Scene of the Crime (24 page)

And indeed the word
corpus
does mean
body,
but the reference is to the
body of evidence,
not to the body of the victim. Which, for example, was how that shy little dentist Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen happened to be hanged in 1910 for the murder of his truly appalling wife, would-be singer Belle Elmore (stage name) who had married him using the name of Cora Turner. (Her real name was Kunigunde Mackamotzki, and I mention this only because it seems more fitting. Photographs indicate she had the build of the stereotypical operatic fat lady; reviews indicate she did not possess a matching talent.)

Crippen earned the living. Did the housework. Indulged Belle in jewelry and furs. Paid for Belle's ill-fated forays onto the stage; critics described her music as screeching. Was openly taunted by Belle and her fashionable friends. Finally fell in love with his shy secretary, Ethel le Neve.

When Crippen told his friends Belle had returned to the United States, but none of her friends heard from her, that looked odd enough. But when Ethel first moved in and then was seen wearing Belle's furs and jewelry, Belle's fashionable friends got suspicious.

Police inspector Walter Dew of Scotland Yard investigated, found nothing amiss. But Crippen panicked and fled, headed for Canada on the
SS Montrose,
taking Ethel with him disguised (not very convincingly) as a boy. Dew investigated further. Body parts were found buried in the cellar, but the head, skeleton and limbs were gone. Belle was identified on the basis of a surgery scar and a vest (according to some accounts, a pajama shirt); Dew boarded a faster ship and arrested the two on July 31, 1910; and Crippen learned what
corpus delicti
really meant. Nobody believed the defense insistence that the body remains were somebody other than Belle and the scar was really a skin crease. What would somebody else's remains be doing wrapped in Cora Crippen's vest or pajama shirt as the case may be?

Many books have been written about this case. A careful reader can find it easy to be a little sorry for Crippen ... but I do wish that before he died, he had explained how he disposed of the rest of the body.

And then there was Edward Ball, who was convicted in 1936 in County Dublin, Ireland, of the murder of his mother, although no body was ever found. The
corpus delicti
included an abandoned automobile, bloodstained towels, bloodstained clothing, bloodstained carpet and a bloodstained hatchet. Although the defense insisted that Mrs. Vera Ball, estranged wife of a physician, had committed suicide, the prosecution evidence was overwhelming.

Perhaps the most interesting
corpus delicti
case was that of James Camb, a ship's steward who was convicted in March 1948 of the strangulation murder of Eileen Isabella Gibson, an actress whose stage name was Gay Gibson. Strong evidence was presented that Camb had attempted to sexually assault Gibson; had strangled her when she attempted to ring for help; had covered up her attempt to call for help by pretending, when the ship's night watchman arrived in answer to her bell, that he had arrived sooner; and then had pushed the body through the porthole. He eventually admitted having sex with her and pushing her through the porthole, but he contended she had died naturally, apparently of a heart attack or a "fit"; that he had attempted artificial respiration; and then, panicking, he put the body through the porthole. But that did not explain the scratches on his hands and wrists apparently made by the woman fighting for her life, nor did it explain the ringing of the signal bell from her stateroom the night she vanished. The prosecution contended—successfully—that Camb had disposed of the body under the all-too-common assumption that he could not be convicted of murder if the body could not be found.

Like many other people who made the same assumption, he was proven wrong.

DNA fingerprinting, if available then, could have provided conclusive proof in the case of Crippen and of Webster, if—that is-known genetic material of Belle Elmore and of Dr. Parkman had existed. It wouldn't have helped in the case of Ball, because nobody argued that the blood was not that of Mrs. Ball or that Mr. Ball had not disposed of his mother's body; the question rather was one of how Mrs. Ball came to be a body; nor would it have helped in the Camb case, as no one disputed that the body fluids in the bed were those of Gay Gibson. In the Haigh case, it probably wouldn't have helped; and in the Scott case, it certainly wouldn't have.

But we're just now on the cutting edge of DNA experimentation, and what will be possible twenty years from now none of us can begin to guess. So let's think, now, about the gene test that can —at least theoretically—prove conclusive identity.

Well, almost conclusive. Although in general DNA fingerprinting can distinguish between siblings, Jay Henry of the Utah State Crime Laboratory pointed out to me that it cannot distinguish between identical twins, as they would, of course, have the same DNA material —that is, the same genetic heritage

The technique called DNA fingerprinting—the name was coined by Sue Jeffreys, wife of English scientist Alec Jeffreys, who invented the process—is the descendant of a long line of work. But what does it mean?

DNA Fingerprinting

When I was in junior high, I was taught that human beings have forty-eight pairs of chromosomes in every cell of their bodies except reproductive cells, each chromosome consisting of a long string of genes. That was not quite correct; scientists had miscounted, and we now know that human beings have forty-six pairs of chromosomes. These strings were originally called chromosomes because, under extreme magnification, they look extremely colorful (the prefix
chrome
refers to color). The genes are composed of spiral-twisted strands of deoxyribonucleic acid, the chemical that carries the computer codes, so to speak, that tell the body how to develop not only in humans but in all animal and plant life.

Now bear with me a minute, because if you're up on your biology you know all this. Here's where you get these sets of chromosomes: the reproductive cells, unlike all other cells, have single chromosomes rather than pairs. When the spermatozoa, the male reproductive cell, and the ovum, the female reproductive cell, join, the first thing they do is produce a
zygote,
a new cell that joins the single chromosomes from the ovum and the single chromosomes from the spermatozoa to produce new pairs of chromosomes. So each human being is produced by a code that comes half from the father and half from the mother.

