Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (9 page)

This case inspired widespread interest among pathologists, notably Edmond Perrier Mégnin in France, who worked at the Natural History Museum. He regularly visited morgues and cemeteries, recording eight distinct stages of necrophilous insect infestation. He agreed to consult on a similar case in 1878 of a mummified infant, utilizing the information that was then known about insects on corpses, as well as knowledge about decaying plants, to estimate that the child had been dumped some seven months earlier. He would eventually publish
Fauna of the Tombs
in 1887 and
Fauna of the Cadavers
in 1894, which offered his considerable findings about both insects and plants. He identified those insects that assisted in estimating the postmortem interval over the course of three years, should a corpse remain out in the open that long: egg-laying blowflies, beetles, mites carried by beetles, moths, and flies that liked fermented protein. The progression was different for buried corpses, and Mégnin wisely warned that the results might differ in other types of soils and climates. Other researchers during this time joined him by studying the corpses of animals or going to exhumations to look at the effects of burial on the dead. Their work helped to identify the bits of insects that police often mistook as the marks of weapons or poisons. Eventually researchers across the ocean in the United States and Canada would contribute to the growing body of data. By 1897, M. G. Motter, who had assisted with the disinterment of a cemetery in Washington, D.C., would identify different types of insects inside the coffins.

DIVIDING LINE

Back in America in 1852, an Oregon sheriff was asked for his opinion about the nature of a hole found in a victim’s shirt. He used the suspect’s firearm to shoot another hole into the material to prove that the original was not a tear but identical to the place where the test bullet had entered.

Then the 1853 trial of John Hendrickson in Albany, New York, caught America’s attention. Hendrickson, twenty, was suspected of killing his wife, Maria, who was nineteen, because their two-year marriage had been rocky and Hendrickson had assaulted another young woman. In addition, the baby that his wife had borne had died in their bed the year before. The examining doctors found symptoms that indicated that Maria may have been poisoned by aconitine, via aconite. Yet Maria had used homeopathic remedies with this ingredient, and she’d been feeling ill in the days prior to her death so it would be difficult to prove that she’d been deliberately poisoned, especially with the state of toxicology at the time. While Stas had demonstrated an ability to find alkaloids in human tissue, his experiments had been arduous and no one in the States yet had repeated them, especially for an entirely new substance—and one considered the most difficult to detect.

Hendrickson was indicted for murder, because his poor behavior around town garnered circumstantial evidence against him, as did the rumor that Maria, whose family was wealthy, had intended to divorce him.

It soon became evident that there was no way to prove that aconitine was in Maria’s system, so Hendrickson’s defense attorney attacked the medical diagnosis of poisoning. Dr. James Salisbury, an expert medical chemist, had conducted rudimentary chemical tests that he believed confirmed the presence of the poison, as well as smelling and tasting the substance, but he had failed to save the aconitine that he’d isolated. Indeed, he’d fed it to a cat, and the cat had survived. The defense attorney seized this with a flourish: “The cat should have died out of deference to the doctor’s opinion, or the doctor should have given up his opinion out of deference to the life of the cat.” Salisbury was embarrassed by the outcome, but he believed in his testimony.

The prosecutor summarized the case as perhaps the most important one of the century, in light of the medical and chemical questions it raised. His closing remarks emphasized the experiments that Salisbury had performed, which shored up his testimony. He used the circumstantial evidence as reinforcement. The jury found Hendrickson guilty, and medical science proclaimed this a victory.

However, Dr. David Wells read about the way Salisbury had claimed to isolate aconitine and he knew that it was impossible, so he made a public rebuttal of what he considered a wrongful conviction. He insisted that Salisbury had derived a different substance that might taste like aconitine, but he certainly had not proven that he’d gotten that alkaloid. Wells wrote to the leading medical men and toxicologists, urging them to join in his protest. Many responded, and a joint letter was drafted to the governor of New York. They believed that the jury had been swayed by the confident manner of the expert witnesses, not by their so-called proof. Even as Hendrickson waited to be hanged, scientists across the nation rallied on his behalf, discussing the case at medical meetings. But the New York Supreme Court and the New York Court of Appeals both affirmed the verdict. Hendrickson’s new execution date was set, and despite a flurry of medical protest, he was hanged on May 5, 1854. Between two thousand and three thousand people waited outside the Albany prison to try to see, including a large contingent of the press. For the professionals involved, the case proved traumatic and they renewed their efforts to introduce better standards and safeguards into their profession. That a man could be executed on such flimsy and controversial evidence seemed ghastly to them.

