Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (16 page)

In January 1906, Weber appeared in court, where Thoinot described studies from the past eighty years concerning marks left by manual strangulation. In 1888, Dr. Langreuter had opened the skulls of fresh corpses and observed what occurred inside as his assistant choked the corpses or strangled them with cords. Langreuter had noted that victims of manual strangulation show specific bruises on the neck, and dotlike facial and muscle hemorrhages, called petechiae. Thoinot had to admit that his tests on the corpses based on these studies had come out negative. While circumstantial evidence and witness reports supported a finding of murder, forensic science could not support it. Weber was acquitted, but the case was not over.

Under another name, she became a governess and another child died. She was arrested again and subjected to Thoinot’s analysis, but he rejected the cause of death as strangulation, so Weber received another reprieve. But then she was caught in 1908 attacking a young boy. The examining doctor made an exhaustive photographic documentation, knowing that Thoinot would evaluate the corpse. However, Thoinot avoided impugning his reputation and decided that this time Weber had acted out from the stress of her numerous arrests. He recommended that she be sent to an asylum. Those doctors who had lost ground in this case were determined in the future to avoid what they considered a travesty, so they set about to improve the system. They believed that careful analysis had proven the case, even if an imposing authority had swayed the jury. With more convincing proof, they could have saved the lives of at least some of Weber’s victims.

During this time in Germany, a young woman named Margarethe Filbert was murdered. She had disappeared on May 28, 1908, and her headless corpse was located the next day, with hairs clutched in her fist. Although she was provocatively posed, there was no evidence of sexual assault. District Attorney Sohn, also the chief investigator, had read an article celebrating chemist Georg Popp as a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, a man who used microscope analysis to solve crimes. He called on Popp in Frankfurt, Germany, to request his assistance.

Popp had become fascinated with the application of chemistry to forensic analysis after a case he had worked in which he had analyzed spots on a suspect’s trousers. He had read Hans Gross’s book
Criminal Investigation,
and had even managed to identify a thief in his own lab by using vapors to expose a latent fingerprint. He continued to assist the police with fingerprint photography and the identification of fibers and soil traces.

In the case of the headless corpse, Popp analyzed the hairs and said that they were from a woman, and were possibly Filbert’s, but he needed the entire head to be certain. A farmer and local bully named Andreas Schlicher came under suspicion, and scorings from under his fingernails were analyzed with the Uhlenhuth test, yielding traces of human blood. Popp requested the man’s clothing for microscopic analysis, but curiously, Sohn refused to send them. Despite the existence of methods that would clearly help, the local authorities apparently balked at taking this approach too far.

Then another detective took over the case and he wanted to see it resolved, so he sent the clothing. Popp found evidence of blood on the man’s shirt and trousers, with obvious attempts to wash it off. He also examined the suspect’s shoes, finding that they bore several layers of soil with embedded purple and brown fibers. Some of the soil was similar to soil from the crime scene, but not with soil found in other places the suspect claimed to have been. Popp used a spectrophotometer, based on the spectroscope invented in 1859 by Robert Bunsen, because he wanted to compare the spectrum of emission lines that came from the dyes in the fibers from the shoes and the victim’s clothing. He found that the purple and brown fibers were identical in color and consistency to the victim’s skirt.

In the first documented case to focus on the analysis of soil and the chemical composition of fiber, a jury found Schlicher guilty, based largely on this impressive physical evidence, and he then admitted his deed as a crime of opportunity. He had hoped to rob the woman, he said, but when it turned out she had no money, he had removed her head as a gesture of anger. He led authorities to where he had placed it.

Popp was not the only one to espouse the use of the microscope. Lacassagne did as well, when he taught its merits to students at the Lyon Institute of Forensic Medicine. One of them, Émile Villebrun, went on to study the value of fingernails in forensic investigation. Not only could evidence be found under fingernails, he indicated, but they also make distinctive marks when scraping human flesh—sometimes perpetrators to victims, and sometimes victims to perpetrators.

