Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (4 page)

When a man disappeared in 1741, de Veil suspected the man’s servant, James Hall, who told a less than convincing story about his master’s whereabouts. De Veil pressured him and sent constables to search the missing man’s place of business, Clement’s Inn. They found the corpse, dumped head-first, in an outside privy. Hall broke down and admitted that he had killed the man, drained him of blood, and carried the body to the privy. Afterward, de Veil’s reputation as a crime analyst spread and he was soon consulted on tricky crimes outside his jurisdiction that proved resistant to quick solutions.

After de Veil died, Sirs Henry and John Fielding, successive magistrates at the court at Bow Street, established the first constables in London in 1749. Henry Fielding had been a political playwright and novelist, but after he failed in the theater and his novels did poorly, he accepted a position as a justice of the peace. Unlike many of his predecessors, he truly did wish to eliminate crime from London and he set about to do that to the best of his ability. However, it proved to be a formidable task, since so many thieves and forgers had found their occupation an easy means to make money, with little consequence.

Henry Fielding’s job was to track down known criminals and deliver writs of arrest. From a group of community-minded constables, he organized the “thief-takers” as a form of bounty hunter. Victims of crimes would report to Fielding and he’d send out a thief-taker to track down the culprit. For the first time, local robbers were identified, arrested, and sent to prison in an organized and efficient manner. Because the thief-takers were so quick to respond, they came to be known as the Bow Street Runners. The number of robberies in the area diminished. Fielding then sent armed constables against highwaymen and the results were similar. Committing crimes of this nature became riskier, even after Henry died in 1754 and his blind brother, John, took over. Collectively, their success was such that the office was expanded and proposals were made for routine patrols around the city. Nevertheless, there were no organized bodies for investigation, just the occasional brilliant thinker. Each new case proved the need for more systematic study of criminals.

This was evident to those who investigated murders by poison as well. An incident occurred in England in 1751, after a smitten Mary Blandy agreed to marry Captain William Cranstoun. She introduced him to her father as a man of wealth and position equal to his, and perhaps she herself did not then realize that he was already married, had no money, and was nothing short of a scoundrel hoping to enrich himself. He asked his wife to issue a statement that they were not married, and she initially agreed, but when Cranstoun started divorce proceedings, she balked. Cranstoun’s dishonest scheme reached the ears of Mr. Blandy. He demanded that the lovebirds split up, but Mary was more inclined to carry on with the captain in secret, and to listen to
his
advice.

He urged Mary to place a white powder into her father’s tea, but when it failed to dispatch him, Cranstoun told her to keep administering it in small doses. Blandy grew ill with gastric distress, numbness, and severe headaches, a common ailment for those times, and Mary attended him with great solicitousness. But a servant had seen her with the powder and warned Blandy that he was being poisoned. She even tasted the food herself and grew ill. Mary tried to destroy the powder by throwing it into a fire, but the servant rescued it. Nevertheless, quite soon thereafter, the elder Blandy died.

The local authorities were suspicious, so Cranstoun fled. Mary tried to follow him out of town but was arrested instead and sent to trial. No one knew quite how to prove a poisoning, but four doctors who had examined Blandy’s internal organs at autopsy testified that the “preserved quality” of these remains was suggestive of arsenic poisoning. They believed that the white powder was arsenic as well, but could not prove it. One doctor applied a hot iron to the powder, which the servant had rescued, and analyzed it by smell. Neither of these “tests” was definitive, but both were state-of-the-art for the times. Mary admitted to using the powder but said she believed it was a potion to make her father more agreeable. Yet she could not explain why she had tried to destroy it.

The servant testified as well, describing what she had seen of Mary’s behavior. The jury took just a few minutes to find Mary Blandy guilty of murdering her father. On April 6 of that same year, she was hanged.

