Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (23 page)

He was also told to copy photostats of the ransom notes, although this was improper protocol, and at no time was he offered a lawyer. That same day, the police unearthed a large cache of ransom money hidden in Hauptmann’s garage. This information was inappropriately conveyed to the Osborns, and that same day they identified Hauptmann as the author of the ransom notes. According to the analysis, Hauptmann had a peculiar way of writing the letters
X
and
T.
He also wrote
not
as
note,
using an open
O
and an uncrossed
T,
and wrote
the
in a strangely illegible manner. The most telling evidence was a diagnosis of agraphia—a peculiar “tic” of adding unnecessary
E
s onto various words, evident in both the notes and in his own letters.

However, another handwriting expert who saw exemplars from Fisch said that Fisch had written the ransom notes. There was also a statement by a witness to the effect that Fisch was seen near the Lindbergh home a short time before the kidnapping, which corroborated Hauptmann’s Fisch story. Hauptmann had learned about Keeler’s polygraph and begged to be tested to prove his innocence, but since a federal appeals court had already banned the results of systolic blood pressure deception tests from the courtroom, his attorney thought it was of little use.

Hauptmann’s trial opened on January 2, 1935 in Flemington, New Jersey, at the Hunterdon County Courthouse. The New Jersey Attorney General, David T. Wilentz, led the prosecution. The
New York Journal
paid for defense attorney Edward J. Reilly’s services in exchange for rights to his story. Reilly was assisted by a Flemington attorney, named C. Lloyd Fisher, who was inexperienced in criminal defense. Reilly had spent only thirty-eight minutes with the defendant and had publicly stated that he believed Hauptmann to be guilty. He also consumed alcohol at lunch throughout the trial, and his afternoon performance was, by many accounts, notably lacking.

Both Osborns gave damaging testimony, but Hilda Z. Braunlich, a European handwriting expert who believed that the ransom notes had been overwritten with changes that amounted to forgery, was not even allowed to testify. She later claimed that Reilly actually ordered her to leave the state. Also, the police had cleared Hauptmann’s home of his writings, so the defense team was unable to offer specimens that might indicate discrepancies between his personal writings and the ransom notes.

The most impressive area of forensic identification involved the kidnap ladder. Wilentz described how an upright from the ladder fit nicely into a hole left in the attic of Hauptmann’s home where a plank of wood had been removed, and put several wood experts on the stand. Arthur Koehler, of the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, testified that a semi-skilled carpenter had constructed the ladder from four types of wood: pine from North Carolina was used for the uprights, Douglas fir from the Western United States for an odd piece on the left upright, birch for the dowels, and Ponderosa pine for the rungs. The odd piece appeared to be from floor boarding and bore four apparently recent nail holes. He showed that the planing machine used on it had a revolving set of eight knives that comprised the cutting head, and one of them had a nick that left a distinct mark. A side cutter had also made a distinct impression. Koehler obtained the addresses of nearly sixteen hundred timber mills from around the country and requested samples of planed pine from those with the right type of machinery. These he examined microscopically until he found the right type of flaws. When he identified the likely mill for the wood’s origin, he learned that they had shipped lumber to a retailer in the Bronx. The mill also verified that the wood had been part of a batch that was cut and planed there.

The defense argued that the ladder had gone through many hands since its discovery and that not only was the beam’s placement in the ladder upright questionable, the police officer who ran that part of the investigation could have removed it from Hauptmann’s attic, since he had access after Hauptmann had moved out. (Officers who had examined the attic earlier had not noticed a missing beam.) Several defense witnesses also discredited Koehler: One used Hauptmann’s wood plane to demonstrate that holding a plane at various angles makes different marks. They ridiculed Koehler’s claim that only Hauptmann’s plane could have made the marks on the ladder. Then a general contractor and a millworker/carpenter testified that one could not match rail sixteen to the attic via grains because many grains in North Carolina pine looked alike. One man produced two pieces of board that looked similar in grain but one had been in a building for forty-seven years and the other for five. He also pointed out that the knots in rail sixteen were different from the other attic boards. The nail holes, said to fit perfectly with the attic beams, seemed to have been freshly made, because there was debris in the holes. They did not appear to have had nails in them for years, as the other attic boards did. Also, Koehler had admitted that if this board had been pried from a floor, there would have been marks on it from the nail heads, but there were none. In addition, the plank, when placed in the attic’s gap, was thicker than the attic floor by one-sixteenth of an inch, and Koehler had no answer for that. Clearly, the wood testimony was not as impressive as it had initially seemed.

