Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (28 page)

This second jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Sam was a free man, but he became an alcoholic. When his anemic medical practice went bust, he looked into professional wrestling, but by age forty-six he was dead from liver disease. When his son attempted a civil suit against the state years later to prove with DNA that Richard Eberling had been the killer and that his father had been unlawfully imprisoned, he lost. His expert had indicated that the DNA pattern could not rule Eberling out, but a basic blood test that the defense performed contradicted his findings. By this time, Eberling, who was right-handed, was dead. So were the Houks, whom Bailey presented once again as suspects during this civil proceeding. Some people believe the case remains unresolved, and books continue to be written to offer new theories.

VIOLENT DECADE

Five years after Kennedy’s assassination it was his brother’s turn: Robert Kennedy was gunned down during his campaign to become the next president. Martin Luther King, Jr., was also assassinated during this time. Around the United States, university students demonstrated against the war in Vietnam and blacks rioted in a show of anger over violations of their civil rights. In addition, the number of murders by strangers had increased, and killers with monikers such as the Boston Strangler, the Co-ed Killer, and the Pied Piper of Tucson were grabbing headlines. In 1967, the FBI started the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) to coordinate investigations across jurisdictions. This involved a computerized index that permitted state and local jurisdictions access to FBI archives on such items as license plate numbers and recovered guns, as well as the ability to post notices about wanted or missing persons.

Another bite-mark case that year gained prominence. In Biggar, Scotland, fifteen-year-old Linda Peacock had gone missing. Officials searched all night before they discovered her body in the local cemetery. She had been strangled and beaten, and her bra and blouse were in disarray. On her right breast was an odd bruise. Bite marks had not yet been used in a British court for the definitive identification of a perpetrator, although their worth for identification had long been recognized. This case would set an important precedent.

Since the bruise appeared to have been made during the struggle, investigators took numerous photographs. Analysis indicated that whoever had killed Peacock had bitten her hard. Dr. Warren Harvey, a forensic odontologist, confirmed that the bruise was indeed a bite mark and upon closer examination indicated that there was some unevenness to the killer’s teeth. They looked strangely jagged.

It seems that there were also witnesses to the crime. A male and female had been spotted at the cemetery gates the night before, and the girl resembled Peacock. From the way these two had addressed each other, they seemed familiar. The witness had spotted them around ten o’clock in the evening and about twenty minutes later, this same person heard a girl screaming.

A systematic search of people’s teeth was undertaken to try to eliminate area residents, and it included thirty inmates at a detention center. Everyone was asked to provide dental impressions to compare to the victim’s bruise. Dr. Harvey studied them all and narrowed the suspects to five, asking each for another impression. At this point, pathologist Keith Simpson joined the team. Together these men examined all the impressions and agreed on a single suspect: seventeen-year-old Gordon Hay, arrested for breaking into a factory.

When the dentist took this second impression, he found that one of Hay’s teeth was pitted in two places by hypocalcination, and the pit locations matched the odd marks on the impressions from the victim’s breast. Harvey was confident he could prove the match in court, even though it would be the first time that this type of testimony would be used as the defining evidence.

To strengthen his presentation, Harvey examined the teeth of 342 young soldiers. Only two had pits of any kind, and none had the particular two pits that shaped Hay’s teeth. From this analysis, Harvey concluded that Hay’s teeth were so unique that it would be virtually impossible to find another set of teeth like his that could come as close to the bruise impression.

At his 1968 trial, Hay claimed he was at the detention center at the time of the girl’s death, so he could not be the person they were looking for. However, another inmate stated that Hay had actually come into the dormitory later than he told the court and there had been mud on his clothes. Another witness said that Hay had met Linda Peacock at a fair just before she was murdered, and he had confided to friends that he planned to have sex with her.