In England, another costly error was made by Alfred Swaine Taylor, who had studied with the famous Orfila and become professor of medical jurisprudence at Guy’s Hospital Medical School. In 1836, he’d published
Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence
and would eventually become one of the century’s most eminent forensic scientists, although his early cases were setbacks for toxicology. Among them was a notorious serial poisoner.

In 1855, Dr. William Palmer, a gambler deep in debt, was accused of using strychnine to poison a friend named Cook, who had died and “left” him a considerable sum. He was allowed to attend the autopsy and was caught trying to abscond with a jar filled with the contents from the dead man’s stomach. Palmer was already associated with a string of sudden and unexpected deaths among friends, acquaintances, associates, and relatives, including his rich wife (whom he had insured for a grand sum) and his mother-in-law. A few of these people had died quite suddenly while staying with Palmer. He’d even insured his own brother, Walter, and invited him into a bout of drinking, whereupon Walter expired. The insurance company refused to pay, so Palmer insured someone else, who also quickly died. Suspicious investigators decided to exhume a few of these victims and they found a large dose of antimony in Palmer’s deceased wife.

Taylor analyzed the contents of Cook’s stomach, and while he found no strychnine, he did detect some antimony. Still, it was not in a sufficient quantity to kill a man. No one thought that Palmer’s possession of the stomach contents for a short time might have influenced the results, and Taylor’s testimony at the trial was unconvincing. The circumstantial evidence did Palmer in and he was hanged in 1856. The rope used was cut into pieces and sold for a good profit. Taylor had tried his best, but some poisons escaped the body in the form of gas. He simply could not prove the presence of something that was not there. His next trial, too, proved problematic, not just for him but the entire profession. In America, several toxicologists who had paid attention to the Palmer trial set themselves to the challenge of detecting strychnine. T. G. Wormley and John J. Reese both committed themselves to research and by the end of the decade were able to publish papers that contributed to future solutions. Clearly, toxicologists were determined to improve their examinations and proofs.

But in the meantime, other scientists were making discoveries applicable to the forensic arena. Between 1853 and 1856, Ludwig Teichmann of Poland invented the first microscope crystal test for hemoglobin, and Richard L. Maddox developed dry plate photography, which reduced the exposure time and amount of equipment formerly required for processing. This made his technique highly practical for photographing inmates. Prisons collected a catalogue of images to help them keep track of convicts who were repeat offenders. Sir William Herschel, a British officer, began to use thumbprints to authenticate documents and he learned from his own studies that fingerprints did not change with age.

In 1859, the United States became the first country in which photographs were used as evidence in a court of law, while in Germany, physicist Gustav Kirchhoff and chemist Robert Bunsen founded the field of spectroscopy with a prism-based device that made it possible to study the spectral signature of chemical elements in gaseous form. Bunsen had met Kirchhoff at the University of Breslau, where Kirchhoff taught. When Bunsen took a position at the University of Heidelberg, he secured one there for Kirchhoff as well so that they could continue to work together. Bunsen had developed techniques for separating and measuring chemical substances, and he invented the Bunsen battery and the Bunsen burner. The latter offered a nonluminous flame test for metals, and this paved the way for the spectroscope, which demonstrated that the color of a flame can be used to identify the substance burning by separating light into component wavelengths. These two scientists discovered that the spectrum of every organic element has a uniqueness to its constituent parts. By passing light through a substance to produce a spectrum, the analyst could read the resulting lines, called “absorption lines.” That is, the specific wavelengths that are selectively absorbed into the substance are characteristic of its component molecules. Then a spectrophotometer measures the light intensities, which yields a way to identify different types of substances. While not immediately relevant to the courts, it would eventually become an integral part of chemical analysis for trace evidence.

Over the next few years, presumptive tests were also developed for detecting blood on smooth surfaces or clothing, although not yet distinguishing human blood, and German pathologist Rudolph Virchow systematically examined the value of hair as evidence in crime detection. He successfully persuaded investigators to include his ideas in their repertoire. Each of these procedures advanced forensic science and the more techniques there were that proved reliable, the more it became evident that crime investigation must integrate them.

Charles Darwin had published
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
in 1859, in which he proposed a theory of evolution based on survival of the fittest. Realism in art and literature helped to reinforce the new scientific ideas, and evolutionary theory soon provided a perspective for developing theories of criminology.

