FORENSIC PUZZLES OF THE PAST

Forensic scientists are, by nature, extremely inquisitive, and every year we travel to cities across America and around the world to attend conferences and seminars on various fields of interest to our profession. Many of us belong to a variety of organizations, such as the International Association of Forensic Science, the World Association of Medical Law (of which I am currently vice-president), the National Academy of Forensic Science, and the National Association of Medical Examiners. We meet together often, as professionals and as friends. To laymen, a convention of coroners might appear to be a rather morbid group. But, in fact, our meetings are lively occasions with much humor and banter, and energetic but good-willed debates on many subjects.

Because crimes and mysterious deaths have occurred for centuries, while forensic science is a relatively new field, we have much to debate. A hundred years after the events that made a certain killer famous, for example, we’re still intrigued about the identity of Jack the Ripper. Other historical questions are equally fascinating to us. Did General Custer and his troops commit mass suicide? Was Napoleon murdered while in exile? Did Adolf Hitler, the archvillain of our century, escape from Berlin in the last days of the war? These are some of the classic historical mysteries which forensic scientists still investigate with often surprising results.

CUSTER’S LAST STAND

In 1984 archaeologists armed with metal detectors descended on the legendary site of “Custer’s Last Stand.” There, in the Battle of Little Big Horn in Montana on June 25, 1876, General George Armstrong Custer and 209 troopers of the Seventh Cavalry were surrounded and slaughtered by thousands of Indians on a grassy hilltop above the Little Big Horn River. Paintings of that battle ever since have shown the golden-haired General firing his pistol at the Indian warriors who whirled by on horses, fighting to the end.

Not for decades was this historical version of the battle challenged. A professor, Dr. Thomas B. Marquis, who in the 1920s wrote a book, Keep the Last Bullet for Yourself, disputing that heroic version of the battle, could not obtain a publisher. Incredibly, it was not until 1976, forty-one years after Dr. Marquis died, that his work was published.

Marquis had been a physician assigned to the Cheyenne Indian Reservation in the early years of this century. Survivors of the battle were still alive, and what they told Marquis stunned him. There had been no hilltop battle as described at all. Custer and his troopers were surrounded, but no Indians had charged either on horse or on foot. Instead they had dismounted and hidden in gullies and draws on the hillside, merely sniping at the soldiers on the ridge with a few guns, or launching arrows toward the hill from below.

Earlier a brave detachment of troopers, few in number, had charged down the hill, attempting to break out of the encirclement, and they had been killed. But the approximately two hundred soldiers on the hilltop were still in fortified positions, and the Indians knew that a frontal attack would be foolhardy. So they waited for dark, but suddenly, to their astonishment, there was a flurry of gunfire on the hill above them. Then silence. An Indian scout crawled up the hill under cover of the bushes and saw an incredible scene. Custer and his men all lay dead.

So went Dr. Marquis’s tale, as learned from the Indians, a version of the battle outrageous to American patriots. For some of the soldiers had been killed by snipers, according to Marquis, but Custer and the bulk of his troops had committed mass suicide rather than suffer torture at the hands of the Indians.

Outrageous—but there were some facts that appeared to back up the story. For example, only about a dozen Indians died in the battle, as against the more than two hundred American soldiers who perished. Also, very few expended shells were found on the hilltop, indicating that not much firing had been done by the soldiers.

In 1982 Navy Commander Jerry Spencer, formerly of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, presented the mass suicide theory at a conference of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. He said that he had requested exhumation of the skeletons for examination. His presentation, reprinted in The Journal of Forensic Sciences, explained why.

With the techniques of modern forensic science, it would be possible to substantiate the suicide theory of Dr. Marquis if the skeletons could be examined.

Most individuals who commit suicide with a firearm shoot themselves in the head, with the muzzle of the weapon in contact or loose contact with the head. Besides the bullet, a large quantity of powder residue is driven into the scalp tissue and into the skull, where it will remain indefinitely.

Sophisticated techniques such as scanning electron microscopy with X-ray diffraction analysis could be used to evaluate the skulls for powder residue. Because of the type of gunpowder used in 1876, however, these techniques would be unnecessary. At that time “black powder,” a mixture of charcoal, sulfur and potassium nitrate, was used as the propellant in both rifle and handgun bullets, rather than the modern “smokeless” gunpowder, or nitrocellulose. Black powder in ignition produces very large quantities of powder residue, much more than smokeless powder.

Presumably, if most of the skulls revealed evidence of black-powder residue, we would have proof of one of the greatest disgraces in American history, mass suicide in front of the enemy. But permission to exhume the skeletons had been refused by the superintendent of the Custer monument.

Forensic scientists, like most Americans, are fascinated by Custer’s Last Stand. I remember that once, during a coffee break in a National Medical Examiners meeting in Newport, California, a young female reporter for the Los Angeles Times approached me and asked a different type of question from those I usually hear: “Dr. Noguchi, what do coroners talk about at cocktail parties?”

I’m afraid I made her laugh when I replied, “Well, last night we spent the whole evening arguing whether General Custer committed suicide.”

My friend Bill Eckert of Wichita, Kansas, is one of my colleagues most interested in Custer. Because of him I looked into the baffling mystery of the dead troopers myself. And my attention first centered on a second forensic enigma in that battle: the body of General Custer.

After the soldiers had died, the Indians stripped them of their uniforms and then proceeded to mutilate all the bodies in terrible fashion, chopping off legs, arms and heads, and scalping each and every man. Except General Custer. Alone among the mutilated bodies, he was untouched, though naked. A bullet was in his side, and one in his head.

There were many witnesses to this fact, because the reserve troops who came to the hill after the Indians had fled all gathered around the fallen General. But their testimony reveals forensic evidence which seems to refute Dr. Marquis’s thesis, at least in Custer’s case. The bullet hole in Custer’s side was bloody; the hole in the head showed little blood. That means the shot that actually killed Custer struck him in the side, not a location which persons use to commit suicide by gun. The bullet in the head was probably a coup de grâce shot fired by an Indian after Custer was dead.

Why was Custer’s body, alone, untouched and unmutilated? Most Americans over the years have tended to believe it was because the Indians respected their greatest enemy. Not so, it seems. Custer had fought Indians in the Midwest; this was his first campaign in the North. The Northern Indians in the area had never heard of him, as almost all of them told interviewers over the years.

There was, however, one Indian chief, with the poetic name Rain-in-the-Face, who had fought Custer before. Perhaps he intervened and saved Custer’s body, and his dignity, for history. But an even more romantic idea emerged when historians discovered that a young Indian woman who had been a mistress of General Custer’s was in the Cheyenne Indian village from which the warriors rode to battle. Perhaps she, among the squaws on the hill after the battle, protected Custer’s body.

My own opinion on the controversy about Custer’s Last Stand is that Custer was a brave man, as he had proved many times in the past. He would never have committed suicide. The forensic evidence of his two bullet wounds shows he was killed by a shot in the side.

I believe that Custer died early in the battle, no doubt astride his horse, showing his bravery to rally the spirit of the troops, when a sniper’s bullet struck him in the side and killed him. Unfortunately, his best junior officers had been assigned to other regiments, and I believe the leaderless troops may have panicked with thousands of Indians surrounding them. That, in my opinion, is why so few shots were fired, and so few Indians died.

All of the troopers knew that Indians tortured soldiers while they were alive, and perhaps some did commit suicide when all was known to be lost. But most, I’m sure, fought heroically to the end.

An archaeological dig in 1984 at the site of the Battle of Little Big Horn turned up some shells, and a finger bone encircled by a ring. But to date no more clues have been found to the mystery of Custer’s Last Stand, that savage day on a hill when a few hundred Americans looked out at thousands of hostile Indians on every side—and wondered what to do.

