The Sunday Gentleman (52 page)

And what has happened to the reputation of Alphonse Bertillon in the last fifteen years? The fact is that his name has gained ever wider popular acceptance. On my reference shelves, I find that he is cited in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
as one who “invented the system of identification of criminals, known as Bertillonage”; in Webster’s Biographical Dictionary as the “French anthropologist and criminologist” who “devised system of identifying criminals by anthropometric measurements”; in the
Encyclopedia Americana
as one who “is widely noted as the founder of a system of identification of criminals…he established his system of measurements which were remarkable for their precision.”

Six years after my magazine story was published, Bertillon’s reputation was further enhanced by the appearance of the first book ever written in English on the French detective. This was
Alphonse Bertillon, Father of Scientific Detection
—by Henry T. F. Rhodes, an Englishman with a good knowledge of French apparently. In this volume, Bertillon is given his full due. Affectionately, Rhodes quotes from Professor Lacassagne’s memorial to his friend, that “Bertillon was a man above the common sort” who “had lived to realize in his maturity a dream of his youth.” And again, Rhodes quotes Dr. Locard who said that Bertillon “was a genius” because he created “a new technique” which, for the first time, introduced science into law enforcement, and led to a marriage between the two which has endured ever since. Rhodes concludes that “Bertillon’s discoveries were an historical event of the first magnitude. His anthropometry met a social as well as a technical need, and it thus gave a new form and shape to judicial processes and events.”

However, to my mind, the happiest monument to the genius of Alphonse Bertillon is to be found in a classic of detective fiction. The reader may remember that at the outset of my story, I quoted Bertillon as telling an American publisher, “I would like to see Sherlock Holmes’s methods of reasoning adopted by all professional police.” Well, recently, I was rereading A. Conan Doyle’s
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, and to my delight, in the very first chapter, I came across what I had not noticed before—clear evidence that Sherlock Holmes, the foremost detective in fiction, had obliquely repaid Bertillon’s respect by bestowing upon him the greatest compliment one man can confer upon another—that of jealousy.

A Mr. James Mortimer, having just met Sherlock Holmes, admitted that he was faced with an extraordinary problem. Then Mr. Mortimer, still addressing Sherlock Holmes, went on:

“Recognizing, as I do, that you are the second highest expert in Europe—”

“Indeed, sir! May I inquire who has the honour to be the first?” asked Holmes with some asperity.

‘To the man of precisely scientific mind the work of Monsieur Bertillon must always appeal strongly.”

“Then had you not better consult him?”

“I said, sir, to the precisely scientific mind. But as a practical man of affairs it is acknowledged that you stand alone. I trust, sir, that I have not inadvertently—”

“Just a little,” said Holmes…

This display of Holmes’s jealousy, actually an accolade from the greatest sleuth in fiction to the greatest detective in fact, was published in 1902. How very much Alphonse Bertillon must have appreciated and enjoyed it.

14

The French Sherlock Holmes

For five years, terror gripped the town of Tulle, France. The anonymous letters, printed crudely by hand, appeared sporadically at first, then swept over the community like a dreadful plague. In all, there were three thousand poison-pen letters written, an average of a dozen a week. Toward the end of the affair, with two persons already dead because of the letters, the town was in a frenzy of fear, friend suspecting friend, neighbor suspecting neighbor.

These vicious letters, most of them directed at public officials, told one popular civil servant that his great-grandfather had been a notorious swindler, another that his grandmother had borne an illegitimate son, a third that his mother was a kleptomaniac, a fourth that his son was homosexual. The revelations arrived in curious and terrifying ways. Some were mailed by ordinary post, some pushed under office doors; others were dropped on the sidewalk of the main street, several were slipped into housewives’ shopping bags, and once, one fluttered down into the middle of a festive outdoor gathering. Little was done about the assault until two of the letters had left death in their wake.

A city official, informed by an anonymous letter that his ailing wife was the perpetrator of the crimes, had a heart attack and fell dead. Then his best friend, who also worked in the city hall, learned, through a similar communication, that his wife was having a tawdry affair with a younger man. This husband suffered an apoplectic fit and died.

