Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (7 page)

However, because Marie had aristocratic connections and proclaimed her innocence, the populace grew interested in her case and sided with her. Marie’s tale of woe involved being married to a coarse and foul man who had lied about his wealth and had married her to get access to her family’s money and her dowry. She had never wanted to marry him and had begged to be released. She proved to be a romantic figure and was soon a national celebrity. A handsome young attorney became her advocate and she presented herself as a graceful and poised defendant.

The prosecutor portrayed her as a cunning monster, but his experts were unable to determine with the Marsh Test that the contents of Lafarge’s stomach contained arsenic, so they requested that the body be exhumed to test the organ tissues. Still, the tests were negative. Given the circumstances and the testimony from Lafarge’s servants, this result seemed impossible. Food from the Lafarge household was tested and revealed the presence of arsenic. The experts were stumped.

Marie’s attorney, M. Paillet, invited Orfila to review the experts’ work and conduct his own tests, obviously hoping to prove the prosecution wrong. But Orfila noted the obvious carelessness with the procedures. He examined the materials the experts had used for their analyses and noted their clumsy reliance on the primitive Rose test. This proved their lack of awareness of the progress made in toxicology. That was a score for the defense. But the judge allowed the prosecutor to have his experts use the Marsh Test. Again, the country waited in anticipation of the results, and again, the results turned up negative in the body. People who sided with Marie rejoiced over her triumph, but there was still the issue of large amounts of arsenic evident in the food.

The prosecutor then requested that Paillet’s friend, the renowned Orfila, perform the tests on the contents of Lafarge’s stomach. Orfila arrived and insisted that the local chemists witness what he did. He used the Marsh Test, and to Paillet’s shock, he proved that it was not the method that had been at fault in this case, but the practitioners. They had bungled it. Orfila tested many of the organs from Lafarge’s body and detected the presence of small quantities of arsenic. He also proved that it had not originated in the soil surrounding the coffin, since arsenic was not present in the flesh. Based on his results, Marie was declared guilty and sentenced to death. Her sentence was later commuted to life and she spent ten years in prison. She never confessed.

Since Orfila had been Paillet’s friend, this case offered a demonstration that benefitted toxicology. Orfila had performed the test in a detached manner, uninterested in the outcome aside from accuracy. He might have chosen sides, but he did not. He also showed the reliability of the test and the importance of careful, systematic work.

More devices would soon acquire application in criminal investigation, as the century moved toward its midpoint and the Industrial Revolution continued to transform life in every major European and American city.

THREE

Judges and Juries

NEW TECHNOLOGIES

In 1840, Samuel Morse obtained a patent for the telegraph, and four years later he sent a message from Baltimore to Washington, D.C. Other countries adopted this exciting means of instant communication and it wasn’t long before an underwater transatlantic cable linked Europe with America. In England, an investigator quickly employed this invention to apprehend a murder suspect.

John Tawell was seen leaving his home on New Year’s Day, 1845, and arriving at the home of his mistress, Sarah Hadler, in Saltill, England. As evening set in, a neighbor who’d seen Hadler looking quite pleased during the day heard her let out a piercing scream. This neighbor then saw Tawell run off so he went to check on Sarah, who lay on the floor of her cottage, writhing in agony. She died before the doctor arrived.

Tawell, married twice, had already served a prison term for forgery, and had taken up with Hadler during his first wife’s illness. When she died, he’d begun seeing Hadler more regularly. Yet he’d married another woman and kept Hadler, with whom he had two children, a secret. He was the obvious and only suspect in Hadler’s apparent murder, so to catch him before he got away, the local constable in Hadler’s village telegraphed a message to the town where Tawell was expected to arrive, and there he was spotted and caught. Hadler’s death was proven as a poisoning by prussic acid, which Tawell had purchased. However, in court, the toxicologists made a mess of things by contradicting each other on how much prussic acid apple pips contained, since apples had been present in Hadler’s home. The jury ignored the medical evidence and convicted Tawell based on circumstances. He later confessed.

In 1843, the Belgium
Sûreté Publique
took the first known mug shots of criminals, making this group of law enforcement officers the ancestors of judicial photography. The Swiss used the technique during the next decade for identifying suspected recidivists. Throughout the 1850s, police departments across Europe and the United States also compiled archives of prisoner images.

The early psychiatrists, who were communicating with others in their field via medical journals and papers, sought ways to identify criminals and treat them apart from the nonviolent mentally ill. By mid-century, while they had no tool for systematic diagnosis, these psychiatrists had established the notion that a person who seems unaware of doing something wrong when he or she commits a crime should be viewed as medically insane. Because some of them seemed obvious by appearance, the fashion, coupled with physical anthropology, was to develop a way to use the obvious for making a diagnosis, but to offer this as a controlled result of observation and measurement. The earliest attempts looked to the shape of the head.

