There has been murder done, and the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, was in the prime of life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse, square-toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly cigar.
—Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet
OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES forensic science has become a national spectator sport. A substantial majority of the reading and television-viewing public follows the exploits of both real and fictional criminalists as they go about apprehending the wicked. Several successful contemporary fiction series—among them those by P. D. James, Patricia Cornwell, Kathy Reichs, and Thomas Harris—make forensic investigation a major part of their plot. Fingerprint analysis, DNA, ballistics, blood spatter, toolmarks, body temperature, and rigor mortis are now topics of everyday conversation. There is scarcely a twelve-year-old child who isn’t familiar with the comparison microscope.
The television show CSI (for Crime Scene Investigator) and its spinoffs, in which criminalists use the scientific method to solve crimes, have been among the top prime-time shows for the past decade. In a wave of other shows—Bones, Cracker, Criminal Minds, Crossing Jordan, Da Vinci’s Inquest, Dead Men Talking, Extreme Forensics, FBI Files, Forensic Files, NCIS, Post Mortem, Prime Suspect, Profiler, Secrets of Forensic Science, Silent Witness, and Solved—the forensic investigation of crime is an integral part of the story line. Autopsy close-ups and other gruesome details have replaced the car chases and gratuitous violence of yesteryear.
As one might expect from television programs, with their time limits and need for continuous action, much of the technical detail is wrong, and some of it even wildly incorrect: time intervals are condensed, science is blended skillfully into science fiction, and characters have skills they would never possess in real life. This is not a complaint—a television show’s purpose is to entertain, and no one expects a show about doctors, lawyers, cops, convicts, or, for that matter, spirit mediums to be in 100 percent correlation with the real world.
When did this popular interest begin? In the early years of the nineteenth century, the rise of literacy occasioned a demand for cheap, sensational literature. And this demand was filled in part by true crime stories. Lurid newspaper accounts were often released as pamphlets featuring overly graphic covers.
James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald, became the first investigative reporter when he personally examined the scene of the murder in 1836 of twenty-three-year-old Helen Jewett, one of the girls of the Palace of Passions on Thomas Street in Manhattan. Here he describes the girl’s body in “classical” terms:
Slowly I began to discover the lineaments of the corpse, as one would the beauties of a statue of marble. It was the most remarkable sight I ever beheld—I never have, and never expect to see such another. “My God,” exclaimed I, “how like a statue! I can scarcely conceive that form to be a corpse.” Not a vein was to be seen. The body looked as white—as full—as polished as the purest Parisian marble. The perfect figure—the exquisite limbs—the fine face—the full arms—the beautiful bust—all—all surpassed in every respect the Venus de Medicis, according to the casts generally given of her. . . . For a few moments I was lost in admiration at this extraordinary sight—a beautiful female corpse—that surpassed the finest statue of antiquity.
This overwrought description is certainly inaccurate. In fact, after she was battered and hacked to death with an ax, the poor girl’s body was set on fire.
The case of the “Beautiful Cigar Girl,” Mary Rogers, served as a platform for Bennett’s attack on city government. Three days after disappearing from her Manhattan home, Rogers was found floating in the Hudson River off Hoboken, New Jersey.
The recent awful violation and murder of an innocent young woman—the impenetrable mystery which surrounds that act—the apathy of the criminal judges, sitting on their own fat for a cushion bench—and the utter inefficiency of the police, are all tending fast to reduce this large city to a savage state of society—without law—without order—and without security of any kind.
The case was never solved. The known facts provided the background for several fictionalized accounts, among them J. H. Ingraham’s dime novel The Beautiful Cigar Girl or the Mysteries of Broadway and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Mystery of Marie Rogêt. Poe turned New York into Paris and the Hudson into the Seine. Under that guise, as he explained in a letter to a friend, he provided a rigorous analysis of the actual case and suggested several possible solutions.
In the late nineteenth century, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke blazed the fictional path toward rational crime-solving. Holmes used deduction (actually induction) with a dash of science, and Thorndyke added a heavy dose of scientific analysis. It was around this time that the first scientific crime solvers appeared in the real-life police forces of several European countries. Alphonse Bertillon, Edward Richard Henry, Hans Gross, Bernard Spilsbury, and a host of others applied scientific methods to police work. And mirabile dictu, they solved crimes.
Forensic detectives soon became a standard fixture in mystery literature. Jacques Futrelle’s Professor S. F. X. Van Dusen, M.D., Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S.; Arthur B. Reeve’s chemistry professor Craig Kennedy; and others attempted to use scientific methods (to the extent that their authors understood them) to solve crimes. Even Dame Agatha Christie, though primarily a writer of “cozies,” kept up on the latest information about rare poisons. The appeal of this new genre is spoken of by Hugo Gernsback in The Writers’ Digest for February 1930:
Scientific detection of crime offers writers the greatest opportunity and most fertile field since the detective first appeared in fiction. Radio, chemistry, physics, bacteriology, medicine, microscopy—every branch of science can be turned to account. The demand for this material is large, the supply is small.
As the editor of Scientific Detective Monthly, Gernsback surely knew whereof he spoke.
The popularity of these authors kept the public in mind of the possibilities of forensic science. This appetite was reinforced perhaps by the notoriety of several actual criminal cases of the period, some unsolved and some solved but in unsatisfactory ways. Among them are:
The 1874 kidnapping in Philadelphia of four-year-old Charlie Ross. The police, in a rarely equaled instance of misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance, squandered all opportunities to find the child or catch his kidnappers.
The 1888 “Jack the Ripper” mutilation murders of at least six prostitutes in London, unsolved because of police incompetence and lack of sound investigative techniques.
