FOR MUCH OF European history, from the dissolution of the Roman Empire to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, crime-solving presented no great difficulty. One merely accused someone of the offense and then tortured him until he confessed. Actual guilt or innocence was not allowed to pervert the process. As Enrico Ferri explained:
The tortures, which we incorrectly ascribe to the mental brutality of the judges of those times, were but a logical consequence of the contemporaneous theories. It was felt that in order to condemn a man, one must have the certainty of his guilt, and it was said that the best means of obtaining this certainty, the queen of proofs, was the confession of the criminal. And if the criminal denied his guilt, it was necessary to have recourse to torture in order to force him to a confession which he withheld from fear of the penalty. The torture soothed, so to say, the conscience of the judge, who was free to condemn as soon as he had obtained a confession.
But how to determine whom to torture? Hans Gross, in his landmark 1906 book Criminal Investigation, tells of a medieval practice that was still in use in the German countryside when he was an investigator. Called the “hereditary sieve,” it was used to reveal the identity of a thief. Beans (stolen if possible) were thrown into a sieve one by one. A name was pronounced with the toss of each bean. If the bean jumped out, the named man was innocent; if the bean stayed in, you had caught your thief. There were alternate methods of handling the sieve, all of them equally effective.
Sometimes measures were used that would be equally frowned upon today. In the 1830s in the county of Pest, in Hungary, Count Gideon Raday was called upon to stop a rash of robberies that were causing great distress among the people. Not having any modern forensic techniques at his disposal, he merely hanged the mayor of the town that lay at the center of the epidemic. The robberies ceased.
Arden of Feversham, first published in 1592, is the story of Thomas Arden (or Arderne), a successful burgher of the English town of Feversham (today Faversham), and of his wife Alice, who repeatedly tried to murder him and finally succeeded. Although no writer is credited for the play, Shakespeare may have written it. The poet Swinburne thought so. And he may have even played one of the two hired murderers, the one called Shakebag. Others hold out for Marlowe because that play is a tough-minded story with no hero—the sort of thing Marlowe enjoyed. The strongest claim for authorship, based on an analysis of word usage, goes to Thomas Kyd, who along with Shakespeare and Marlowe was one of the leading dramatists of the day.
The tale is taken from Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577), which tells that one Thomas Arden was indeed murdered on Sunday, February 15, 1551, at his home in Feversham, Kent. The story may not have a hero, but it has a detective—and, for the time, a first-class one at that.
Thomas Arden, “a man of a tall and comely personage,” married Alice Brigandine, “a gentlewoman who was young, well shaped, and every way handsome.” He then proceeded to ignore her and devote his energies to acquiring properties recently expropriated by Henry VIII from the Catholic church. Alice soon directed her energies elsewhere, finding solace in the arms of a tailor named Thomas Mosby, who visited her often, and as the Chronicle would have it, “lay with her and . . . kept her in abusing her body.”
Arden seemed to have little objection to this. He invited Mosby to stay over while he went hither and yon in search of church properties he could add to his collection. To those of us who seek illicit romance, this might seem an ideal situation. But it was not so to Mistress Alice and her lover. They determined to do away with the often-absent Master Arden. The first attempt, as far as we know, was with a poison that Alice purchased from a painter in Feversham. He told her to put it in a bowl of porridge and pour milk over it, but she put the milk in first and poured the poison over that. Arden thought the stuff tasted foul after having only a spoonful or two of it, and Alice tossed it out before he could ask any questions. Still, a couple of hours later Arden “fell into extreme purging, upward and downward.” He survived the experience.
After several more bungled attempts, the lovers hired a pair of brigands—Black Will and Loosebag (the Shakebag of the play)—to do the deed for ten pounds.
One Sunday evening when Arden was in the parlor with Mosby and the two were hunched over a game of tables, a precursor to backgammon, Black Will concealed himself in a corner. As recounted in the play, Mosby then punned, “Now may I take you, sir, if I will,” and events unfolded as follows:
“Take me?” quoth Master Arden. “Which way?”