In 1764, criminology—the psychological analysis of criminal behavior—also gained ground with the Italian publication of
Trattato dei délitti è elle pèna
, by Cesare Bonesana (“Beccaria”), reprinted in England as
Essays on Crimes and Punishment
. Beccaria found inspiration in the case of a Huguenot accused of killing his son for converting to Roman Catholicism. Under torture the man had confessed, but Voltaire, who had written about the case, believed that the boy’s death had been a suicide. He included this analysis in a published plea for religious tolerance and his influence obtained a posthumous reversal of the conviction. He went on to try to stop the torture of religious dissidents. Beccaria set out to free the legal system from religious domination and regain some sense of classical ideals from ancient Greece, which based the state’s power to punish in the collective welfare. Beccaria viewed crime as an offender’s rational decision, so it made sense to devise a system of punishments that fit the crime.

John Fielding died in 1780, but by that time, Scotland had taken up the budding field of forensic science. A young woman was murdered on a farm, her throat cut open. The examining doctor looked closely at the wound and decided that a left-handed person had done the deed, since the slash started on her right. Investigators found a set of shoeprints that belonged to a man who wore footwear with iron nails, and the impressions indicated that he had been running and slipped in the mud. Near these impressions were drops of blood and a bloody handprint. Someone thought to preserve the prints with a casting material, which captured the impression of a recent mending job on the boot.

An autopsy showed that the dead girl was pregnant, but no one knew who her lover had been, not even her parents. Since it was a small village, the investigators believed that the man would have to attend the funeral, so they went to keep an eye out for a suspicious person. They also made each man there show the bottoms of his shoes and allow them to be measured. The authorities were thereby able to identify a man whose shoes had been recently mended and were the right size. He was also left-handed and had a scratch on his neck that had not yet healed. He said he’d been with two other men at the time of the attack, but the men recalled being near the cottage where the victim lived and that their companion had been absent for a short time. When he returned, they had noticed a fresh scratch on him.

When the suspect’s home was searched, bloody stockings were found and an effort was made to match the mud on them to the mud from the bog where the footprints had been left. Indeed, the bog had quite distinct components, and the mud from the stockings matched. Then reports turned up that the suspect had been the dead girl’s lover, and the case was complete. Finally, he confessed and was executed. It would not be long before Scotland established itself as a leader in forensic investigation.

Scholars in the field of toxicology continued to seek ways to improve the detection of poisons in human beings. The first breakthrough with arsenic poisoning was in 1775, when Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered a way to change arsenic trioxide to arsine gas by treating it with nitric acid and combining it with zinc. Six years later in 1781, J. J. Plenck identified plant/vegetable poison in victims. In mid-decade, Samuel Hahnemann experimented with a three-step arsenic detection method that involved mixing it with nitric acid and heating it in combination with sulphurated hydrogen, yet the most significant discovery from that era was the “arsenic mirror.” In 1787, Johann Daniel Metzger did some experiments and learned that when he heated arsenious oxide with charcoal, it formed a black mirrorlike deposit on a cold plate held over the coals. That substance proved to be arsenic. He managed to detect it in substances, opening the door for future scientists to figure out how to utilize this method in a forensic context. It seemed logical that if a death was a suspected poisoning, one could apply it to the stomach contents.

In England, Charles Dickens penned an article about the work of Scotland Yard, not yet an investigative agency, and he referred to the officers as “Detective Police.” It appears to be the first use of the word
detective,
and Dickens utilized the traits and activities of several friends among the police as models for the detectives he created in his stories.

Another early incident that involved forensic analysis occurred in 1794, with a torn piece of newspaper. Edward Culshaw was shot in the head in Lancashire and the surgeon performing the autopsy removed a wad of paper from his bullet wound. It had been used to pack the shot, and the investigator flattened it out so he could examine it more closely. It appeared to be the torn corner of a piece of writing. When eighteen-year-old John Toms was identified as a suspect, his pockets were searched, which turned up a sheet of paper inscribed with a song ballad and missing a corner. This was laid against the bullet wadding, and the two torn pieces proved to be a match. Toms was arrested, tried, convicted, and executed based on this early bit of objective analysis.

