Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (27 page)

Detective Sergeant Raymond Frederick Dagg interviewed the shop owner, Louis Meier, and he gave a description of the young man who had asked to see the daggers. Dagg used the opportunity to compile the features from the Identikit, an instrument in which he had just received training. He confirmed it with another interview in a shop down the road where the same man seemed to have stopped. In fact, he built two likenesses from the two descriptions, and they were considered so similar that Dagg’s supervisor believed it had to be the same man. A photograph was taken and released to the media. Less than a week after the murder, a police officer spotted Bush, identifying him from the facial composite. He arrested the young man, who was then placed in a lineup. One of the witnesses identified him. Bush then confessed, saying he did not know why he had murdered the woman. Sentenced to death, he was executed.

In a more peculiar case in 1961 in England, David Cohen, a branch secretary for the Society for Psychical Research, approached Detective Chief Inspector Tony Fletcher, who worked at the Manchester Police Fingerprint Bureau, with an unusual request. Cohen wanted to know if it was possible to fingerprint a “nonphysical entity,” and if so, would the police assist him in doing so? Fletcher, who later recorded the tale in a memoir, thought it was an interesting question, so he sent an officer to see what could be done. Supposedly, the ghost of a musician, an elderly man named Nicholas, was playing a violin in the room of a young boy in a south Manchester home. Séances were held at the house under Cohen’s guidance and at times he had noted a pair of spirit hands appearing. He believed that if it were a trick, fingerprints would reveal the perpetrator. If not, then fingerprints taken in such a circumstance would make news around the world.

The officer apparently saw the hands for himself and described them as pale and slim, with lace cuffs. He dutifully polished a tambourine that appeared to fly about the room, and after the séance used mercury powder to test it. But there were no prints.

The next experiment involved putting the powder on before the séance, yet still nothing showed up, although the instrument performed its usual act. The group then addressed the entity, asking for and receiving permission to take its fingerprints on chemically treated paper. By all reports, it agreed. The officer said later that he even felt the hand in his own as he pressed it to the paper, but still no fingerprints materialized. Only three scratches showed up where the fingers had been placed. They also tried infrared photography, which yielded a faint image but nothing definitive. Stymied, they could think of no other methods to record this entity, and eventually the experiment was abandoned.

Few scientists are even aware of it, and probably none would view it as an appropriate use of science, yet if not for people who tried to see connections where no one else had before, some of the following discoveries might never have been made.

ELEVEN

MAKING SURE

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, while riding in a black open-top Lincoln Continental before an exuberant crowd. A bullet pierced through him to wound Governor Connally, seated in front of him, while a second one slammed into his skull. Kennedy was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital for emergency treatment, but after he died he was transported to Bethesda Naval Hospital just outside of Washington, D.C., for an autopsy. Quickly classified reports soon inspired theories about an assassination conspiracy and a government cover-up. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the shooting, but Jack Ruby emerged while Oswald was being transferred to a jail and shot him, some said to silence him. Although forensic specialists had no access to Kennedy or the assassination documents, persistent rumors, along with the demands of forensic pathologist and Pittsburgh-based coroner Cyril Wecht, would eventually force the issue.

In the meantime, in England, entomology helped solve another case. In June 1964, two boys found the partially buried body of a man in the woods outside Bracknell. Keith Simpson was among those who went to the shallow grave to examine the remains. The man’s head had been wrapped in a towel, so he clearly had not died in the woods from some accident. When the police attempted to estimate his time of death, decomposition had reached the point where it was difficult to make an assessment. However, Simpson had studied the behavior of blue-bottle fly maggots and from his calculations of their predictable stages of development, he believed that the man had been in this place between nine and twelve days, closer to the former than the latter. He later wrote about the case in his book
Forty Years of Murder.
An autopsy revealed that the victim had died from a strong blow to the throat, and from police reports the discovered remains were linked to area resident Peter Thomas, missing for the past ten days.

The police learned that Thomas had loaned money to a William Brittle, which made Brittle a suspect. Yet he insisted that he’d repaid Thomas on June 16, and when a witness claimed that he’d seen Thomas alive four days later, the case weakened. Nevertheless, Brittle was arrested and tried. This proceeding provided a forum for Simpson to demonstrate what he knew about maggots and decomposing corpses, which clearly proved that Thomas could not have been alive on June 20, as per the witness’s statement. Even the entomologist for the defense conceded the truth of Simpson’s findings, so Brittle was convicted and sent to prison. Simpson used this same technique in other cases, establishing entomology as a viable science for estimates of the time that has elapsed since a death occurred.

In 1965, Oatley McMullan and Ken Smith invented the first high-resolution electron microscope, signaling how forensic investigation was becoming more involved with precision technology. Some of these advances assisted in revisiting cases once thought finished, for sophisticated reconstruction or better analysis.

