Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal

PRAISE FOR THE WORKS OF KATHERINE RAMSLAND

BEATING THE DEVIL’S GAME

“Enjoyable and instructive . . . [Dr. Ramsland] makes these forensic initiatives, and the inventors and investigators who nourished them, really come to life.”

—Taph.com

THE DEVIL’S DOZEN

“Highlights [Ramsland’s] command of history and forensic knowledge, fusing it with her interesting and approachable narrative voice . . .
The Devil’s Dozen
is a collection of some of the most fascinating cases and instances of innovative investigation.”

—BioMedSearch.com

THE HUMAN PREDATOR

“If you’re looking for the perfect gift for someone who’s riveted to television shows like
CSI
, you won’t find a better one . . . This book is unique in the field.”

—
truTV Crime Library

THE C.S.I. EFFECT

“A fascinating must read for
CSI
fans and anyone interested in criminal justice.”

—
Booklist

THE UNKNOWN DARKNESS:

PROFILING THE PREDATORS AMONG US

Coauthored with Gregg O. McCrary

“A must read for true crime fans. A beautifully written expert analysis of high-profile killers.”

—Ann Rule

“One of the most immensely readable and gripping accounts of serial murder I have ever read.”

—Colin Wilson, author of
Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence

THE FORENSIC SCIENCE OF C.S.I.

“Fascinating . . . [A] must for anyone who wonders how the real crime solvers do it.”

—Michael Palmer

“With the mind of a true investigator, Ramsland demystifies the world of forensics with authentic and vivid detail.”

—John Douglas

PIERCING THE DARKNESS:

UNDERCOVER WITH VAMPIRES IN AMERICA TODAY

“A riveting read, a model of engaged journalism.”

—
Publishers Weekly

Titles by Katherine Ramsland

THE
FORENSIC
PSYCHOLOGY
OF
CRIMINAL
MINDS

THE
DEVIL’S
DOZEN

TRUE STORIES OF C.S.I.

BEATING THE DEVIL’S GAME

THE C.S.I. EFFECT

THE HUMAN PREDATOR:

A HISTORICAL CHRONICLE OF SERIAL MURDER

AND FORENSIC INVESTIGATION

INSIDE THE MINDS OF MASS MURDERERS: WHY THEY KILL

A VOICE FOR THE DEAD:

A FORENSIC INVESTIGATOR’S PURSUIT OF TRUTH IN THE GRAVE

(with James E. Starrs)

THE SCIENCE OF COLD CASE FILES

THE UNKNOWN DARKNESS:

PROFILING THE PREDATORS AMONG US

(with Gregg O. McCrary)

THE SCIENCE OF VAMPIRES

THE CRIMINAL MIND:

A WRITER’S GUIDE TO FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY

THE FORENSIC SCIENCE OF C.S.I.

CEMETERY STORIES:

HAUNTED GRAVEYARDS, EMBALMING SECRETS,

AND THE LIFE OF A CORPSE AFTER DEATH

GHOST: INVESTIGATING THE OTHER SIDE

BLISS: WRITING TO FIND YOUR TRUE SELF

PIERCING THE DARKNESS:

UNDERCOVER WITH VAMPIRES IN AMERICA TODAY

DEAN KOONTZ: A WRITER’S BIOGRAPHY

PRISM OF THE NIGHT: A BIOGRAPHY OF ANNE RICE

THE WITCHES’ COMPANION:

THE OFFICIAL GUIDE TO

ANNE RICE’S LIVES OF THE MAYFAIR WITCHES

THE VAMPIRE COMPANION:

THE OFFICIAL GUIDE TO

ANNE RICE’S THE VAMPIRE CHRONICLES

THE ANNE RICE READER

THE ART OF LEARNING: A SELF-HELP MANUAL FOR STUDENTS

ENGAGING THE IMMEDIATE:

APPLYING KIERKEGAARD’S INDIRECT COMMUNICATION

TO THE PRACTICE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY

Novels

THE BLOOD HUNTERS

THE HEAT SEEKERS

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

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BEATING THE DEVIL’S GAME

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright © 2007 by Katherine Ramsland.

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eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-17535-8

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley hardcover edition / September 2007

Berkley trade paperback edition / June 2008

Berkley premium edition / February 2014

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A HISTORY OF

FORENSIC SCIENCE AND CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION

Katherine Ramsland, Ph.D.

To my parents,

for their influence and support

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the result of years of interaction with many people, as well as opportunities to research and write about forensic science. I’ll probably miss someone, but among those whom I wish to acknowledge are:

John Silbersack, my multitalented literary agent and close friend, who understands me, maintains our vision, and keeps the momentum going.

Marilyn Bardsley, my editor and friend at Crime Library, who got me started writing about forensic science.

Ruth Osborne, who listens to me describe what I’m writing, no matter how gruesome, and who proofread portions of the manuscript.

Dana DeVito, my “coroner sister,” who helps me be even more gruesome.

