upside down, so another inventive mind, Johan Lippershey, made one lens concave to right the magnified image. Other glass manufacturers refined magnification through tiny lenses, which produced the name
microscope.
Galileo had improved their utility with a focusing device and more finely ground lenses to produce even higher magnification power.

Some time later Anton van Leeuwenhoek became the real father of microscopy (although Robert Hooke developed a weak form of the compound microscope five years before him). Around 1670, as part of a hobby, Leeuwenhoek devised curvatures that increased the magnification power of a lens and made numerous biological discoveries. In fact, he noted that a shaft of hair has a number of colors and scales. The stereoscopic microscope added a double eyepiece and prisms, which provided three-dimensional images. It wasn’t long before Leeuwenhoek used this device to describe the structure of red blood cells.

Another man who utilized experimentation to look beyond a “fact” long taken for granted was Italian physician Francesco Redi. For a long time in Western countries, people believed that decaying corpses spontaneously produced flies, maggots, and beetles, because these insects were often seen on those that lay out in the open. Redi decided to make some observations of his own. He noticed that wrapped meat had fewer maggots than meat exposed to the air, so he placed fresh meat in three separate jars. One he left open, the other he covered with gauze, and the third he closed with a tight cap. When he found that the capped meat had no insect activity and the exposed meat had quite a lot, he realized that it was attracting flies that then laid eggs, which hatched into maggots. He did this experiment several times and was able to state that meat did not spontaneously produce maggots. Other people took up the study of the relationship between cadavers and insects, and in 1734 Rene de Reaumur published
A History of Insects,
an important milestone in forensic entomology.

EARLY CASES

Until the end of the eighteenth century in England, the accused represented themselves, and they often did not have the wherewithal to do so. Yet for a long time, there were no investigative methods, either, so the courts relied largely on a combination of eyewitness testimony and circumstantial logic.

Criminal investigation methods had emerged in England after Thomas de Veil was appointed magistrate for Westminster, and while he was among those who could be bribed, especially with the favors of a pretty woman, he also single-handedly brought down one of London’s largest gang of thieves. He took up an office in Bow Street in 1739 and started to work on cases as an analyst, developing a keen instinct for figuring out criminal behavior and gaining renown in the process.