“They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains,” he remarked with a smile. “It’s a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.”
—Arthur Conan Doyle,
A Study in Scarlet, 1887
Edward Oscar Heinrich watched his mother mill around their small kitchen in Tacoma, Washington, as she collected breakfast dishes. It was October 7, 1897. The cups clinked in the sink. The sixteen-year-old slowly ate his meal. Reflected in the drinking glasses was a slight woman with an attractive face, wide-set eyes, and dark hair—the strongest, most steadfast person he would ever know. She was his moral guide, and by the end of that morning, he would become her savior for the remainder of her life.
Oscar had watched his mother suffer through much of his childhood. Albertine had been just twenty years old when she and twenty-eight-year-old August Heinrich, both natives of Germany, married in the Trinity Lutheran Church in Wisconsin. A year after having a little girl, Adalina Clara, Albertine gave birth to a boy they named Gustav Theodor Heinrich. The baby lived only a month, a tragedy for the young family. Another girl, Anna Matilde, came shortly after Gustav’s death, and soon Oscar arrived on April 20, 1881.
He would be the Heinrichs’ last child; and to honor the brother he never met, Oscar later named his eldest son, Theodore, after him. Oscar later remembered his mother warmly—she was a solid, secure presence in the young man’s life, and he admired her moxie and her deep sense of duty to their family. She leaned hard on both attributes, because from the time she was married, the family struggled with money.
“We kids earned our pennies by gathering old whisky bottles outside the factories and selling them,” Oscar remembered. “We were paid a penny for small ones, two cents for larger ones. That was our only source of spending-money.” There was never enough money to go around, but even for a young immigrant family there were always ways to scrounge up a little cash. And Oscar was nothing if not resourceful.
When Oscar was nine, August moved the whole family out west to Tacoma, Washington, for better opportunities promised by the newly finished railroad. But life there wasn’t much easier, and Oscar grew frustrated as he found himself surrounded by privileged and entitled children in the then-booming lumber town. His father wasn’t able to provide him with an allowance, so Oscar became determined to earn his own money. He was soon hired for a newspaper route, a lucrative job, but one that took him to the city’s red-light district.
Oscar had never strayed much beyond his family circle, and his forays into Tacoma’s underbelly to sell news to the area’s less reputable denizens were enlightening. He kept his eyes open—and his sense of decorum intact.
“Our family’s solidarity and my mother’s teachings served me well,” he said. “When I approached women in saloons and offered them my papers, I always had my cap in hand. They seemed to respect me.”
That entrepreneurial flair, linked with his own love of the written word, led young Oscar to embrace journalism of all kinds. Not content to merely hawk the news, the teenager reported and penned a newspaper story about the new game of handball for the Tacoma Morning Union in 1895, when he was in eighth grade, moving from delivering the news to actually writing it. But his moneymaking endeavors weren’t just an adventure: they were increasingly a necessity. That same year, patriarch August Heinrich lost the family’s savings during a recession, and fourteen-year-old Oscar was forced to leave high school for a few months to take a janitorial job in a pharmacy, an entry-level post that would eventually serve as the foundation of his career.
Oscar read constantly in his off-hours: English literature, scientific tomes, and language primers. He also began tinkering with fiction writing—rudimentary, silly detective stories. He liked making money in his janitorial job, but he knew he wanted more of an intellectual challenge out of his work. Luckily, his family’s finances improved somewhat, and he returned to school less than a year after withdrawing with dreams of moving overseas. But when Oscar confided his plan to his father, August Heinrich stared back and issued a stern warning that portended difficult times ahead.
“You have no brothers,” he cautioned. “If anything happens to me, it’s up to you to support your mother and sisters.”
With broad shoulders and callused hands, Oscar’s father worked as a skilled carpenter in his woodshed behind their Tacoma home, pushing saws and driving nails into boards for hours. But the forty-nine-year-old struggled to find steady work. August was handsome, even with scruffy brown hair and a ragged beard that framed his face—the antithesis of the cultivated public image Oscar would later strive to achieve (and would always demand of his own sons). He and his mother thought that things were improving with his father and their fortunes. But the reprieve was short-lived.