John Timpane, who has encouraged me every step of the way and provided material that was difficult to find.

Gregg McCrary, who taught me so much about profiling and investigation.

Robert Hare, whose work I deeply respect, and who provided me with great resources for understanding psychopaths.

James E. Starrs, who got me involved with the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, not to mention let me be on his exhumation teams.

Forensic scientists, with whom I’ve had many conversations: Traci Starrs, Karen Taylor, Jack Frost, Zack Lysek, Tom Crist, Henry Lee, Jack Levisky, Tim Palmbach, Michael Baden, Cyril Wecht, and Bill Bass.

Deborah Brown, whose friendship steered me toward the Nutshell Studies.

Kim Lionetti, who made the early push for me in publishing forensics books.

My mother, Barbara, who never discouraged me from my “dark interests” as I grew up, and my father, Henry, who always supported my education.

Karen Pepper, who provided research support and proofreading.

Karen Walton, who always reads my books, even when they scare her.

Ginjer Buchanan, my enthusiastic editor at Berkley, for her encouragement and interest in all that I’m doing.

INTRODUCTION

Early in the morning of June 13, 1994, someone attacked and killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman outside Simpson’s home in Brentwood, California. Both had been slashed to death with a knife, and from the extreme brutality of the attack, Nicole appeared to have been the target. That threw suspicion on her estranged ex-husband, former celebrity athlete O. J. Simpson. His arrest and trial brought to the public’s awareness the nature of evidence handling and scientific analysis in a criminal investigation, during an age when a number of sophisticated procedures were being utilized. Spots of blood turned up in Simpson’s vehicle and home, and he had a cut hand supposedly from the same night as the incident, but he protested that he was not guilty. Still, he did attempt to flee with a bundle of money and he penned a suicide note. He also had opportunity to commit the double homicide, as well as a history of threats and domestic violence involving Nicole.

Simpson’s murder trial was televised, offering viewers months of proceedings that featured crime scene specialists, crime lab personnel, pathologists, investigators, DNA analysts, blood spatter pattern analysts, and other experts who were called on to reconstruct the crime. In the end Simpson was acquitted, while investigators, scientists, and lab personnel were left to ponder their costly and embarrassing mistakes. Not only had the public learned many details about the investigative process but they’d also seen its foibles and limitations. Nevertheless, widespread interest in forensic investigation had been sparked, leading the way for the field of forensic science to garner more attention, including funding from Congress. We’ll return to the Simpson investigation later in the book, since it’s part of the fascinating history of just how science and the legal process merged. Our focus will be on those people—criminals, investigators, and scientists—whose lives and activities affected one another toward the goal of improving the pursuit of justice and our understanding of why some people criminally harm others.

The priority in forensic investigation is to make an identification, whether it be of a victim, an offender, a fraudulent document, or a weapon. Before scientific analysis was established, people were identified and crimes were solved mostly through logic, snitches, and confessions. For centuries in fact, among the best methods for getting a confession was torture. If it made sense that a specific individual had committed a crime and he or she wasn’t talking, there were ways to persuade him. Suspects might be stretched, roasted, dunked in water, whipped, branded, or subjected to having a body part chopped off, and it’s likely that to stop the pain or prevent disfiguration, many an innocent person blurted out whatever was required. Punishments ranged from banishment from a community to death by grisly means.

Yet not all convicted criminals were detained for life or executed, and thus society needed a way to identify repeat offenders. Branding was effective, as were certain types of bodily mutilation, but some cultures devised a means of describing criminals so as to recognize them if they returned before governing bodies. Even so, most systematic forms of identification and categorization did not develop until the nineteenth century.

The story of forensic science unites the narratives of both science and law. It’s important to see first how each developed to fully appreciate how their merging proved productive for both. Science emerged as both a perspective on human experience and an objective measure of human reality. Guided by the fourteenth-century notion of Occam’s razor, which encouraged devising the simplest explanation for phenomena, persistent men who found more truth in the scientific method than in religion, myth, or superstition, directed the evolution of science and law. They took risks to have their experiments and theories viewed seriously and their careful work often yielded impressive results. They were assisted by the empirical philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who shifted ideas away from esoteric notions about reality and toward experience and observation. Yet just as science did not achieve recognition without a struggle, the same is true of its forensic application.

In its earliest days, physicians, chemists, and other scientists attempted to develop and reform legal proceedings, which eventually inspired new investigative techniques and methods for dealing with offenders. While court systems initially resisted scientific procedures as a hindrance to logical analysis (especially when these approaches diverged), the impressive resolution of sensational cases with the help of science slowly persuaded the judiciary that scientific methodology was beneficial, then essential, to achieving justice.