THE DEATH OF NAPOLEON

1

St. Helena is a speck of land in the Atlantic Ocean which lies 1,750 miles from South Africa, 1,800 miles from South America, and, most important to the British, 4,000 miles from England. For there in exile in 1815 was Napoleon Bonaparte, England’s hated rival, whose great armies had ruled Europe for years.

Exiled once before on an island closer to land, Napoleon had escaped, raised an army, and again terrorized Europe. In one of history’s landmark battles, he was defeated by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, and this time the English took no chances. St. Helena was about as far from civilization as one could go, a rather pretty little island, green and hilly, but suffering from a terrible climate in which excessively hot spells alternated with blustery periods when an icy wind bent trees to the ground and tore through the thin wooden walls of the island dwellings.

There the exiled Emperor arrived on October 17, 1815, with a retinue of faithful servants and three former officers of his army, Count Charles-Tristan de Montholon, General Henri-Gratien Bertrand, and Count Emmanuel de Las Cases. Such was the devotion that Napoleon inspired that these three voluntarily chose to spend years in exile on this “godforsaken” island to be close to their imprisoned leader.

A garrison of three thousand British troops (on an island only six and a half miles wide and ten and a half miles long) was assigned to make certain Napoleon stayed a prisoner. Under the almost paranoiac supervision of Governor Hudson Lowe, they watched Napoleon’s every move, and Lowe constantly kept placing new, and petty, restrictions on his dangerous captive.

By 1821, Napoleon was ill, and no one knew why. He was only fifty-one years old; he was not losing weight—indeed, he had gained poundage. And yet he complained of weakness and swelling of the ankles. On the fifth of May of that year he was dead. And not until his will was read was it discovered that, two months before he died, he had written the following words: “I am dying before my time, murdered by the English oligarchy and its hired assassin.”

The autopsy on his body was conducted with the ex-Emperor stretched naked on a billiard table in the house, Longwood, where he had died. Thereafter physicians reported a large benign ulcer in his stomach and an enlarged liver. Neither was the cause of death, although the discovery of the ulcer led people to believe that Napoleon died of cancer. The terrible words included in his will suggested another cause of death—murder.

But how had murder been done? Poison had not been found in Napoleon’s stomach during the autopsy, and no violence had occurred. In fact, during his illness Napoleon was constantly attended closely by his fanatical followers.

The answer might never have been known had not Napoleon’s loyal valet, Louis Marchand, shaved off his leader’s hair in order to present locks of it to members of Napoleon’s family and friends from the old days. Those locks of hair were preserved, and, 150 years later, one thin strand of that hair presented, through modern forensic science, a solution to the mystery.

2

Sten Forshufvud, a tall, lean blond Swede, was a Napoleon idolater whose house in Göteborg was filled with portraits, busts and statues of the Emperor. In 1955 Forshufvud read the memoirs of Louis Marchand, which recounted in diary fashion Napoleon’s last days. According to Marchand, the diminutive Emperor, in his illness, had alternated between drowsiness and insomnia, his feet had become swollen, and he had been so weak that he complained, “My legs don’t hold me up.” Then during his very last days Napoleon had been administered tartar emetic and calomel, a “heroic” (10 gram) dose of the latter bringing on the final fainting and death.

The sequence leading to death constituted a pattern, Forshufvud realized upon reading Marchand’s diary: slow poisoning by arsenic. The symptoms of such poisoning were all there: alternating somnolence and insomnia, swollen feet, general fatigue, and an enlarged liver. Because arsenic, Forshufvud believed, had been given to Napoleon in small doses over a long period of time, the poison had not been suspected. And the ingestion of tartar emetic and calomel in his last days had made it untraceable in the stomach.

From his studies, Forshufvud knew that arsenic has a special property. It is indestructible. If Napoleon’s body could be examined, he could test it for arsenic traces. But the Emperor was buried in state in Paris, in a shrine visited by millions of tourists each year. Forshufvud realized he would never have a chance to prove his theory. But then he heard about the locks of hair. He traced a descendant of one of Napoleon’s retinue on St. Helena, and obtained a strand of it for testing.

3

The investigation of the mystery of Napoleon’s death is a textbook example of modern forensic technology at work. By 1962 scientists had developed equipment which bombarded an object with radiation to determine its elements. Forshufvud sent a strand of the hair he had obtained to a forensic scientist, Hamilton Smith, in Glasgow. In Smith’s laboratory, the Scotsman weighed the lone hair strand and sealed it in a polyethylene container. Then the hair strand and a standard arsenic solution were both irradiated for twenty-four hours. The hair strand, it was discovered, contained 10.38 micrograms of arsenic per gram of hair, almost thirteen times the normal amount, which is 0.8 parts per million.

Excited by this discovery, Forshufvud traveled to Glasgow to confer with Smith. Nonbelievers, Forshufvud said, might declare that the arsenic could have come externally, in some way, from the natural environment, and not been ingested as a poison. Was there a method to discover if the arsenic had been taken internally?

Smith smiled. A few months earlier, he said, that would have been impossible, because his irradiation equipment did not have the capability of analyzing different sections of a hair strand—only the total strand. But he had just installed an improved technological device which could do so.

Why was section analysis important? Forshufvud asked, and Smith told him, “If arsenic was absorbed from the natural environment, the analyses of the hair strand would show a constant amount of arsenic along its length. If, on the other hand, arsenic was ingested into the body at intervals, the hair strand would show peaks and valleys of arsenic in each section.” Furthermore, because hair grows at about .014 inches per day, Smith could calculate the time between the peaks.

Smith performed 140 tests on a new sample of hair which Forshufvud obtained from a lock that had been owned by one of Napoleon’s valets, Jean-Abraham Noverraz. The section analyses showed that the arsenic had not come from the environment, because its content was not constant. Instead, it ranged from a low of 1.86 to a high of 51.2.

Forshufvud and Smith published their findings in the British scientific journal Nature, on October 14, 1961. Here, it appeared, was proof that the Emperor Napoleon had been assassinated, and the world was fascinated by the forensic detective work which had used modern devices to solve a murder more than a century and a half old.

But in academia a reaction always inspires a counter-reaction, and some scientists set out to disprove Forshufvud and Smith’s theory. These scientists believed that the arsenic had entered Napoleon’s hair naturally from the environment, and in the late seventies they had a find equal in significance to Forshufvud and Smith’s analyses of Napoleon’s hair. It was, believe it or not, Napoleon’s wallpaper.

The culmination of their efforts, in which they exposed the wallpaper to neutron-activating equipment, was published in Nature magazine in 1982. The New York Times, with some amusement, wrote an editorial on the scientific debate, entitled “Arsenic and Old Napoleon”:

Two British scientists note that the emerald greens in 19th century wallpaper were made from a copper-arsenic pigment, which could be converted by a fungus into a deadly arsenical vapor. Having discovered scraps of Napoleon’s St. Helena wallpaper in an old family scrap-book, they say it contains enough arsenic to cause illness, but not death. “Conspiracy theories need not be invoked to explain arsenic found in the hair,” they conclude with a touch of scorn.

The Times went on to say that the original advocate of the poisoning theory, Sten Forshufvud, not only hotly contested the British scientists’ findings, but thought their theory was “off the wall.”

Napoleon’s dread words in his will reveal that he did not think the subject was amusing. He believed he was being murdered, but he obviously didn’t know how it was being done or he would have stopped it.

Arsenic in those days was the poison of choice by murderers, and it was present in suspiciously large amounts in Napoleon’s hair. But was it an assassination or merely an accident? Perhaps we will never know, but a friend of mine with whom I discussed this mystery reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s last words on his deathbed in a dingy Paris boardinghouse:

“Either that wallpaper goes or I go.”

DID HITLER ESCAPE?

