Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (5 page)

It seems that the empress Josephine discovered that a priceless emerald necklace, a gift from her husband, was missing. Napoleon ordered his director of police to spare no effort to find the necklace. However, the police had no training in looking for thieves and no network of informants, so they did not know what to do. Vidocq stepped in, donning a disguise to enter the taverns where rogues gathered so he could acquire information about such a theft. He listened to others brag about their plunder and soon had the leads he needed. Within three days, so the legend goes, Vidocq managed to locate the necklace and deliver it safely, as well as bring the thief to justice. It was reportedly this feat that got Napoleon’s attention, who then urged Vidocq to continue his work as an undercover informant.

In whatever manner he actually achieved his new occupation, underground he went. Officials “sent” him to La Force prison, where he mingled among the prisoners, making reports twice a week about what new criminal activities to expect on the streets. He even solved a few unsolved murders by listening to his “fellow” convicts discuss their deeds and make arrangements with one another for more crimes. One of his first tasks was to get evidence against “Coco,” a notorious burglar who had stolen from a police official and who would shortly be up for trial. Vidocq ingratiated himself with the man, learned that the police had failed to question the only witness, and delivered the name of that person. To Coco’s surprise, he was convicted.

After a spell in the prison, Vidocq requested a street assignment and was taken out in irons so he could “escape.” He merged into the Parisian underworld, a hero among them for his ability to “defy” the authorities. Since these men believed that Vidocq had actually escaped, he won their respect and their confidences, which he quickly betrayed. He was responsible for hundreds of arrests.

Vidocq’s growing success eventually won him an audience with officials, to whom he proposed a whole agency staffed with undercover informants like himself. They would be plainclothes agents who could move freely across the city’s many jurisdictions rather than being “turfed” like the gendarmes were in specific districts. It seemed a good plan, at least as an experiment, so he received permission to hire four men. They worked out of a three-story building in which Vidocq could store his innovative card files and police reports, which grew exponentially, and the force eventually expanded to eight, then twelve, including a few women. In October 1812, Napoleon signed a decree that turned Vidocq’s
Brigade de la Sûreté
into a national security force. Thus, Vidocq created the world’s first undercover detective organization.

He taught his cohorts a number of clever moves, particularly with disguises. As one story goes, when a gang of Parisian criminals wondered who among them was the informant that had lately triggered an increase in arrests, no one suspected the sailor with the month’s growth of beard, the redheaded pirate, or even the scar-faced, dark-haired gypsy. Yet they were wrong on all counts. Each of these supposed thieves or grifters was in fact a single person: François Eugène Vidocq, a master of disguise and the very informant they sought to flush out. Supposedly he even accompanied a group of assassins who planned to ambush and kill Vidocq, but failed when their target did not show up.

To blend in effectively, he not only changed the color of his hair and the outfits he wore—including becoming a woman—but also advocated that to be successful at duping others, one must be fully immersed in the character one adopts, including special effects such as dirt, sweat, and shabby clothes. He supposedly once summed up the secret to passing as someone else for the author Honoré de Balzac: “Observe what you would become, then act accordingly and you will be transformed.” Vidocq’s own favorite personas were “Jean-Louis,” a sixty-year-old “fence” who paid high prices and spoke like a Breton, and “Jules,” a bearded burglar who preferred physical force and was frequently seen with his blond mistress (another informant).

In the meantime, politics in Paris took a new turn. French domination of Europe had produced heavy taxation and trade restrictions that fed a growing desire abroad for Napoleon’s demise. Eventually Britain, his enemy since the War of 1812, which set the boundary between the United States and Canada, invaded France. Napoleon also took a blow from Russia, and his humiliating retreat inspired other countries to move against him. By 1814, Paris had fallen and Napoleon was banished. He attempted to regain his throne, but the British and Prussian armies defeated him at Waterloo. Yet France was treated well at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, and its royal rule was restored.

The
Sûreté
continued with business as usual, and its success brought respect to law enforcement in Paris. Branches were soon established in nearby towns. As per Vidocq’s philosophy that a good job can transform a criminal, the agents all had criminal records and only Vidocq knew their identities, which annoyed the uniformed police. Despite doubts from officials about trusting former cons, these men and women quickly proved themselves, making Vidocq proud.