Just after six on the morning of October 6, 1897, August pushed his chair back from the breakfast table and picked up his kit of tools, informing his son and wife that he would be leaving for a carpeting job on C Street. He glanced toward his woodworking shed at the back of the house and wished them a good day. As he walked through the back door, Albertine had no inkling that she would never see her husband alive again, no idea that at forty-two years old she would be abandoned with a teenaged son and two unmarried daughters.
After August disappeared in the backyard, Albertine noticed that her husband had left behind his dinner bucket. She walked swiftly toward the shed and swung open the building’s door. She screamed so loudly that most of their neighbors heard.
In less than a decade, Oscar would become one of the greatest forensic scientists in history. But at that moment, standing in his parents’ kitchen, he was just minutes away from seeing the first of many, many corpses in his career. The scene would plague Oscar until his own death, a ghastly reminder of what might happen if he surrendered to his own flaws.
The teenager sprang up from the table when he heard his mother’s wailing; he raced through the backyard and stood in the doorway of his father’s woodshed. Oscar looked upward as his mother collapsed. His father was hanging from a wooden beam near the ceiling with a window cord tied around his neck, dead from suicide.
As his mother sobbed, Oscar did something extraordinary for a sixteen-year-old boy. He gently led his mother to the kitchen and settled her in a chair so she wouldn’t faint. He phoned the police, retrieved a knife from the kitchen, and returned to the woodshed; Oscar climbed the stepstool that his father had used to slip on the noose. August’s body shook and swayed from the violent hacking of the knife. It finally dropped to the ground. Exhausted, Oscar dragged him to the house. Soon the police arrived, followed by local newspaper reporters, who collected details on the family tragedy.
“Suicide at Glendale,” read the Tacoma Daily News. “August Heinrich Hangs Himself in His Workshop.”
“No reason for the deed can be discovered,” read the copy, “and his wife and family, as well as many of his acquaintances, are at a loss to explain the cause of the suicide.”
But Oscar’s family knew the truth: his father had been distressed over finances for years, yes, but he had also been plagued with an ongoing darkness that clouded his life, one he had always struggled to overcome. The coroner determined that August had died from strangulation, not a broken neck—a more prolonged, painful death. It was an agonizing end for the flawed father Oscar loved so much.
Over the next six decades Oscar secretly fretted that he might also suffer from his father’s same anguish, his same craven weaknesses. But that fear also shaped his future—it spurred on his determination and helped craft his acumen for controlling every aspect of his life. Oscar transformed frustration into resilience. His deficiencies, such as his obsessive compulsions, became attributes . . . until they threatened his career, his family—even his life.
“Among my earliest recollections, the most prominent are those of the brutal ways in which I have been robbed of all my illusions,” Oscar wrote his best friend, John Boynton Kaiser. “It stirs resentment, suggests revenge and breeds caution.”
After his father committed suicide in 1897, sixteen-year-old Oscar was immediately assigned immeasurable responsibility, almost more than he could bear. Reporters knocked on his door, demanding answers about his father’s death, the first of many secrets Oscar Heinrich would protect until he himself died. His father’s grim fate would haunt Oscar for decades, testing his relationships with his children and challenging his own mental health.
When he became the patriarch of the Heinrich family, there was no hope of returning to high school for his final two years. He studied at night to become a pharmacist, a steady career for a young man who needed to support his family. By the turn of the century, pharmacists were still sometimes called apothecaries. They dispensed medications, prescribed remedies, and even gave some treatments that were difficult to self-administer, like enemas. Going to a pharmacy school wasn’t needed to take the state board exams, but apprenticing under a licensed pharmacist was required, usually for at least a year.
The pharmacy curriculum of the early 1900s leaned heavily on chemistry. It trained a pharmacist not only to prepare medications but also to practice clinical chemistry, which was the analysis of bodily fluids, like conducting a urinalysis. The training was Oscar’s first step toward becoming a forensic scientist—a career he never initially intended to follow.
