Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (6 page)

However, Gross compensated for his error by describing the research on signs of asphyxiation by strangulation. Indeed, he had done his own research by strangling small animals and dissecting them to examine the damage done to the tissues. Despite the defense’s display of a dozen physicians brought in to contradict young Gross, he stood his ground. Since the circumstances went against Goetter, he was found guilty. When he confessed just before he was hanged, Dr. Gross achieved the fame he sought, along with professional advancement, and the incident affirmed the scientific method.

Investigation was making some progress in England, too. In 1829, the British Crown assented to Sir Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police Bill, which was the beginning of an organized, full-time police force in London. Called Peelers or Bobbies (both derived from Peel’s name), they were housed in Whitehall Place near Great Scotland Yard (and later moved to another building called New Scotland Yard). During the 1840s, a separate detective department was established, and over the course of the next few decades, most of Britain worked on replacing parish constables with local police forces.

Early in 1835, Bow Street Runner Henry Goddard investigated a case of an alleged burglar who had invaded a stately home. The home’s butler, Joseph Randall, reported that a masked man carrying a lantern had awakened him and he’d described the lantern casting a shadow in front of the intruder, who was accompanied by a second man. They quickly left but fired into the room on their way out. The bullet shot past the butler’s head and lodged in the bed’s backboard. Randall ran out, encountered the men again, and scared them off, rescuing the goods they had attempted to steal.

Goddard listened to this story but found it less than convincing: The way the would-be burglars had entered made little sense, especially when he noted marks on the inside of the door frame they had supposedly pried open. He also examined a closet in the home they had allegedly pried, and the marks indicated a different tool. Why, Goddard wondered, would they change their method in the middle of a job?

Hypothesizing from inconsistencies between Randall’s story and the evidence that the burglary may have been an inside job, Goddard asked to see the butler’s gun and the bullet fired at him in his bedroom. When these were produced, Goddard thought that while deformed from impact, the fired bullet had characteristics that were similar to the bullets the butler used in his gun. Each had a tiny imperfection, most likely produced by the mold used to make them. Goddard asked the butler for the mold and quickly located the source of the imperfection—a tiny hole. He took all of this to a gunsmith, who confirmed that the mold had produced the fired bullet.

Confronted with these findings and with the different types of pry marks, the butler confessed that he had staged a burglary and shot into his bed board himself. He’d been hoping for a nice reward from the grateful mistress of the house for saving the goods from the “intruders.” With the resolution of this case, Goddard became the forerunner of a long line of forensic ballistics experts, although it would be decades before the examination of projectiles would become a rigorous discipline.

English chemist James Marsh made the next dramatic advance for toxicology. Although at the time arsenic could be detected in the organs of victims of poisoning, there was no known way to measure its quantity, and defense attorneys were suggesting other ways that arsenic could enter the body. Wallpaper paste, for example, or hair products and even women’s makeup often contained arsenic as well. In October 1836, Marsh published an article in the
Edinburgh Philosophical Journal
to describe how one might measure small quantities in such a way as to indicate ingestion and absorption. He had developed his method from a rather peculiar case, which had forced him into months of persistent analysis.

George Bodle had died after drinking coffee and his symptoms, along with the reportedly strained relationship he had with his family, suggested that he may have been poisoned. According to the reports offered, on the morning of the death, Bodle’s grandson, John, had filled a kettle with water from the well, a behavior that the maid reported as uncharacteristic. He’d also previously expressed to acquaintances a desire for the old man to die. The kettle had then been used to brew the coffee.

Marsh tested both the kettle and the coffee that was made that morning, and he found the presence of arsenic in both. However, when he testified in the case before a jury, he had a difficult time describing the test he had used. His scientific explanation proved too abstract for the jurors so they declined to convict. (A decade later, the young suspect would confess.)