Teaching his associates that “observation is the first rule of investigation,” Vidocq devised a system of clever techniques for acquiring information, especially with interrogation. He also offered a form of plea-bargaining, and he gained a reputation for being fair. Yet he was not above using tricks. When he went to search a place, he might tell a suspect that he was being investigated for a different crime than the one for which he was suspected. That person, knowing he was innocent of
that
offense, would allow Vidocq to search his rooms, and Vidocq would then look for evidence of the actual crime. (No one worried then about a criminal’s rights.)

Vidocq’s focus on a systematic approach to crime helped him to develop some of the forensic techniques in use today, such as keeping detailed written records, comparing spent bullets to weapons (mostly for size), preserving footprint impressions with plaster of Paris, comparing samples of handwriting to forged notes, and suggesting that fingerprints might be used as a form of identification. Vidocq also worked with area chemists to create forgeproof paper and indelible ink, and he took out patents on both. Whenever he had a body removed from a crime scene, he required the “most minute exactitude” to items at the scene, not knowing when some slight scrap of paper or a button might become an important clue. If a robbery occurred, he would look for people in the underground who suddenly spent money in an uncharacteristically free manner. Thus, he might just as easily be called one of the earliest criminal psychologists.

In 1833, Vidocq submitted his resignation from the
Sûreté
, but he did not retire from law enforcement; he had too much going for him to call it quits. Early the following year, he established
Le Bureau des Renseignements
, the world’s first private detective agency. Given his reputation across Europe by that time, Vidocq had no trouble attracting clients who wished to locate confidence men who had stolen their money. His agency took on more personnel, utilizing the methods and tools he had already perfected, and he remained active until he was eighty years old. He died two weeks after suffering a stroke, just short of his eighty-second birthday.

Despite the resistance among established law enforcement to Vidocq’s “new” methods, he made such an impression and was so successful that he inspired many crime novelists—and thus, became the archetype of the forensic sleuth. Throughout his life, his exploits were legendary and when he submitted his memoir to a publisher, a ghostwriter beefed it into a bestselling sensation in 1828—albeit largely exaggerated and untrue. Vidocq was unhappy with it, but he did not seem to mind how his literary friends used his life and exploits for their own gain. He was the role model for Balzac’s clever Vautrin, and he inspired characters in novels by Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, père. All three authors were Vidocq’s frequent dinner companions, as were the prominent literary critics, social reformers, and poets of his day. Several stage plays in England, where Vidocq was highly regarded, were based on his memoir. He even penned a few novels himself (or allowed his name to be used), thereby giving the world yet another innovation, the first detective story (beating Edgar Allan Poe by a few years).

During Vidocq’s years as a detective, a steamship crossed the Atlantic on its own power, which presaged an independence from the forces of nature. Industrialization swept through Europe, which gave greater support to the areas of science that could boost production and make daily life more efficient. The United States laid tracks for a network of cross-country trains, while waves of emigration to new lands took European culture and technology onto other continents.

At the same time, ideas formed that benefited criminal investigation, and dentistry received attention. Frenchman Pierre Fauchard had grounded the discipline with his comprehensive 1728 publication,
Treatise on the Teeth,
and dentists around Europe who read it shared a common knowledge, aware that teeth remained constant and had characteristics that could help to identify the dead. Thus, some dentists found themselves invited into criminal cases. In 1814 in Scotland, a medical lecturer and two of his students from Glasgow were charged with violating the grave of a Mrs. McAllister during an attempt to acquire bodies for dissection (a common but illegal practice). Prosecutors had to establish her identity, so Dr. Alexander, her regular dentist, testified that he had constructed a partial upper set of teeth for her. He took a mold of the teeth he had made and demonstrated how he could fit the denture in a skull, which the relatives of the deceased had identified as Mrs. McAllister’s. Another dentist affirmed the fit, and all seemed well until the defense attorney produced his own expert. This dentist stated that the upper denture did not articulate with the natural teeth in the mandible and argued additionally that artificial teeth could fit other jaws equally well. Since the professional testimony conflicted, producing a reasonable degree of doubt, the court made a finding of not guilty. Once again, people questioned the concept of a scientific expert.