That same year, Dr. Alfred Taylor experienced his next humiliation in the courtroom. Doctor Thomas Smethurst was charged with the murder by poisoning of Isabella Bankes, a woman he had married bigamously. When she died, he proved to be the beneficiary of nearly two thousand pounds, and two physicians had stated that the decedent’s symptoms had resembled poisoning. More suspicious, his other wife took him back, inspiring the notion that she’d known he’d been with Bankes merely as a means to acquire her money. Taylor was called into the case.

He indicated that he had found traces of arsenic in the body and in a bottle of colorless liquid found in Smethurst’s rooms, but during the trial when the bottle of liquid was proven to be potassium chloride, Taylor admitted that his findings were the result of an imperfection in the apparatus that he’d used. He’d actually detected potassium chlorate. Furthermore, he and two other medical experts contradicted one another on matters in which there should have been no dispute, leaving the case in a muddle, but Smethurst was nevertheless convicted and sentenced to hang.

The press jumped on this case, as did other professionals, criticizing the expert testimony and asking how such eminent people could disagree on matters based in proper scientific analysis. A collection of medical men composed and signed a letter to the home secretary insisting that the case receive further attention, as there had been no clear proof of poisoning. Officials sent it to yet another medical expert for analysis, and finally the defendant won a pardon. The way his case had been handled brought shame to the profession and detractors of forensic medicine dubbed it a “beastly science,” which forced physicians to greater accountability. The toxicologists and anatomists had to work hard to recover their dignity and credibility. But eventually, they did.

FOUR

THE MEASURE OF A MAN

As cities expanded during the nineteenth century, crime rates rose, and it was no longer sufficient to be able to identify a thief or burglar on sight. Few investigators possessed the prodigious memory of Vidocq for case details and criminal faces, and while photography was used in some places as a means of preserving images, the number of photographs added up and took up space with little sense of organization. No one had yet devised a system for sorting through them, and since criminals often used disguises, pinning crimes on specific perpetrators often required specific identifiers. People involved in law enforcement and science were working on that goal.

Christian Freidrich Schonbein developed the first presumptive blood tests in 1863, basing his discovery on observation that the reaction between hydrogen peroxide and hemoglobin took on the appearance of “foaming” as the oxygen bubbles rose. Schonbein reasoned that if an unknown stain foamed when hydrogen peroxide was applied to it, then that stain probably contained hemoglobin, and therefore was likely to be blood. However, he could not prove that it was human blood, specifically.

Other scientists studied the structure of the body. Belgian statistician Lambert Quételet set forth the notion in the early 1860s that no two human beings shared the exact same dimensions. Over two decades before, he had published
On Man
, in which he proposed statistical studies of intellectual development. The warden of Louvain Prison agreed with Quételet about the physical dimensions and applied the hypothesis to his charges by taking their physical measurements. Yet while Quételet’s methods failed to catch on with a wider audience, physical anthropology, which had been in the lexicon since 1593, dominated mid-nineteenth-century discussions about crime.

Among those who made a significant contribution was a man interested in human remains. In Paris, the ancient cemetery of the Celestins was undergoing excavation, and while many of the remains had decomposed into dust or bone fragments, some skeletons remained intact. Paul Pierre Broca, a former child prodigy with academic degrees in literature, mathematics, medicine, and physics, was a professor of surgical pathology at the University of Paris. He was interested in cartilage and bone structure, as well as cancer, the behavior of blood, and the mechanisms of the brain in language processing. He would soon gain the distinction of having his name applied to the part of the frontal lobe of the brain, Broca’s area, which he proved, via intensive study of aphasic patients, was responsible for speech production.

It was his work in the cemetery in 1847, however, that led him in another direction. Broca was well-read in anthropology and although he was denounced as a materialist corruptor of youth for his support of Charles Darwin’s theory, in 1859 he founded the Anthropological Society, along with a laboratory at the École des Hautes Études and the Anthropological Institute in Paris. The Roman Catholic Church stood firmly against the Anthropological Institute, since it encouraged study in the mutability of races and species, and Church officials were incensed when Broca produced a journal,
Revue d’ Anthropologie.