The teenager couldn’t afford formal pharmacy classes, so he depended on his innate ability to understand the context of the texts and the math behind dispensing the correct amounts of medication. He relied on his memory and his compulsion to stockpile useful information. When the eighteen-year-old passed his pharmacy state exams, he seemed to be the only one who wasn’t surprised as he slipped on a white coat. Inside the Stewart and Holmes Drug Company he studied drugs, poisons, chemicals . . . and human nature.
“A drugstore is a veritable laboratory in behavioristic psychology,” he said.
He watched male customers slyly leer at women in the store. Some tried to bluff Oscar to secure more medicine without a prescription. Others were desperate, clearly addicted to the medicinal alcohol he could access for them. And a few customers turned mean, even threatening, if they didn’t get their way—when they thought no one was listening.
“I learned what people do in secret,” he said with a smile.
Pharmacy work also offered him another reward—eight years of excellent training in the valuable skill of handwriting analysis.
“I had doctors’ prescriptions to decipher,” Oscar explained. “And doctors are the worst writers in the world. Right then I started in to qualify as a handwriting expert.”
For almost a decade, he watched the other pharmacists quickly calculate the formulas for medicine—and he envied them.
“I was impressed with the difference between the caliber of my work and that of college-trained men,” he said. “Those men were far away from me as technicians.”
He desperately wanted to be a skilled chemist. He needed to secure a well-paying, stable job in Tacoma to help his family. He hoped to spend his life bending over beakers in a lab, but to do that, he had to go to college, and it wouldn’t be easy. Even though he had his pharmacy license, Oscar lacked a high school degree—and despite his years of work, he’d managed to save very little money. Still, he was determined, and he’d heard about a special program for nontraditional students like himself at the University of California at Berkeley that sounded like just the ticket for a driven (but uncredentialed) student like Oscar. With just $15 in his wallet, the twenty-three-year-old planned to embark upon the next phase of his education.
But just three hours before he was scheduled to board the train to Berkeley, a disaster: he received a letter from the university that said he had missed the entrance exams to become a special student by two weeks. The details of the mix-up are lost to history, but true to his enterprising nature, Oscar was determined to achieve his goals. He hopped the train anyway and turned up at the registrar’s office in Berkeley, demanding to be admitted.
“When I presented myself the Recorder of the Faculties listened to my story, looked me over, then told me to go up to the Chemistry College and go to work,” Oscar would later tell his son.
It didn’t happen right away, but finally Oscar’s perseverance and intelligence convinced admissions officers to allow him to join the freshman class of the College of Chemistry as a special student in chemical engineering. It was a good gamble. He quickly became invaluable to his professors as a laboratory assistant in quantitative analysis, and then as an assistant instructor in physics and mechanics. He studied medicine and attended law courses, then took classes in sanitary engineering—a discipline that used science and math to improve sanitation along with the supply of safe potable water.
His Bachelor of Science degree taught him how to uncover nearly invisible clues and become a specialist in chemical jurisprudence who could detect poisons and identify mysterious stains. Amid furious bouts of studying and teaching, he managed to make time to woo a pretty co-ed, a calming companion during his transition from student to independent man.
Marion Allen and Oscar Heinrich met on campus at the University of California at Berkeley as students. They were both involved in Greek life; Marion was prominent with Delta Delta Delta, while Oscar had been elected to the Mim Kaph Mim chemistry honor society and the Acacia club, a social fraternity founded by undergraduate Freemasons. They took chemistry classes together, though Marion never seemed to use her degree for a profession—being married to E. O. Heinrich was likely challenging enough.
Their friends playfully nicknamed Oscar “Heinie,” just to gig the fastidious student, who could be a know-it-all. He seemed stoic much of the time, aloof even in his youth, but those who were close to Oscar, like his wife, knew that he was also witty and loving.
“It may seem delightful,” he wrote to Marion about the fancy Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., “but without you it is all sheer near-beer.”
Oscar and Marion were married at her parents’ home in San Francisco shortly after he graduated in 1908. They immediately moved to Tacoma, where his mother lived, and Marion gave birth to Theodore two years later. She was a homemaker, bright and social—a good writer who kept up with national news, but she didn’t seem to talk much with her husband about his job. Much of the letters involved neighborhood gossip, the boys (a second son came a few years later), and household finances.