The 1892 Lizzie Borden case. In Fall River, Massachusetts, Lizzie was acquitted of the hatchet murders of her father and stepmother. Her guilt can be assumed—it is virtually impossible that anyone else had the required access to the crime scene. But sloppy police work in the early stages of the case prevents us from knowing for sure if Lizzie did it.
The 1920 armed robbery of a factory payroll in South Braintree, Massachusetts, for which the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted and executed. Future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter criticized the handling of the case, and there remains serious debate among crime experts as to the guilt of the two men.
The 1932 kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son, for which Bruno Richard Hauptmann was convicted and executed. There are still arguments in favor of his innocence. And, even if guilty, he certainly did not act alone. Yet no one else was ever apprehended or even accused.
This book delves into the history of criminalistics, a general term for the science of forensic investigation, which in turn is defined as the careful scientific examination of a crime scene to determine from the objects left behind just who did what, with what, and to whom. As one technical definition puts it, criminalists
examine and identify physical evidence to reconstruct a crime scene. Physical evidence can be a weapon, a piece of clothing, a bloodstain, drugs, or even a vapor in the air. Criminalists use this physical evidence to provide a link between a suspect and the victim. The transfer of clothing fibers or hair fibers between a suspect and the victim can provide just such a link. Fingerprints, bullets, and shoe impressions are other important links. . . . Criminalists collect physical evidence at crime scenes and receive evidence at the laboratory, which has been collected at the crime scene by crime scene investigators. The proper collection of evidence is essential to prevent contamination and destruction of the evidence. . . . Criminalists are often called to court to provide expert testimony regarding their methods and findings.
This distinguishes forensic science from criminology, the study of crime as a social phenomenon and the province of sociologists, psychologists, and penologists. Where criminologists theorize about the root causes of crime and the effectiveness of punishment versus rehabilitation, criminalists use scientific disciplines to analyze a crime scene and gather information for the purpose of apprehending and convicting a perpetrator, whatever his or her social or psychological background.
This book explores the history of the forensic sciences as well as the dedicated and sometimes obsessed people who developed the numerous forensic disciplines in use today. We’ll look at how these methods came into being and why police investigators began applying them, however reluctantly, to solving crimes. Writing in 1908, the author Arthur Train, who had recently quit his job as district attorney for New York County, was a bit contemptuous of forensic detection:
. . . No intelligent person to-day supposes that, outside of Sir Conan Doyle’s interesting novels, detectives seek the baffling criminal by means of analyzing cigar butts, magnifying thumb marks or specializing in the various perfumes in favor among the fair sex, or by any of those complicated, brain fatiguing processes of ratiocination indulged in by our old friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. . . . The magnifying glass is not one of the ordinary tools of the professional sleuth, and if he carries a pistol at all it is because the police rules require it, while those cases may be numbered upon the fingers of two hands where his own hair and whiskers are not entirely sufficient for his purposes in the course of his professional career.
The past century has seen a great increase in the skills and capabilities of the forensic investigator, particularly after important breakthroughs in medicine and in the biological sciences. The criminalist today is one of a team of highly trained specialists. He or she uses the advances of many sciences and brings far more rapid and reliable solutions to cases than even two decades ago. Of course, this ideal is not always realized. Most crimes are still solved by what might be called good old-fashioned police work—asking questions, giving “deals for squeals,” and leaning hard on the person with the strongest and most apparent motive. Forensic techniques are painstaking and time consuming. They require highly trained, dedicated technicians equipped with expensive tools. In the past, few police departments have had the personnel, the money, or the inclination to use their resources in this way. But with the federal government’s new emphasis on homeland security, that situation is rapidly changing.
One of the revelations of modern forensic investigation is that good old-fashioned police work, despite its successes, produces an unacceptably high percentage of false convictions. This is one reason why in 2002 Governor George Ryan of Illinois, claiming that the state’s death-penalty system was “fraught with errors,” declared a moratorium on executions. In a series of highly publicized cases, DNA testing had demonstrated that thirteen of the prisoners awaiting execution on Illinois’ death row were innocent of the crimes for which they had been convicted. Some of the exonerated prisoners had falsely confessed to their crimes, demonstrating that the pressure of a police interrogation does not always disclose the truth.
Forensic science is still rapidly evolving. Even the few years of the new millennium have seen major advances in DNA testing, blood-spatter analysis, the automated detection of explosives, and face-pattern recognition. On the other side of the coin, microscopic hair examination has been discredited; bite-mark evidence is, or should be, discarded; handwriting analysis has become suspect; toolmark comparisons are less reliable than previously thought; bullet composition comparisons have been shown to be bad science; and, after a hundred years of being the burglar’s bane, latent fingerprint identification has been shown to be less foolproof than thousands of prosecutors and fingerprint analysts have sworn it to be. Problems are now coming to light with certain methods of arson investigation as well as other forensic specialties long thought to be reliable.
We will look at how these various errors—some of them the result of bad science—crept into courtrooms in the first place. We will also see how difficult it has been—and continues to be—to challenge them in court once they become entrenched. More frightening are the cases where the sworn testimony of supposed experts in hundreds of trials has proven to have more in common with witchcraft or voodoo than with responsible science.
Rigorously conducted experiments have demonstrated what criminal defense attorneys have long suspected—that eyewitness testimony (perhaps the most damning type of evidence in the eyes of the jury) is possibly the least reliable of all. Its accuracy rate is now thought to be less than 50 percent. We now know that when a witness points a quivering finger at a defendant and declares, “He’s the one! I’ll never forget that face—never!” he or she is mistaken more than half the time.
Recent Supreme Court rulings on the admissibility of expert testimony have placed a greater responsibility on judges to distinguish reliable from unreliable science. As different judges rule differently on what should and should not be admissible, this area of the law remains in a state of flux. It will take years and perhaps decades to bring order out of this chaos.