Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (14 page)

Here in America the science of forensic anthropology can trace its origins directly to a celebrated murder, that of Dr. George Parkman, killed in 1849 by a Harvard professor who owed him money. Parkman’s murder was investigated by another Harvard professor, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Both men had sons who would be more famous than their fathers. Parkman’s was Francis Parkman, who became one of America’s greatest historians, and whose
Oregon Trail
has become a classic. Holmes’s son would later serve with distinction in the Civil War, in which he was thrice wounded, and would go on to become one of America’s greatest Supreme Court justices, dying only in 1935.

At the time of the murder the elder Holmes held the Parkman professorship of anatomy, endowed by and named after George Parkman himself. So in a way Parkman reached out from the grave and helped bring his own murderer to justice.

Parkman was a wealthy Boston physician and landlord who donated the land where Harvard Medical School now stands. Vain, a notorious skinflint, he ordered new dentures to wear at the groundbreaking ceremony for the medical school and told his dentist, Dr. Nathan Keep, that if the new false teeth couldn’t be finished in time for the ceremony he wouldn’t pay a cent for them. Working frenziedly, Dr. Keep just managed to finish the dentures in time, and luckily kept the mold of Parkman’s jaw, which he had used to model the teeth.

In the meantime the avaricious Parkman had lent a sum of money to a Harvard anatomy professor named John Webster. When Parkman dunned Webster for the repayment of this loan, Webster murdered him, dismembered his body and hid pieces of it among other remains in his anatomy laboratory, where it was unlikely to arouse suspicion. The rest of the corpse Webster concealed in his indoor privy, where the pieces were found by a suspicious janitor, who broke through a wall to discover them. Other bits of the doctor’s body, including his lower jaw, were found burned in an assayer’s furnace nearby.

The police at first detained the janitor, believing he had committed the murder. Close scrutiny of Parkman’s scattered remains in the laboratory by Holmes and his colleague, anatomist Jeffries Wyman, revealed that the remains in question were not anatomical lab specimens—they had not been treated with any preserving chemicals. They all came from the same body, and that body belonged to a man fifty to sixty years old who stood about five feet ten inches tall (Parkman was fifty and stood five-ten). Finally, the false teeth retrieved from the bed of the assaying furnace perfectly fit the model of Parkman’s jaw that Keep had kept.

Confronted with this evidence, the guilty Webster finally broke down and confessed that he had killed Parkman “in a fit of rage.” Webster was tried, convicted and hanged for the murder in 1850.

The Parkman case received tremendous publicity at the time and probably influenced young Thomas Dwight (1843–1911), then only a boy of seven, to devote his career to the study of anatomy. Today Dwight is honored as the father of American forensic anthropology. A Bostonian, Dwight spent nearly forty years as an investigator and teacher of anatomy, and during the last twenty-eight years of his career he held the Parkman professorship of anatomy at Harvard. Throughout his life Dwight published papers on skeletons, their identification and differentiation by sex, age and height. An essay of his in 1878 was the first of its kind in this field.

Dwight’s most famous pupil was George A. Dorsey (1868–1931), a multitalented man who was interested in ethnology, photography and, almost as a sideline, the human skeleton. Dorsey’s career, too, was given a huge boost by a notorious murder that he helped solve, the gruesome case of the Chicago sausage maker, Adolph Luetgert.

Luetgert murdered his wife Louisa in 1897. Since he ran a sausage factory, he was in a unique position to make her body disappear. Louisa Luetgert was murdered at home, but her husband transported her body in a carriage by night to his five-story factory at the corner of Diversey and Hermitage streets in Chicago. There he plunged it into a huge vat filled with a caustic solution containing 375 pounds of potash. Evidence later brought out at his trial indicated that Luetgert sat beside the vat stirring the grisly mixture all through the night. In the morning he was found sleeping in his office, with the vat overflowing and a greasy substance all over the floor. The acidic potash had leached out most of the calcium from Louisa Luetgert’s bones, gradually reducing them to jelly. This was the “grease” noticed the next morning on the floor.

Luetgert reported his wife missing, but after a few days her brother began to suspect foul play. A search of the factory by police yielded Louisa Luetgert’s ring and four tiny pieces of human bone in congealed sediment in the vat, which had by then been drained. Luetgert was charged with his wife’s murder. His defense was bold and straightforward: there was no
corpus delicti
. Louisa Luetgert’s body had been dissolved.