Frustrated over his inability to communicate with a jury, Marsh set about making his methods more demonstrable to uneducated minds. Should he be invited into another case, he decided, he did not wish to watch all his work go to waste. He knew that Metzger’s test could show how arsenic formed the mirror deposit, but since the arsine gas escaped into the air, allowing small amounts to remain invisible, Marsh sought a way to contain it. In a sealed bottle, he treated poisoned material with sulphuric acid and zinc. From this bottle emerged a narrow U-shaped glass tube, with one end tapered, through which the end product would emerge into a flask containing zinc and sulphuric acid. If there was arsine gas present, it passed into a heated glass tube and could be ignited to form the expected black mirror substance in a cooler area of the tube. Marsh did manage to use the test again, and it proved sufficiently visual to illustrate his explanation. The method, which could detect even miniscule amounts of arsenic, became known as the Marsh Test.

In France, Mathieu Orfila recognized the Marsh Test’s value and he used the device to test for arsenic in exhumed bodies and in cemetery soil, so that he could show whether a suspected poisoning victim had more arsenic in his system than was consistent with the amount in the surrounding dirt. However, he concluded erroneously that arsenic could not enter bodies from the soil if they were buried in coffins.

CELEBRITY CRIMES

As a few experts and investigators gained fame, the public grew more fascinated with criminal cases. Sometimes they rooted for the noted authorities but just as easily supported a defendant. While newspapers covered these cases and brought greater awareness to the feats (and foibles) of forensic developments, certain traditions that evolved into tabloid journalism arose from serendipitous decisions made during a case in Manhattan.

Mrs. Rosina Townsend’s bordello of nine girls experienced a fire early in the morning of Sunday, April 10, 1836, and one girl, Helen Jewett, was found murdered in her bed. The key suspect was Richard P. Robinson, nineteen, a cultured young man and one of Helen’s frequent clients. He claimed innocence but certain pieces of evidence implicated him so he was bound over for trial.

During the investigation, James Gordon Bennett, editor of the
New York Herald,
went to the crime scene to view Jewett’s body and interview Townsend. He observed how the subjects of sex, crime, and scandal would be edgy, and he was willing to endure criticism to make his reporting more interesting. He succeeded at both, and the popularity of his coverage was so great that people in other cities demanded to know more about this murder, so for the first time journalists traveled to report back to their own papers.

In front-page articles, Bennett described the sensuality of the victim’s body under the sheet that was placed over her. He suggested that Robinson might indeed be innocent, while other papers sided together against the
Herald
’s coverage and offered sympathy to Helen. A cult movement developed in which young men supported Robinson with cloaks and caps like his, and attitudes that men had the right to do what they wanted. Yet Helen, too, had supporters—women who donned white beaver caps.

Then Robinson’s journal was found in his room in which he described how his innocent looks belied the depravity of his soul. The papers now identified him as a “consummate scoundrel,” while Helen became a beautiful girl seduced.

More interesting was the physical evidence against Robinson. He admitted that he owned the cloak left behind in the bordello that night, and a broken piece of twine attached to a buttonhole of his clothing appeared to coordinate precisely with broken twine on the hatchet handle used to bludgeon the victim. A porter from the store where Robinson had worked identified the hatchet as the one Robinson always used. It had turned up missing on the Monday after the murder. The twine on Robinson’s coat also proved consistent with the type of twine used at the store, and Robinson’s roommate could not alibi him. There were traces on his trousers of whitewash, apparently from the backyard fence over which he presumably had climbed leaving the bordello. He’d also shown no surprise when the police came to question him. Letters back and forth between Helen and Robinson indicated that they had been quite attached and he was jealous. When Helen learned of his plan to marry a respectable girl, she threatened to publicly humiliate him. Robinson sent a note saying he would come to her but asked her not to tell anyone about his visit. He would be there on Saturday night—the night of the murder. About a week before the murder, a man named Douglas had attempted to purchase arsenic at an apothecary close to the bordello for getting rid of rats. The clerk had refused his request, and in the courtroom that day, this same clerk provided a dramatic moment by identifying Robinson as Douglas.

