Silent Witnesses (22 page)

Lacassagne also scrutinized the teeth of the body, after which he estimated the deceased to have been in his early fifties, certainly not thirty-five as Bernard had suggested after the original postmortem. Gouffe was, as we know, forty-nine. Breaks in the thyroid cartilage confirmed strangulation as the cause of death, although Lacassagne considered that it had been done manually rather than with a cord or a garrotte as Bernard had thought. The final test was the hair. Lacassagne used a microscope to compare some hair that had been taken from the corpse with some taken from Gouffe's hairbrush. They matched in color and were both 0.13 mm in diameter. Both Lacassagne and Goron were now completely convinced that the remains were indeed those of Gouffe. Had it not been for Lacassagne's determined and systematic approach, it is very likely that this would not have come to light, especially given the inaccurate information arising from the first postmortem and the confusion caused by the filthy hair.

But while they now knew for certain who their victim was, they still needed to find a killer. In the hope of jogging someone's memory, Goron commissioned a copy of the trunk the body had been carried in, which was then put on public display. An estimated 35,000 people filed by to see it, and thousands of photographs were also circulated around the world. This might have seemed like a long shot, but it worked—Goron received a letter from a Frenchman now living in London, who
had seen a photograph of the trunk in the paper. In the letter, the man explained that an ugly, balding man calling himself Michael, along with his daughter, had stayed with him the previous June. They had bought a trunk just like the one in the photograph from a shop near Euston Road and had taken it with them when they finally returned to Paris.

The description of the man calling himself Michael fitted one that Goron had been given of a man called Michel Eyraud, with whom Gouffe had been seen drinking a couple of days before his disappearance. With them was Eyraud's beautiful mistress (not, in fact, his daughter) Gabrielle Bompard. Given Gouffe's eye for attractive women, it seemed this might well be the lead that Goron had been looking for. When he received the information, Goron at once ordered a search for Eyraud and Gabrielle, but they had come to nothing.

Once again, Goron turned to the newspapers for help. Luckily they couldn't get enough of the story and relished the chance to become involved. Soon they were full of descriptions, drawings, and background information, all pertaining to Eyraud and Bompard. Then, completely out of the blue, Goron received a letter from Eyraud stating that he was now living in New York and wondering why Goron was implicating him in the murder of his friend, of which he denied all knowledge. He went on to offer an alternative theory, mentioning Bompard as his former mistress and suggesting that perhaps she was in some way involved in the murder. He also promised to return to Paris and hand himself over to Goron.

The surprises didn't stop there. A few days later, Bompard appeared at the police station with her current lover in tow. Goron described her as being small and pretty, with grey eyes and
excellent teeth. He later reflected that “corruption literally oozed from her.” She had come to denounce Eyraud as Gouffe's murderer and admit that she had been his willing accomplice.

When Goron questioned her, she was very frank and straightforward. The murder, she said, had been committed in one of the rooms at 3 Rue Tronson de Coudray. Although she said she knew this to be a fact from what Eyraud had told her, she claimed she hadn't actually been present at the time of the crime. She had then traveled to the United States with Eyraud. While there she left Eyraud for another man (the one she had brought with her to the police station), and Eyraud had apparently planned to murder and rob this usurper. However, she told her new lover about Eyraud's scheme and together they escaped back to Paris. It was he who had then persuaded her to tell the police what she knew. Goron appreciated her bravery in coming forward, but he nevertheless instructed the prefect, Loze, to arrest her and hold her in custody.

Goron sent men to search for Eyraud in the United States and Canada, but they were unable to catch up with him, despite tracking a long trail of his petty crimes, and eventually returned to France empty-handed. But one misdemeanor in particular eventually proved to be Eyraud's undoing. While in New York he “borrowed” an expensive oriental robe from a Turkish gentleman, on the pretext that he wanted to be photographed wearing it. Needless to say the poor man never saw his robe, or Eyraud, again. He subsequently traveled to Havana, Cuba, and while there tried to sell the stolen robe to a dressmaker. In a stroke of luck for Goron and Lacassagne, the dressmaker recognized Eyraud from having seen his photograph in the paper, and promptly informed the French consul. The hunt was on.