One from 1959 was reopened in Canada in 1966 as a near-crusade. After dinner on June 9, twelve-year-old Lynne Harper left her home on the Clinton air base in Ontario, to take a walk. She encountered an older classmate, Steven Truscott, fourteen. He invited her to go for a ride, so she climbed onto the crossbar of his bike. Another child reported seeing them around 7:10 that evening on a road north of the base. A few minutes later, a boy riding his bike on the same road claimed that he’d seen no one, and someone else reported that he’d seen Steven alone. It seems that the first child was the last one to have seen Lynne Harper alive.

She failed to come home, so her parents called the police, who organized a search. No one found her that night, but the police continued the search the next day. They already knew that Truscott had been with her, but he claimed to have dropped her off in a specific spot and had seen her get into a car. That had been around 7:30. He then went to play a sport with friends and arrived home about an hour later. When asked for the car’s description, he said it had been a new Chevrolet, gray, with a yellow license plate. Since Michigan cars, just across the border, had such plates, it sounded as if he were telling the truth. He had not seen the driver so he could provide no description.

It was two days before Lynn’s body turned up in the woods. She’d been sexually molested and then strangled with her blouse. Her shoes and socks were laid out in a neat arrangement, along with her shorts. Her panties lay thirty feet away. Nearby were the tire tracks from a bicycle and the footprints of a person wearing crepe-soled shoes. At the scene, Dr. John Penistan turned the body onto its left side to photograph the ground. To estimate her time of death, which he said could no longer be attained with rigor mortis or liver mortis measures, Penistan analyzed the contents of her stomach and the state of digestion of the meal she had eaten just before leaving home. He estimated that she had died around 7:30
P
.
M
. that same evening. Thus, she had been killed around the time she’d been with Steven Truscott, less than two hours after leaving her home.

Investigators determined that from the vantage point that Truscott said he was at, he could not have caught a clear glimpse of the car he claimed to have seen. They knew it was time to subject the boy to more rigorous analysis. Suspicion deepened when the tread on his bicycle tire matched the impression left at the crime scene. A physician found marks on his penis consistent with rape, although Steven protested that they were from a rash. However, he did own a pair of crepe-soled shoes, which he was unable to produce after a search indicated that they were no longer among his effects. In addition, the semen removed from the victim revealed a secretor and matched Truscott’s blood type, but since Lynne had the same blood type, this evidence proved less compelling. Still, Truscott was charged with murder.

The strong circumstantial evidence, along with testimony from a boy whom Truscott had asked to manufacture him an alibi, ensured a conviction, and Truscott was sentenced to hang. However, due in part to public outrage over killing a child, his sentence was commuted to life. Eventually an appeal was filed to Canada’s Supreme Court, which ordered a judicial review. A journalist picked up the story and viewed the evidence as favoring Truscott’s innocence, claiming in her bestseller
The Trial of Steven Truscott
that there had been an unfair ruling in the case. She hoped to get the attention of two prominent pathologists in Britain, Keith Simpson and Francis Camps. They both read her argument, and while Camps agreed and claimed he wanted to help see justice done, Simpson inclined toward the findings of the original pathologist. They ended up in Canada in 1966, on opposite sides.

Experts also came from the States, aligning themelves in one camp or the other, with the focus centered on the analysis of the estimated time of Lynne Harper’s death. If Penistan had been wrong, that would provide reasonable doubt for Truscott: If Lynn had in fact died an hour or more later, then Truscott had an alibi and could not have been her killer. New York pathologist Milton Helpern, with decades of experience, affirmed the time of death at approximately two hours after Lynne had left home.

The prosecution was prepared to go before a nine-judge tribunal to argue the case again, hoping to avoid the inconvenience and expense of a retrial. Every piece of the original evidence had been preserved, and experiments with blouses like the one Lynne had worn proved that she could have been murdered with it (which the journalist claimed was impossible). Another issue was whether marks on the girl’s face proved that she had been moved after she was killed to where she was found, but the prosecution was able to show that Penistan’s moving the body at the crime scene for photographs of the ground had caused them.

Since the sole time-of-death indicator had been the process of digestion, Simpson and Camps debated its accuracy. It had been determined that she had eaten at 5:30
P
.
M
., and it had seemed impossible to Penistan from the amount of food remaining in her stomach when she was found that more than two hours had passed. Because there are variations in the digestive process, depending on the type of food eaten and the speed of the person’s metabolism, the experts siding with the defense argued that the assessment could easily have been wrong. In addition, they added, certain strong emotional states such as terror or anger can also slow the process, and the girl had certainly been afraid, as she was being assaulted.