The following year in 1795, in the fourth edition of
Laws of Evidence
, a discussion was included on the subject of expert witnesses. The book noted the advancement of science, yet included the need for caution in light of physicians’ mistakes. Just after publication, Franz Joseph Gall first devised the idea that moral character shows up in the shape of the skull, and he began to tour Europe to teach his ideas and acquire followers. He passed off as science a mistaken notion that would prove to be quite popular, to the detriment of people who merely had an unfortunate physical appearance. Yet even as Gall’s ideas caught on, an impressive group of scientific pioneers during the next century would also trigger a spurt of growth in applying experience and experiments to criminal investigations. The Industrial Revolution had proven the value of the application of science to everyday life, and with this kind of encouragement, innovative minds quickly produced a number of marvelous inventions.

TWO

From Spies to Investigators

TOWARD SYSTEMATIC INVESTIGATIONS

As the 1700s came to an end, the University of Edinburgh had already thrown support to its practitioners of medical jurisprudence, and among them was Andrew Duncan, a professor of medicine who offered the earliest formal lectures on the subject in the English language. He even allowed members of the public to attend as a way to inject greater awareness into society. His aim was to urge physicians who participated in legal procedures to become more objective, systematic, and vocal in applying their knowledge of death and disease in the courtroom. The first formal chair in medical jurisprudence occurred in Edinburgh in 1807, with the establishment of the Forensic Science Institute. Duncan’s son, also named Andrew, was its first occupant, and Americans seeking to improve their own haphazard field of medical jurisprudence looked to the Scottish physicians for guidance.

By this time, German-born Englishman William Herschel had discovered infrared light beyond the red portion of the visible light spectrum, inspiring Johan Wilhelm Ritter, a Silesian physicist, to look for invisible light at the violet end. With a prism and reactions to silver chloride, he thus discovered “chemical rays,” or ultraviolet radiation, which would become a basis for identifying organic chemicals. Another Englishman, Thomas Bewick, viewed his fingerprints as identifying markers, but did not take the notion any further. Toxicology actually took the lead as a science applicable to criminal investigation when Dr. Valentine Rose showed in 1806 how arsenic could be detected in human organs. It was just in time for the sensational murder trial of a female serial poisoner.

Anne Schonleben neé Zwanziger, widowed at forty-nine, faced growing old alone and without money, so she hired herself out as a housekeeper in the hope of finding another man to marry. Her first target was Judge Glaser in Bavaria, who was married but separated. He seemed a good catch, but first Zwanziger worked to reconcile them to get access to the wife, whom she then poisoned. This left Glaser free to marry. However, he did not wish to marry Zwanziger, so she needed another plan.

She soon spotted a younger man who was merely engaged, and went to work on him. When he failed to respond to her, he died a ghastly death. Then another lawyer’s wife died of gastric distress, which got Zwanziger booted from that house as well. By this time, she was getting desperate and feeling rejected, so she left some “gifts” behind. In the salt boxes, she placed some white arsenic powder, which made the servants, the master of the house, and his baby violently ill. However, they all survived and given the fact that they’d all grown ill at once, Zwanziger finally came under suspicion.

The police got involved, exhuming corpses believed to have been earlier victims. However, they could not prove poisoning beyond merely observing the state of the organs, which in the case of arsenic poisoning should be fairly well preserved. That turned out to be the case with these victims, so the authorities went in search of Zwanziger, already on her way to another potential “mate.” They arrested her in 1809, finding a packet of arsenic on her person. She was held for trial, and just by luck, toxicology had taken a step forward just three years before when Valentine Rose, a member of the Berlin Medical Faculty, invented a method for detecting arsenic in the stomach or absorbed into the other organs.

Rose had cut up the stomach of a victim and dissolved it in water, filtering this substance many times before treating it with nitric acid, potassium carbonate, and lime to evaporate it into arsenic trioxide and treat it with coals. He thereby derived the telltale mirror substance that indicated the presence of arsenic.

Rose’s procedure was applied to the organs of one of Zwanziger’s victims, the wife of the judge whom she had initially targeted for a husband. It revealed arsenic, and along with the clearly identifiable arsenic in the salt containers of the surviving victims, the evidence against this predatory woman was convincing. Zwanziger then admitted that she had poisoned the judge’s wife. She added the names of other victims as well, indicating that she had committed these murders for her own pleasure and had she not been caught, she would have continued to poison even more people. She called arsenic her “truest friend.” In 1811, after being convicted of murder, she was beheaded.