Police raided Eyraud's room at the Hotel Roma in Havana. There they found his belongings packed and ready for a quick exit, but no sign of the man himself. Later that night he tried to gain entrance to a brothel, but the madam, suspicious of his ragged appearance, threw him out before calling the police. It did not take long for them to locate him wandering the streets and arrest him. They finally had their man.

On being brought back to Havana Police Station, Eyraud attempted and failed to commit suicide. He was then transported back to Paris where he confessed and told his version of the story. Contrary to Bompard's account, Eyraud said she was very much involved and that he had persuaded her to lure Gouffe to a room where he would be lying in wait for him. Bompard would then begin to seduce him and, while he was distracted in this way, Eyraud would strike. Things went according to plan; Eyraud attacked Gouffe, first attempting to hang him and then, when he started screaming, resorting to strangling him with his bare hands. The body was hidden inside the trunk. Eyraud then left in order to break into Gouffe's office to steal the money he knew to be there—this was the entire motive for the crime. However, for some reason—most likely because he was in something of a panic—he was unable to locate the cash. Later he disposed of the body in the river, thinking that would be an end to the matter.

Had the two committed the murder in another area, one not served by Lacassagne, it is highly probable that they would have gotten away with it, since without Lacassagne, Gouffe's corpse would have remained unidentified. Unfortunately for them, they didn't. After a four-day trial, Eyraud was found guilty of murder and sent to the guillotine. Despite the important part she had played, Bompard was treated more leniently and sentenced to twenty years
in prison. The high profile of the case, both in France and internationally, considerably enhanced Lacassagne's own reputation, not to mention being a huge boost to that of forensic science as a whole.

The discovery of a corpse in a bag seems more the stuff of nightmares or Hollywood thrillers than real life, and of course such things thankfully only occur extremely rarely. However, a couple of decades after that unpleasant episode in France, New York had its own case of an unidentified corpse that would prove to be every bit as sensational. Although it was not forensic analysis of the body itself that solved this case, the circumstances of the crime and its peculiar nature merit its inclusion in this chapter.

On September 13, 1913, eighteen-year-old Mary Bann and her eleven-year-old brother Albert were looking out from the porch of their Palisades home on the Hudson River, as they often did. On this occasion, however, they spotted a parcel being carried along on the early morning tide. Even as they watched, it came ashore. Their curiosity got the better of them, and they hurried down to the edge of the water to find out what the package contained.

Pulling the manila paper apart, they discovered a red-and-blue striped pillow. It had been slit open, and the interior of the parcel was covered in feathers. Whatever childish fantasies they might have been cherishing about what the package contained were about to be utterly destroyed when—digging in among the feathers—they uncovered the headless trunk of a woman. Screaming, they ran home to tell their father what they had found. After he had confirmed their story, he immediately called the police.

The following day, two crab hunters were searching the banks of the Hudson at Weehawken, New Jersey, about three miles
downriver from where the first package had washed up. They too came across a parcel, one that contained the lower part of a torso. As with the previous parcel, there was a pillow stuffed inside, along with a large rock to weigh everything down. The remains themselves had been wrapped in a newspaper dated August 31, 1913.

Both sections were taken to Volk's Morgue in Hoboken where Dr. George W. King examined them. He estimated the woman's age at around thirty, due to the softness of the cartilaginous joints, and suggested that she must have been about 5 feet 4 inches in height, probably weighing approximately 120 to 130 pounds. He also concluded that the woman had been dismembered by an experienced hand and that she had also only been in the water for a few days. She had given birth prematurely not long before she died.

Perhaps unexpectedly, it was the rock used to weigh down the second parcel that was to provide a useful lead to investigators. Geologists determined that it was a piece of schist, a greyish-green rock that was rarely found in New Jersey but that was very common in Manhattan. It was irregularly shaped, as if it had been broken off a larger piece by blasting, which, given the massive building program that was underway in New York at the time, would also be consistent. As a result, after some initial disputes regarding who was responsible for it, the case was finally handed over to the New York Police Department.