While attempting to measure the skulls of the deceased, Broca invented more than two dozen new measuring devices called craniometers, which standardized a classification system known as craniotomy, derived from the published accounts of the anatomical measurements of skulls in humans and animals. In part, this work had been done to distinguish Europeans from other races via skull capacity and brain size, as well as to illustrate human kinship with apes. At the Anthropological Institute, Broca and others taught anthropometric measuring in the hope of learning more about human intellectual capacity, which they expected would help them to understand the differences among the various races. They were hoping to prove superiority for males over females and European races over others, and Broca actually warned against mixing Africans and Europeans. These freethinkers believed that most people could be improved to European levels, but not all. Some races supposedly suffered from an “organic curse.”

Phrenology had already won adherents to the idea that specific brain functions and personality temperaments showed up in bumps and depressions on a person’s skull, and this idea won new adherents during the 1860s. Some “practical phrenologists” who claimed an elevated position with respect to knowledge about people would “read heads” for fees, as well as put on demonstrations, which helped to inspire the anthropological enthusiasm for measuring heads. They would run their fingertips over the skulls to identify the precise location of elevations and depressions, and compare their findings to charts (or ceramic busts) that showed how the brain areas were divided. Thus they could diagnose a particular temperament and, in criminal cases, predict the potential for reform. Some physicians decided that criminals could be detected via facial characteristics, so for a time, prisoners were classified by these features. While the phrenologists turned out to be partially correct about the idea that different parts of the brain had localized functions, their deductions about skull formation and personality diagnosis were uncorroborated with actual science.

In addition to criminality, the cause of insanity continued to interest investigators and some began to look at the notion of heredity. Several sociologists studied family lines to prove that some genetic strains produced outstanding citizens and others were only good for spawning losers. A specific type of criminal, who showed extreme brutality and no remorse, got attention as well. To classify such people, Philippe Pinel had introduced the notion of “mania without delirium” in 1809, and more than two decades later British physician James Prichard called the same behavior “moral insanity,” to indicate that one’s faculty for appropriate behavior had been corrupted. These were the precursor labels to the psychopath—the person who had no conscience about his cruelty or destructive acts. Psychiatrists continued to try to learn what they could about the condition, while anthropologists were convinced they could formulate identifiable physical characteristics.

Among these ruthless and remorseless criminals was Edmond de la Pommerais, who in the age of evolution was attempting his own form of survival of the fittest. He had purchased a practice in homeopathy but had failed to see the riches he’d expected, so he looked around for an easier route to wealth. To facilitate his introduction to women of means, he called himself a count. Soon he married a woman from a wealthy family whose mother kept strict control over her, but when the mother fell ill and died, de la Pommerais used the inherited funds to purchase a lavish lifestyle. Soon he and his wife were bankrupt. He insured his mistress, Séraphine de Pauw, for a considerable sum, and she, too, fell ill and died, which filled his pocket for a little while. Then he pressed de Pauw’s sister into a scheme for insurance fraud, which included making out a will in his favor. He assured her that if she went along with it they would both benefit substantially.

The police got wind of this plot from an anonymous letter and were able to save a potential victim by stopping her from carrying it out. Having discovered what de la Pommerais was up to, they then exhumed Séraphine and found that she had not died of cholera, as de la Pommerais had indicated. Professor Auguste Ambroise Tardieu, who taught forensic medicine at the University of Paris and was considered an expert on the wounds and asphyxiation symptoms of victims of hanging, supervised tests on Séraphine’s body for arsenic and antimony, but these were negative. Still certain that the victim had been poisoned, Tardieu decided to perform an experiment. He remembered that before Madame de Pauw died, she had suffered from a racing heart, so he suspected an alkaloid toxin. In order to prove this, he injected a dog (some sources indicate it was frogs) with an extract he had obtained from the decedent’s organs using the Stas method. The animal vomited and showed symptoms of a racing heart. Then Tardieu found the drug digitalis among de la Pommerais’s remedies, which was used for regulating the heart but could be lethal in elevated doses. But Tardieu needed more than just the presence of the drug in the “count’s” stock. When the police managed to scrape up traces of vomit from the victim’s sickroom, Tardieu tested it for digitalis and proved his theory. This evidence held up in court and on June 9, 1864, de la Pommerais was convicted of the murder of his mistress. He was executed.