Another linked set of brutal incidents drew attention in England, proving the need for a better police force. On December 7, 1811, the residents in London’s East End near the Ratcliffe Highway docks had settled in for the night. One resident, Timothy Marr, was closing up his shop, assisted by his wife and apprentice. An intruder slipped in and murdered them all, as well as a baby in another room, by bashing in their skulls and slashing their throats. A constable who was called the following morning surmised from a bloody implement left behind that the weapon had been a seaman’s maul with the initials
J.P.
set in copper nails into the handle. A small amount of money appeared to be missing, but otherwise the crime seemed to have no motive. The trick was to discover “J.P.” ’s identity.

There was no organized police force or investigative agents, so no one in the vicinity knew how to look for leads. The residents could only hope it might have been some ruffian passing through. But their peace of mind was quickly shattered again nearly two weeks later on December 19, when down the road a family residing at the King’s Arms Inn was similarly slaughtered. The inn’s owner, John Williamson, lay bludgeoned to death on the cellar stairs while the beaten bodies of his wife and the maid were in the parlor. The local residents demanded some form of police action, and circumstantial evidence soon pointed to an Irish sailor, John Williams. The constables searched his lodging house and found a trunk belonging to John Peterson (J.P.), a sailor out at sea, and the trunk was missing a maul. Based on a few witness reports, this slender “evidence,” and the fact that Williams had no substantiated alibi or reason to be away from his room during the time of the second crime, he went to trial.

The courts of this era generally relied on circumstantial appearances, logic, and eyewitness testimony to form a narrative from the collected assortment of facts. When the pressure was on to convict someone so residents could feel safe again, as it was in this case, citizens might end up being scapegoated. But Williams was never tried, because he hanged himself first in the Coldbath Fields Prison.

For London officials, it was clear that with the growing population, they needed a way to focus on crimes and solve them. Leaving such matters in the hands of magistrates and constables was too haphazard. In addition, some of the local officials were open to bribes, so people with money might elude justice and continue with their crime sprees. The discussions began, but even so, an organized police force in London was still nearly two decades in the future.

Also in 1811, French pediatrician and chemist Pierre Nysten published the results of his studies of the state of a corpse in rigor mortis. He knew that at death, bodies initially went lax, but then stiffened up for a number of hours or days before once again returning to a flaccid state. He identified the various stages to formulate Nysten’s Law, which stated that rigidity starts in the face muscles and descends from there to the lower limbs. He believed that progression had something to do with the distance from the brain. It was Nysten’s hope that his “clock” would provide other physicians with an accurate estimate of the postmortem interval. While some of his reasoning was in error, his approach laid important groundwork for pathologists. In England, Dr. John Davey placed a mercury-based thermometer inside bodies to measure postmortem body temperature, adding algor mortis to the time-since-death indicators. However, neither man accounted for such things as environmental temperature or individual factors, so it seemed to them that they might be able to formulate calculations for an accurate postmortem interval and arrive at an exact time of death. Such precision eludes physicians to this day.

Now let’s back up and return to developments in France, which would become significant for forensic science around the world.

UNDERCOVER

In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte became emperor of France, shortly after America purchased the Louisiana territory from them, and he extended France’s frontiers. By 1811, the French Empire ran from the Baltic Sea to the south of Rome, through Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and into most of Germany and Poland. Under Napoleon’s encouragement, manufacturing and industry prospered, while poets, artists, composers, and novelists ushered in the Romantic Movement. Napoleon’s exploits made good subjects for stirring tales. Dying for a cause became a noble goal and young men throughout Europe entered into revolutions in the name of glory and freedom. As an activist spirit spread, the Industrial Revolution, which put more money and goods into the hands of people, provided sufficient power to challenge authority. Yet while Napoleon was still in command in France, a former criminal, guilty largely of public scuffles and prison escapes, introduced an idea that would lead to a number of new inventions for criminal investigation, as well as inspire a fictional genre. To understand how he accomplished this, we must go back before Napoleon’s time.