MURDER SQUAD

Scotland Yard’s most elite department of detectives was founded in 1907. At the time, there were many unsolved murders around England, so home secretary Herbert Gladstone decided to create an elite unit from members of the Criminal Investigation Department. London had plenty of detectives—around seven hundred—but the provincial cities were lacking. London officials found that when cases with special circumstances arose, the local law enforcement generally muddled them. They might eventually request a consultation from Scotland Yard’s more experienced force, but usually after it was too late for the detectives to offer much help. In addition, there were turf wars, even when help was requested. The home secretary decided that since he had men with considerable experience “with a particular class of people” he thought their talents should be better utilized. He moved to give Scotland Yard greater jurisdiction over serious crimes in locations outside London. For that, he designated a small number of talented men for this task. They would come to be known as the Murder Squad, although they received no such official title. Gladstone set to work advising local chief constables of the experience these men had and inducing them to take advantage of their experience when needed.

The first chief of the Murder Squad was Frank Froest and he set about making the group of four men under his supervision into a unit in which they would serve with pride. They received more training and assisted one another, soon developing an identity among law enforcement, as well as working on crimes that garnered media attention. In an age when Sherlock Holmes stories were all the rage, these men gained national prominence.

However, it proved difficult at times to investigate murders some distance from London, because people with something to hide often corrupted crime scenes and removed clues. In one case, a young amputee saving money for a cork leg was murdered. His mother, Flora Haskell, said that half the money was missing. She also described a running man who had thrown a knife at her and spattered her clothing with blood. That’s when she’d found her son dead in his bed. A story like this sounded suspicious to seasoned detectives, and it was, since no one else in the village reported seeing a stranger of the description she gave. Given that the boy, age twelve, was probably a burden, and that she had needed money, it seemed clear that she was the likely culprit—especially when she admitted to having cleaned up all the blood. Indeed, the local doctor had even washed the body by the time the detectives arrived, and they were on the scene in less than twenty-four hours. They soon learned that the knife used belonged to the family’s household, and recently had been sharpened. The circumstances added up against Flora, but her counsel managed to convince the jury that the lack of blood at the scene meant the key piece of evidence had been unavailable. They acquitted the woman, believing the case against her had not been proven.

But the police believed otherwise. The Haskell case inspired the home office to notify the authorities in all localities that junior officers were to be instructed that all such crime scenes must be preserved in the condition they were found, and a guard should be posted until experienced personnel could arrive. As these safeguards were instituted, one member of the Squad, Walter Dew, won widespread fame for his handling of a missing persons case. That same incident brought a new expert into the courtroom who would go on to become one of Britain’s premiere forensic pathologists.

Dr. Bernard Spilsbury already had made a name for himself as a medical practitioner during the early 1900s at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, associating him firmly with the coroner’s court, where he performed “necropsies” to determine the cause of death in civil and criminal cases. In 1910, he examined two cases of medical malpractice, but then a physician came to Spilsbury’s attention who had committed murder outside the practice.

The suspect was American-born Hawley Harvey Crippen, a patent salesman as well as a physician. In January, he boarded the S.S.
Montrose
bound for Quebec with a young boy, who was actually his disguised mistress, Ethel Le Neve. A telegraph to the ship (a first for radio technology) effectively stopped him, and he was arrested on board and returned to England for trial in the murder of his wife, Cora.

In fact, she had been his second wife, and they had moved to England together in 1900. Cora fancied herself an opera singer and at some point she apparently got involved with a performer named Bruce Miller. Around the same time, Crippen hired Le Neve as a typist. They remained acquaintances for five years before becoming lovers.

The Crippens resided at 30 Hilldrop Crescent, generally living above their means. Crippen, forty-eight, cut an insignificant figure, being small, bespectacled, and mild-mannered. People viewed him as kindly. One day, Cora simply vanished without saying good-bye to a single friend. She had last been seen at a dinner party on January 31, and within a day, Crippen had pawned some of her jewelry. He also sent letters in her name to various organizations offering Cora’s resignation, and he moved his mistress into his home as his new companion.