Opportunities came in quick succession after Oscar’s wedding to Marion. In Tacoma, he took a job as a chemical and sanitation engineer for the city, where he dealt with paving, bridges, and the development of water and power plant construction. He inspected reservoirs, tunnels, dams, and bridges. He studied the city’s sewer and irrigation systems and then designed two chemical plants. And soon Oscar took the job of city chemist, a position that required him to do quite a lot of investigative work with the coroner and the police in cases involving complex chemicals.
But he was frustrated both with the pay and the lack of equipment, so in 1910 he resigned and opened his own private industrial chemical lab called Heinrich Technical Laboratories, a company that helped develop and manufacture products and create processes for clients. But Oscar’s work with the police and the coroner continued to stoke his interest in forensics, so he received more criminal cases from the city and the public.
Oscar quickly realized that chemistry faced limitations in criminalistics—there were so many clues to miss without the right training. He expanded on his expertise, spending nights poring over books. He began studying poisons, fingerprinting, geology, and botany—the studies of a forensic generalist. Inside his lab in Tacoma he solved bizarre cases, like the mystery of a poisoned lemon pie sent to a man who became deathly sick after a small taste. Oscar examined the finely sugared crust under his microscope, which proved to contain poison crystals. But there was one big case that established him as a forensics expert in Tacoma shortly after he opened his lab.
He examined the body of a woman found slumped behind a stove in her kitchen. A revolver lay next to her. Investigators labeled it a suicide, but Oscar wasn’t so sure. Police led him to a wall behind the victim—there was a hole with a bullet hidden deep inside. But Oscar examined it with his tweezers and found dust inside. A bullet had not passed through it recently. He squatted on the floor and examined every inch of the wall and found two important clues: a small indentation with a bit of lead inside and some washed-out blood on the wall nearby. Now his training in ballistics became practical.
He used string to trace the trajectory of the bullet from the wall to a spot where the shooter was standing—it was far away from the woman’s body. He used another string to trace the path where the woman was shot near the wall to where she staggered and fell behind the stove. It was murder. Police arrested her husband, and Oscar was the main witness, securing a conviction. The young, serious-faced chemist was now a star forensics expert.
Soon his constant need to be challenged required a change of career, and it came at a fortuitous time. Through a mutual friend, Oscar would meet an investigator who would help him dissect some of his toughest cases, a cop who was also beguiled by science—American Sherlock’s own Inspector Lestrade.
By the late 1910s, August Vollmer was something of a luminary in the Bay Area, Berkeley’s first police chief and the man who had reformed police methods nationwide. He would be later nicknamed the “father of modern policing,” a revered figure in law enforcement.
In cities at the turn of the century, criminal investigations were predominately “solved” on hunches—the instincts of experienced but ill-equipped detectives who sniffed out suspects based on motive, a dangerous guessing game that leaned on mistaken intuition. A gun and a badge were the only requirements to be a police officer, and a hard spray from a rubber hose was still a common way to make suspects talk. American investigators hoped for clues, hunted for witnesses, and bullied suspects into false confessions based on little or no evidence. It was madness for anyone caught in the legal system, particularly for minorities and immigrants.
August Vollmer demanded reform, and his changes were swift and far-reaching. He created one of the nation’s first centralized police records systems, and he was the first police chief to require that cops receive college degrees. Vollmer outlawed the third-degree approach to abusing suspects to get confessions. He argued that a type of truth serum called scopolamine, developed in the early 1920s, was more effective. Vollmer called it the fourth degree. Scientists now know that there is no current drug that can effectively enhance truth-telling, but Vollmer’s endorsement of the serum was enough to encourage police departments across the country to reduce their own brutal interrogation methods.
Vollmer trained and then hired African American cops and female officers. He was the first chief to create motorized patrol, buying motorcycles and cars for his officers so they could cover wider areas. He believed in compassion, but he was often criticized for being too lenient on petty criminals. Vollmer gave sound advice to all his rookie cops.
“Your main job as a cop on the beat is not to make a lot of arrests, but to help prevent crime,” Vollmer told them. “The best way to do this is to start with the children. Make friends with them. Guide them towards law abiding citizenship. Show them that the law is their friend not their enemy.”
