Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (24 page)

Professor Mearns devised a timetable that established how long the maggots had taken to reach their stage of development. He combined weather factors, known insect behavior, and information about larval stages to estimate the postmortem interval at twelve to thirteen days, which indicated the bodies had been thrown into the ravine around September 16.

Detectives decided from the newspaper used to wrap the dismembered parts that the women had been killed in either Morecambe or Lancaster. They then learned that in Lancaster, a medical doctor, Buck Ruxton, had reported his thirty-four-year-old wife missing. The police were already acquainted with the household, including the fact that they had a young nursemaid for the children, because Isabella Ruxton had told them that her husband beat her and persistently accused her of infidelity. It soon turned out that Ruxton had also informed the parents of his nursemaid, Mary Rogerson, age twenty, that she had gotten pregnant so his wife had taken her away to get an abortion. He urged them not to go to the police but they did so, anyway, because Ruxton’s tale failed to ring true to them.

Ruxton was now under intense suspicion, and more clues soon fell into place. When the Rogersons were shown a patched blouse that had wrapped victim parts, they recognized it as their daughter’s. Then a charwoman who worked for the Ruxtons reported that Ruxton had told her not to come to work on Sunday, September 15. The next day she had found the home in a state of disarray, with carpets removed, unusual stains in the bath, and a pile of burned material in the yard. Neighbors said that they had helped to clean the house and had received a bloodstained suit and some carpets. They said Ruxton had told them that he’d cut them himself. However, traces of human fat found in the bathtub drain belied this, and on October 13, he was charged with the murders.

The police believed, from reports of Ruxton’s behavior the week prior to the killings, that he had decided that his wife had cheated on him and that Mary had assisted in the cover-up. The case seemed entirely obvious, but Ruxton’s attorney, Norman Birkett, insisted that since the bodies had not been definitively identified, his client could not be tried for homicide. Rogerson’s fingerprints identified her, and the remains, based on anthropological calculations from the limbs, matched her height. The task remained to identify Isabella Ruxton, and for that they used a photograph of her and a unique new technique. Professor Brash photographed the skull of the unidentified body from the same angle as the photograph he had acquired of Isabella. He made this image into a transparency and superimposed it over Isabella’s photo, showing how they matched on all the key points. The same was done on Mary Rogerson. Using a gelatin glycerin mix, Brash also made models of the left feet of both victims and proved that they fit the shoes of the missing women.

With all of the witness reports and physical evidence, and with the bodies now identified with this unique process, Ruxton was tried for both murders and convicted in just over an hour. On May 6, 1936, he was hanged. Glaister then wrote a book,
Medicolegal Aspects of the Ruxton Case,
which was published the following year. Sadly, the trunk of Rogerson’s body was never located.

OTHER ANALYSES

Besides examining handwriting or a document composed on a typewriter, the analysis of questioned documents also involved an analysis of the type of paper used, and the state of this science proved useful in a 1934 New York case. Twelve-year-old Grace Budd had disappeared six years earlier in the company of a middle-aged man named Albert Fish. He had ingratiated himself with Grace’s parents as “Frank Howard” and convinced them to allow him to take their daughter to a birthday party for children. That was the last they saw of either of them. But years later they received a letter from Fish, who fiendishly described how he had killed Grace, dismembered her, and cooked her into a stew that he had savored for days.

The Budd family turned this letter over to the police and a dogged investigator, Will King, traced the monogrammed stationery envelope to a former tenant of a flophouse on East Fifty-Second Street. The tenant identified his stationery and told them where he’d left it, in a closet. His handwriting did not match that from the note, so King looked into the possibility that someone else had used the abandoned stationery. But the next person who had inhabited the room had already moved on. The police asked the landlord if this person ever came around and he said, yes, he returned to claim checks sent there from one of his sons. The handwriting from the letter proved to match samples saved earlier from “Frank Howard,” so detectives staked out the flophouse until they caught Fish on December 12.