1

A mystery that emerged from the caldron of World War II may at last be solved. So far it has attracted little attention, but if my friend forensic odontologist Lester Luntz, D.D.S., continues his efforts, and he plans to do so, the world is in for a shock.

The mystery is this: Did Adolf Hitler, Germany’s fanatical dictator, survive the war and escape?

To ask the question is to invite ridicule. Western historians, basing their conclusions on “eyewitness” accounts, have said for years that Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in a bunker beneath wartorn Berlin. Then their bodies were doused with gasoline and burned in the garden of the Reich Chancellery above. But not long after the last smoke cleared over the ruins of Berlin, Soviet leaders, from General Zhukov to dictator Joseph Stalin, hinted that Hitler had escaped.

What actually happened on April 30, 1945? Did Adolf Hitler die?

2

In April 1945, the proud German Army that had once thundered across Europe, then probed deep into Russia, was reduced to a few divisions of men fighting a last-ditch battle in Berlin against the Allies. Adolf Hitler commanded this defense from a fortified bunker deep underground, huddled together with his closest cronies and aides as artillery shells exploded overhead.

Each day smartly uniformed Nazi generals marched into the bunker and gathered around military maps with the Führer. As red lines indicating the Russian envelopment of the city drew closer, the generals could no longer hide the truth of defeat. And on April 21, 1945, in a conference never forgotten by its participants, Adolf Hitler went into a frenzy. He threw down his pencil on the table, white-faced, then screamed at the frightened generals, “Then it’s finished? The war is lost!”

From that day, his aides later testified, Hitler began making plans to kill himself. He told them he did not intend to be dragged through Moscow streets in a cage, exhibited like an ape. Instead, he discussed a suicide through poison with his doctors, who recommended potassium cyanide because it acted so swiftly. And in a scene perhaps symbolic of Hitler’s ruthlessness (or “iron will,” as his fanatical followers believed), he had the poison administered to his faithful dog, Blondi, who twitched violently, and died. It was said that when Hitler was called in to see his dead pet on the floor, he merely nodded and, face expressionless, retired from the room.

In those last desperate days aides pleaded with Hitler to escape. Hans Bauer, undoubtedly one of the most skillful aviators the world has ever known, had been landing and taking off from the street outside the Reich Chancellery, the Wilhelmstrasse. He told Hitler he could fly him to an airbase in northern Germany, and from there he could travel by a long-range German Army transport plane into hiding in a far-off country. Martin Bormann, his deputy, and others pleaded with the Führer to fly to Berchtesgaden, his villa in the Alps, where German troops could guard him in those almost impenetrable mountains.

But Hitler, according to aides who survived, said no; he had determined to die in Berlin. The idea of suicide by the Führer saddened his followers, but did not surprise them. The Hitler they knew in the bunker was entirely different from the dynamic leader who had single-handedly galvanized the German people and led them into war. Now the Führer was weak-looking, graying, ashen-faced, and his left arm trembled so violently that he sometimes had to hold it still with his other hand.

His Nazi cronies believed the transformation was not because of the pressures of war, or even the sting of defeat, but instead was due to the exotic pep-up drugs administered to Hitler daily by Dr. Theodore Morell, perhaps the original “Dr. Feelgood.” Morell was scorned by the legitimate doctors who also attended Hitler.

Day by day, night by night, the Russians drew closer. The Battle of Berlin was a fierce war, fought among rubble which gave excellent protection to the defenders. But the massive might of the Red Army, with Stalin’s “organ grinders” firing multiple artillery shells into the heart of the city, took its toll.

With defeat inevitable, Hitler took two final steps. He gave permission to his Nazi followers to break out of the bunker and attempt to escape after he died. And he made the dreams of his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, come true. He married her, less than twenty-four hours before they were to die together.

On the afternoon of April 30, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun retired to Hitler’s living room in the bunker. Hitler had a Walther 7.65-caliber pistol, Eva a smaller one. They each had two cyanide pills. Hitler had been told to place the pistol to his temple, and bite down on the cyanide pill as he pulled the trigger. Eva would simply take the poison.

Our knowledge of what happened next arises from conflicting testimony of witnesses. We are not even certain which aides waited outside the door. Among them, reportedly, were Major Otto Gunsche, Hitler’s adjutant, Heinz Linge, his valet, Martin Bormann, his deputy, and Arthur Axmann, Nazi Youth leader. Most historians agree Gunsche and Linge were certainly present. But Erich Klempka, Hitler’s chauffeur, for example, was one of the few of the bunker’s inhabitants to escape the Russians and land in Allied lands, and his “eyewitness” account was heavily relied upon by Western historians. Yet twenty-five years later he admitted he was not even inside the bunker at the time.

According to other of the “bunker people” interrogated later by Western authorities, after returning from Soviet prisons, this is what happened at the time of Hitler’s death. First of all, interestingly, no one ever heard a shot. This fact puzzled them, and their only explanation was that Hitler’s room had a heavy steel door. They waited nervously for ten minutes, then entered the room, where they found Hitler slumped on one side of the sofa (one witness said he was in an armchair), blood running from his temple (one said left temple, another, right), a gun at his feet. Eva Braun was slumped on the other side of the couch. A smell of bitter almonds characteristic of potassium cyanide was in the room. They wrapped the bodies in blankets and carried them up the staircase which led to a door on ground level opening onto the Reich Chancellery garden. There they placed the two bodies in a shallow trench, doused them with gasoline, and set them afire with a flaming rag.

It was a grisly, perhaps fitting end for the Nazi empire: a few forlorn fanatics huddling in a dark doorway as artillery shells exploded nearby, forcing them to duck inside the building from time to time for protection. They watched a roaring sea of flame consume the Führer who had once ruled with such might and ceremony. But the charred, unrecognizable bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun were never buried. The shell fire made it impossible for his aides to remain exposed aboveground long enough to do the job.

And thus Adolf Hitler died.

Or did he?

4

Allied troops poised outside Berlin wondered what had become of Hitler. A German radio report on April 30 had said that the Führer had died in action, leading his troops in battle. But the Russians, who now controlled the German capital, said the Nazi dictator had not died. He had escaped. According to an electrifying report published in Time magazine:

A team of Soviet detectives concluded last week that if Adolf Hitler was dead, he had not died in the ruins of his Reich Chancellery.

… Behind the bookcase in Hitler’s personal room in the battle-wrecked Chancellery, the sleuths found a thin, concrete, removable panel. Behind it was a man-size hole leading to a super-secret concrete shelter far underground and 500 meters away. Another tunnel connected the shelter with an underground trolley line.

… In a corridor leading to the secret shelter, the detectives found a charred note in a woman’s handwriting. It told her parents not to worry if they did not hear from her for a long while. The Soviet investigators thought that Eva Braun had written it.

On May 26, just weeks after the end of the war, Harry Hopkins, a special adviser to U.S. President Harry Truman, arrived in Moscow to confer with Stalin on problems concerning the founding of the United Nations. Stalin told Hopkins that the Russians had not found Hitler’s body. “In my opinion Hitler is not dead, but is hiding somewhere.”

Ten days later, on June 6, Soviet Marshal Zhukov held a press conference in Berlin. When Western reporters pressed him to explain what had happened to Hitler, Zhukov commented, “I can say nothing definite about his fate. He could have flown away from Berlin at the very last moment. The state of the runway would have allowed him to do so.”

It was said the press sat dazed after this revelation. Adolf Hitler might have escaped? The resulting uproar in the world press caused the British government to launch its own investigation of Hitler’s fate. It uncovered the chauffeur, Klempka, who claimed he had been in the bunker when Hitler committed suicide, and Herman Karnov, a German policeman who had seen, from the Reich Chancellery roof, the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun burning. “I recognized the Führer by his mustache and Eva Braun by her peculiar black shoes,” he said. But he admitted he couldn’t recognize their features because of the flames.