However, these defense experts could not refute that Hauptmann had made a purchase at the lumber company to which Koehler had traced shipments from the mill. It was circumstantial, to be sure, but nevertheless a strong piece of the puzzle. Yet the prosecution faced other problems. Hauptmann’s shoe size was between a nine and a nine and a half, the same size as the officer who had compared his own shoe against the footprint at the estate on the night of the kidnapping and found it larger than his own. Thus, it was only Hauptmann’s print if he had worn larger shoes.

The principal defense witness was Hauptmann, whom Wilentz attacked in long cross-examination, and who presented himself as arrogant and defiant. In a high, whining voice (nothing like that described by Condon about the man he had met), he was unable to satisfactorily explain Isador Fisch, the handwriting similarities, or his whereabouts on the night of the kidnapping. He claimed he had worked as a carpenter at the Majestic Arms Apartments until 5:00
P
.
M
. on the day in question, but the prosecution produced work records that contradicted him.

After 29 court sessions, 162 witnesses, and 381 exhibits, the case was given to the jury at 11:21
A
.
M
., Wednesday, February 13, 1935. Eleven and a half hours later, the jurors returned a unanimous vote of guilty. Hauptmann was sentenced to be executed. But this case, forensically speaking, was far from over.

Partly at the urging of Ellis Parker, the detective who had gained fame from the tannic acid case in Camden, Governor Harold G. Hoffman took up Hauptmann’s cause. (Oddly, Parker and his son kidnapped a disreputable lawyer, Paul Wendel, and forced him to confess that he had kidnapped and murdered the Lindbergh baby. Wilentz questioned Wendel, found that he had been coerced by Parker and his partners, and dismissed the entire “confession” as a travesty. Parker and his associates were sentenced to prison for kidnapping.)

Hoffman met with Hauptmann in his cell and gave him a temporary stay of execution. He believed that Hauptmann should be given a polygraph, so Anna Hauptmann traveled to Chicago to talk with Leonarde Keeler, who was eager to be involved. To demonstrate the test’s reliability, he used Anna as a subject. Reading off a list of numbers, Keeler correctly judged her age from the machine’s recording of her physiological response. She was impressed, and returned to New Jersey to tell the governor that Keeler would provide his services at no charge and in secret. However, Keeler could not resist leaking the news, since he was desperately hoping for a noteworthy case, which violated the terms of the deal. He thereby undermined his chance to make a potentially monumental contribution. Instead, William Marston, whose machine had already been banned from the courtroom, was brought in to perform the test. He said it would take two weeks to get results, and arrangements were about to be made when the trial judge abruptly denied Marston access to Hauptmann. Time had run out, so Hauptmann was duly executed on April 3, 1936, by Robert G. Elliott, who had operated the electric chair for Sacco and Vanzetti nine years before.

THREADS, BONES, AND BUGS

Science was definitely having its day in court, even in the far reaches of Scotland. Helen Priestly was only eight when she set out to purchase bread for her family in Aberdeen, Scotland, in April 1934. She showed up at the bakery but failed to return home, so area residents who knew the family set out to look for her. The only immediate neighbors who declined to assist were Alexander and Jeannie Donald. Helen’s body was finally located, stuffed inside a cinder sack on the ground floor of the tenement building where she had lived. Yet she clearly had not been in that spot a half hour earlier, so someone had placed her there. In fact, lividity indicated that she had died earlier and had been moved. Although she was clothed, her underwear was missing and there was blood between her legs. An autopsy revealed that she had been asphyxiated and sexually molested with extreme brutality, so every male in the vicinity was questioned.