Under arrest, he confessed in lurid detail, admitting to the crime and adding others. He’d also killed before, in 1910 in Delaware. Believing himself to be Christ, and obsessed with sin and atonement, he had made a practice of beating himself with spiked paddles. He also stuck needles into his groin, threaded rose stems into his urethra, and lighted alcohol-soaked cotton balls inside his anus. Fish admitted to the murders of three other children, but also claimed as many as four hundred others. Despite his obvious psychopathology, the jury convicted him of murder and sentenced him to death. Had an observant detective not paid attention to the clues provided by the stationery, Fish might have gotten away to commit yet more unspeakable crimes.

The same can be said for a case that involved fiber analysis. In 1936, Nancy Titterton, a novelist and the wife of an NBC executive, Lewis Titterton, was murdered in their Manhattan brownstone. Two furniture movers found her body. She had been strangled with her pajama top and left in the bathroom. All indications were that she had known her killer, and when there appeared to be few clues except some twine used to bind her and some green paint on the bed cover, Dr. Alexander Gettler from the toxicology lab was brought in. He examined the bedspread in meticulous detail and found one strand, half an inch long, of stiff white hair, which he soon identified with a microscope as horse hair. He said that it had to have been transported to the bed on someone’s clothing, since there was no source for it in the room.

Since two furniture movers had delivered a horsehair couch that morning and it was those men who found the body, the detective in charge, Chief Inspector John Lyons, speculated that one of them might have paid an earlier call. In fact, it turned out that the furniture movers had been at the home the day before, picking up the couch for upholstery repair. Lyons identified the likely culprit, John Fiorenza, who had a criminal record, and then found a connection via the piece of twine: It had sufficiently distinctive markings to be traced to a manufacturer and distributor, which sold that type of twine to the upholstery shop where Fiorenza worked. Using this collection of evidence to pressure the suspect in a game of psychological cat-and-mouse, Lyons finally got the confession he needed for conviction.

The years 1937 and 1938 saw more improvements in forensic methods. Walter Specht did experiments with the molecule luminol, first synthesized in 1853, and saw that it offered a luminescent reaction in the presence of blood. If someone tried to wipe clean such evidence, an investigator could use luminol to locate the position and size of the former stain. Then scientists at the University of Kharkov developed a simple thin-layer chromatography, which enhanced toxicological analysis. With this process, a sample was subjected to a liquid solvent that separated it into its constituent parts, making it possible to directly analyze without resorting to the tedious process of extraction.

The next year, W. M. Krogman published his
Guide to the Identification of Human Skeletal Material
, ushering in the modern era in forensic anthropology. In fact, by this time, Russian paleontologist Mikhail Gerasimov had taken charge of the department of archaeology at the Irkutsk Museum, although he was barely out of his teens. He wanted to perfect the art of facial reconstruction, so he experimented with fossilized skulls in his care, calculating formulas for the thickness of musculature formerly on the face. His methods assisted others to learn facial sculpture from a skull, rescuing the field from the humiliation it had suffered in 1913 when two anthropologists proposing their own techniques had developed strikingly different faces from the same skull. While Gerasimov’s emphasis on facial muscles contrasted with the American approach of calculating skin tissue thickness, both had developed more reliable procedures.

In 1940, there were also several notable innovations, according to several forensic timelines. Vincent Hnizda, a chemist with Ethyl Corporation, is believed to have pioneered the forensic analysis of ignitable fluids, assisting better arson diagnosis, while Hugh C. MacDonald, chief of the civilian division of the Los Angeles Police Department, devised the Identikit system, inspired by Bertillon’s
portrait parlé
. MacDonald had been tracking down criminals in Europe who were taking advantage of wartime conditions, and he found that victimized people were offering only vague descriptions of offenders. He tried capturing these descriptions with facial sketches, but as cases piled up he sped the process along by creating standard transparencies of different facial features, which he could then lay over a facial outline. This worked well enough, so when MacDonald returned to the States, he consulted with colleagues to improve his collection and then approached a company that could mass-produce the images.

The earliest kits, which MacDonald claimed could compile 62 billion composite facial images, used more than five hundred “foils,” or transparencies, on which separate features such as a nose, mustache, mouth, or set of eyes were drawn in varying shapes and sizes (initially, there were no ears). These pre-drawn images could be stacked on top of one another as witnesses described or picked them out, until the composite image satisfied the witness. Police departments could also quickly alert those in other jurisdictions by simply telegraphing the coded card numbers for each foil. It was a vast improvement over the older methods.

