Scene of the Crime

by Anne Wingate

  Gerasimov has worked in many criminal cases; he's also been involved in reconstructing the faces of historical figures whose skulls could be recovered and of whom authentic portraits are not known. The photographs in his book of facial reconstructions of such people as Ivan the Terrible and Attila the Hun are fascinating and at times extremely revealing.

  Martin Cruz Smith's novel Gorky Park was based on the work of Gerasimov, and the description Smith gave of Gerasimov's work is far more detailed than this book has the space to present. Smith wrote the book partly under the assumption that no one else in the world was doing the same sort of work. This fact, to him, meant that he had to travel to the Soviet Union to do research, and had to set the book in the Soviet Union. What began, in his mind, as another mystery of the type he was already writing turned into a personal and fictional odyssey. The book, which took more than seven years to write, catapulted the writer from the status of barely making a living (among other things, he had worked as an ice cream man) to the status of millionaire.

  And there's one very interesting thing I thought you'd like to know: Smith was incorrect in his assumption that nobody but Gerasimov was reconstructing faces from skulls. William Krogman of the FBI was one of the pioneers of the technique, and the Oklahoma team of Clyde Snow and Betty Gatliff work all over the world. Similar work, using photos as well as sculpture, has been going on in England for more than fifty years. Which brings to mind an interesting question: If he'd known the truth, would he have ever written Gorky Park! Well, if you've read Gorky Park, most likely you, like me, are glad Smith knew about Gerasimov's cases but not, perhaps, about Buck Ruxton.

  Though to be completely fair, I should add that Smith might have known about the Buck Ruxton case but decided it was immaterial. The techniques used were somewhat different.

  Who Was Buck Ruxton?

  AParsi, he was born Bukhtyar Sustomji Ratanji Hakim. His medical training was in Bombay, but when he moved to England, he

  Anglicized his name. In 1928, at the age of thirty, he entered into a common-law marriage with Isabella Van Ess, and by 1930, the Ruxtons were settled in Lancaster.

  The marriage was a stormy one. According to later reports, Ruxton was convinced his wife was cheating on him; Mrs. Ruxton several times reported to police that he was physically abusing her. In 1935, Mrs. Ruxton and her twenty-year-old maid Mary Rogerson were reported missing. Ruxton maintained that his wife had left him for another man; he had no explanation for why the maid also was missing. His explanations of the blood on carpeting and clothing also were somewhat frail.

  In late September of 1935, portions of two bodies were found in and near the Annan River between Carlisle and Edinburgh. All identifying characteristics, including fingertips, eyes, and front teeth, had been removed. There is a slight possibility that they might not have been connected with Mrs. Ruxton and Miss Rogerson, except that portions of the body were wrapped in a copy of a newspaper sold only in Lancaster and nearby More-cambe.

  When questioned, Ruxton continued to insist that his wife had left him and he didn't know what had happened to the maid. But the circumstances were suspicious: Mrs. Ruxton had buck teeth, and the teeth of the older woman were missing. Miss Rogerson had a squint in one eye, and the eyes of the younger woman were missing. And there was still all that blood on the carpet.

  Pathologists from the universities in Edinburgh and Glasgow examined the bodies. Enough was left of the dermis to permit a fingerprint examination of Miss Rogerson. To identify the other body, pathologists seized photographs of Mrs. Ruxton. Then, from the same angle, they photographed the unknown skull. The two photographs were then superimposed and rephotographed. The fit was perfect.

  Was the body indeed that of Mrs. Ruxton? Was Dr. Buck Ruxton guilty of murder? The question was for a jury to decide. Ruxton continued to deny everything, calling his accusation "absolute bunkum" (Gaute and Odell 200). The jury did decide; Ruxton was hanged on May 12, 1936, at Strangeways Prison. It was later revealed that he had written and signed a brief confession on October 14, only one day after his arrest.

  Strange Identifications

  In some situations, positive identification may be impossible, but because of surrounding circumstances, a presumptive identification that will be sufficient grounds for a murder charge may be made. John Haigh, English murderer of the year in 1949, misunderstanding the meaning of the term corpus delicti, dissolved the body of his victim Olive Durand-Deacon in forty gallons of sulphuric acid. Her dentist's identification of her plastic denture (still intact) coupled with other evidence was sufficient to lead to his conviction and his execution on August 10, 1949, in Wandsworth Prison. Numerous books have been written about this case, which is considered one of the classics of criminology.

  Similarly, on December 21,1957, con man L. Ewing Scott was convicted in Los Angeles, California, of the murder of his wife Evelyn on or about May 16, 1955, even though all that was ever found of her was her denture and some of her medicine, both dumped near the incinerator of the Scotts' next-door neighbors. A fascinating book, Corpus Delicti, by Diane Wagner, details this case and the painstaking investigation that led to Scott's conviction.