The local police did their blundering best. Investigations revealed that every employee in the Tulle city hall had received anonymous letters except one—a handsome Frenchman named Maury. The police learned, too, that Maury and his pretty wife were the only persons praised in the letters received by others. Throughout the town, feeling ran high against Maury. In fact, one city hall worker, Jean Laval, made himself spokesman for the community and fearlessly denounced Maury to the police. When the police, confused, failed to act, they too received anonymous letters blaming them for slackness in not arresting Maury.

At this point, the local prefecture contacted the Sûreté Nationale in Lyons, and promptly Dr. Edmond Locard, France’s foremost criminologist, was assigned to the case. From the moment Dr. Locard entered Tulle, events sped to a swift climax.

After examining the evidence, Dr. Locard dismissed the popular villain, Maury. Instead, he began to investigate the victimized people’s spokesman, Jean Laval, as well as his relatives and friends. At once, interesting facts came to light. Dr. Locard learned that a year before the letters began plaguing the populace, Jean Laval had helped his sister obtain a job in the city hall. Here the sister, Angèle Laval, worked side by side with a Miss Fioux, in an office run by Maury. Both women, it appeared, had set their sights on Maury, competed coquettishly for him, and after a close contest. Miss Fioux had won. Maury married Miss Fioux, and Angèle Laval was left loveless and embittered.

“There we have our motive,” Dr. Locard told his colleagues. “Angèle Laval hated Maury for marrying Miss Fioux. Angèle decided upon revenge. She began the anonymous-letter barrage. With the help of her mother, she had enough malicious gossip and half-truths to throw the town into an uproar. She committed a terrible crime, and then tried to point the finger of guilt at Maury by not sending him any letters, by complimenting him in her letters to his neighbors, by whispering suspicions to her brother, who consequently accused him. Yes, I am sure it is Angèle Laval. Now comes the most difficult part. We must prove it.”

Unable to obtain samples of Angèle Laval’s handwriting.

Dr. Locard summoned the frail young lady to his office and bluntly accused her of the crime. She denied everything. Dr. Locard ordered her to take dictation, while he read aloud from various of the anonymous letters. Calmly, slowly, Miss Laval wrote on the paper. Dr. Locard compared her block lettering to the printing of the anonymous notes. They did not match at all. Either she was disguising her printing or she was not guilty. How to discover which?

Then, Dr. Locard had the inspiration which has since become legend in police circles. Miss Laval was pulling on her gloves, preparing to leave, when Dr. Locard halted her. “One moment, Miss Laval,” he said, “we are not quite through. You have given me one sample of your hand. It is not enough, I must have more.”

Dr. Locard stacked a hundred sheets of blank paper and two dozen sharpened pencils before Miss Laval, and commanded her to print as he dictated. He gave her no rest, no pause. When she protested, he grimly dictated faster, pressed her harder. One hour passed. Two hours. Page after page was completed. Angèle Laval hunched, quivering, her face flour-white, her cramped hand rapidly printing sentences on the pages. Three hours. Four hours. She was shaking, gasping, scribbling automatically now, without feeling or thought or deliberation.

Suddenly, abruptly. Dr. Locard stopped. The third degree by penmanship was over. He snatched up the last dozen pages she had filled. He compared them to the anonymous letters. They were exactly alike.

“
Voilà, simple
!” Dr. Locard told his colleagues later. “She was writing too slowly, deliberately changing her true handwriting. I knew if I could break her down, tire her, prevent her from thinking before she wrote, she would reveal her natural hand. When she became exhausted, she could not fake. So she signed her own confession of guilt.”

Sent home with a policeman for her belongings. Miss Laval managed to escape with her mother through the rear door of the house. At a deep swimming hole called Gimel, the two women tried to commit suicide, but woodcutters plunged into the water after them. The mother was drowned. Angèle Laval was rescued, quickly placed on trial, quickly found guilty. Since it had all begun as an affair of the heart, a factor which has a persistent melting effect on the hard objectivity of French jurors, the terror and the deaths were overlooked, and Angèle Laval was sentenced to a short jail term and a stiff fine.

The affair at Tulle was ended, but not without an unexpected and pleasant aftermath. For as it turned out, this celebrated case—which occurred twenty-seven years ago, and which inspired a French movie called
The Raven
, a great success across the United States—became the pivotal point in the remarkable career of Dr. Edmond Locard.