A roofer said he’d heard a girl scream around 2:00 on the previous afternoon, which corresponded to the various signals of her time of death. When pathologists failed to find semen in Helen’s vagina, they were no longer certain that the girl had been raped. In fact, they wondered if the “rape” had been staged by a female in the building, since the males all proved to have alibis for the time period when Helen was thought to have been murdered.

The person found to have lied about her whereabouts that afternoon was Jeannie Donald, who had been feuding with Helen’s family and disliked the little girl. The Donald apartment was searched and the police turned up an apparent bloodstain, although tests revealed that it was a less sinister substance. Jeannie’s husband had a solid alibi, but Jeannie did not. The Aberdeen police invited Professor Sydney Smith from Edinburgh University into the investigation, renowned for his work with ballistics. He had advised Littlejohn on the Merrett shooting.

Smith looked at everything and decided to focus on the sack in which Helen had been placed. He noted similar sacks, made in Canada, in the Donald apartment, and inside this one, he found plenty of trace material to examine: dust, fibers, and hair, both human and animal. Helen had not shed the human hairs, since they had been processed with a permanent chemical, but they proved a match to Jeannie Donald’s hair. Smith also subjected the fibers from the bag to spectroscopic analysis, and he was able to match two dozen different fibers to materials in the Donald residence. He could not find the same comparison results in other nearby residences. In addition, bloodstains on a washcloth and several other items were the same type as Helen’s, but did not match Jeannie.

Given the nature of Helen’s wounds, Smith believed that there would have been bacterial contamination. He involved a university colleague, Dr. Thomas Mackie, who performed several analyses and found the same type of bacterial stain inside the dead girl as on a bloodstained washcloth in the Donald home. This provided both circumstantial and physical evidence against Jeannie Donald. In fact, her trial proved to be highly technical as the scientists explained their tests and their findings. Smith offered more than two hundred exhibits, which impressed the jury sufficiently to return a quick guilty verdict. Since it seemed clear that Jeannie Donald had probably reacted to the child’s typical taunts rather than planning the murder, she received life in prison instead of death.

* * *

In Edinburgh, Scotland, on September 29, 1935, a young woman leaning over the railing of a bridge on the Gardenholme Linn spotted a cloth-wrapped bundle snagged against a rock. As she focused on it, she noticed the shape of a human arm protruding from a tear, so she ran for the police. A search soon turned up more human parts: two heads, parts of legs and arms, and one armless torso that proved at least one set of remains were those of a woman. These parts had been wrapped in four separate packages, and some items from the other body were still missing, notably the torso, but investigators judged that these remains were female as well. A piece of newspaper from the
Sunday Graphic
, wrapped around two upper arms, showed the date of September 15, two weeks earlier. According to some sources, however, the police initially estimated the time of death as September 19.

Professor John Glaister from the University of Glasgow and Professor James Brash from the University of Edinburgh, invited to examine the remains, noted that the person who had killed and dismembered these two women knew something about bodies and how best to take them apart with a knife. That indicated either a butcher or someone involved in the medical profession. He had even skinned the faces, removed the eyes from one and the teeth from both to make identification difficult, if not impossible. From a pair of hands recovered, the fingertips had been removed. Glaister sent these seventy pieces to the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Anatomy, treating them against further decomposition with ether and formalin. The maggots that infested these pieces went to Alexander Mearns at the University of Glasgow.

The first task was to separate the pieces and lay them out as individual corpses. A few more parcels were found, providing more parts for the grisly puzzle. The forensic team managed to determine that one woman had been taller than the other by half a foot, and the shorter one was still missing the torso, although the hands that seemed to go with her offered fingerprint possibilities.

Using the skulls, the team, which included Drs. W. G. Millar and F. W. Martin, determined that the ages of the victims were about thirty-five to forty-five for the taller one (stabbed five times, beaten, and strangled) and under thirty for the shorter one (possibly stabbed or bludgeoned). The undeveloped wisdom teeth and cartilage development for the latter finally set her age closer to twenty. Glaister surmised that the tall woman had been the intended victim, possibly killed during a violent rage by someone who knew her, and the other had probably been in the wrong place at the wrong time, seeing or knowing something that made her death inevitable.