The British government published the results of its investigation in an official report which concluded that Adolf Hitler had shot himself, and that Eva Braun had taken poison. But the report was based on scanty evidence, mainly the testimony of Klempka and Karnov; and in light of Soviet denials that Hitler’s body had been found, it was greeted with skepticism.

In this continuing turmoil, England’s most respected historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, attempted to clear up the mystery once and for all. He went to Berlin and discovered that almost all the bunker inhabitants had been captured by the Soviets and imprisoned in Russia. Still, he was able to find “fringe” witnesses, such as guards and soldiers, as well as to interview high-ranking Nazi officers who had not been in the bunker at the time but knew of the events that had taken place there. And, of course, he used the testimony of Klempka and Karnov.

Trevor-Roper published a book, The Last Days of Hitler, in which he concluded that Hitler had in fact committed suicide. Such was Trevor-Roper’s reputation that, for most people, the book effectively put to rest the belief that he might have survived. Still, the Soviets continued to deny they knew anything about Hitler’s fate.

Then in 1968 there was a sensational development. For reasons never explained, Kremlin leaders admitted they had not only recovered the charred corpses of Hitler and Braun on May 4, 1945, five days after their death, but also had conducted autopsies on the bodies and, through odontology (forensic dentistry) had positively identified them as those of the Führer and his wife.

This revelation, complete with pictures and diagrams of the dead man’s teeth, was contained in a book, The Death of Hitler, by a Soviet historian, Lev Bezymenski. But was it Hitler’s body that had been recovered, or a double’s? Bezymenski had no doubt it was the Führer’s, but his fascinating story of the discovery of the body raised the possibility that doubles might have been used as part of Hitler’s security system, or as decoys to enable him to escape. In fact, the first body found by the Russians near the bunker and initially identified as the Führer’s was a double’s. Meanwhile, a Russian soldier had found the bodies of another man, a woman and two dogs in a nearby crater that was strewn with burned paper. But in the belief that Hitler’s body had already been found, the two new corpses were covered in blankets and buried. Later, when it was discovered the first body was not Hitler’s but that of a look-alike, the two corpses were dug up again and sent to a Berlin suburb, where autopsies were performed.

Both of the corpses were burned severely, and parts of the cranium were missing in each case. Splinters of glass and parts of a thin-walled capsule were found in the mouths, which, together with the “smell of bitter almonds,” convinced the forensic specialists that both the male and the female had poisoned themselves.

But were they really Hitler and Eva Braun? Charred bodies, as I have learned in my experience with both fires and airplane crashes, are the most difficult to identify. You have indications of height, race, sex and age, and sometimes bones yield evidence of previous fractures which are helpful in identification. But almost always the teeth are the main clue. And there we rely on the science of forensic odontology, by which means surviving teeth and bridges are compared to previous X rays and medical records of dental work to positively identify an anonymous corpse.

In the upper jaw of the corpse tentatively identified as Adolf Hitler’s were nine teeth connected by a gold bridge. The lower jaw had fifteen teeth. Soviet forensic scientists removed both the bridge and the lower jaw and delivered them to Soviet Counterintelligence, which was assigned the task of identifying the body.

Hitler’s dentist, Dr. Hugo Blashke, had fled, but an assistant, Kathe Heusemann, was found still in Berlin. She was taken to Blashke’s clinic, where she was able to locate a card which proved to be the dental history of Adolf Hitler. But there were no X rays. Again with Heusemann’s assistance, they were discovered in Blashke’s office in the basement of the Chancellery.

Another of Blashke’s dental assistants, Fritz Echtmann, was found and interrogated. Shown Hitler’s bridge and lower jaw, which the Russians had placed unceremoniously in a cigar box, both Heusemann and Echtmann identified them “unequivocally” as Hitler’s. Furthermore, a gold bridge taken from the mouth of the female corpse was identified “without hesitancy” as belonging to Eva Braun.

The Soviet book should have settled the question of Hitler’s death once and for all, but it did nothing of the kind. There were too many inconsistencies in it—and in the official autopsy reports included in its pages. For example, Bezymenski said that the X rays of Hitler’s teeth, the most vital tool of identification, were found by the Soviets—but intriguingly the X rays were not published in the book, only pictures of the teeth found on the unidentified corpse.

There was another forensic flaw in the book. The autopsy reports revealed that the corpse contained only one testicle—and none of Hitler’s medical records showed him to be a victim of monorchism, as the condition is called. In fact, his doctors vehemently denied it.

Chief among those claiming the book was a fraud was Dr. Erwin Giesing, the last physician to give Adolf Hitler a complete physical examination, after the bomb plot which almost took his life. Giesing denounced the Soviet odontology of Hitler’s teeth, and had evidence to back him: an X ray of Hitler’s head, including the teeth, taken by himself during his examination of the Führer. There were marked differences between this X ray and Hitler’s teeth as they were pictured and described by the Soviets.

In sum, according to Giesing, the corpse with one testicle instead of two, and the wrong teeth, was not and could not be Adolf Hitler’s. The Soviets had autopsied the wrong man. Had they autopsied a double? Had they been the victims of a hoax? Or were they perpetuating a hoax themselves?

5

In this climate of confusion, a distinguished American odontologist entered the picture, and apparently settled the question.

Raeder Sognaaes, a professor of anatomy and oral biology at the University of California at Los Angeles, embarked on a personal academic expedition to solve the case. He delivered the results of his research at an international forensic convention in 1972. Noting that neither Trevor-Roper’s nor Bezymenski’s book had contained any X-ray documentation, Sognaaes said he had realized that his first task was to find such X rays.

Sognaaes was apparently unaware of the X-ray photograph owned by Giesing and published that same year, 1972. Or perhaps he thought Giesing’s X rays were not adequate. In any case, his search for X rays led him first to the transcripts of the interrogation of Dr. Hugo Blashke, Hitler’s dentist, by the Americans after the war. In it, Blashke described Hitler’s teeth from memory, and mentioned X rays of Hitler’s head. But he told his American interrogators that his files, including X rays, had been placed on a transport plane bound for Salzburg, which crashed and burned.

Sognaaes did not give up hope. His search led him to a U.S. archives building in Suitland, Maryland, where he looked up the file of Hitler’s “Dr. Feelgood,” Dr. Theodore Morell. In the table of contents were listed “Annex II: Five X-Rays of Hitler’s Head.” But Annex II was missing. “However,” Sognaaes reported, “separate from the document itself was found a very worn and torn rough pink wartime paper envelope. This, at long last, did indeed reveal the missing links, five X-ray plates marked September 19, 1944, and October 21, 1944, respectively.”

Sognaaes now felt he had the forensic evidence he needed. He could compare these antemortem X rays with the Soviet postmortem pictures and autopsy description of Hitler’s teeth, and arrive at either an identification of Hitler or proof that the Soviets were wrong.

Sognaaes concluded, from his study of Blashke’s interrogation, the X rays he found in Maryland and the Russian postmortem information, that “the accumulated evidence now provides definite odontological proof that Hitler did in fact die, and that the Russians did indeed recover and autopsy the right body.”

This impressive, and important, research of a professional forensic odontologist was greeted by the world press as the final answer to the mystery. Only Dr. Giesing in Germany still objected, and with some good reason, it would seem. He had an X ray of his own of Hitler’s head which did not correspond to the Soviet pictures and descriptions. But Giesing was an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist, not an odontologist skilled in forensic dentistry, and thus his opinions were discounted.

But the puzzle of Hitler’s fate was far from solved.

6

One phase of the continuing mystery began with Sognaaes himself. Almost incredibly, it seems to me, he claimed in 1981 that although the male body found in the trench was Adolf Hitler’s, the female body found with him was not Eva Braun’s. How could that be?

