His upper jawbone was massive—a long, curved bone with nine tiny holes meant to hold his teeth. The remainder of his skeleton was blackened by a fairly large fire ignited by an anonymous killer. Lifting up the jawbone, I examined the small blades of grass that adhered to its exterior—organic evidence from his hillside grave in El Cerrito in Northern California.
It was distressing to hold a bone that had belonged to a murder victim, particularly one who was never identified. I glanced over at the archivist, Lara Michels, who quietly stood across the wooden desk inside the massive warehouse. “What’s next?” I asked.
She led me down a long row of large cartons, more than one hundred boxes donated by the same owner. I had been given exclusive access to a trove of material collected over five decades by a brilliant man, a forensic scientist and criminalist from the first half of the twentieth century, a man who changed how crimes were solved before forensics became the foundation of most criminal cases—America’s Sherlock Holmes. I walked along the tight corridor, scanning the labels on the cardboard boxes for a common name: Edward Oscar Heinrich.
When Heinrich died in 1953, at the age of seventy-two, his youngest child, Mortimer, waited sixteen years to donate the contents of his father’s laboratory, a bastion of forensic history that once monopolized the ground floor of Mortimer’s childhood home in Berkeley, California. In 1968, he bequeathed his father’s many boxes, containing case files, evidence, personal diaries, letters, even romantic poetry, to the University of California at Berkeley, Oscar’s alma mater and the college where he spent years teaching forensic science. The archive was an incredible repository of information, but given the university’s limited budget for archival material and research, the collection remained uncatalogued and untouched for more than fifty years.
In 2016, I discovered Oscar Heinrich hidden in a short article that lauded one of his most famous cases, the Siskiyou train robbery of 1923. Astonished that no contemporary author had penned a book about him, I requested that UC Berkeley open his collection for research. Michels agreed, and after more than a year of waiting, I began to immerse myself in the bizarre world of Oscar Heinrich, the most famous criminalist you’ve likely never heard of.
The boxes contain more than one hundred thousand pieces of information, such as photographs, notes, letters, sketches, and trial transcripts. It was an overwhelming and disorganized collection that was housed in the school’s off-site processing center. Heinrich seemingly kept everything from his life (personal and professional), manically collecting notes written on napkins, thousands of newspapers, hundreds of bullets, and dozens of financial journals. I began jokingly describing him as a “productive hoarder”—until my colleague, a psychology professor, at the University of Texas suggested that he had in fact fit the diagnostic criteria for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, which occurs in just 1 percent of the population. People with OCPD have a preoccupation with perfectionism, control, and order—a neat life. They are frequently extremely productive and successful, but their personal relationships often suffer because their rigidity can manifest itself in righteousness, even anger when their control is threatened. Heinrich’s already-stressful life was certainly complicated by his OCPD, but as an author and researcher, I was thankful for his fastidious habit of adding constantly to his collection. I was particularly grateful for the numerous boxes of evidence he had preserved from criminal cases.
The evidence was plentiful, spanning investigations that unraveled over decades. The archivist allowed me to examine pieces from a detonated bomb, a locket owned by a dead woman who was run down by her own car, a lock of hair belonging to an actress who died during an infamous party, and several pistols that required having their firing pins removed by UC Berkeley police.
As I picked up the first photo, I was struck by something that seemed like an odd observation at the time—Heinrich was quite handsome for a tightly wound scientist. He was slight and not particularly tall, with thinning light brown hair. There was something about the sharp angles of his face that made him magnetic in photos, a confidence in his eyes as he cleaned a revolver.
I spent months staring at thousands of photographs, some taken by Heinrich’s assistants and others developed by the criminalist himself (he was an avid photographer who relished documenting crime scenes). I noted hundreds of details, like the way he squinted as he adjusted the focus knob on his favorite microscope. The way his teeth gripped the bit of a straight-stemmed pipe as a small stream of smoke billowed from its bowl. The way his forehead wrinkled as he hunched over evidence. The way his round rimless glasses fit extra-snuggly around his temples—a requirement for a chemist who spent much of his time leaning over a microscope.