With that Black Will stepped forth and cast a towel about [Arden’s] neck so as to stop his breath and strangle him. Then Mosby, having at his girdle a pressing iron of fourteen pounds’ weight, struck him on the head so that he fell down and gave a great groan. Then they carried him into the counting house, where—the pangs of death coming on him—he gave another great groan and stretched himself. Black Will gave him a gash in the face and took the money out of his purse and the rings from his fingers. “Now this feat is done,” he said, as he came out of the counting house; “give me my money.” Mistress Arden gave him ten pounds, and . . . he rode away.
Alice Arden then stabbed the body of her dead husband a few times before returning to the dining room and calmly sitting down to dinner with two London grocers curiously named Prune and Cole. She told them not to wait for her husband as he might be delayed. When the visitors returned to their rooms in the local inn (the aptly named Flower-de-Lice), Mistress Arden sent her servants out “to inquire for her husband in divers places.” In their absence she, along with her own daughter and Mosby’s sister, dragged the body out through the new-fallen snow and left it in a nearby field.
The clever Mistress Arden then set up such a-weeping and a-wailing about her absent husband that the mayor of Feversham was pulled out of bed. He formed a group to hunt for the missing man. As it happened, Prune the grocer spotted a man-shaped lump in the field outside Arden’s house, saying, “Stay, for me-thinks I see one there.”
Then the mayor showed qualities that would have done Sherlock Holmes proud. He prevented everyone from approaching the body and examined the footprints in the snow. Three pairs of footprints led from Arden’s garden door to the place where he lay, and three pairs of footprints led back to the door—the only footprints since the snow had fallen. Three people had left the house with Arden’s body, the mayor concluded. They had dropped it where it then lay, and returned to the house. The mayor’s forensic genius lay in his having the wit to prevent his men from trampling the area, and in examining it closely, probably in the dim light of oil lamps, to determine the facts.
The mayor had the house searched. Bloody rags were found in the parlor and a bloody knife was discovered in the bedroom. Within two hours of committing their well-planned murder, Alice Arden, her daughter, and her maid were arrested and taken to jail.
Then the mayor and his men went to the Flower-de-Lice and awoke Mosby. When they found blood on his stockings and purse, he joined his paramour in jail. All were tried at the next assizes in Feversham and variously hanged or burned to death along with a man named Green, who had had the bad luck to be mentioned in a letter from Mosby to Alice. In fact he had no knowledge of the crime and had taken no part in it. His innocence was established several years later.
In 1828, Eugène François Vidocq, newly retired as the head of the Sûreté, the detective branch of the Paris police, wrote his memoirs, offering the European public its first view of the life of a police officer. Vidocq had spent the first half of his life as a criminal and therefore understood criminals well. As a detective, he made most of his arrests by wandering in disguise among the criminal classes in Paris and listening to their conversations. His knowledge of criminal methods helped him anticipate, and thus foil, many crimes. As he put it:
Each day increased the number of my discoveries. Of the many who were committed to prison, there were none who did not owe their arrest to me, and yet not one of them for a moment suspected my share in the business. I managed so well, that neither within nor without its walls, had the slightest suspicion transpired. The thieves of my acquaintance looked upon me as their best friend and true comrade, the others esteemed themselves happy to have an opportunity of initiating me in their secrets, whether from the pleasure of conversing with me, or in the hope of benefiting by my counsels.
Vidocq is credited with introducing the first card-indexing system into police procedures, and of being the first to make plaster of paris shoe and foot impressions. In addition to publishing his autobiography after leaving the police force, he set up a paper-manufacturing plant and patented an unalterable bond paper and an indelible ink. In 1833 he founded Le bureau des renseignements (The Office of Intelligence), the world’s first private detective agency.
Vidocq is thought to be the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, the world’s first fictional detective, as well as Émile Gaboriau’s detective, Monsieur Lecoq. Today the Vidocq Society, an exclusive nonprofit, crime-solving association of forensic experts, meets in Philadelphia and takes up unsolved criminal cases of interest to its members.
The prosecution that resulted in the earliest known wrongful conviction in a murder case in the United States suffered from several of the problems that still plague us today—inflamed local sentiment, flawed “expert” testimony, and reliance on the evidence of a “jailhouse snitch.”
