The Devil's Dozen (6 page)

The German biologist
Paul Uhlenhuth, who was first
successful in distinguishing
animal from human blood. His
analysis of the evidence against
the “werewolf” Ludwig Tessnow
played an essential role in the
investigation.

Over several centuries, wolves have been the scapegoats for crimes that defy belief that a human could have committed them. Victims might be bitten all over, torn limb from limb, drained of blood, or disemboweled. Since these offenses seemed altogether inhuman, villagers were certain they were committed by someone possessed by a force that could only originate from supernatural evil. Some evil is so overwhelming it’s nearly impossible for normal people to accept that it originated with a rational being. Such a person must have been transformed.

The belief in the possibility that humans could change shape has been traced to 600 B.c., when King Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible thought he’d suffered from a condition that made him grow out his hair and romp around as a wild beast. By the 1500s in France, lycanthropy was a diagnosable medical condition. An informative early book about the myths was
The Book of Were-Wolves
by Sabine Baring-Gould, a nineteenth-century archaeologist and historian. Shape-shifting ideas were traced from ancient times and across different cultures, with many accepting that man-beasts were the result of an encounter with the devil.

These folks were thought to dress in wolfskins at night as a way to contact Satan to gain the wolf’s special powers. As the myth goes, when they managed to make “the change,” they gained a period of complete abandon into blood and violence. Common tales around Europe told of hunters who had hacked off the paw of a wolf that had run away only to find that the paw in their pouch had become a woman’s hand, and then they’d discover a woman in town with a mysteriously bandaged arm.

Some practitioners viewed shape-shifting as a gift, and those who possessed a strong sexual drive viewed a pact with the devil as a perfect excuse to claim that their misdeeds were beyond their control. For example, in 1521, Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun were tried in Besançon, France. They admitted that they had pledged obedience to the “master” of three black men they’d met in exchange for money and freedom from trouble. They were then anointed in a ceremony with unguents that changed them into savage animals. Together they had torn apart a seven-year-old boy, a grown woman, and a little girl, whose flesh they consumed.

A pioneer in the early days of
psychiatry, Richard von Krafft-
Ebing’s theories aided in the understanding
of killers such as Tessnow.

They so loved lapping up the warm blood, they stated, that they could not help but continue to kill. They also claimed they had sexual relations with female wolves. The court sentenced both men to be executed for sorcery.

Lycanthropy has long been considered a form of lunacy that compels people to eat raw meat, attack others, let their hair grow, and run on all fours. By the late nineteenth century, such behavior had drawn the interest of mental health professionals, known as alienists. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, one such practitioner at the Feldhof Asylum, and a professor of psychiatry in Strasbourg, believed that without a standard diagnostic system, psychiatry could not consider itself equivalent to the field of medicine, so in 1880, he published three volumes, collectively titled
A Textbook of Insanity,
in which he outlined an elaborate system for categorizing mental diseases. By this time, insanity had already been accepted as a legal concept in England, so this medical context would cloud the waters, because it would become apparent in certain proceedings that some people who suffered from psychosis might still appreciate that what they were doing was wrong. Thus, they might be medically insane but legally sane.

Krafft-Ebing’s more well-known text, published in 1886, was
Psychopathia Sexualis with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study.
His approach was to identify a foundational problem, the development of degeneracy, and study it according to its manifestations in sexual deviance. He set up a theoretical framework through which to identify and interpret the various behaviors, relying on such factors as heredity, corrupting influences on the nervous system, the evolution of a motive, and a qualitative set of details about the personality. He described the details of forty-five cases that focused largely on violent criminals or extraordinarily perverse practices (in later editions, the number of cases would grow to more than two hundred). These wretches illustrated the harmful consequences of a degenerate lifestyle, which itself was often influenced by specific types of temptations. Such persons were not well equipped to resist; they might be timid, lacking in education, unable to control themselves, or of limited intelligence. Nevertheless, they were considered to be responsible for exposing themselves to situations in which their weakness of character would undermine their efforts to be good.

Krafft-Ebing found a close link between lust and the impulse to murder. By selecting cases to correspond to a simplified framework that discounted multiple motives, he offered psychiatry a “vocabulary of perversion” and a seemingly viable standard of interpretation. He was the first to try to study and categorize the varieties of perversion, especially lust murders that inspired certain types of frenzied activity closer to what a beast might do than a human being. “A great number of so-called lust murders,” he wrote, “depend upon combined sexual hyperesthesia and parasthesia. As a result of this perverse coloring of the feelings, further acts of bestiality with the corpse may result.” He found that the largest percentage of offenders who indulged in truly perverse acts were white males. Once they were caught, they also apparently enjoyed describing the acts.

Krafft-Ebing’s work became both a professional and popular sensation, just in time to explain the bestial acts of the serial killer in Germany who had a lust for tearing apart children.