In addition, Bell Labs used L. G. Kersta’s work on voiceprint methodology to produce the sound spectrograph. It analyzed sound waves from people’s voices and produced onto a graph a visual record of patterns based on frequency, intensity, and time. The idea that someone could be identified by the sound of his voice had its origins in the work of Alexander Melville Bell (father to Alexander Graham Bell). More than one hundred years earlier, he had developed a visual representation of the spoken word, based on pronunciation, and he had insisted that there were subtle differences among different people. While Kersta’s machine would eventually prove useful in crime investigations, during World War II it appeared to be more valuable for evaluating enemy communications.

As the war ended with two devastating atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities, the world entered the atomic age. Science was now a valued tool for aggression and defense, and this elite status filtered into forensic science as well. It had come a long way from the early days of legal resistance. But in some ways, the stakes had been raised.

TEN

DEAD GIVEAWAYS

Someone entered the Chicago apartment of Josephine Ross in June 1945, hit her over the head, and cut her throat, but before exiting, the intruder placed tape over the wounds. The crime was soon linked to another such intrusion in October, wherein Frances Brown was murdered, mutilated, and then bathed in the tub. On a wall, written with the victim’s lipstick, were the words
“For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”
Not long afterward in January 1946, a six-year-old girl disappeared from her bed and a ransom note was left in the room that soon proved pointless: Her head and body parts were found in the sewer. The police increased their vigilance, but there were no more similar murders.

As reporters kept the story alive, they interviewed handwriting analysts. Just four years before, Albert S. Osborn, who had written
The Problem of Proof
since his 1910 volume on questioned documents, had founded the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners. The issue at stake in this case was whether the ransom note had been penned by the same person who had left the lipstick message on the wall. Some experts said yes, and some said no. They would have to wait and see.

In June 1946, an off-duty cop spotted a young man surreptitiously entering an apartment, so he chased him down, unmasking him as William Heirens, a seventeen-year-old university student with a long record of burglaries and arsons. Under truth serum and a painful spinal tap, Heirens confessed to the three murders, although in later years he said that he’d been hypnotized and coerced.

Now the handwriting analysts were asked more formally for their opinions. George W. Schwartz compared the lipstick message and ransom note to handwriting in Heirens’s school papers, declaring that there were no significant similarities. Prosecutors then sought another opinion, hiring Herbert J. Walter, who had participated in the Lindbergh case. He had told reporters that he did not see similarities between the ransom note and lipstick message, but after he examined the samples up close, along with Heirens’s papers, he stated that Heirens was indeed the “Lipstick Killer.” Walter believed that apparent discrepancies merely showed that Heirens had attempted to disguise his handwriting (seemingly a common judgment in this discipline). As Heirens blamed “George Murman,” an alter ego, he pled guilty, receiving three life sentences.

* * *

A couple of bite mark cases in Britain put forensic odontology on the map, in a better light than handwriting analysis. Professor Cedric Keith Simpson, a pathologist for the home office who would gain the reputation of performing more autopsies than anyone in the world, was also a pioneer in forensic dentistry. He’d made his public debut in 1942 with the case of a beheaded murder victim found under a slab, her legs severed at the knees. From a list of missing persons, a potential victim was selected, and her family offered information about her doctor and dentist. Simpson utilized the dental plate of the intact upper mouth to track down a dentist who had done work on this middle-aged woman. The records matched, so she was identified. When her cause of death was ascertained as strangulation, her estranged husband was soon identified as her killer.

In 1946, Simpson also matched the distinctive teeth and weapon impressions from victims to a sadistic killer. On June 20, Margery Gardner was found dead in a London hotel, and she’d been whipped with a metal-tipped implement, as well as bitten, and raped with a blunt object. Neville Heath, twenty-nine, had signed for this room. The police found him in a seaside town, posing as a war hero, where he had met, dated, and killed a pretty young woman named Doreen Marshall. A braided whip among his effects matched to the bruise patterns on the first murdered woman. Found guilty, Heath was sentenced to be executed. But soon there was another bite-mark case that some scholars indicate was the true start of forensic odontology, at least in England.