Forensic science is the application of scientific perspectives and techniques to the legal process, including investigations and courtroom protocol. While it’s lately become an umbrella term covering everything from the investigation of historic events that have no forensic significance to disciplines of skill that involve little to no science, it’s most technically accurate to say that forensic science is the use of scientific data and procedures specifically for the legal system. This discipline relies on the same values and methodology used by other members of the scientific community. There’s a rigorous procedure involved, including controlled conditions, reliable data collection, and the attempt to disprove hypotheses. A hypothesis must be testable, which means it must be capable of being proven wrong. In setting up a hypothesis, the scientists can envision other possible interpretations of the data, such that they can determine whether one hypothesis or another best applies. Too often investigators develop a hypothesis and then seek data to support it. They will likely find what they’re looking for, but in doing so may twist the facts, or neglect or ignore others that could contribute to a different outcome.

Scientists are interested only in the outcome the facts allow, not in the outcome they may desire, because their work must be performed in a way that others can replicate: with objective methods and reasoning that other forensic scientists—their peers—would support.

“Observation” was the watchword of the early forensic pioneers. They understood the value of observing a crime scene as a whole and then identifying something in that context that should be carefully analyzed. It could be gunshot residue on someone’s coat, a piece of bomb shrapnel, a strand of hair, or a suspicious stain on a carpet. It might be how a car was driven against a tree or blood spattered onto a wall. It might even be behavioral clues, such as the fact that three similar crimes all occurred in the same neighborhood between midnight and two
A.M
. The scientists focused on the subject of study and pondered its implications before they determined the appropriate method. A proven scientific procedure evolved for each type of evidence, whether measuring bitemark impressions, analyzing the DNA in saliva, or finding poison in human tissue, and the men who introduced and refined the best procedures contributed toward our betterment. (Until recently, this area has been the province of male scientists, so I’ll generally use the male pronoun.)

THE EMERGENCE OF SCIENCE

For the philosopher Heraclitus in ancient Greece, the one key principle to explain everything in our world lay in the notion of change, while to Parmenides the principle was permanence. Yet others believed that reality was based in numbers and mathematics, and a few noted thinkers viewed it as mental or spiritual rather than physical. Still, all of this was largely theoretical. It was Aristotle who began to organize and systematize concepts about the physical world, and his approach long defined scientific methodology. The spiritual world was assigned to the realm of religion, and science looked to those objects and situations that could be observed, measured, and categorized.

Yet even the solid and secure evolved into something more variable. Throughout the history of science, ideological foundations that defined our notions of reality have been shattered and rebuilt, as emerging anomalous facts revolutionized even the most entrenched perspectives. Many theories once believed fundamental have been replaced with others that better explain the body of facts and observations. Then with new knowledge that reveals the limitations of even
those
ideas, the theories give way.

The bulk of forensic science developed during the era of Newtonian physics in the nineteenth century, with key influences from Charles Darwin, physical anthropology, medicine, and even early psychiatry. The innovations took hold around mid-century and picked up speed over the next hundred years. Instead of attempting to include every possible development in every area of forensic science or technology in this volume, I’ve selected what I consider the most illuminating and interesting tales, setting them out as stories to give the chronology momentum. I was especially impressed with the vision of some key participants.

To explain and defeat the problem of crime, the early forensic scientists and investigators tended to focus on the criminal, with special study devoted to the criminally insane. They examined the criminals’ physical, moral, and psychological constitution, as well as their hereditary and environmental influences. In general, the experts viewed criminals as set apart in some manner from normal society, whether it was how they looked or how they thought, and certain thinkers believed that if the cause of their deviant behavior could only be clarified as the manifestation of a “type” of person, crime could be erased and society thereby ennobled. Thus, a number of scientists set about to train themselves to closely observe incarcerated criminals so as to learn how to spot them “in the wild.” This expertise alone, although there was more logic than science, gave them the status of a “scientist” and allowed them to speak with authority in their various societies, in treatises, professional journals, and in court. Some of these authorities explained criminality as a moral failure, others as a biopsychological defect, and still others as the effect of poor social conditions or the result of inheriting family corruption.

Nineteenth-century practices in forensic science derived from ideologies that proposed perfect societies free of crime, and they believed that specific people who were responsible for illegal deeds (mostly foreigners or people from the lower classes) could be singled out and dissected so as to decrease recidivism and prevent future criminality in others. They proposed that the state support experiments that, in the long run, would benefit society, paying back manifold any expenses incurred. Since they needed a norm against which to measure success, they devised the “rational man,” who used his wits to exercise control over his behavior and strive to better himself. As a result, those men who offered informed opinions from scientific disciplines to achieve diminished offenses and greater moral self-improvement in the greatest number of people became increasingly important in the courtroom. That they might make a mess of things in the process did not stop the courts from increasing their participation and at times even compelling it. Once science got a foot through the courtroom door, there was no getting it out. The only thing self-respecting scientists could do was to keep improving their contributions and to police their colleagues.

Thus, as science assisted justice, justice helped to polish this form of applied science. Largely, that’s the story of forensic science. But it’s also the tale of visionaries who persisted in setting forth standards within the judicial arena. From the earliest autopsy results that figured in a criminal case to the latest technology for DNA analysis, forensic science has come a long way.