The small police force in Lechtingen began to question all the villagers to learn if anyone had seen the murdered girls that day. They failed to gain information specific to the victims, but they did hear about a suspicious man named Ludwig Tessnow, who was seen that day entering the village from the woods and whose apron was stained with some dark liquid. They went to see him, but he said he was a carpenter and the stains were from wood dye. His explanation seemed plausible enough, so they let him go.

However, one enterprising officer decided to take the investigation a step further; he went to Tessnow’s workshop to see what he might find. He saw a can of wood dye, just as Tessnow had said, so he decided to try an experiment. When Tessnow was near it, he pushed it so that some spilled onto Tessnow’s trousers. Since it resembled the stains seen on his clothes earlier that day, the investigator had to let the matter drop. Tessnow remained in the town, working among its inhabitants without further incident for the next four months. He then picked up and left to find work elsewhere, and the deaths of the two children went unexplained. Their mothers grieved without closure.

While Krafft-Ebing might have understood the offender who committed these crimes, his psychiatric approach could not have been used to catch him, because Tessnow had already learned an effective way to escape detection. His capture would depend on a different type of science.

Blood is one of the most mystifying and significant substances in life. It symbolizes so many things, from life itself to birth to kinship to death. As forensic science developed during the nineteenth century, biologists sought to better understand the activity, function, and composition of blood. One forensic interest was to distinguish human from animal blood, and another was to try to understand the activities at a crime scene that involved blood. For example, in Paris in 1869, an investigator named Gustave Macé gained fame from his quick-thinking examination of the floor of a murder/dismemberment scene. Although the floor had been scrubbed cleaned, he noted that the tiles sloped toward an area under a bed. He instructed a workman to lift the tiles, presuming that blood would have pooled underneath, and he was correct. Both the analysis of blood and its patterns come under the umbrella of the discipline of serology, or the science of biological fluids.

The first method for distinguishing animal blood from human was proposed in 1841: it was heated up with a chemical and sniffed for a specific odor, but there proved to be no scientific basis to this claim. During the next decade, Ludwig Teichmann mixed blood with a solution of potassium chloride, iodide, and bromide in galactic acid, showing that hemoglobin could be changed into hemin in order to examine the shape of the resulting crystals. While useless as yet for forensic investigation, this method stood for half a century before another scientist improved upon it.

Different blood types were recognized as early as 1875, but it wasn’t until 1901 that Dr. Karl Landsteiner, at the Institute of Pathology and Anatomy in Austria, named and standardized the groups. He asked colleagues for samples of their blood, and with a centrifuge he separated the clear serum from the red cells. He then placed the samples in a number of different test tubes, mixing the blood of one participant with the blood of all the others. He found that sometimes blood clumped together and sometimes the samples repelled one another. He determined from these experiments that there were three types of blood, based on differences in a substance called an antigen, which produces antibodies to fight infection. He labeled them types A (antigen A present, anti-B antibody present, but antigen B absent) and B (antigen B present, antigen A absent). A third distinct reaction was labeled C (both antigens A and B absent), but was later relabeled as O.

It took another two years, but a colleague of Landsteiner’s, Dr. Adriano Sturli, discovered yet another type in which both antigens were present, so he called it type AB. It soon became clear that the blood type depended on genetic inheritance from parents, which helped with paternity tests. Types A and O are the most common in the human population, and AB the rarest.

At the same time that Landsteiner was experimenting with blood types, another young doctor was working on the distinction between animal and human blood. German biologist Paul Uhlenhuth, working at the Institute of Hygiene in Griefswald, had taken up the study of hoof-and-mouth disease, and he hoped to develop a serum to combat it. Before him, Jules Bordet, from Belgium, had shown that a vaccination elicited a specific antibody and had worked with the behavior of antigens. He was able to see a visible reaction between the antibody and antigen. Others who injected animals against infectious diseases found that foreign substances caused the production of defensive substances specific to the injected material. These “precipitins” could be utilized to distinguish different types of protein.

Uhlenhuth continued to pursue the implications of this research with other experiments, learning that if he injected protein from a chicken egg into a rabbit, and then mixed serum from the rabbit with egg white, the egg proteins separated from the liquid to form a precipitin. As he proceeded, he found that the blood of each animal had its own characteristic protein, and then, after injecting human cells into the rabbit, he realized that the test was also applicable to humans.

This was welcome news for law enforcement, because crime suspects often claimed that blood on their clothing was from animals, and as yet their stories could not be scientifically disputed. With the precipitin test, those days appeared to be over. To be certain about this result, a coroner asked Uhlenhuth to test some dried bloodstains from both animals and humans, and the results proved the test to be reliable.

Then, just four months after Uhlenhuth announced his discovery, a particularly brutal crime brought the test into the forensic spotlight.