Born in Arras, France, on July 23, 1775, François Eugène Vidocq was the son of a baker, but from a young age he viewed himself as an adventurer. Toward that end, he ran away several times, including an attempt to reach America. However, before he could board a ship, a clever prostitute robbed him, leaving him without means to go anywhere, so he sullenly returned home. Taking out his frustration in swordplay, he killed a man in a duel. As punishment, he received a choice: go to prison or join the military. King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette needed fighting men to help resist the movement for a new republic, so Vidocq agreed to serve in the Bourbon Regiment. But he could not keep himself out of trouble.

On leave in 1794, after Louis and his queen had both lost their heads on the guillotine, Vidocq interrupted an execution that disgusted him, and was arrested. A high-placed official intervened on his behalf, but Vidocq became too familiar with the man’s daughter and found himself married and in charge of a grocery store. This was hardly to the liking of a self-styled adventurer in the last breath of his adolescence, so when the girl proved faithless, he returned to his more aggressive career path. In Brussels, Vidocq posed as a military officer and became a successful cardsharp before being arrested yet again, this time for supposed desertion. He escaped and returned to Paris, where he made a violent scene over his mistress and another man, and was promptly arrested there, receiving a three-month sentence.

During his first actual prison stint of a serious nature, Vidocq performed an act of kindness that was to change his life, for both the worse and the better. He met a farmer serving six years for stealing grain to feed his family. Taking pity on the man, Vidocq forged a pardon for him. When prison officials discovered the deception, they slapped Vidocq with a harsh sentence of eight additional years. Refusing to capitulate, he escaped, was caught, and escaped again. He seemed always to find ways to charm or elude officials, but eventually he would make a mistake and end up back in prison. At one point, his reputation for breaking out was so great among the jailers that they forbid him from even leaving his cell. To their surprise, he managed to rig a disguise that got him past them. Yet for all his escapes, he kept getting caught and his sentences increased in severity until he ultimately received a life sentence in a prison so brutal that many men who went there buckled and died.

While Vidocq was busy moving from one arrest to another, Napoleon Bonaparte took charge of the army and declared himself the master of France. He instituted a new code of laws, expanded the empire, and granted the citizens greater personal freedom. Invading other countries with flourish, Napoleon made Paris the capital of Europe and rebuilt it into a magnificent new city of monuments and boulevards. Yet these improvements also attracted criminals, and since the police force focused largely on political subversives, the crime rate for theft, forgery, and murder climbed, which would one day prove beneficial to Vidocq.

In another part of France, he was still attempting to regain his freedom, but this time by appeal to reason. While romantic stories abound as to how he eventually managed to join law enforcement, the truth appears to be more mundane. Still, one tale has become so firmly a part of his legend that it would be remiss not to tell it. Supposedly, Vidocq asked the prefecture of police (the specific official and city change with different authors) for the chance to prove he wished to go straight by becoming an informer on the criminal element. He knew these people, he pointed out, so who better to go among them to learn their secrets? The prefecture said he had no choice but to send Vidocq to prison, since he had not served out his sentence, so Vidocq posed a deal: If he should succeed in escaping and returning to the prefecture’s office, that very act should sufficiently prove his sincerity. That scenario seemed too improbable for the prefecture so he agreed, and then added extra guards to escort Vidocq to prison. Yet Vidocq was soon back in the official’s office, ready to begin his new occupation.

In a less imaginative account, Vidocq explained his plight to Jean-Pierre Dubois, chief of police in Lyon. Dubois looked into it and realized that Vidocq was actually guilty of only a minor misdeed, so he offered the deal to become a police informer. Grateful to be free of prison, Vidocq accepted.

No matter which tale of entrée is true, Vidocq eventually went among criminals who knew him as one of them, learned what he could about planned criminal activities, and duly reported them to Dubois. Vidocq succeeded quite well and the arrest rate improved, yet the criminals could not figure out how the police knew so much. Eventually Vidocq moved to Paris with his mother and mistress, and in 1809 continued his activities as an informant for the criminal division of the prefecture of police. How that came about presents yet another mythical narrative that added to Vidocq’s mystique.