But it was Vollmer’s emphasis on science that really endeared him to Oscar Heinrich, whom he met through a mutual friend. They had both read the same books by European forensic experts—they spoke the same scientific language. In his own department Vollmer insisted on using forensic evidence like blood, fiber, and soil to solve crimes, and with Oscar’s guidance, he created the nation’s first police lab, one that tapped the criminalist’s expertise in all forms of forensics. Their philosophies on education were symbiotic.
In 1916, Vollmer recruited Oscar to design an innovative program for police officers, America’s first “cop college.” They wrote back and forth about courses, adding some and scrapping others. They discussed faculty hires, classroom locations, and the most updated methods in forensics. They exchanged syllabi and dissected each line, hoping to improve the other’s descriptions for clarity.
“Your suggestion for instruction in library work is timely,” Vollmer told Oscar, “and will be taken advantage of.”
As Vollmer and Oscar crafted a degree structure together, their friendship grew.
“The course extends over a period of three years, the first-year courses being—physics, chemistry, physiology, anatomy and toxicology,” explained Vollmer. “The second year surely requires a college education—criminal psychology, psychiatry, criminology, police organization, methods and procedure. The third year completes the course with microbiology and parasitology, elementary and criminal law.”
The next year they launched the School for Police at the University of California at Berkeley, and Oscar began teaching the nation’s first criminology classes. Vollmer was incredibly grateful.
“Your outline of lectures is very comprehensive, and should prove of great value to all students of criminal investigation,” he wrote Oscar.
Vollmer and Oscar subscribed to the same philosophy: educated police officers were America’s most valuable asset in law enforcement. Vollmer hired experts like Oscar to teach elementary law, criminology, and forensic sciences like fingerprinting, handwriting analysis, and ballistics. Police departments across the country sent their officers to UC Berkeley. They listened to Vollmer’s lectures on police organization, administration, methods, and procedure. Students lauded Oscar’s courses on chemical jurisprudence, judicial photography, applied optics, handwriting analysis, and the use of chemistry and physics in evidence.
He was a demanding, dynamic educator who boasted of his packed classes—though he refused to be called “professor.” He believed that while he had earned the title, it was a bit too stodgy for a worldly criminalist who tracked killers. Oscar’s unique gift to his students was his breadth of field and lab experience coupled with an astounding amount of book knowledge.
“I’ll take you all from a thrill to a shudder,” Oscar promised a crop of fledgling police officers. “But a chessboard in police station is more valuable than crime books. There is nothing that I know of in English that will quickly enable a man to see situations and analogies.”
Only an educated, scientific investigator could catch criminals, Oscar and Vollmer believed—everyone else had to pray for luck.
“The investigation of crime is merely a special case of the study of behavior,” Oscar told his friend. “Success in it depends upon the development to a high degree of the powers of perception and to an almost equal degree the powers of memory and ratiocination [reasoning].”
His students, who were exclusively police officers at the beginning of the program, were frequently skeptical. Luckily, August Vollmer and Oscar Heinrich were intellectual equals, both committed to crime solving and teaching future detectives. They forged a lifelong partnership, a union of trust and support. They became close friends, bonding over similar upbringings. Like Oscar, Vollmer was born to German parents, and he had also lost his father at a young age.
They would work together on many cases, including a murder trial in San Francisco involving a gang that planted a suitcase bomb during a parade, killing nine people. Oscar helped establish that the bomb parts found at the scene matched the material found in one suspect’s room. Vollmer helped Oscar match handprints in the trial of a man accused of murdering his wife by shooting her in the back of the head. They leaned on each other countless times over the years. But soon their loyalty to each other would be tested over a coveted position teaching alongside legends in forensics.
By 1917, teaching young law enforcement officers wasn’t enough to satisfy Oscar’s deepening interests in policing. At the age of thirty-five, he was named the police chief of Alameda County in San Francisco Bay despite having no formal experience in law enforcement. In California, he restructured the police department, and he dabbled in forensics by studying handwriting with Thomas Kyka, the famous trial expert.