Le Neve took over the household and hired a French maid. She was even seen by people who knew Cora wearing some of Cora’s furs and jewelry. Crippen told friends that Cora had gone to visit friends in America, and very soon he was adding that she had grown ill and died there. But his public flaunting of Ms. Le Neve made his story suspicious. A friend of Cora’s tried to get answers and when he could not, he went to Scotland Yard. Questioned by Walter Dew from the Murder Squad, Crippen said that the embarrassing truth was that Cora had run off to be with a lover, Bruce Miller, and they were together in Chicago. Nevertheless, the officer searched Crippen’s house but observed nothing to indicate foul play.

But people who knew the Crippens were aware of Cora’s domineering behavior and Crippen’s obviously resentful restraint. Apparently she had learned about the mistress, because in December 1909, she threatened to take the money from their joint savings account and leave. In January, Crippen had ordered five grains of hydrobromide of hyoscin at the shop of Lewis and Burrows on New Oxford Street—a considerable amount that demanded a special order. He picked it up on January 19. Shortly thereafter, Cora “ran off.”

The day after Dew had visited, Crippen used a pseudonym to board the S. S.
Montrose
in Antwerp. This left Crippen’s house unattended, and since his sudden departure had again raised suspicions, a team of officers performed a more thorough search. This time, the results were quite different. Beneath some bricks in the coal cellar, Cora’s dismembered and decomposing torso, sans some organs, bones, and the genitals, was found, and it was determined from tissue analysis that she had ingested a lethal dose of hydrobromide of hyoscin.

Even before these tests were performed, a police sketch artist made a drawing of the fugitive, based on old photos. But the
Montrose
’s captain had already recognized Crippen from photos of the “Cellar Murderer” in a newspaper he’d brought on board. He sent a telegram back to officials on shore regarding his suspicion. Crippen was detained, while a police officer boarded a faster ship to arrive before him in Canada. On July 31, 1910, Crippen was arrested and returned to England.

During his sensational murder trial, his counsel questioned that the remains were those of Crippen’s wife but failed to produce evidence that she was alive beyond February 1, as well as to demonstrate why she would leave on a journey in February without her furs. A chemist testified that twelve days before Cora disappeared, he had sold the fatal drug to Crippen, who had never purchased it before. Then a doctor described the tests he had used to determine that Cora had been poisoned, while Spilsbury and another doctor identified a scar from the torso’s lower abdomen as the result of a surgical procedure that Cora had endured, as well as proving the scar was not just a postmortem fold in the skin. Spilsbury even demonstrated this with a microscope. After five days of testimony, the jury took twenty-seven minutes to convict Crippen and he was hanged. (Ethel Le Neve was acquitted of any involvement and she sold her story to the press.)

Spilsbury was soon testifying in yet another fatal poisoning. In 1911, insurance agent Frederick Henry Seddon was arrested for poisoning his lodger, Elizabeth Barrow, to steal her assets. The circumstantial evidence was that Seddon had persuaded Ms. Barrow to transfer a considerable sum of stock funds and some property to him in exchange for a regular annuity. Not long afterward, she grew ill and died. Since she had suffered from asthma, her doctor decided the cause of death was heart failure. But then a relative announced to the police that her cash had disappeared, so her remains were exhumed.

Scotland Yard authorized Spilsbury to perform another autopsy and toxicologist William Willcox to make some tests. Spilsbury failed to find evidence of heart failure, so Willcox, who had noted arsenic in the organs, hoped to try to quantify it. He ran hundreds of weight tests for arsenic and then used the arsenic mirror method and the assumption that arsenic would distribute evenly in the body to figure out how much arsenic was in each of the poisoned woman’s internal organs. He came up with a figure of two grains, which was sufficient to kill a person. Setting a precedent for forensic science, he calculated the amount via body weight in milligrams.