On New Year’s Day in 1948, a young woman turned up murdered, her body lying in a carpark outside a dance hall. Her name was Mrs. Gorringe, and some time during the course of her revelries the evening before, she had been bludgeoned and strangled. On her chest was a distinct bruise that turned out to be a bite mark, with two upper teeth and four lower teeth impressions visible. Her killer had left his calling card. Since witnesses had seen the dead woman arguing with her husband the night before, he became a suspect.

Simpson required Gorringe to submit to having his teeth imprints set in wax molds for making comparisons. The case closed when the man’s teeth proved to have made the bite marks, and circumstances convinced the jury that he’d killed his wife.

But as a pathologist, Simpson participated in an even more notorious case the following year that did not involve dentistry, but did require a rather astute observer. It was the disappearance of Mrs. Olive Durand-Deacon in 1949 that put the police on the trail of an unusual killer in Crawley, England. She resided at the Onslow Court Hotel in South Kensington and had reportedly met a man, John George Haigh, who also lived there and who discussed a potential business deal with her. He had directed her to his warehouse, where he would show her the product he could make with her funding. But she failed to return to the hotel, and he himself went to the police with one of her friends. He readily admitted that he’d intended to meet Mrs. Durand-Deacon that afternoon, but she had failed to show up at the designated time. He had not seen her since and was concerned for her safety. Despite the suspicious circumstances, he seemed a decent enough sort. Yet that’s not what some of the hotel staff had to say.

As detectives looked into the matter, they found that Haigh had a criminal record for swindling. When they searched his supposed warehouse, they found the receipt for a fur coat from a dry cleaner. Tracing it and asking more questions, they learned that the coat had belonged to the missing woman. Indeed, they soon found that Haigh had pawned some of Durand-Deacon’s jewelry as well, right after she was last seen, so he was arrested on suspicion of murder. His first question concerned his chances of getting out of the local institution for the criminally insane, a signal that he intended to launch a mental illness defense so he could end up there.

He admitted to having killed six people compulsively since 1944. He said that he lured them into a storage area, bludgeoned them, and cut them to drink their blood. Then he would dissolve the corpses in a large acid-filled drum. He taunted the police with the fact that Durand-Deacon no longer existed. “How could you prove murder,” he gloated, “when there is no body?”

However, Simpson was not so easily dissuaded. Aware that the dissolved remains of Mrs. Durand-Deacon had been poured out onto the ground at Haigh’s supposed warehouse, Simpson believed he could find evidence. He took a team to the crime scene to search an area of sludge three inches deep. The task seemed nearly impossible, not to mention odious, but he managed to pluck out a gallstone and a partially dissolved foot, along with bone fragments, dentures, a lipstick container, and part of a purse. Under careful scrutiny, Simpson identified the bone fragments as human, and some showed an ailment that Durand-Deacon was known to have. The foot fit one of her shoes and her dentist recognized her specially made dentures.

In addition, behavioral evidence confirmed that Haigh had long been in the habit of entering fake business schemes wherein he would kill his dupes and acquire their property, which he then sold. Despite his reports of blood-drenched nightmares, it was clear to investigators and mental health professionals alike that each time he committed murder he had acted with rational awareness, selecting well-to-do victims, manipulating them, and killing them for his own enrichment. It did not take long for a jury to accept the physical evidence, reject the mental illness defense, convict Haigh, and sentence him to die.

SHARING THE WEALTH

Back in America, a group of professionals had been busy forming an organization for the collective forensic sciences. On January 18, 1948, two scientists had met at the police academy in St. Louis, Missouri, to discuss a project on which they had worked over the past year: the First American Medicolegal Congress. Most professionals in the field were operating independently and these men believed that dialogue among toxicologists, biologists, chemists, criminalists, and other members of the scientific community who also worked in the legal arena would assist the field to become more interactive and holistic in its approach. This conference would mark the first international multidisciplinary effort to try to ground an organization. There had been two earlier conferences in St. Louis in 1945 and 1946 for coroners, attorneys, physicians, and investigators, but this current project was aimed at a far broader community.