To take the case beyond circumstantial evidence, the prosecution introduced the dental results. Since this type of analysis was so unique, the defense team fought to have it ruled inadmissible. When the judge allowed it, the attorneys then brought in their own dental expert to refute it, or at least to confuse the issue. The jury apparently accepted the quality of the evidence because Hay was convicted of murder. Still, the defense did not give up; they appealed on the same basis. However, the court upheld the judgment, which set a precedent for similar cases with this type of evidence.

The first Canadian case to identify a perpetrator from bite marks in skin began that same year, 1968, and involved a series of fatal attacks. A young schoolteacher, Norma Vaillancourt, was found murdered in her Montreal apartment. She’d been strangled, raped, and bitten all over her breasts. The crime was sadistic, but from among her many boyfriends there were no good suspects. Only a day later, another victim was found in that town in the same condition, and the bite marks linked the cases. In both incidents, there appeared to have been little struggle, so it was assumed that the women may have been engaged in something they wanted to do. Then Marielle Archambault told coworkers that she felt entranced by a man she’d recently met. She, too, turned up dead.

There was another victim across the country in Calgary before the “vampire” was stopped in 1971. Schoolteacher Elizabeth Ann Porteous was found lying on the floor in her apartment on May 20, with several bite marks on her breasts and neck. The suspect whom the police identified was a traveling salesman, Wayne Clifford Boden, and while he was being investigated, the police invited odontologist Gordon C. Swann to take casts of Boden’s teeth to compare to the victim’s bite marks. He used a system of geometric progression and found twenty-nine points of similarity. He believed that Boden had made the bite marks. The chief justice agreed, citing this evidence when he sentenced Boden to life in prison.

Dr. Swann also compared Boden’s teeth to the marks on two of the three victims from Montreal (one had no bite marks). In the case of one victim, the photography had been poorly done so Swann was unable to make a determination. He did match the bite marks from Shirley Audette from Montreal to the Calgary victim and then to Boden, with seventeen points of similarity. Boden went to Montreal for trial, where he pled guilty to those three murders, claiming they had occurred during rough sex. He received three more life sentences.

Around the same time, in Britain, photographer Jacques Penry refined the Identikit system into the Penry Facial Identification Technique, or Photo-FIT. The images came from photographs instead of drawings for a closer approximation of what people actually looked like. Penry claimed that his approach dated back to 1938 when he was illustrating a book,
Character from the Face
. The home office hired him in 1968 to develop a kit, and his first one could theoretically build as many as five billion Caucasian faces. He added a supplement for black and Asian features, then devised another supplement for female identifications. Witnesses could choose from a series of foreheads, mouths, hairlines, eyes, noses, and chins, along with headwear, facial hair, eyeglasses, and other items. The final result boosted the kit’s power to about fifteen billion possible combinations. This form of composite identification became the precursor to the computerized images in use today.

VOICES

Voiceprint technology had received limited notice for criminal investigations by the early 1960s when the New York City Police Department received numerous bomb threats by phone against major airlines. Stymied, the FBI had requested assistance from Bell Labs. Lawrence G. Kersta, a senior engineer who was experienced with the sound spectrograph and had developed the voiceprint in 1941, acquired the task of devising a method of identification that would stop the calls and bring the perpetrators to justice. It took him more than two years and the analysis of over fifty thousand voices, but he managed to offer a technique that he claimed tested at a rate of accuracy over 99 percent. While he did not solve the mystery of who was making the calls, Kersta eventually broke away from Bell Laboratories to market the machine on his own, and law enforcement invited him to develop applications.

In 1971, the Wisconsin police used voice recognition during the investigation of the September 24 murder of game warden Neil LaFeve. That afternoon, he had been out in the woods posting signs and had planned to finish long before the party that his wife had organized for his birthday. When he failed to show up, she grew worried and phoned his boss. They discussed it together, but there was no reason they could think of that Neil might still be in the woods. LaFeve’s boss drove out to have a look. He noticed that all the signs were posted, so he called the police. Their search that night came up empty, but in the morning they located LaFeve’s truck with the door ajar. Not far away on the ground was a considerable amount of blood, a pair of broken sunglasses, and two spent shells from a .22 rifle. In fact, they were able to follow a trail of items, from teeth to blood to bone fragments, until they came across an area of freshly dug earth. With shovels, they soon located Neil LaFeve, but his head was missing. Another soft spot nearby yielded it. His head had been hacked off with a blunt instrument, and he’d also been shot several times.