But in one of the most brilliant courtroom displays of forensic anthropology ever witnessed, George Dorsey was able to prove that the four tiny fragments of bone, so small that all four of them together would fit on a silver quarter dollar, were parts of a human skeleton. The bones introduced in evidence were: the end of a metacarpal from the hand, a head of a rib, a portion of a phalanx, or toebone, and a sesamoid bone from the foot. These minuscule fragmerits, together with Louisa Luetgert’s ring, were enough to convict Adolph Luetgert and send him to prison for life. Even though Luetgert had not attempted to convert his wife to sausage, the memory of the case gave the factory such a bad name that it was soon forced to shut down for lack of business. Dorsey in 1898 published a landmark paper, “The Skeleton in Medico-Legal Anatomy,” based on his research in the Luetgert case.

After this extraordinary coup, however, Dorsey gave up anatomy and devoted himself to the study and photography of North American Indians. He later became the U.S. naval attaché in Spain. In those days forensic anthropology was not recognized as a science but only as a subbranch of anatomy that could occasionally furnish interesting information to the police.

One of the rarest and most interesting books in my library is a black and gold volume called
Medico-Legal Aspects of the Ruxton Case
, published in 1937. Written by John Glaister, M.D., and James Couper Brash, M.D., this remarkable book examines, with amazing detail and thoroughness, one of the most grisly and notorious double murders committed in this century. These murders, moreover, were carried out by a doctor with a good knowledge of anatomy, who was determined to destroy all evidence of his crime. The Ruxton case is probably the single most quoted murder discussed in modern forensic textbooks.

This weird and grisly double killing has a rich, period flavor of England about it. British society in the mid-1930s emerges from Glaister and Brash’s account as so remarkable, cohesive and tightly interdependent that one wonders how anybody ever got away with murder at all.

Witnesses abound in the Ruxton case. People knock at his door all day long while the murderer is about his gruesome task of dismembering the bodies. Charwomen later recall horrible odors and strange stains. A bandage on the doctor’s finger arouses a neighbor’s suspicion. The killer rents a car to dispose of the bodies and promptly collides with a bicyclist, who calls the police, who make a full report. The entire British press is in full cry against the criminal. Brilliant specialists step forward to reconstruct the remains in detail, matching their reconstructions with known photographs of the victims. The hapless murderer is arrested, pleads he is innocent—in vain. Surrounded by eyes that see all, ears that hear the least whisper, memories that let nothing slip, pursued by vigilant constables on bicycles and by sober cleaning ladies, the culprit is overwhelmed by the evidence, found guilty, and hanged. The majesty of British law triumphs absolutely. It is interesting to speculate what effect the Ruxton case may have had upon the young film director, Alfred Hitchcock, who was just then coming into his own in Great Britain. In Hitchcock’s movies, murder will out, always. No one escapes punishment. The police are omnipotent and omniscient figures of dread.

Dr. Buck Ruxton was born in 1899 in India. He was a Parsee whose real name was Bikhtyar Rostomji Ratanji Hakim (“Hakim” means “doctor”), and he took his Bachelor of Medicine degrees at Bombay and London universities. After settling in England, Ruxton took a mistress, Isabella Van Ess, whom he described to neighbors as his wife. The couple lived in Lancaster and had a stormy relationship. “We were the kind of people who could not live with each other and could not live without each other,” Ruxton later told police. The pair fought frequently and twice Mrs. Ruxton sought police protection.

On September 7, 1935, Ruxton accused his wife of having an affair with the Lancaster town clerk. Soon after this she disappeared. Isabella was last seen alive on Saturday, September 14, at 11:30
A.M.
On Sunday the doctor paid a visit to his charwoman, Agnes Oxley, who was scheduled to come clean the house on Monday morning at seven-fifteen. He asked Oxley not to come Monday, but instead on Tuesday. He explained that his wife was away on a holiday to Edinburgh.

On Monday, September 16, several tradesmen and one patient called at Ruxton’s house at 2 Dalton Square. They were all turned away. Ruxton explained that he was busy redoing the carpets in the house and showed the would-be patients his hands: “Look how dirty they are,” he said. To one of these visitors Ruxton said that his wife’s personal maid, Mary Rogerson, had gone with her to Scotland on the same holiday.