Rutherford B. H. Gradwohl, director of research at the St. Louis Police Department and director of his own private medical lab, had originated the idea and offered financial support. Dr. Sidney Kaye, former assistant director and toxicologist at the St. Louis Police Research Laboratory, and now with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Virginia, agreed to be the secretary-treasurer and co-planner. They had another partner as well, Orville Richardson, a St. Louis attorney, who served as their legal counsel.

For the inaugural meeting, they had invited scientists from other countries, but at the last minute, due to political disruptions and national financial problems, seven professionals from Cuba, Chile, Argentina, and Columbia were barred from leaving their countries. So on the evening of the conference at the Sheraton-Coronado, the schedule had to be revised, highlighting an acute loss: the co-chair, Dr. Israel Castellanos of the Cuban National Bureau of Identification. He had participated in discussions over the years about the need for bringing together forensic scientists from all disciplines to resolve growing problems in the field. Alas, he could not be there to witness the results of his efforts.

The hope was that scientists and investigators from the different forensic disciplines would interact as colleagues, finding personnel for filling job openings, helping to resolve problems, and brainstorming solutions to unresolved crimes. In addition, they would support training for more personnel in areas that were sorely lacking, such as chemistry. The organizers sought to connect a community of professionals who could enhance one another’s knowledge and careers.

One hundred fifty participants were present as the conference took place at Twelfth and Spruce Streets on January 19. For three days, twenty-nine papers were presented and Gradwohl articulated the purpose of the organization. Among the items discussed or described were the “intoximeter,” the most recent blood analysis tests, improvements in microscopy, the reading of bloodstains, sexual criminals, and war crimes. Leonarde Keeler made a presentation on the polygraph, and toxicology provided plenty of topics on poisoning and drug overdoses. There were representatives for firearms and trace evidence analysis, and the renowned pathologist Milton Helpern commented on unexpected natural deaths. There was even a discussion about the relationship of trauma to cancer.

The group found this gathering to be helpful and agreed to meet annually, so a committee formed to seek the opinions of other scientists, attorneys, and jurists about the need for such a national organization. They were also to organize the program for the following year. With the adjournment, the mood was positive.

Later that year, a few members met to discuss an appropriate name for the fledgling organization. From among five titles, the final choice was not from the list, but the organization officially became the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS). Among their goals were to revise the standards of investigative techniques and the quality of testimony in court, engender public confidence in the judiciary, and create confidence in the courts in scientific evidence. In addition, they hoped to encourage the exchange of information among the various scientific fields, “encourage enlightened legislation,” and improve the way scientists participated in attaining justice. As things progressed, the initial body became even more enthused about what they envisioned as an enduring association that would set and informally sanction ethical and procedural standards for their participation with law enforcement.

The second annual meeting occurred in January 1950 in Chicago’s Sheraton, and the Windy City became the organization’s home base. At this time, along with a constitution and bylaws, seven sections were established, including pathology, psychiatry, toxicology, immunology, jurisprudence, police science, and questioned documents. More would be added as the need arose, such as odontology, anthropology, and entomology, and a few section names would change. A committee drew up the first newsletter as well, published later that year.

Among the participants of this second conference was Mrs. Francis Glessner Lee, who had designed the “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death” during the 1940s. A philanthropist known to be domineering, exacting, and full of good humor, she had founded and supported Harvard University’s weeklong seminars on homicide investigation, taught twice a year, and she posed her eighteen miniature scaled models of crime scenes (now on display at the Baltimore medical examiner’s office) as vignettes of different types of violent death. On these, new officers could practice their theories. Mrs. Lee was a fan of Sherlock Holmes stories and she had created the models from a combination of fictional narratives, news stories, crime scene photos, and witness interviews. Her hope was to establish better contact between law enforcement and the medical community, so she fit right in with the AAFS agenda. To make her creations authentic, to the tiny pieces of furniture she collected internationally from dollhouse manufacturers (or commissioned from her full-time carpenter), she added sweaters and socks that she’d knitted on straight pins, tiny cigarettes she’d rolled, and even items she’d whittled. The settings were exquisitely detailed and would have served quite nicely as dollhouses, save for the blood and corpses inside.