In 1812, Russell Colvin, who lived and worked on the Manchester, Vermont, farm of his father-in-law, Barney Boorn, disappeared. Seven years later, his wife’s uncle Amos had a vision. Russell appeared to Amos in a dream and said that he had been murdered and his body dumped into a cellar in a potato field on the farm. The hole was dug up, but Russell’s ghost had apparently been mistaken—his body was not there. There were broken dishes, two knives, and a button, but no Russell. But Russell’s wife, Sally, claimed to recognize the contents as having been her husband’s. Sally had a strong motive to prove Russell dead—she had given birth a few years after Russell’s disappearance. As long as Russell was presumed to be alive, even if long absent, he was the child’s presumed father. If Sally were ever to receive support from the child’s actual father, her husband would need to be dead.
A short time later the Booms’ sheep barn burned to the ground. Not long after that, a dog dug up a couple of partial bones, whereupon three separate doctors promptly identified them as human.
Popular suspicion settled on Sally’s brothers, Jesse and Stephen. They were believed to be Russell’s murderers, the despoilers of the potato cellar, and the burners of the barn. The brothers were known to have disliked Russell, whom they looked upon as a wastrel who spent too much time drinking at the local tavern and too little time working in the fields. The popular logic worked backward from the discovery of the bones: Why were the bones buried there? Because they’d been moved out of the barn for some unknown reason. Why had the barn been burned? To hide any trace of the transfer of the body. Why had it been in the barn in the first place? It was moved there from the potato cellar. And, of course, it had been placed in the potato cellar in order to hide the murder.
On the basis of this retrograde logic, Jesse was promptly locked up and an arrest warrant issued for Stephen, who had since moved to New York. Jesse was placed in a cell with a forger and fink named Silas Merrill. He promptly went to the authorities to find out what they wanted to hear, then promptly told it to them with an added flourish. Jesse had confessed all to him, he said: the brothers had argued with Russell, Stephen had hit him with a club, and their father, Barney, who happened along at that moment, had borrowed a pen knife from Stephen and cut Russell’s throat. Then the three of them buried Russell in the potato cellar; later they dug him up and reburied him in the barn. After the barn burned, they moved the body to the location where the dog had found the bones. At least in this version they hadn’t deliberately burned the barn. Murderers, yes—but not barn burners.
Silas Merrill’s price for his testimony against the Boorn brothers was his immediate release. State’s Attorney Calvin Sheldon was willing to trade a forger for a trio of murderers any day.
Jesse then confessed, declaring that Stephen had committed the actual murder, and that his father had had nothing to do with it. What pressures were put on him or what promises made can only be guessed. But when Stephen—to everyone’s surprise—returned voluntarily from New York and protested his innocence, Jesse recanted his confession.
But the evidence piled up. Seven years after the event the Boorns’ neighbors then remembered threats the brothers had made against Russell before the man went missing. They recalled sly comments the brothers made afterward, suggesting that they knew more than they would say about his disappearance. Two men suddenly remembered that they had seen Stephen and Russell fighting on the day Russell disappeared, though neither had stayed to see how the fight turned out.
With all the evidence piling up against him, Stephen now confessed in order to spare himself the death penalty, claiming that he had killed Russell in self-defense. The confession seems to have been written by Stephen’s lawyers, since it used words and phrases certainly beyond his intelligence and level of education. Stephen was known to be rather slow.
So we have the ghost of Russell Colvin appearing to Uncle Amos, his bones dug up by the dog, the confessions of each of the two brothers, the story of the jailhouse snitch, and seven-year-old memories of various local people. Certainly enough to convict.
By the start of the trial, the evidence of the bones had disappeared—on closer examination, the physicians concluded that they were animal bones. In spite of the fact that there was no body (not even a bone), that the confessions had been recanted, and that the only evidence of substance was the story that one of the brothers had been seen fighting with the missing man, the brothers were convicted and sentenced to hang. Jesse’s sentence was subsequently changed to life imprisonment. Colvin’s ghostly appearance to Uncle Amos was inadmissible as evidence, but it was surely on the juror’s minds.