At 11:30
A.M
. that same day Ruxton took his children to a friend’s house, asking him to look after them. The friend noticed Ruxton’s finger was cut and bandaged. Ruxton explained he had cut it that morning, opening a can of peaches. One can only speculate about what he was really opening. Dismembering a human body is a very tricky procedure. I have had to do it myself, and, though I have never cut myself with a scalpel, I was once cut by another doctor’s knife, when he lost control of it. I have also been cut by the sharp end of a broken bone that was floating around loose inside the torso of a plane crash victim.

Dr. Ruxton later went over to the maid’s house and explained to her parents, the Rogersons, that their daughter was on vacation with his wife in Scotland and would not be back for a week or two.

That Monday afternoon Ruxton asked a patient of his, a Mrs. Hampshire, to come over to his house and scrub down the staircase. Mrs. Hampshire agreed. When she went into the bathroom, she noticed the tub was stained yellow and even a vigorous scouring with Vim cleanser could not remove the discoloration. Ruxton gave Mrs. Hampshire one of his suits, badly stained, as a present. “He said I could have it cleaned,” she told police later. The next day Ruxton apparently changed his mind and asked for the suit back. When Mrs. Hampshire tried to clean the carpets, the scrubbing water turned blood-red.

On this same busy Monday, Ruxton rented a car and on Tuesday, September 17, he was involved in a slight collision with a cyclist at Kendal, in the Lake District. To a policeman investigating the accident, Ruxton said he was returning from a business trip in Carlisle.

The charwoman came as scheduled on September 17, letting herself into the empty house. Two other charwomen were brought in to clean the house as well, up to the day of September 20. All later complained of bad stains and odors in the house. Ruxton sent one of them to buy eau de Cologne and a sprayer, and the house was sprayed and fumigated.

On September 29 the dismembered remains of two women were found in a ravine near Moffat, Scotland. The bodies were so mutilated and decomposed that at first it was supposed that one of them belonged to a man. Ruxton, upon seeing the news in the newspaper, remarked to Mrs. Oxley: “So you see … it is not our two.”

On October 9, Mary Rogerson’s mother informed police that her daughter was missing. The next day Ruxton himself went to the police and asked that “discreet inquiries” be made “with a view to finding my wife.”

A blouse and a pair of children’s rompers belonging to Ruxton’s children were found with the remains at Moffat (the rompers had been used to wrap one of the severed heads). The newspapers speculated openly about Ruxton’s involvement and the doctor complained to the police that the publicity was “ruining my practice.”

On October 13, Ruxton was charged with the murder of Mary Rogerson and on November 5 with that of Isabella. The police said Ruxton had murdered his wife and then killed the maid because she saw the murder or its immediate aftermath. The doctor pleaded not guilty and called the charges “absolute bunkum, with a capital B.”

The remains found in the Scottish ravine consisted of two skulls, two torsos, seventeen parts of limbs and forty-three portions of soft tissue. All identifying characteristics had been carefully removed from the remains. One set of hands, later found to belong to Isabella Van Ess, was found with the fingertips cut off, to prevent fingerprinting. The other pair was left intact, presumably because the killer believed no fingerprints of Mary Rogerson were on file with the police. On the other hand, Mary Rogerson had had a squint in one eye, and the eyes from one skull had been carefully removed. By the same token, Mrs. Ruxton’s legs had been noticeably fat and untapering down to the ankle—and the soft tissue from the legs of one body had been sliced away. Even a distinguishing bunion had been hacked off a severed foot. Both bodies had been dismembered and drained of blood after death.

Almost every conceivable point of scientific attack, every distinguishing characteristic that might have identified either of the two corpses, was foreseen, seized upon and obliterated by the murderer with diabolical thoroughness.

Yet in the end the bodies were identified beyond all question, in a brilliant process of forensic detection that is still a landmark today. Glaister and Brash reconstructed the bodies in the Ruxton affair, took photographs of the mutilated remains, posed them at certain angles, and compared them to photos of the two murder victims in life, taken at the selfsame angles. The resulting photographs are not for the faint of heart. In the final superimpositions, the mutilated skulls were ghosted into photographs of the victims taken when alive, and shine through them like silvery death’s heads. This photographic evidence was devastating. The disfigured skulls agreed with the living portraits in every detail.