As I flipped through those portraits, I gleaned more details about his private lab in Berkeley Hills, a lovely neighborhood overlooking San Francisco Bay. Heinrich was surrounded by odd devices. Every conceivable type of microscope was crammed onto a long wooden desk. Any extra space was surrendered to test tubes, crucibles, beakers, lenses, and scales. Behind Heinrich were shelves filled with hundreds of priceless books, at least priceless to a chemist turned forensic scientist. There were tomes on fingerprint identification, applied mechanics, analytic geometry, and powdered vegetable drugs.
The titles, written in six different languages, would intrigue any intellectual. Blood, Urine, Feces and Moisture: A Book of Tests, read one cover. Arsenic in Papers and Fabrics, read another. He even owned a tattered dictionary of slang used by criminals. They seemed unrelated, a cache of mismatched textbooks in the library of a brilliant madman. But each was a tiny piece belonging to a bigger puzzle that only he could assemble. The portrait of a genius and the tumultuous era in which he lived began to emerge.
And it was a tumultuous era—the homicide rate in the 1920s, when Heinrich’s most interesting work began, had increased by as much as almost 80 percent from the decade before, thanks to Prohibition. For thirteen years the federal government banned alcohol in hopes of reducing crime, but instead it spawned new and more creative criminal enterprises. Varying levels of corruption tainted local governments and police departments across the country. Judges enjoyed immunity from arrest, and most major cities were ruled by crime bosses. Poverty and unemployment were also responsible for the increase in violent crimes, as many Americans became desperate for security and safety. And there was an ever-growing backlog of unsolved crimes.
The FBI was still the Bureau of Investigation, a group of insufficiently trained officers who mostly investigated bank fraud. Local police forces were underfunded, poorly instructed, and mostly using investigative techniques that hadn’t been updated since the Victorian era. There would be no public federal crime lab until 1932; violent bank robberies increased while murderers terrorized Americans, especially women, whose newfound independence inflamed both the passions and the anger of many in society.
The archaic methods of crime fighting in the 1920s, procedures depending on hunches and weak circumstantial evidence, were futile. Cops were combatting a sneakier criminal, those thieves and murderers who understood chemicals, firearms, and the criminal court system. Police were outmanned and many times outsmarted.
“Footprints are the best clue,” declared one top cop at the time. “There’s no need for any other type of identification.”
Innocent men were being hanged while criminals escaped justice. The complicated crimes of the 1920s demanded a special type of sleuth—an expert with the instincts of a detective in the field, the analytical skills of a forensic scientist in the lab, and the ability to translate that knowledge to a general audience in a courtroom. Edward Oscar Heinrich became the nation’s first unique crime scene investigator—one of America’s greatest forensic scientists, a criminalist who cracked some of the country’s most baffling cases.
But not everyone in law enforcement welcomed his peculiar approach. In 1910, when he opened the nation’s first private crime lab in Tacoma, Washington, he was scorned and quickly labeled a quack, an arrogant academic who claimed he could solve baffling crimes with some suspicious chemicals and a heavy microscope. His snappy tweed suits made him seem more like a square college professor than a seasoned detective. But he offered astounding results, solving at least two thousand cases in his more than forty-year career. He would regularly work between thirty and forty cases a month.
The press at the time dubbed Edward Oscar Heinrich “America’s Sherlock Holmes” thanks to his brilliance in the lab, his cool demeanor at crime scenes, and his expertise in the witness chair. Between 1921 and 1933, his reputation evolved from curiosity to legend. His cases are enshrined in books, but their hero is largely unknown—a pioneer in the world of crime solving whose fingerprint is everywhere.
He invented new forensic techniques, a CSI in the field and inside the lab before the acronym even existed. And he was a nascent innovator of criminal profiling fifty years before the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit invented its methodology, in 1972. Present-day scientists recite his methods as they sit on the stand in criminal cases. He pioneered countless methods that we take for granted as part of the crime-fighting arsenal—techniques like blood-spatter analysis, ballistics, and latent fingerprint retrieval and analysis. It’s safe to say Oscar Heinrich shaped modern criminal investigation techniques as much as any other scientist in the twentieth century.
He also pioneered some significant mistakes—problems that law enforcement are still grappling with today.
So much can be gleaned from Heinrich’s best-known cases, many of which were front-page news at the time (but most of which have fallen into obscurity, much like the man himself). It was through these cases that his reputation was made. It was also in a few key cases that his worst mistakes were codified for generations of investigators to come. But first, to understand where Heinrich went wrong, we need to understand where he went right, by peering into his work at the very height of his powers.