It was one of New York's finest detectives, Inspector Joseph A. Faurot, who took it on, assisted by detectives first class Frank Cassassa, Richard McKenna, and James O'Neil. Faurot was a great believer in forensic science and had traveled to London in 1906 in order to observe Scotland Yard's use of fingerprinting. Indeed, later that same year, having returned to New York, he
arrested a man who had been seen acting suspiciously in the Waldorf-Astoria. The man, who had a British accent and claimed that his name was James Jones, insisted he was only there because he was having an affair with one of the hotel's guests. Not easily convinced, Faurot sent the man's fingerprints to Scotland Yard, where they were matched with those of an infamous hotel thief, Daniel Nolan. Incidentally, this was the first time in US legal history that fingerprints were used to find a suspect guilty.

Faurot began his investigation by looking more closely at the pillows found inside both the packages. On the pillowcase of one he found an embroidered A, about an inch high and obviously the work of an amateur. A tag on one of the pillows had a maker's name: the Robinson Roders company of Newark, New Jersey. Faurot visited the company, where he was told that the pillows had been a bit of a disappointment; the company had only sold twelve, all to George Sachs, a secondhand furniture dealer. Sachs, when questioned, also said that the pillows had been very slow movers and that he had sold only two. One of these sales had been to a woman who, when questioned, seemed highly unlikely to be connected to the crime. The other had been delivered, along with some pieces of furniture, to an apartment at 68 Bradhurt Avenue.

The landlord informed Faurot that two weeks earlier he had rented the apartment to a man calling himself Hans Schmidt, who said he was acting on behalf of a female relative; it was apparently for her that he had ordered all the furniture. Faurot had the apartment watched for a week, but no one went in, or even showed any interest in it. On September 9, the police entered the apartment by climbing up a fire escape and jimmying open a window. What they found inside was far from pleasant.

In spite of someone's attempts to remove them, dark stains were still visible on the floor and on the green wallpaper. They were obviously blood. There was a trunk, inside of which was a foot-long butcher's knife and a large handsaw. Both had been recently cleaned. In another trunk, Faurot discovered several small handkerchiefs, each embroidered with a letter
A
identical to the one found on one of the pillowcases. There was also a bundle of letters addressed to one Anna Aumuller. Most of them had come from Germany, but three had return addresses in New York. Faurot visited each of these addresses, interviewing the people named in the letters. His final visit was to St. Boniface's Church on Forty-Seventh Street and Second Avenue. The pastor there, Father John Braun, remembered Anna Aumuller well—she was a twenty-one-year-old Austrian immigrant who had worked as a maid in the rectory until she was fired for misconduct. He also knew the name Hans Schmidt. Schmidt had been a priest at the church but had recently moved on to another, St. Joseph's, at 405 West 105th Street. Faurot rushed over there, arriving just before midnight. It was Schmidt who answered the door. When Faurot introduced himself and told him why he was there, Schmidt almost collapsed. Once he had recovered, much to Faurot's surprise, he made a full confession.

He claimed to have married Aumuller in a bizarre-sounding ceremony that he had carried out himself (for the obvious reason that, as a Catholic priest, he was officially unable to marry). Shortly afterward, on September 2, he killed her by slitting her throat while she slept. The only explanation he was able to give for his actions was, “I loved her. Sacrifices should be consummated in blood.” It is perhaps closer to the truth that, after
discovering she was pregnant, he murdered her to avoid the matter becoming public. He also admitted to buying both the handsaw and the knife, and when asked why the cuts were so professionally done, he explained that he had been a medical student before being ordained. He said that having dismembered Aumuller's body, he had thrown all the various parts into the river—though no more of them were ever discovered.

When Schmidt's past was investigated, it became clear that he had always been troubled. Born in Aschaffenberg, Germany, in the diocese of Mainz, he was ordained there in 1906. He was later arrested for fraud but was then declared insane and released. The local bishop defrocked him (meaning that the papers he brought with him to the United States were false). In 1909 Schmidt traveled to the United States, where he presented his papers and was assigned to St. John's parish in Louisville, Kentucky. However, after several serious arguments with another priest there, he was moved to St. Boniface's in New York City.