Each of Oscar Heinrich’s careers required perfection, orderliness, and a rigid attention to detail. They demanded an incredible ability to synthesize thousands of crucial pieces of data and then recall where they were all stored and how to use them. He hoarded information in every corner of his laboratory—along bookshelves, atop desks, and inside cabinets, all classified to his standards. Oscar’s measured methodology was a remarkable system that provided his students and colleagues with a blueprint for how to organize evidence to solve a crime. But the more stress he endured, the more compulsively he organized—his lists and charts became a salve for the anxiety and insecurity he had felt since childhood.
From the first day he had slipped into the white jacket of a pharmacist two decades earlier, Oscar had evolved into an efficient, potent, and hyper-organized investigator, a criminalist who could survey a crime scene and determine which of his myriad of tests might solve the case.
By 1918, he and his wife, Marion, had two sons, eight-year-old Theodore and four-year-old Mortimer, and he needed a new challenge. In January, Oscar defeated more than one hundred other applicants to become Boulder, Colorado’s first city manager and commissioner of public safety for about $5,000 a year, but the job lasted only a year. When his mentor, Thomas Kyka, suddenly died in San Francisco, Oscar returned to take over his questioned-documents business while teaching at UC Berkeley with Vollmer. And he strengthened an already close relationship with a brilliant cohort, a reference librarian from his days in Tacoma—his own Dr. John Watson.
Oscar vented often about other competitors, but not to his wife or even to his colleagues at UC Berkeley. He griped in hundreds of letters to John Boynton Kaiser, his closest confidant.
“His propaganda is partially for the purpose of personal publicity rather than the scientific value his alleged discoveries may have,” Oscar complained of one rival expert.
Oscar and Kaiser had written almost weekly since they met in Washington State in 1914. Kaiser wasn’t just a close friend—he was also an outstanding researcher and a published author. The thirty-four-year-old had written well-respected guides for librarians on organizing municipal and legal documents, on the national bibliographies of South American republics. And he enjoyed criminalistics, writing an article for the Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology about people who bought and sold children.
Kaiser received a master’s degree in library sciences from the illustrious New York State Library School in Albany in 1917. After school, Kaiser was appointed librarian at the Texas State Library before moving on to a bigger position at the University of Illinois and then finally to Tacoma. The researcher became Oscar’s meticulous adviser, a font of material who sent him hundreds of books paired with loads of advice over four decades. Kaiser often happily played the role of problem-solver for Oscar.
The librarian was a smart dresser, slightly portly with dark thinning hair and a toothbrush mustache, a fussy but brilliant writer and bookish amateur detective. He enjoyed flagging useful articles for Oscar, like a piece on how to identify an authentic document.
“On page 363 of the LIBRARY JOURNAL is a list of ten tests by which the original may be distinguished from any of the reprints,” wrote Kaiser. “This may be of some value to you at some time.”
Oscar utilized Kaiser as a sounding board for personal problems, health queries, financial concerns, and criminal cases. When he lectured to students or appeared on the witness stand, Oscar remained unflappable and confident, the embodiment of a savant in criminalistics. But Oscar’s public bravado masked private self-doubts and insecurities that he rarely revealed to anyone but Kaiser.
“Sometimes I enjoy your insistence in thinking I am a great detective,” wrote Oscar, “and other times I wonder where you get the idea. I remember that I told you in one of my recent letters that I never talk to people. I simply look them over.”
Kaiser advised Oscar on books and references throughout some of his most challenging trials. The forensic scientist had first appeared in international newspapers about five years earlier, when he cracked enemy codes for the American government during World War I. In 1916, Indian nationalist groups attempted a rebellion in India against Britain, a plan dubbed the Hindu Ghadar Conspiracy. Oscar spent months with tutors, learning the three distinct Hindu dialects that were represented in the letters. It wouldn’t be enough to just translate the codes; he wanted to learn the nuances of the language to decipher the messages and prove their authorship using patterns in word choice and writing style—profiling.
With the help of more books from Kaiser, Oscar analyzed the handwriting and typewriting on hundreds of documents, and he used chemicals to test ink. Working alongside investigators with Scotland Yard and the American government, they finally solved the case, a conspiracy that involved more than thirty people. By the end of the war Oscar earned the rank of captain in the U.S. Engineers’ Reserve Corps and the admiration of federal investigators.