Sognaaes pointed out that one of the pieces of evidence by which Eva was positively identified by the Soviets was a certain dental bridge with white plastic teeth. According to their autopsy report: “On the metal plate of the bridge the first and second artificial white molars are attached in front; their appearance is almost indistinguishable from natural teeth.”

If this bridge had actually been in Eva’s mouth, Sognaaes said, the plastic teeth would have melted, along with the metal plate. However, the bridge was not in her mouth. It had never been fitted and was still in the files of Blashke’s office when Eva supposedly died. Thus, Sognaaes believed it likely that the body found in the Chancellery garden was a substitute, not Eva Braun’s, and that the Soviets placed the bridge on the body after it had been found.

With that revelation, the mystery deepened. For if the body found in the trench was not Eva Braun, why should the man found lying beside her be Adolf Hitler? If we are to believe the Nazi witnesses who huddled in a doorway and watched the flames, the two of them, Hitler and Braun, died together.

Wondering if the mystery would ever be solved, I was intrigued when I heard that Dr. Lester Luntz, professor of oral diagnosis at the University of Connecticut Dental School, was going to deliver a paper on the identification of Hitler’s body at the 1984 triennial meeting of the International Association of Forensic Sciences in Oxford, England. Luntz had spent eighteen years on his research, and advance word said that he was going to refute both the Soviet report and the Sognaaes report.

In his speech at the conference, Luntz said that the Soviets, contrary to Bezymenski’s book, had not found Hitler’s dental X rays in Blashke’s office in the Chancellery. Those X rays had indeed disappeared on a plane which never reached its destination. And, on the other hand, the X rays found by Sognaaes in the U.S. archives, and said by him to be definite proof of Hitler’s identification, were not that at all. For one thing, Luntz said, the dates handwritten in ink show a strange and troubling discrepancy. On the alleged German X rays, “Oct.” appears, short for “October.” But if the X rays really were German, the abbreviation would have been “Okt.,” short for the German “Oktober.”

“Such questionable evidence is unacceptable for making a positive dental identification,” Luntz concluded, adding that in the archives there appeared to have been several sets of original and duplicate X rays. So no one, including Sognaaes, could be certain that the strange envelope he found contained Hitler’s X rays or someone else’s.

In fact, Luntz believed that the Soviets had autopsied the wrong body, and cited other evidence such as the testimony of Otto Gunsche, Hitler’s adjutant, who had told him that the Russians had not found Hitler’s body. Gunsche, who was present during those last days in the bunker, should know, Luntz said.

Later that afternoon, in the charming lounge of a small hotel in Oxford, I spoke to Lester Luntz. Usually a lively, loquacious man, Luntz was subdued. For the very day he delivered his paper refuting Sognaaes, the California odontologist died of cancer. This was sad news for Luntz (and for me, as well); like all professionals, he never let an academic dispute darken a friendship.

Luntz told me he was writing a book on his eighteen-year search for the answers to the mystery of Hitler’s death, and that the paper he had just delivered merely touched on a few points. He had interviewed many German witnesses and had seen all the documentation, but the only hint he would give me about his new material was: “Sognaaes didn’t know that Blashke was a fanatical Nazi.”

What the fanatical Nazism of Hitler’s dentist meant in terms of the mystery Luntz wouldn’t tell me, but he emphasized again that the Soviets had not autopsied Hitler’s body.

In sum, Luntz believes, as do many others, that the Soviets did not find the body of the real Hitler. And Sognaaes before his death claimed that the body identified as Eva Braun’s was most likely a substitute.

If one substitute, why not two?

Which brings us back to the days of May 1945 in wartorn Berlin when Soviet investigators told a newsmagazine reporter of a hidden door which led to an underground tunnel, and a note found in it which was apparently left by Eva Braun.

Could it be?

WHO WAS JACK THE RIPPER?

On November 10, 1888, American newspapers published a cable dispatch from London, England, which evoked the terror of the English people in that Victorian era, and created the legend of a criminal whose exploits are still spoken of with dread.

The Whitechapel fiend has committed another butchery more horrible than any that has preceded it…. at ten o’clock this morning…. three horrified policemen who had first looked in through Mary Jane Kelly’s window, and then drank big glasses of brandy to steady themselves, were breaking in her door with a pick-axe. The Whitechapel murderer had done his work with more thoroughness than ever before. The miserable woman’s body was literally scattered all over the room…. The butchery was so frightful that more than an hour was spent by the doctors in endeavoring to reconstruct the woman’s body from the pieces so as to place it in a coffin and have it photographed.

Mary Jane Kelly was the fifth and last victim of the Whitechapel fiend, known to history as Jack the Ripper. His victims were all prostitutes, most of whom were found with their throats slashed and their internal organs cut out and either strewn around or taken away by the murderer. Mary Jane Kelly’s heart, for example, was neatly placed next to her face, her amputated breasts were on a table, and her intestines were draped across a mirror.

The murders brought into the action a most unusual forensic-scientist/detective: Queen Victoria. In a letter to the Home Secretary, she wrote, “The murderer’s clothes must be saturated with blood and must be kept somewhere. Have the cattleboats and passenger boats been examined? Has any investigation been made as to the number of single men occupying rooms to themselves?…. is there sufficient surveillance at night?”

Royal outrage matched the horror in the street, a terror accentuated by taunting letters from the Ripper in which he informed the police that he meant to keep on killing, and nothing could stop him. In a letter to the magistrate at Thames Police Court, he wrote:

DEAR BOSS,

It is no use for you to look for me in London because I’m not there. Don’t trouble yourself about me until I return, which will not be very long. I like the work too well to leave it alone. Oh, it was a jolly job, the last one. I had plenty of time to do it properly in. Ha, ha, ha! The next lot I mean to do with a vengeance, cut off their head and arms…. So goodbye, dear Boss, till I return.

Yours,

JACK THE RIPPER

The killings began on August 31, 1888. Mary Ann Nicholls, a forty-two-year-old prostitute, had been seen lurking around the streets of the East End, drunk, trying to raise fourpence for a bed in a lodging-house. She was later found in an alley, her throat slit and her internal organs disemboweled. In reporting the murder, The Star, a London newspaper, did not spare its readers the gory details:

The knife, which must have been a large and sharp one, was jabbed into…. the lower part of the abdomen and then drawn upwards, not once but twice. The first cut veered to the right, slitting up the groin, and passing over the left hip, but the second cut went straight upward, along the centre of the body, and reaching to the breastbone. Such horrible work could only be the deed of a maniac!

Nicholls’ case was mishandled from the start. A doctor called to the scene merely affirmed that she was dead and later admitted he had not seen, or realized, the extent and nature of her injuries. He ordered her moved to a workhouse mortuary, where the attendant, a “pauper” with no medical knowledge, cleaned and washed the body before physicians could examine it for forensic clues. Meanwhile the bloodstains in the street were washed off by police before the Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard arrived.

Nevertheless, some clues were found. The policemen testified that there was only a small amount of blood in the street, a puzzling phenomenon considering the many terrible knife cuts. Could the victim have been killed elsewhere and dumped there? police wondered. No, because there had been no trail of blood which would indicate that the body had been dragged to the spot, and no marks of wheels in the road. Also a doctor who examined the body stated, “There was very little blood around the neck, and there were no marks of any struggle.”

The doctor also made these forensic points: The knife slashes were made “from left to right and might have been done by a left-handed person.” The weapon, he said, was a very long-bladed knife, adding that it was possibly a “cork-cutter’s or shoemaker’s knife.” And he remarked that the mutilations were “deftly and fairly skillfully performed.”

The second murder provided more clues. Eight days after Nicholls’ killing, on September 8, 1888, Anne Chapman, another prostitute, with the picturesque nickname “Dark Annie,” was found on a street in the same neighborhood, even more horribly butchered than the previous victim.