Looking for someone with a vendetta, detectives scoured a list of men that LaFeve had arrested for poaching. All who had been convicted of hunting illegally on those grounds were located and interviewed on tape, and a few were asked to submit to polygraph examinations. However, there was one man who refused to cooperate: twenty-one-year-old Brian Hussong. LaFeve had arrested him several times, yet he had continued to poach. Hussong had no alibi for the day in question and when he resisted attempts to clear up the murder mystery, he seemed a good suspect.

Sergeant Marvin Gerlikovski managed to acquire a court order that allowed him to put a wiretap on Hussong’s house. He took the extra precaution of recording everything that was said, which paid off in a way he didn’t expect. At one point, Hussong called his grandmother to urge her to hide his guns and provide an alibi. She appeared to cooperate, so Gerlikovski sent detectives to her house. Flustered, she led them straight to the hiding place. Ballistics experts confirmed a match between the .22 rifle and the bullets found in LaFeve’s body, which was sufficient evidence to place Hussong under arrest.

Gerlikovski then sent the tapes he had made to Michigan’s Voice Identification Unit—at that time the best in the world for voiceprint analysis. Ernest Nash examined the tapes, gave his opinion, and served as an expert witness during Hussong’s trial. However, it was not Hussong’s voice that he testified about, but that of Hussong’s grandmother. She had denied saying that she had hidden the guns, so Nash explained how he could match her voice to that of the voice on the tape. He then used his laboratory results to affirm that she was definitely the person speaking on the tape. That meant that Hussong, the man talking with her, was worried about the guns. The jury listened to the tapes for themselves and returned a guilty verdict of first-degree murder, which resulted in a life sentence for Hussong.

LARGER DEVELOPMENTS

Since 1972, fingerprints had been retrievable via computer. The FBI put into motion a plan for the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), which was finally established in 1975. The following year, Scotland Yard utilized a national fingerprint computer called Videofile, containing more than two and a half million prints from criminals. Just as significant was the inclusion of the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GC-MS) in forensic use. Chromatography was a method by which compounds could be separated into their purest elements, as inert gas propelled a heated substance through a glass tube where a detector charted each element’s unique speed for a composite profile. The mass spectrometer, linked to it, affirmed the identifications via patterns of spectra. With this equipment, forensic scientists could analyze such items as hair samples for drugs or poison, charred remains for accelerants, and the chemical composition of explosives.

During this time, the FBI also established the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) at their training academy on the marine base at Quantico, Virginia, for a more effective approach to the investigation of serial crimes. By 1977, the BSU specialized in crime scene analysis, criminal profiling, and the analysis of threatening letters. As murder rates rose during the 1950s and 1960s the FBI had received expanded jurisdiction, and a handful of agents versed in abnormal behavior had devised a way to “profile” behavioral evidence from crime scenes. Special Agent Howard Teten had met psychiatrist James Brussel during the 1960s to learn how he had accurately provided a personality composite of Manhattan’s Mad Bomber. Teten added what he knew from criminal investigation and with Special Agent Patrick Mullany, refined the approach for law enforcement. He then trained other agents to become crime consultants.

The BSU started with eleven agents, who taught and offered advice to local law enforcement on different types of crimes. Pattern violence quickly became their forte, and they expanded their skills from teaching to investigation, developing an identity as the Crime Analysis and Criminal Personality Profiling Program. Once these agents gained national recognition from their investigation of high-profile serial murders, the unit became firmly entrenched.