CRIMINAL INSANITY

With the rise of modern science and the emphasis on natural law and material substance, the appraisal of human character from external appearances became a fashion. Phrenology, first proposed by Austrian physician Franz Joseph Gall in 1796, espoused that the brain was the organ of the mind and thus the basis of personality. Gall stated that moral and intellectual faculties are innate, they’re locatable in specific areas of the brain—“organs”—and the form of the head represents the form of the brain, which reveals the development of the various areas. Gall called his idea organology, but later in Britain, physician T. I. M. Forster coined the term
phrenology
. Gall’s colleague and disciple, Johann Spurzheim, also referred thus to the practice.

Phrenology involved feeling the various bumps or depressions on a person’s skull to determine how different areas of the brain were functioning. It was dividable into thirty-five distinct organs, each associated with a specific trait such as “secretiveness,” “firmness,” “adhesiveness,” and even “philoprogentiveness.” The larger the area of the organ, as evidenced by a bump in the skull, the more pronounced the trait was believed to be.

When phrenology filtered into mainstream society, the phrenologists became matchmakers and employment advisors as people consulted them on everything from the best qualities for a romance to whether they should hire a certain person. Yet it was not accepted as a science in quite a few circles, notably in Edinburgh, largely because there were many counterexamples for which the phrenologists failed to account, so its proponents had to fight to have their work taken seriously. Eventually they gained a foothold, even in Edinburgh, where the first phrenological society was founded. Although the British Association for the Advancement of Science excluded phrenologists, their own journals and associations were modeled on the practice. This approach to understanding and predicting behavior proved highly popular in America, especially toward the middle of the century. It also spawned other approaches with a similar notion that physicality was key to personality types. Hubert Lauvergne, a physician at Toulon Penitentiary, observed that many convicts had unusual faces, which he believed must reflect their criminal instincts. For a time, prisoners would be classified according to their phrenological profiles—a listing of traits specific to them, based on skull formation.

Brain damage supposedly caused insanity, and theorists set about distinguishing the mentally deficient from the deranged. Autopsies were often performed on mental patients to locate affected areas of the brain that would account for some trait or behavior. The superintendents of mental institutions during the nineteenth century, called alienists from their expertise with
aliéné
or mental alienation, founded the rudimentary practice of psychiatry and encouraged one another to report interesting cases.

Despite the growing emphasis on free will operating in criminal behavior, there were clear instances in which someone acted from a delusion or uncontrollable impulse, and some experts who studied them were pleading for greater understanding. In 1837, Matthew Allen published an essay on the classification of insanity. He discussed the role of stressful relationships as a precipitator and described one of the first cases of parole into an asylum. In that same year, American psychiatrist Isaac Ray published a tract,
Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity
, which laid the basis for forensic psychiatry. Shortly thereafter, in 1843, the issue of insanity challenged a British court.

Sir Robert Peel, founder of the English Bobbies, was the target of a deranged man who mistook his secretary, William Drummond, for him. Daniel M’Naghten believed that “Tories” were conspiring to murder him, so he shot Drummond as a preemptive act of self-defense. Since M’Naghten had a history of such delusions, his attorney found plenty of support for a defense of madness. His counsel claimed that he had not known what he was doing and was not in control of his acts. The prosecution offered no rebuttal, acknowledging the obvious, so the court declared that the accused must be found not guilty by reason of insanity. M’Naghten was detained in an asylum to keep him from harming anyone else.

However, since he’d shot a public official, British citizens reacted with anger to this finding, so a royal commission undertook to study the issue. They examined every angle and agreed with the court, formulating a response that became the M’Naghten Rule, and thereafter the House of Lords required that to establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it must be proved that “at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.” The legal system in the United States likewise based such decisions on this ruling.

Throughout the inquiry, there was no mention of M’Naghten’s phrenological profile, but phrenology still had firm adherents. In 1845, German Gustav Zimmermann wrote that if phrenology could accurately identify the marks of “villainy” on a person’s skull, every person age twenty-five and over should submit to a phrenological examination. If they were found to have a dangerous predisposition, they should be hanged or confined so as to prevent them from exercising their criminal propensity. Zimmerman seemed to think it might be possible with a large-scale study to eventually predict a person’s specific type of crime before that crime was ever committed.

ENTERPRISING DETECTIVES

Allan Pinkerton, born in Glasgow, Scotland, emigrated to the United States in 1842, and moved to Illinois to make barrels. His first engagement with law enforcement occurred four years later when he identified a gang of counterfeiters. Inspired by Vidocq, he soon became a deputy sheriff for Cook County and then the first police detective in the city of Chicago. He immediately solved a string of post office thefts and went undercover into the gang responsible for the crimes in order to identify its leader. His work on this case became news, which emboldened Pinkerton to found the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. He offered high-quality work and promised to accept no bribes, partner with local law enforcement agencies, refuse cases that initiated scandals, accept no reward money (his agents were paid well), and keep clients fully informed.