Once again there was the curious phenomenon of only a little blood found at the scene, and no evidence that the body had been dumped there. But this time the killer had deliberately left clues. A few pennies, two farthings, and two brass rings taken from the victim’s fingers were placed neatly at her feet. A portion of a bloodstained envelope bearing the name of the Sussex Regiment and postmarked “London, 28 August, 1888” was also found, but the address was missing.

Surprisingly, the victim’s clothes were not torn, but another garment caught the police inspector’s attention: a leather apron hanging nearby. It was saturated with water, but revealed no bloodstains. Butchers and slaughterhouse workers wore leather aprons, and indeed a slaughterhouse was in the vicinity.

Once again the physician who conducted the postmortem examination complained about what had been done to the body before his arrival. Dr. Bagster Phillips revealed that the body had not even been taken to a mortuary; instead it was carried to a shed and cleaned and washed before he could examine it.

Nevertheless he detected some differences between the two killings. Nicholls’ throat had been slashed; Chapman’s had been cut clear through, the head almost severed. And, most grimly, the second victim’s kidney and ovaries had been removed. The killer had taken them with him.

Dr. Phillips said that the cutting out of the internal organs revealed “indications of anatomical knowledge.” He added that the wounds indicated “a very sharp knife with a thin, narrow blade…. six to eight inches in length” or even longer. He speculated that the weapon was either a physician’s surgical instrument or a bayonet.

As yet there had been no eyewitness sightings of any men with the two victims, but, based on the forensic evidence of the knife and the leather apron, police concentrated their search on the slaughterhouse and butcher shops in the area. Suspects were turned up, but all had alibis. Meanwhile, at an inquest Dr. Phillips emphasized the “deliberate…. and apparently scientific manner in which the poor woman was mutilated…. I myself could not have performed such surgery, even working at top speed, under a quarter of an hour…. No unskilled person could have done this. It must have been someone used to the postmortem room.”

On September 30, just three weeks later, the famous “double event” occurred: two murders within an hour. The killer was obviously interrupted before he could mutilate Elizabeth Stride, although he did slash her throat. An hour later he found and killed another victim, Katherine Eddowes, and this time proceeded with his characteristic disembowelling and mutilation.

Not far away from the scene of the second crime, police found bloodstained water in a sink in a narrow passage off the street. The killer had obviously stopped to wash his hands. But, even more importantly, the Ripper had taken a piece of Eddowes’ apron to wipe his hands, and this bloodstained fabric was found in the doorway of a nearby house. And there the Ripper left a message which haunts the killings to this day. On the wall inside the doorway the following words were found written in chalk: “THE JUWES ARE NOT THE MEN TO BE BLAMED FOR NOTHING.”

“Juwes?” Was that a misspelling for “Jews?” If so, did it mean the Ripper was Jewish, or that he wanted to mislead the police into believing so? Whatever his motive, the writing of the message itself, including the possible identification of the chalk and analysis of the printing style, was destroyed by none other than Sir Charles Warren, the bumbling Police Commissioner. He ordered the message to be wiped off the wall immediately.

In the words of a junior officer at Scotland Yard, “The metropolitan police held the clue to the identification of the murderer in their own hands and deliberately threw it away under the personal direction of the Commissioner of Police, who acted in the belief that an anti-Semitic riot might take place.”

There was, however, a break in the case. This time witnesses had seen a man with each of the victims, and the descriptions were almost identical. Seen with Stride was “a man, age 28, height five feet eight inches, dark complexion, small dark moustache, black diagonal coat, hard felt hat, collar and tie; respectable appearance.” Seen with Eddowes was a man age thirty, height five feet seven or eight inches, mustache fair, medium build, but he was not as formally dressed. Instead of a collar and tie he wore a reddish neckerchief under a loose jacket.

Other witnesses claimed they saw a well-dressed man carrying a “shiny black bag,” and decades later, in 1931, Robert Clifford Spicer claimed that, as a constable that night, he had arrested just such a man around 2 A.M. The man was sitting on a dustbin in an alley with a prostitute named Rosy who had two shillings in her hand. But at the local police station the inspector informed Spicer that his suspect was a highly respected doctor with an address in Brixton, and the man was released even though Spicer asked what a respectable physician was doing sitting on a dustbin with a prostitute in a dark alley.

Meanwhile, the taunting letters from Jack the Ripper had begun. To this day there is controversy over the authenticity of the letters, but one of them was accompanied by a gruesome bit of evidence in a cardboard box: a portion of a kidney. The letter said: “From Hell…. I send you half the kidne [sic] I took from one woman, preserved to you, tother piece I fried and ate it, it was very nice.”

The curator of the London Hospital Museum examined the organ and stated that it was a portion of the kidney of someone who drank alcohol heavily. “I should say it belonged to a woman aged about forty-five and had been removed from the body within the last two weeks.” The left kidney of Katherine Eddowes, a heavy drinker about forty-two years of age, had been taken away by the Ripper after her murder less than two weeks before.

The fifth and last murder by the Ripper showed some differences from the others. Mary Jane Kelly, the victim, was young and pretty, only twenty-five, whereas the other prostitutes were aged forty to forty-five. Secondly, she was the only one of the victims to be killed indoors, in her room, instead of in a dark alley. But, like the others, she was a prostitute and a known heavy drinker.

At 2 A.M. on November 30, 1888, George Hutchinson, a laborer, had no place to sleep. He saw a man standing at the corner of Whitechapel Road and Commercial Street, but paid little attention to him because pretty Mary Kelly was approaching. He had always fancied Mary, but never had the money to afford her. Now she asked to “borrow” sixpence, her way of soliciting, but Hutchinson had to admit he didn’t possess even this small sum.

Mary Kelly said that in that case she would have to look for money elsewhere, and walked across the street to the man on the corner. Jealous, Hutchinson looked more closely at the man and, as he told police later, his suspicions were immediately aroused because it was unusual to see so “well-dressed” a man in the East End.

If Hutchinson’s eyewitness account is accepted as truth, then his was the first real look at Jack the Ripper, because Kelly’s murder took place shortly after the man and the girl walked toward her house, watched by the jealous Hutchinson. In the earlier eyewitness accounts, the sightings of possible suspects were not closely linked in time or place to the killings.

The man, according to Hutchinson, was about five feet six inches in height, dark complected, with heavy eyebrows and a thick mustache which curled at the ends. He wore a soft felt hat, a long dark coat, a black tie fastened with a horseshoe tiepin, and spats over buttoned shoes. Hutchinson thought he looked like a foreigner. Ominously, the man carried in his left hand a thin parcel about eight inches long.

Pretty and saucy Mary Kelly was butchered more cruelly than any of the others. And this time another puzzling clue emerged. Kelly’s room contained a fireplace, and the grate was still warm when police arrived in the morning. Obviously a fire had burned in it late at night. In its ashes were a woman’s felt hat, a woman’s clothing, and a piece of burnt velvet.

Mary Kelly’s clothes were neatly stacked in a pile by the bed, so whose clothes had been burned? And why burn them unless they were bloodstained? Was it possible that Jack the Ripper was a woman and thus had been able to elude detection? And what class of woman would have anatomical knowledge? Midwives, police knew.

But another answer to the clue of the fire occurred to police. Doctors who examined Mary Kelly’s remains concluded that it would have taken the Ripper two to two and a half hours to accomplish his mutilation. In that time he needed light and a fire. Mary Kelly was too poor to own firewood, so the Ripper had used her other clothes to make a fire that would provide light and keep him warm while he concluded his grisly work.

Modern forensic science was in its infancy in the 1880s. Still, by examination of the wounds of all of the Ripper’s victims, police surgeons were able not only to describe the type of weapon, a long thin knife, but to narrow the field of suspects to someone who had a knowledge of surgical cutting as well as of the locations of anatomical organs. This, together with eyewitness descriptions of a “well-dressed” man, led police to discard the notion of a slaughterhouse worker or a butcher, and to begin searching among the better classes for a physician, or a layman with medical knowledge.