But at the June 1836 trial, Robinson’s defense attorney had his own dramatic moment as he presented a handkerchief taken from under Helen’s pillow to show that Robinson had not been the only person in her room that night. A witness, Robert Furlong, provided an alibi—that Robinson had been in his store that evening smoking “segars” and reading. The supposed whitewash stain on Robinson’s trousers was consistent with paint from the store where he worked, and a manufacturer of the hatchet testified that he had sold some 2,500 in New York City. Thus, each item of the circumstantial evidence was reinterpreted in Robinson’s favor (and probably with the help of a bribed witness).

For the first time in American history, representatives from newspapers in other cities were present. On June 8, the jury found Robinson not guilty, which caused one side to be angry while the other felt vindicated. After this case, thanks to keen public interest, journalism showed greater interest in covering crimes, especially those with a salacious side.

Two years later a man was murdered in Baltimore, his face cut so much with a hatchet it was difficult to identify him. He’d also been shot, and the bullets removed from him proved to have been specially made for William Stewart, who had recently claimed his father’s inheritance. The victim, it turned out, was Stewart’s father, and thanks to the identification of the bullets, Stewart was convicted of murder.

Around this time in Boston, the first professional American police force was established as the “day watch.” Based on the British system, it diverged by retaining local instead of central governance.

MORE POISONERS

In 1839, the word
scientist
came into use, H. Bayard published the first reliable procedures for the microscopic detection of sperm, and photography was invented in France. Louis Jacques Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot developed the process and a young writer named Edgar Allan Poe, who would soon write his first detective story, penned several essays about the daguerreotype. It involved a mirror-polished silver-plated copper sheet, treated with iodine fumes, which converted its surface into a thin coating of silver iodide. After the plate was exposed in a camera, it was developed with a vapor of metallic mercury. Poe noted its superiority to mere description of a person, and even as cameras were utilized for portraits, police officers saw their value for mug shots.

As photography evolved, toxicology suffered a setback in a notorious British case. People reading the papers believed that Wainwright the Forger, an artist and former contributor to
London Magazine
, had killed three relatives and a friend for profit. Yet because he had allegedly used strychnine, a poison difficult for toxicologists to detect, these scientists were unable to prove the murders. Wainwright was sentenced for forgery and sent to Australia, but the populace decried the scientific findings and believed that he had gotten away with murder.

That same year in Paris, Mathieu Orfila entered a notorious case. A gendarme named Dupont wanted to marry the daughter of a man named Cumon, who lived in Montignac. Cumon refused the request, since Dupont had few prospects for taking care of Victorine. But like Mary Blandy, Victorine most ardently desired to make the match so she continued to encourage Dupont, which precipitated quarrels with her father. Victorine cried on the shoulder of her nursemaid, Nini, and before long, the old man fell ill and died from a gastric condition. Victorine, who seemed to bear this loss without much sorrow, immediately married Dupont. Given the circumstances, Cumon’s death was clearly suspicious, but no one investigated.

Then Nini heard an emotional speech made by a condemned convict who had passed through the village, and in remorse she admitted that she had purchased the arsenic and other toxins that had rid her mistress of the hindrance to marrying Dupont. She added that Victorine herself had administered the fatal substance. Cumon’s body was exhumed and submitted to experts. The local doctor said there was no evidence of wrongdoing, but Orfila had relied on the Marsh Test. His demonstration was apparently more convincing than the doctor’s word, so Victorine was convicted and received life in prison, while Nini got eighteen years of hard labor. Largely due to cases like this, Orfila’s name became established, and by the following year, he had to rescue the field of toxicology from bunglers.

* * *

Twenty-four-year-old Marie Lafarge had been arrested at Le Glandier, France, for the murder of her husband, Charles. Known to be unhappy with her arranged marriage to the owner of a rat-infested forge, she stood accused of using arsenic planted in food as a murder weapon. She had bought a relatively large amount during the months preceding the death, allegedly to exterminate the rats, and her husband had become violently ill from eating a piece of cake. Servants claimed that Marie had fed him herself and had stirred white powder, which she claimed was a special type of sugar, into a glass of milk. But a servant noticed white flakes remaining on the glass and showed them to a local pharmacist. He tested the food and found arsenic. Lafarge’s doctor, too, had suspected someone had been poisoning Lafarge over the past month. The circumstances were clearly against her.