In 1856, he hired the country’s first female detective, Kate Warne. As a childless widow, she’d answered his ad but initially he’d resisted, because the notion that a woman could be a detective seemed implausible. She assured him that there were important places a woman could go to get information, and methods she could use that were not accessible to men. When she persisted, Pinkerton gave her a chance and she proved her worth by showing how easily she could infiltrate high-class social events, where tips about professional crimes were gained with but a little flirtation. In addition, she assisted in uncovering plots against president-elect Abraham Lincoln, and accompanied him as part of the Pinkerton detectives escort to Washington; Warne posed as an invalid to stay close to him and watch for assassination attempts. She became one of the top agents in the agency, taking command of an all-female unit, but died young, with Pinkerton at her side. It was a sore loss for the man who’d initially been skeptical.

“The Eye,” as Pinkerton came to be known, developed a reputation for solid integrity and delivery of services. His company motto was, “We never sleep,” and he eagerly set up undercover operations, espionage for the government, and an interstate cleanup operation of the West’s notorious bandits and gangs. Unfortunately, the Chicago fire of 1871 destroyed the impressive Pinkerton archive of documents and daguerreotypes, and the great detective himself died in 1884, although the agency continued his legacy.

* * *

In France, affairs among the famous brought attention to the microscope. The duc de Choiseul-Praslin, Charles-Louis Theobald, had married the daughter of one of Napoleon’s generals. Her name was Fanny, and she bore him nine children. They hired Henriette Deluzy as a governess and the duke began an affair with her. Fanny fired her but Charles-Louis publicly continued seeing her, so Fanny announced she would seek a divorce. Shortly afterward, on August 17, 1847, the servants heard a scream from Fanny’s bedroom, amid the crashing of furniture. They believed a burglary was in process, but her locked doors hindered them from entering. From outside in the garden, they could see Charles-Louis framed in the window, so they returned to the room, which was now open. Fanny had been beaten to death with a blunt instrument and her throat was slashed open. Charles ran in and acted as if he’d only just discovered his murdered wife that moment. Since the servants had been unable to get into the room until after they saw him there, his story clearly had holes.

M. Allard, Vidocq’s successor to the head of the
Sûreté
, surmised at once that the duke was lying. There was no evidence of a burglary and a pistol found under the bed belonged to him. It was covered in blood, as if used to bludgeon the victim. Charles-Louis claimed that he had run into the room with it, but seeing Fanny already dead, had dropped the gun to hold her. When he saw he couldn’t help her, he went back to his room to wash off the blood, and a blood trail attested to that. The problem was, did he return to his room after killing her or after discovering her? In his room was a blood-stained dagger and the severed blood-stained cord from his wife’s bellpull, which the servants had heard when the victim first screamed for help.

Allard arrested Charles-Louis and then set about trying to disprove the story he told. For assistance, he invited pathologist Ambroise Tardieu to observe the scene and the body. Tardieu had gained eminence with his study of asphyxiation victims, noting the differences among those who hanged or were suffocated by strangulation, chest pressure, or smothering. He even called the spots of blood that formed under the heart during rapid suffocation “Tardieu spots,” after himself.

He examined the pistol under a microscope and located a chestnut-colored hair on its butt (the victim’s hair color) and skin fragments near the trigger guard. In addition, the wounds on the duchess’s head matched the size of the pistol butt. This evidence undermined the duke’s story. Tardieu’s reconstruction was that Charles-Louis entered his wife’s room to slit her throat, but failing this, bludgeoned her to death as she screamed and fought. Her struggle seemed affirmed by a fresh bite mark on the duke’s leg, which seemed to match his late wife’s teeth.

However, Charles-Louis apparently realized that his story wouldn’t hold up and he poisoned himself with arsenic.

MID-CENTURY PROGRESS

Trial judges were showing a more tolerant attitude toward physicians and other scientists. Throughout America, societies of medical jurisprudence were watching European developments and pressing for higher standards in their courtroom testimony. A trial that gained a great deal of notoriety involved physicians, anatomy experts, and dentists on both sides.

Among Boston’s wealthy Brahmins in 1849 was George Parkman, near sixty years old. On Friday, November 23, he went out to collect his rents and never returned. He was last seen that afternoon at Harvard Medical College, where he had gone to call on Professor John Webster, who owed him money. Webster later claimed that he’d paid it and Parkman had left, but no one came forward to say they had seen him leave the building. Police searched the place, but found nothing to incriminate Webster.