By coincidence, a play based on the novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson had opened in London at this time and suggested the possibility that a “normal” man might also be a sadistic killer. But police apparently were loath to concede that the killer was a “normal” Englishman. Instead they focused their suspicions on a Pole named Severin Klosowski and a Russian named Alexander Pedachenko.

Severin Klosowski, the Pole, had been in his native country a feldscher, an assistant to a doctor. In London he was a barber’s assistant. Police pointed out that in Europe the local barber was the poor man’s doctor, often performing minor surgery. Thus Klosowski would have knowledge of surgical technique. Moreover, he physically resembled the description of eyewitnesses, even to the mustache curled at the ends. And he was known as a “ladies’ man,” drifting from woman to woman.

Klosowski was not arrested for the Ripper’s crimes. In 1890 he left for the United States with a wife and settled in Jersey City, where, very soon after, a Jack the Ripper–type murder occurred. Two years later he returned to England, using the name George Chapman. The police had lost track of him until it was learned that three of his wives, one after the other, had died suddenly, suffering from violent stomach cramps.

Whether or not he was Jack the Ripper, Chapman became a legend in forensic-science history, because it was at his trial that the first chemical analysis of poison by forensic scientists in England resulted in the conviction of a killer. The poison was antimony.

Scotland Yard was certain that Jack the Ripper and George Chapman were the same man, but many students of the case disagree. For one thing, Klosowski was only twenty-three at the time of the murders, not thirty or thirty-five. Also, his mode of crime was to marry a woman, take her money, then dispose of her quietly by poison, not mutilation.

To further confuse the issue, it was discovered that Klosowski had a “double” in London, a Russian who was also a barber-surgeon. The police never named the man, but an author, William Le Queux, a former British Secret Service agent, revealed the name Alexander Pedachenko. His source was, of all people, Rasputin, the fanatical monk who was so powerful in the court of the Tsar of Russia. Le Queux claimed that the Kerensky government in Russia gave him documents found in Rasputin’s house so that he could write an exposé of the friend of the deposed Tsar. Among them was a manuscript labeled “Great Russian Criminals” which said that Pedachenko, “the greatest and boldest of all Russian criminal lunatics, was encouraged to go to London and commit that series of atrocious crimes.” The motive, according to Rasputin, was to bring discredit on the Russian emigré revolutionaries who lived in the East End. And that, it was thought, might explain the chalked message about “the Juwes.”

Police searching for Pedachenko went to a certain basement and there found Klosowski (before he left for America). The two men were remarkably similar in appearance and often used to assume each other’s identity. The coincidence of the two look-alikes was never explained, and Pedachenko eventually went back to Russia, according to Rasputin.

Or did he drown? For years police officials told many people, off the record, that Jack the Ripper was a Russian surgeon who had been found drowned in the Thames a month after the last killing. Nevertheless the official search continued, and the names of new suspects emerged, ranging from an American doctor to the Duke of Clarence, King Edward VII’s eldest son, who was allegedly insane.

A few years ago I journeyed to Wichita, Kansas, with other pathologists to speak at a seminar on Jack the Ripper organized by Bill Eckert, a forensic historian and head of INFORM, the clearinghouse for information on forensic subjects. We discussed what modern forensic science could have done to assist the police in their search for the identity of Jack the Ripper.

Fingerprinting, blood-typing, hair and fiber analysis, and many other modern procedures were not available to the surgeons who examined the victims in 1888. If they had been, there is no doubt in my mind that Jack the Ripper would have been caught. For example, the piece of Katherine Eddowes’ apron found in the doorway must have contained fingerprints. The Ripper had apparently used the cloth to wipe his bloodstained hands after the murder.

Secondly, some of the victims might have fought back before death, and caused scratches on their assailant’s face or neck. Often, tiny rolls of skin are found under a victim’s fingernails and can aid in the identification of a murderer. Further, if the assailant had somehow been cut, an analysis of the bloodstains in the area might have revealed his blood, and typing the blood could have narrowed the field of suspects. Also, the analysis of semen stains, if any, would have assisted in locating the killer.

As to speculations that the killer was a woman (“Jill the Ripper,” as one newspaper said), there are even blood analysis procedures which can distinguish female blood from male, although they are so new that the courts have not yet accepted them.

The surgeons in 1888 were able to describe Jack the Ripper’s knife, but nowadays we can actually reproduce the weapon’s blade by pouring a hot waxlike substance into the wound and waiting until it cools. London police could have taken such a replica to various shops which sold knives, and also could have compared it physically to surgical or slaughterhouse knives.

If the killer bit his victim, modern dental odontology could have recreated his teeth. And finally, of course, hair from the killer’s head, as well as fibers from his clothing, would almost certainly be found at the scene of such violent crimes, and they could have led to positive identification.

In Wichita we also discussed the strange phenomenon of so little blood at the scene of the butchery. The surgeons in 1888 believed that the killer clapped his hand over his victim’s mouth, then slit her throat. But the lack of blood indicates she was dead before the knifing began, so we believed she was strangled first, and then the mutilation began.

In 1992 the English government will at last open Scotland Yard’s files on Jack the Ripper, and we can expect a fresh surge of speculation on the case of the most famous criminal of all time. If those files contain original documents and evidence, forensic science may yet play a role in identifying the immortal Jack the Ripper.

THE RETURN OF THE RIPPER

Almost a century after Jack the Ripper terrorized London, a series of nearly identical murders occurred in England. Once again the victims were prostitutes in inner-city slums who were savagely mutilated and, just as in the 1890s, police received taunting letters from someone who signed his name “The Ripper.”

Because of television and other means of instant communication which swiftly, and graphically, circulated the news of the murders, the new Ripper’s deeds inspired even more widespread horror than Jack’s. And the public was right to be afraid, for this “Ripper” did not stop after five murders; he eventually killed thirteen young women in his murderous rampage.

The killing spree began on October 29, 1975, in Leeds, an industrial city in northern England. Chapeltown, an inner-city ghetto of Leeds with seedy bars and pubs, was the area in which Wilma McCann earned her living as a prostitute. Dressed in a pink blouse, blue bolero jacket and white slacks, McCann made the rounds of pubs that night and was intoxicated when she emerged from the last one, the Room At The Top, shortly before one o’clock.

The next morning a milkman spotted a body in the Prince Philip playing fields. Wilma McCann’s white slacks were down around her knees, and her brassiere had been moved up to expose her breasts. She had been stabbed in the lower abdomen and chest thirteen times, and her head had been crushed with hammer blows. Despite the sexual overtones of the crime scene, there was no evidence of sexual activity.

Less than three months later, on January 21, 1976, another prostitute, Emily Jackson, was found murdered in Leeds in an even more brutal manner. This time in addition to the crushed skull there were no fewer than fifty-two stab wounds, and the killer had thrust a piece of wood between her legs.

The murders of these two prostitutes received little press coverage, and no connection was made between the deaths. Indeed, they were almost forgotten, until on February 5, 1977, the killer struck again in Chapeltown, smashing Irene Richardson’s head with a hammer, and stabbing her so viciously that her intestines spilled out. Once again the clothing of the victim had been pushed around to reveal her sexual parts, although no evidence of sexual activity was found.

My friend and colleague Professor David Gee of Leeds University’s Department of Forensic Science was the man who first realized the connection between the killings. He performed the autopsies on all three victims and saw the forensic “signature” of a single killer: the identical modes of death, hammer blows plus stabbing of the chest and the lower abdomen, as well as the clothing moved to reveal sexual parts even though no rape had taken place. When Dr. Gee revealed his findings, the press dubbed the killer “the Yorkshire Ripper,” and a new legend in the annals of serial crime was created.