In 1823, Czech physiologist Johannes Evangelist Purkinje published a description of nine fingerprint types, thinking along the same lines as Vidocq had that fingerprints might prove to be the basis for identification, and Thomas Bewick, an English naturalist, used his own fingerprints on his published books. In 1828, William Nichol invented the polarizing microscope, the French worked on methods for bloodstain detection, and John Glaister was putting together his studies for
Hairs of Mammalia from the Medico-Legal Aspect
. Toxicology, however, was about to make the most dramatic leaps forward.

CHEMISTRY, BULLETS, AND BLOOD

At the Paris School of Medicine, Mathieu Joseph Bonaventure Orfila received his medical degree. Originally from Spain and a former child prodigy, in only two years he became the most eminent name in toxicology. In 1813 at the age of twenty-six, he published the first systematic treatise on known poisons,
Traité des Poisons . . . ou Toxicologie Générale.
In this, he documented and organized the findings of scientists before him to offer a systematic guide to everything then known. He had set up a rudimentary lab in his own home, doing experiments there on animals and offering private lectures. It was when he found some methods failing to produce what he expected that he set about to learn why. That’s how he moved the chaotic field of toxicology into the true mode of science.

Four years later, Orfila published a second book, which earned him an appointment as professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Paris and renown throughout Europe as the foremost authority on poison. It was Orfila’s experiments that showed how arsenic traveled from the stomach to other areas of the body, so physicians now knew that its absence in the stomach was no proof that a person had not been poisoned.

Despite his fame, it was not until 1824 that police consulted with Orfila on a criminal case. A man had died suddenly, within ten days of getting married, and an autopsy indicated that there might be arsenic in his body, so his new bride was arrested. The contents of his stomach went to Orfila for tests, but he found no arsenic, and since that was all he’d received to work with, the widow was acquitted. As his fame grew, Orfila repeatedly found himself in a battle of experts in court as toxicologists on the other side went up against him. His careful approach won him greater respect, so his opinion often prevailed. Nevertheless, this type of clash was an ominous sign of what lay ahead for medical jurisprudence. If toxicology and medicine claimed to be scientific, i.e., precise, then the results of these so-called objective tests ought to be the same for anyone. That experts could end up on opposite sides, with both experts confident of their findings, undermined for the public the claim that they offered indisputable facts. It seemed more subjective than they admitted, and even open to being purchased by the attorneys. Medical jurisprudence throughout Europe and America would suffer over this issue into the next century.

Yet toxicology did find success in an American case in 1828. In a village near Philadelphia, a man died following an illness, and Dr. Samuel Jackson, a medical educator and expert on pharmacology, considered it the effect of heavy drinking. However, people who knew the man believed that his wife had poisoned him after she’d allegedly purchased arsenic. The local coroner had four doctors review the case, and they conducted primitive tests for arsenic. They concluded that the man had been poisoned, so Jackson came back into the case to point out the French method of having everything double-checked by a reputable expert, and he upbraided the doctors for not sending the viscera for testing in Philadelphia. When the grand jury voted not to indict, Jackson was pleased that the reasoning of science had trumped a loose collection of innuendo and gossip.

American physicians noticed that resolving a case that garnered publicity was a road to fame and professional advancement, and people did attend trials for entertainment. It was a productive venue to demonstrate what medical science could do. The doctors in America looked to noted figures such as Orfila and aspired to gain that sort of reputation for themselves. One such person was Samuel Gross, who had taken an early course in medical jurisprudence in Philadelphia. He lived in Easton, Pennsylvania, and as luck would have it, ended up in a sensational case in 1833. A woman eight months pregnant was strangled to death, and the suspected culprit was her lover, a man named Goetter. Gross performed the autopsy and thus came before the court. But Goetter had engaged the service of a famous Philadelphia lawyer, James Madison Porter. When Gross took the stand, Porter attacked his vulnerability, notably that he had failed to examine the woman’s brain for signs of a cause of death other than strangulation.