Now, if exactly the same chromosomes from each pair went into each ovum or into each spermatozoa, all the offspring of one set of parents would be just alike. But in fact, either chromosome from each pair can go into each ovum or spermatozoa; furthermore, genes possess the ability to "jump" from one chromosome to another, so that a chromosome that came mainly from a person's father may contain genes that came from a person's mother. As each human chromosome contains about a hundred thousand genes, this means effectively that the genetic heritage in each zygote is going to be different from the genetic heritage in any other zygote. And as that zygote turns into a fetus, which turns into a human being, each human being—again with the exception of identical twins or other identical multiples, who develop from a single zygote—every human being is going to have a different set of DNA from every other human being.

This means many things. First, it is possible to identify an individual from very small samplings once a suspect has been developed by other means. That handful of hair the victim snatched, the scrapings under the fingernails where the victim scratched the assailant, the blood where the assailant got a nosebleed — even the semen left behind by the rapist—all these can be matched to the individual they belong to.

Earl Ubell, writing in
Parade
magazine, told of the first case solved by Jeffreys's method: A man suspected of the rape and murder of two fifteen-year-old girls was innocent; the semen stains on the bodies did not match his DNA. Police then asked for blood samples from all the men living in the neighborhood. Obviously, the men could not be required to give these samples, but their failure to do so might raise certain questions in the mind of investigators. One man asked a friend to provide a blood sample in his place. That naturally roused the curiosity of the friend and hence of the police, and court orders were eventually obtained. When the DNA of the suspect, Colin Pitchfork, was compared to the semen, it matched.

There are other uses for DNA fingerprinting. In questions of

paternity, it is possible to prove with very close certainty who is and is not the parent of the child in question. In one very sad case, it was able to show that parents had left the hospital with each other's baby, but by the time the switch was discovered one girl was ten years old and one girl was dead. Another time, British authorities thought that a citizen of Ghana was trying to enter England on a passport owned by a resident of Ghana with British citizenship. DNA fingerprinting of both parents and of the young man proved' that the young man was exactly who he said he was; half his DNA had clearly come from his purported mother and half from his purported father.

In 1991, scientists proposed opening Abraham Lincoln's tomb and obtaining genetic scrapings in order to check for the Marfan's syndrome gene and finally determine for sure whether Lincoln did indeed have Marfan's syndrome.

What Is Marfan's Syndrome?

Marfan's syndrome is a hereditary ailment of the long bones, connective tissue and blood vessels. The most obvious symptom externally is very long legs and arms; the most serious symptom is a tendency toward spontaneous rupture of the aorta, the largest blood vessel in the body, and as a result Marfan's victims rarely live past middle age without surgical intervention. Modern medical historians, examining Lincoln's portraits and what is known now about his body measurements (easily determined, as some of his clothing still exists) insist he was a Marfan's victim. Other historians aren't so sure.

Marfan's syndrome may be useful in fiction because a rupture of the aorta is excruciatingly painful, and although the victim will usually bleed to death internally within ten minutes, it has happened that a victim, bleeding internally and in great pain, has grabbed a pistol and shot himself (in this case, rarely herself). In that case, for insurance purposes, the question of whether the person died from suicide or from the ruptured aorta may become crucial.

And of course, if someone else muddies the water further by taking away the pistol... there's a lot you can do with that.

But DNA fingerprinting is not yet fully accepted. So far, more than 400 cases have gone to trial, and no one knows how many cases have been settled without trial because DNA evidence was available. But in a nonbinding precedent, Judge Douglas Keddie of Yuma County, Arizona, ruled that DNA tests were not yet acceptable in his court, despite the contentions of the FBI agents who had performed it that the test was conclusive. According to Judge Keddie, the fact that the test is supposedly so conclusive means that it "puts a fist on the scale of justice." Because it is "so likely to sway a jury, it must be subjected to the strictest scrutiny" (Kolata).

And Kolata to a large degree is right. In a copyrighted article originally published in the
Washington Post,
Boyce Rensberger pointed out some of the problems with DNA fingerprinting. In general if a complete DNA fingerprint is taken, all people except identical siblings can be distinguished from one another. But the problem is that DNA fingerprinting does not look at the entire DNA sequence; rather, it looks at certain parts of sequences that are normally different in all people. Given this short sequence comparison, it is indeed true that any person is totally different from any person not closely related. But the chances that two siblings will be identical in this short-sequence comparison may be as low as 1 in 128.

Furthermore, Rensberger quoted geneticists Richard Lewon-tin of Harvard University and Daniel Hartl of Washington University as saying it is possible that the odds for and against a wrong match must be calculated differently for each race and ethnic group and subgroup, because some ethnic groups are more interbred than others.

This can be as important in writing fiction as in real life; I'm already thinking of ways of using it, and I'm sure you can think of many more.

One more thing ... don't have a DNA test performed in the morning and the results announced that afternoon. DNA test results require an absolute minimum of ten days, but two weeks is more likely.

What is the future of identification?

Genetic fingerprinting—when the entire genetic sequence, rather than only a part of it, is used —is probably as good as it gets, though the techniques of genetic fingerprinting and of interpreting the tests will certainly be improved in the future. At present, the tests involve several complicated chemical steps, and the resultant printout resembles a bar-code of the type used in grocery stores to scan prices, except that it is far more complicated and far more colorful.

Scientists in several parts of the world are involved in a project called gene-mapping. They hope that by the time the project is completed, around the turn of the century, they will know what every gene on every chromosome controls. Frequently the papers announce new discoveries related to this mapping; within the time I have been working on this book I've read about the discovery of the location of genes that relate to several different kinds of cancer and of genes that may control the onset of Alzheimer's disease, and of course it was the gene-mapping project that located the Marfan's syndrome gene. Once this project is complete, DNA fingerprinting will be able not only to identify a person, but also perhaps to determine what illnesses that person is likely to have in his/her lifetime and maybe even what his probable appearance, intelligence and talents are.