In April of that same year, there was another slaughter in Chapeltown, this time of a streetwalker named Jayne MacDonald, whose body, in addition to the usual wounds, had a broken bottle embedded in her chest. The public now demanded action, and police launched a massive manhunt. Hundreds of people were interrogated, prostitutes were cautioned, a mobile police post was established in Chapeltown, and plainclothesmen fanned out through the area at night.

Then the Ripper struck again. Maureen Long was intoxicated as she walked along Manningham Lane in Leeds at about 2 A.M. on July 9, 1977. A man in a car offered her a lift and she accepted. When she proposed sex for money, he agreed and took her to a waste ground on Randle Street near her home. Once she was out of the car, he struck her with a hammer and stabbed her in the stomach, the chest and the back. He rearranged her clothes, as usual, then left her for dead.

But Maureen Long didn’t die, and police finally had a witness who could describe the anonymous killer. Long told them that he was about thirty-seven years old, over six feet tall, and had long blond hair. Ironically, her description turned out to be far off the mark and impeded the investigation, as detectives overlooked potential suspects who did not fit it.

The Ripper had been fortunate, but then he made a second mistake. On October 9, 1977, in his next encounter with a prostitute, Jean Jordan, in Manchester, a city near Leeds, he gave her a five-pound note in advance, and forgot it after he murdered her. Later he realized that this note was newly minted and taken from his pay packet at his place of employment, so it might be traced. But once again fate seemed to smile on the Yorkshire Ripper. The body hidden in bushes had not been found after a week. Emboldened, he decided to return to the scene of the crime and retrieve the note. But when he did so, he found the body but not her purse, and left empty-handed.

Five days later when the police discovered the body, they also found her handbag containing the five-pound note. Immediately they realized the significance of the banknote and started on its trail. The note could not be traced to one man, but it could narrow the field to employees of companies which had received a certain batch of currency from a subbranch of the Medford Bank in Shipley. Eventually the police interviewed eight thousand men, including the Ripper, but his wife assured the police that on the night of the murder he had been home in bed with her.

And so the killings went on. Helen Rytka, eighteen, was the next victim, and the Ripper, in a break with his custom, raped her before stabbing her to death. In doing so, he left evidence of semen. In the 1890s forensic science could have done nothing with such evidence. But in 1977 forensic scientists on the case, led by Dr. Gee, quickly analyzed the semen stains and discovered the Ripper’s blood type. It turned out to be Type B, which is found in only six percent of the population in Britain.

Furthermore, footprints in bloody areas near the bodies of his victims had been measured, so Dr. Gee knew the Ripper’s foot size. The wounds had been analyzed, enabling Dr. Gee to describe the weapons—a ball-peen hammer, knives and a Phillips screwdriver. And tire tracks had been found which could eventually identify his car. Gradually, forensic science was homing in on the killer—and then the murder of his next victim, Josephine Whittaker, left yet another critical forensic clue. Tiny metallic particles and machine oil were found in the wounds of Whittaker’s body. From this clue Dr. Gee knew that the Ripper worked around machinery.

But just at that time the case was sidetracked by a series of letters signed “Jack the Ripper,” and a tape recording. The letters were similar to those received by a puzzled police force ninety years before, as was the tape, which began, tauntingly, “I’m Jack. I see you are having no luck catching me.” Police not only took the letters and the tape seriously, they also played the tape on national television and radio. The voice on the tape had a peculiar accent associated with a small mining town called Wearside, and police told detectives to disregard all suspects without such an accent. Unfortunately, the tape was fraudulent.

And so the killings went on and on, even as the police manhunt escalated into the largest criminal investigation in England’s history. By August 1979 police said that almost 200,000 people had been searched, and more than 22,000 statements were in the files.

Meanwhile, forensic scientists had attacked the authenticity of both the letters and the tape, in which police put so much store. They discovered that everything mentioned in the letters had been printed in the press and so was available to the public. Furthermore, the very similarity of the letters to those of the original Jack the Ripper indicated a hoax.

Nevertheless, police higher-ups doggedly stuck to their belief in the authenticity of the letters and the tape, and their stubbornness once again impeded the investigation. In January 1980, the police, still tracking the five-pound note, had narrowed the companies involved to three, one of which, T. & W. H. Clark Ltd. of Carol Road, Shipley, employed the Ripper, who was interrogated for a second time. On that very day, he was wearing boots which could have incriminated him because Dr. Gee had discovered the footprint of a boot at the scene of the Josephine Whittaker killing, and they could have been compared. But once again his lack of the odd accent of the voice on the tape led police to dismiss him as a real suspect.

In November 1980 a college student, Jacqueline Hill, was murdered, and on January 2, 1981, the Ripper went out on another killing mission. This time, worried about police surveillance of the red-light areas in Leeds and nearby towns, he drove to an automobile scrapyard, stole some license plates, and taped them over the plates of his own Rover. Then he drove to Sheffield, about thirty miles from Leeds, and cruised the seedy area of the city. There he picked up a young black woman (whose name was not revealed by police) and drove her to a private road of a large estate. But while he attempted to have sex with her in the front seat, a police car cruising the area drove up.

The police checked the license plates by radio and immediately discovered they belonged to a Skoda, not a Rover. The Ripper was in trouble, yet once again he pressed his luck. Persuading the police that he wanted to “take a pee,” he secreted his weapons—the ball-peen hammer and the single-bladed knife—on his person and hid them behind a small fuel storage tank on the estate. This left only a small wood-handled knife to dispose of, which he did at the police station in a cistern.

Under interrogation, the cunning Ripper offered a plausible explanation for the stolen plates. He was due in court on a drunk-driving charge in a week and his insurance had just lapsed, so he had hoped to disguise his car with false plates. But good detective work finally came to the fore, aided by forensic science. Police discovered that the young man had been interrogated no fewer than five times in connection with the investigation of the five-pound note and were suspicious. They went back to the place where they had arrested the Ripper and found the hammer and the knife, which fit the descriptions of the weapons that Dr. Gee had provided. Furthermore, his foot size measured at the police station was the same as the boot mark found at the scene of Josephine Whittaker’s death.

Meanwhile, in addition to the weapons recovered in the bushes, screwdrivers which also matched the wounds analyzed by Dr. Gee were found in the Ripper’s house. As a detective later put it, “We knew the killer’s boot size because the Ripper had left footprints in pools of blood; we knew the various types of cars the killer had driven because of tire tracks found at the murder sites; we knew the Ripper’s blood type based on semen tests; we knew his weapons, and his connection to the five-pound note.”

Confronted with the incriminating evidence, the Ripper finally lost his composure and confessed. “I am the Yorkshire Ripper,” he said, and a whole nation breathed a sigh of relief.

Who was the monster, the “Yorkshire Ripper?” He was Peter William Sutcliffe, a man of thirty-five, described by police as “average-looking,” who came from a highly respectable family whose financial fortunes had run downhill. Sutcliffe worked as a truck driver with the T. & W. H. Clark Company (accounting for the machine oil found in the wounds on the body of one of the victims). He also sang regularly in the choir at church and was, by all accounts, a happily married man.

Probably no one will ever know the motives for the original Jack the Ripper’s killing rampage, but we do know the Yorkshire Ripper’s motive. It seems the slaughter of thirteen women was precipitated by anger over a prostitute by whom he was “ripped off” for the grand sum of ten pounds. Or so he told police in his initial interrogation. He later pleaded insanity at his trial, but was convicted of the murder of thirteen people and sentenced to life imprisonment.

It was a victory for police who, duped at first by an inaccurate description and a fraudulent tape and letters, finally captured the Ripper through thorough surveillance procedures. It was an even greater victory for forensic science. While the identity of Jack the Ripper may forever remain a mystery, the forensic evidence collected against the Yorkshire Ripper left him no alternative but to confess.