That same year, Henry Goddard, formerly a Bow Street Runner and now a private detective in London, investigated another insurance swindle. The Gresham Life Assurance Company requested his assistance in investigating the unexpected death of one of its employees, Edward J. Farren. Goddard accepted the case and learned that Farren had been traveling when he’d died and that his wife had received a letter about his death from strangers, but there were inconsistencies in the stories. Goddard conducted the investigation with his characteristic thoroughness. First he learned everything he could about the victim, including that the man had a deformity of the foot that made one heel three inches higher than the other one, resulting in a noticeable limp. Thus, if the man had not died but was attempting to collect money from a faked death, he would have had to hide the limp. That is, he’d need a cobbler who could create a special kind of footwear.

Goddard asked around and eventually found the tradesman who had made a special boot for a princely sum. But reportedly the man who had collected the boot still limped slightly, which gave Goddard sufficient detail to question concierges around the city about seeing such a person in their hotels. With some extraordinary sleuthing, Goddard finally traced the still-living Farren as far south as Egypt and all the way to Australia. In a hotel there, he located the specially made boot, along with its owner, clinching the case for the “assurance” company, which paid
him
instead of Farren’s “widow.”

MAKING A MATCH

A case from the history of ballistics actually belongs with document examination. In 1860, a man was found in a London street, shot dead. Beside him lay a crumpled piece of newspaper from the London
Times
dated March 24, 1854. Since the paper smelled of gunpowder, the piece was collected as potential evidence. When a suspect was identified by the name of Richardson, the police searched his rooms and found a double-barreled pistol. One barrel had been fired but the other was still loaded; it had newspaper wadding stuffed into it, also from the
Times.
Although it bore no date, the investigator went to the newspaper editor and asked for back copies for comparison. Both pieces proved to be from the same issue. Under pressure from this evidence, the suspect admitted to the murder.

Ballistic interpretation managed to get into the American Civil War, when a general for the South, “Stonewall” Jackson, was shot while riding in the front lines. The bullet removed from him proved to have come from a gun fired by one of his own men, and thus he succumbed to friendly fire. His death was a significant loss for the South, coming just before the turning point of the battle in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1863.

In 1869, Swiss biologist Frederick Miescher carried out chemical studies on the nuclei of pus cells from discarded bandages that isolated DNA for the first time. He called it “nuclein” and demonstrated that it consisted of an acidic portion and a basic protein portion. The acid portion is now known as DNA, while the rest is responsible for DNA’s packaging. But it would be more than a century before this discovery proved useful to investigators. For now, they had to rely on ingenious ideas; several occurred in cases later that year, just after Paris established the Institute of Legal Medicine.

The
curé
of Bretigny was the victim of a fatal shooting, but the bullet fragments removed from his head during the autopsy proved too fragmented to match to a gun or to bullets owned by the primary suspect, a watchmaker named Cadet. Not to be stymied, French chemist Monsieur Roussin melted the fragments to establish their physical composition via chemical analysis, and they proved to be a compositional match to bullets found in Cadet’s residence. Based on this evidence and reports of bad blood between the two men, Cadet was convicted of murder.

Also in Paris, an incident occurred in the history of serological analysis that demonstrated the power of science and deductive reasoning. Water from a well in the cellar of a restaurant on rue Princesse had made several customers ill, and an investigation yielded a package that contained the lower half of a decomposing human leg. A new officer in the French
Sûreté,
Gustave Macé, also an attorney, was assigned to look into the matter. When he peered into the well, he spotted another package, so he drew it out and opened it to find the lower part of yet another leg, encased in a stocking and presumably from the same victim. A physician determined that the remains were from a female victim.

Both legs had been stitched into a black calico bag, tied with a method known among tailors, so Macé kept this information in the back of his mind. Looking through the city’s files of missing women, Macé was not certain which lead to follow, but Dr. Ambroise Tardieu offered his own opinion that the legs belonged to a man, not a woman, who had probably been dead at least a month and a half. So Macé started over again, searching files of missing men. He remembered the human thigh that had turned up around that time as well as a thigh bone, both found in another area of town. Indeed, chunks of human flesh had also been discovered in the St. Martin canal, and a man had been spotted dumping them “for the fish,” but unfortunately he had not been detained. The gendarmes had also stopped someone early one morning carrying several leaking parcels, which he claimed were hams, so they had not bothered to open them. The description they gave matched that of the man who had tossed the remains into the canal, so as aggravating as their lax attitudes were, these officers did provide some valuable pieces to the puzzle. Pulling all the items together, Macé believed that the two legs he had at the morgue belonged to those earlier pieces.