Then serendipity took a hand. An article about the murder in a New York paper in November 1819 recounted how the ghostly appearance of Russell Colvin to Uncle Amos had set events in motion that led to the trial and conviction of the brothers. A New Jersey man, Tabor Chadwick, was in the lobby of a New York City hotel when someone near him began reading the article aloud. He immediately sat down and wrote one letter to the newspaper and another to the postmaster in Manchester, Vermont. It happened that he knew a man named Russell Colvin who worked as a farmhand in Dover, New Jersey. And this Russell Colvin talked a lot about Vermont, where he had come from.
It took a little coaxing to get Colvin to return to Vermont, but he did and was immediately recognized by his former neighbors. When the brothers were released from prison, Stephen was within six weeks of his execution date.
On October 7, 1925, Henry Sweet, twenty-one, and Carmen Wagner, his seventeen-year-old girlfriend, left their homes in Eureka, California, to go deer hunting in Coyote Flat, an area some forty-five miles to the southeast. Four days later the body of Henry Sweet was found in a deserted cabin. Twelve days later, on October 23, the girl’s body was found at Baker Creek, a few miles away. She had been shot twice, and an attempt had been made to bury her body in a shallow grave. Dried blood and skin scrapings were found under her fingernails.
The police decided to arrest a couple of “half-breeds,” Jack Ryan and his half-brother, Walter David, for the murders. David was picked up on the October 23 and Ryan the next day. There was absolutely nothing to connect them to either the killings or the victims, except that they lived in the area. David was released a couple of days later, but Ryan was held for trial in the murder of Wagner.
Ryan’s trial began in February 1926 and lasted five weeks. In the end, the all-male, all-white jury found him innocent. But the citizens of Humboldt County were unhappy with the verdict. In January 1927 a local attorney and bootlegger, Stephen Earl Metzler, ran for the office of district attorney on a platform of righting this obvious injustice.
When Metzler was elected he set about to keep his promise to the voters. Instead of “Justice for all,” his motto seems to have been “Give the people what they want.”
On October 31, Walter David was found strangled to death with barbed wire. His body showed signs of torture. No one was ever tried for his murder. Shortly after the murder, Jack Ryan began to receive anonymous letters threatening him with a similar fate unless he confessed to the killings of Sweet and Wagner. The letters were being sent by District Attorney Metzler.
On July 12, 1928, Ryan was arrested and accused of the statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old girl. To avoid a trial he immediately pled guilty to two of the three counts against him. Held overnight in the local jail and interrogated by Metzler, by morning he had confessed to the two murders. Since he couldn’t be tried a second time for the killing of Carmen Wagner, he was charged with the murder of Henry Sweet. He pled guilty, was sentenced to life in prison without a trial, and was shipped off to San Quentin that same day.
In 1947 the Bureau of Indian Affairs began an investigation into Jack Ryan’s case. Stephen Earl Metzler admitted to the agents that he had set Ryan up for the rape charge, paying the girl’s mother $100 for her false testimony. He also admitted that the murder confession had been beaten out of Ryan, and that the man who was probably guilty of the murders, Bill Shields, had actually provided him with information to set Ryan up. Still, it took six years to win Ryan a parole—not a pardon—from the State of California. On May 11, 1953, after twenty-five years, Jack Ryan walked out of San Quentin, not quite a free man.
On March 20, 1969, Governor Ronald Reagan commuted Ryan’s life sentence to time served, effectively releasing him from parole. But he was still legally guilty. Ryan died in 1978.
It wasn’t until 1996, after the culmination of an extensive unofficial investigation conducted in his spare time by Humboldt County detective Richard H. Walton, that Ryan’s innocence was officially accepted. California governor Pete Wilson issued the first-ever posthumous pardon and exoneration, saying it was clear that Ryan had been framed by Metzler. In his declaration Wilson said:
Unfortunately, we cannot do justice for Jack Ryan, the man. But we can do justice for Jack Ryan, the memory. And by doing so, we breathe vitality into our system of justice. We must remember that a just society may not always achieve justice, but it must constantly strive for justice. This means that we must not excuse the guilty nor fail to exonerate the guiltless. Therefore, so that justice is maintained, I grant Jack Ryan posthumously a pardon based on innocence.