In a surprising statement, Camps claimed that Lynne could have died as long as ten hours after her last meal. Countering this, Simpson pointed out that the death scene supported the initial analysis. In addition, no suspicious gray Chevrolet had been found and there were no clues pointing to other suspects. The time of death estimate, said Simpson in his calm and methodical manner, was more likely to be correct than as inaccurate as Camps was claiming.

In the end, the judge decided that Camps and his allies had provided no reason for a new trial (and Camps even conceded that two hours was a possible time frame), so the sentence was reaffirmed. Yet Truscott was released on parole in 1969, ten years after the murder, as if sufficient doubt had indeed been raised to just let him go.

* * *

Just south of Canada, in Ohio, Sam Sheppard, an osteopath from Bay Village, also appealed his case in 1966, with much more emphasis on evidence analysis. It was also a much older case.

Early on July 4, 1954, Sheppard had phoned the mayor (his neighbor and friend) and then the police to report that his pregnant wife, Marilyn, had been murdered in their upstairs bedroom. She had been brutally bludgeoned, they saw, and Sheppard told a strange story of how he’d been asleep on a daybed at the foot of the stairs. Apparently the intruder had crept past him and up the steps, for he’d awakened to the sound of Marilyn screaming for him. (Their seven-year-old son sleeping in the next room did not wake up.) Sheppard had then encountered this intruder, a “bushy-haired stranger,” and they had struggled twice, but Sheppard was knocked out (twice) and the man escaped. Sheppard had few injuries from this encounter, all of which were documented at the hospital that his family operated, so no independent doctor had examined him. He’d described getting blood on him when he’d checked to see if Marilyn was alive, but oddly, there was no blood on his hands. Yet there was blood on his watch, which would later become an issue.

There were also blood spatters throughout the room where Marilyn lay, blood smears on the sheets, and a blood trail leading through the house. Multiple gashes scored her face, as if her killer had been enraged. On the first floor, Sheppard’s medical bag was overturned, but had no blood on it, and a desk was rifled, also without the killer leaving blood behind. Sheppard’s story sounded fishy, so the police arrested him. It became clear as they questioned him, and later at his trial that October, that his account had glaring holes, including lies about an extramarital affair and his seeming inability to tell the story straight.

Yet both sides failed in a number of significant ways to prove their cases. No one examined Marilyn for evidence of rape, for example, or compared Sheppard’s blood type against the blood trail found in the house. Although the prosecution managed to give Sheppard a viable motive with testimony that he had intended to file for divorce, they were unable to produce the murder weapon. Their medical expert insisted it had been some type of surgical instrument, but he was unable to identify it. Not surprisingly, the jury took the middle ground and returned a verdict of second-degree murder. Sheppard received life in prison.

A renowned criminalist, Dr. Paul Leland Kirk, was invited to assist with evidence for an appeal. Kirk was head of the criminalistics department at the University of California and in 1953 had published
Crime Investigation: Physical Evidence and the Police Laboratory,
which would become a classic textbook for forensic science. He coined the term
blood dynamics
, for the scientific approach to bloodstain pattern analysis.

Kirk had examined the crime scene and autopsy photos, with special attention to the blood spatter in the room. He testified that the killer had been left-handed, which would exclude the right-handed Sheppard. He also said that the blood spatter on Sam’s watch was a transfer stain, which had probably come from contact with Marilyn’s body when he tried to find her pulse. Kirk had examined an additional spot of blood from the bedroom that he said had originated with someone other than Sam and Marilyn. While it was type O, the same as Marilyn’s, it had other components (observed from an unrepeatable test) that gave it a different composition. However, even with the weight of Kirk’s credentials and analysis, the appeal failed. Nevertheless, Kirk’s findings became fodder for several other theories, which generated books denouncing the original investigation.

In 1959, a window washer named Richard Eberling was arrested, and among his effects was one of Marilyn’s rings, taken from the home of her sister-in-law. He admitted that he’d washed windows for the Sheppards not long before the murder and offered information, unsolicited, that he’d cut himself and dripped blood on the basement steps. So he was now a suspect, but it would be four decades before this information became a serious part of the case.

Defense attorney F. Lee Bailey took over, filing a motion with the U.S. District Court to overturn the conviction based on prejudicial pre-trial publicity. The court acknowledged this, but its decision was reversed. Then in a precedent-setting decision in 1966, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that Sheppard should get a second trial.

A book had come out in 1961 proposing that Sheppard was innocent and that a man and woman had killed Marilyn together. Along with Kirk’s blood analysis, this gave F. Lee Bailey what he needed to propose a new theory. His version honed in on two people: the neighbors whom Sheppard had called for help right after the murder, and Sheppard’s story about encountering a stranger was not even mentioned. Nor did he testify. Bailey believed that a left-handed woman had struck Marilyn and had been bitten during the attack, so she had left the blood trail. However, he was not allowed to enter much evidence, so he resorted to embarrassing the prosecution’s witnesses on cross-examination.