“I am grateful to that Laval woman,” Dr. Locard likes to say today. “After I trapped her, my name became known everywhere. Look, here is the front page of a Texas newspaper. You see how far away it was publicized at the time. Well, sir, after that, I began to get more and more cases outside of France, crimes from Germany, England, Africa, South America. At that moment, I became an international criminologist.”

Dr. Edmond Locard was forty-five years old when he solved “
l’affaire Laval
.” Today, at seventy-two, he is still as active as any renowned private eye on the screen, and certainly one of the few great man hunters in the world, if not the greatest of them all. Of course, there is no precise scale by which one can rank men who solve crimes. No real record is kept of their times at bat, their hits, their errors. But if such an average could be kept. Dr. Locard would undoubtedly be the Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth of criminology.

It is unlikely that his versatility, ingenuity, success, and scope of operation have ever been matched in law enforcement history. The United States has had its share of wizards, from Pinkerton and Burns to Leonarde Keeler and Raymond Schindler. However, most of those men were, or are, specialists. Some excel in fieldwork, others in the laboratory; some are good with a gun, others with a microscope. Dr. Locard is one of the few who can do all these things, a man with as many talents as the god Siva has arms. He is not merely a human bloodhound or a laboratory technician. “Dr. Locard is not a detective as we understand the term,” says H. Ashton-Wolfe, an Englishman who studied under him in the twenties. “He is an expert on crime. He is in real life the embodiment of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Thorndyke. He is psychologist, doctor, chemist, and criminologist.” And he is equally at home in crimes involving arson, forgery, swindling, smuggling, or murder.

Today, although at the ripe age when most men are spending portions of their pension checks on nurses, canes, and grandchildren, Dr. Locard is at his peak of activity and popularity. His twenty books on solving assorted methods of extinction by violence, the most important of which is the seven-volume encyclopedia he wrote called
Book of Criminology
, are now studied by detectives and police scientists throughout the world. Several weeks ago, a French movie short subject on Dr. Locard’s methods, starring the old man himself, was playing in Paris cinema houses, and this film will eventually be shown in London and Rome. Fellow criminologists, like Rochat in Geneva, continue to consult him on enigmatic cases—just as Lombroso, the brilliant Italian Jew at Turin University, and Nelcher, the Berlin police head before the advent of Hitler, and Percival Frazer, the New York City laboratory expert, used to consult him when they were alive before the Second World War. Embryonic sleuths, from as far off as Singapore, make their way to France to study for a few months under Dr. Locard.

Most impressive of all, though he remains by choice in the relatively remote city of Lyons, are the world’s harried victims of crime who beat a path to his door. Movie stars from Hollywood, politicians from Paris, millionaires from Cairo are included among his recent or current clients. Dr. Locard is in the curious, and somewhat enviable, position of being able to take on cases that are official as well as unofficial. That is to say, he works for the Sûreté Nationale as well as for individuals—just as if J. Edgar Hoover, besides his work for the FBI, were able to take on assignments as a private detective.

“I work for the French police, with ten government experts under me,” Dr. Locard explains, “but I contribute my services to the government free, without salary. Therefore, I am able to accept private cases and investigations. You would be surprised at how many wealthy husbands suspect their wives are slowly trying to poison them, and want to hire me to investigate first before going to the police.”

Despite the fact that he is officially director of the Lyons Laboratoire de Police, with its one million criminal charts—police headquarters for the Rhone district of France—and even though he works with the colorful French Sûreté, which is said to be the oldest law enforcement agency in existence, Dr. Locard prefers to think of himself as crime consultant to the world.

In his private cases, almost nothing surprises Dr. Locard any more. Recently, he received a half-dozen poisoned arrows which had killed a trader in Africa and which the colonial governor of the resident foreign power wished examined. Once, Dr. Locard was hired by the President of Brazil for a special criminal investigation assignment. Another time, a wealthy Egyptian family retained Dr. Locard to untangle a one-million-dollar inheritance case, which had been complicated when dozens of forged wills turned up. It was Dr. Locard’s longest case, requiring one year and two months to solve.