In 1920, he testified as an expert in handwriting analysis in heavyweight champion boxer Jack Dempsey’s draft-dodging trial, though Oscar never took the stand, and the “Manassa Mauler” was acquitted.
Oscar used hair comparison analysis to secure the conviction of two soldiers accused of beating to death a taxicab driver in Salinas with a blackjack (a type of thin club). And with virtually each case, Oscar offered Kaiser a tantalizing, secret glimpse behind the process of forensic investigation.
“I am enclosing a print showing the hairs as they were found on the blackjack,” Oscar wrote to Kaiser. “I was able beyond doubt to establish these hairs as having come from the head of the taxi man.”
The pair exchanged books, photos, and opinions. Both were insatiable readers and news consumers. And they shared another interest: studying and collecting stamps. When Oscar was a kid, he had enjoyed deciphering the dates on used stamps as a hobby.
“Whenever you are ready send the 3Cent Lincoln which you have mentioned,” Oscar wrote the librarian.
Kaiser and Oscar often sparred intellectually, but they deeply valued their friendship, revealing details about their lives that they didn’t dare tell others, even their wives—especially their wives. The librarian recognized that Oscar’s life as “star witness” was complicated because his friend had been agitated over finances for as long as they had known each other. In 1921, Oscar was expanding his forensics lab, a large space tucked on the ground floor of his three-level house in the hills of Berkeley. With large glass windows overlooking San Francisco Bay, Oscar was finally building a proper laboratory, his first office since he had left Tacoma four years earlier.
“I now use three rooms,” he told Kaiser, “a combined laboratory and camera room for photographic enlarging and photomicrographic work; a separate fully equipped dark room; and a room for my secretary and auxiliary library.”
But the expansion was costing the Heinrich family loads of money, and with two little boys and a wife to support, Oscar worried. The 1920 recession had left his business light, so he agonized over bills, much like his father had decades earlier.
“When I bought the car recently it put such a crimp in the cash account that I will have to work all winter to recover,” he told Kaiser.
Oscar was desperate to avoid his father’s fate, haunted by August Heinrich’s demons. He began to closely regulate his family’s finances, curating thousands of bits of information in bound journals. About ten years earlier the scientist began charting his wife’s domestic expenses by collecting reams of paper filled with prices of groceries, insurance, clothing, literature, and anything else that had cost him money. The type of data was not alarming, but the amount of information was incredible. Storing it all made him feel more in control of his money, even when he was not.
In 1915, the criminalist defaulted on his mortgage for his home in Tacoma, and the legal process had stretched over three years. When the Heinrichs relocated to Boulder, Kaiser began collecting their mail in Tacoma. In 1918, the librarian sent an urgent telegram to Oscar about threats from the bank.
“Bankers Trust Co has foreclosed mortgage and secured judgment amounting to over eleven hundred dollars,” read Kaiser’s telegram. “Property will be sold unless you adjust matter.”
Oscar sent a payment and regained ownership of the house, but money struggles continued to plague him. And in 1921, despite his mounting debt, Oscar considered opening an additional lab, a smaller one in San Francisco for clients in that city. It might have seemed like a horrible decision, but Oscar was determined to remain a successful (and competitive) forensic scientist. He had to maintain adequate facilities—the willingness to grow his business was a requirement, but it was also a dangerous risk.
His father’s sudden death solidified the sixteen-year-old boy’s fate—life would be a constant struggle. His father’s death roused Oscar’s determination to skirt poverty for good. He was determined to offer his two young sons a happier life—a stronger, more stable upbringing than his own, with plenty of toys, food, and joy.
Now in 1921, Oscar Heinrich was ready for his first case to make “E. O. Heinrich” the star of international headlines. August Vollmer would soon label him “the foremost scientific investigator of crime in the United States.” It was quite a heavy burden for a man already carrying a lifetime of angst and self-doubt. Yet Oscar buried his fears and moved forward toward his first big investigation, one that would put him on the front pages for the first—and definitely not the last—time.