  The Parkman-Websfer Case

  And there is the one that has been called "America's classic murder." It happened in staid Boston, in November 1849. Dr. John White Webster of the Massachusetts Medical College, a Harvard graduate, owed money to Dr. John Parkman, another professor at the medical college. When Dr. Parkman tried to collect, Dr. Webster knocked him in the head with a stick of kindling wood ... and who knows better how to dispose of a body than a doctor?

  Webster dissected Parkman's body and burned the pieces in his assay oven. He probably would have gotten away with it except for Ephraim Littlefield, the college janitor, who remembered how hot the wall got behind the oven the day Dr. Parkman vanished. Webster got nervous; he gave the janitor a turkey for a Thanksgiving present. But he had not been noted for generosity to the help, and that only made Littlefield more suspicious. Finally Littlefield, knowing that for a janitor to accuse a professor without evidence would be futile, pried out some brick and found portions of a body. Now he had something to tell the police.

  Webster, of course, insisted the body portions were from a cadaver he'd been working on. But even Webster's imagination could not dream up a reply when police found Parkman's teeth in Webster's assay oven. And one professor was hanged on August 30, 1850, for bludgeoning to death another professor, with a conviction based on the testimony of the janitor... not quite what you'd expect in Boston in the mid-nineteenth century.

  How do we know so much about what actually happened?

  Just prior to his execution, Webster confessed.

  What Is a Corpus Delicti?

  More than a few murderers have come to grief because of their misunderstanding of this legal term. Knowing that a case cannot be tried without a corpus delicti, and seeing the word corpus, which is so similar to corpse, they leap to the conclusion that nobody can be tried for murder if the corpse cannot be located or identified.

  And indeed the word corpus does mean body, but the reference is to the body of evidence, not to the body of the victim. Which, for example, was how that shy little dentist Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen happened to be hanged in 1910 for the murder of his truly appalling wife, would-be singer Belle Elmore (stage name) who had married him using the name of Cora Turner. (Her real name was Kunigunde Mackamotzki, and I mention this only because it seems more fitting. Photographs indicate she had the build of the stereotypical operatic fat lady; reviews indicate she did not possess a matching talent.)

  Crippen earned the living. Did the housework. Indulged Belle in jewelry and furs. Paid for Belle's ill-fated forays onto the stage; critics described her music as screeching. Was openly taunted by Belle and her fashionable friends. Finally fell in love with his shy secretary, Ethel le Neve.

  When Crippen told his friends Belle had returned to the United States, but none of her friends heard from he
r, that looked odd enough. But when Ethel first moved in and then was seen wearing Belle's furs and jewelry, Belle's fashionable friends got suspicious.

  Police inspector Walter Dew of Scotland Yard investigated, found nothing amiss. But Crippen panicked and fled, headed for Canada on the SS Montrose, taking Ethel with him disguised (not very convincingly) as a boy. Dew investigated further. Body parts were found buried in the cellar, but the head, skeleton and limbs were gone. Belle was identified on the basis of a surgery scar and a vest (according to some accounts, a pajama shirt); Dew boarded a faster ship and arrested the two on July 31, 1910; and Crippen learned what corpus delicti really meant. Nobody believed the defense insistence that the body remains were somebody other than Belle and the scar was really a skin crease. What would somebody else's remains be doing wrapped in Cora Crippen's vest or pajama shirt as the case may be?

  Many books have been written about this case. A careful reader can find it easy to be a little sorry for Crippen ... but I do wish that before he died, he had explained how he disposed of the rest of the body.

  And then there was Edward Ball, who was convicted in 1936 in County Dublin, Ireland, of the murder of his mother, although no body was ever found. The corpus delicti included an abandoned automobile, bloodstained towels, bloodstained clothing, bloodstained carpet and a bloodstained hatchet. Although the defense insisted that Mrs. Vera Ball, estranged wife of a physician, had committed suicide, the prosecution evidence was overwhelming.

  Perhaps the most interesting corpus delicti case was that of James Camb, a ship's steward who was convicted in March 1948 of the strangulation murder of Eileen Isabella Gibson, an actress whose stage name was Gay Gibson. Strong evidence was presented that Camb had attempted to sexually assault Gibson; had strangled her when she attempted to ring for help; had covered up her attempt to call for help by pretending, when the ship's night watchman arrived in answer to her bell, that he had arrived sooner; and then had pushed the body through the porthole. He eventually admitted having sex with her and pushing her through the porthole, but he contended she had died naturally, apparently of a heart attack or a "fit"; that he had attempted artificial respiration; and then, panicking, he put the body through the porthole. But that did not explain the scratches on his hands and wrists apparently made by the woman fighting for her life, nor did it explain the ringing of the signal bell from her stateroom the night she vanished. The prosecution contended—successfully—that Camb had disposed of the body under the all-too-common assumption that he could not be convicted of murder if the body could not be found.

  Like many other people who made the same assumption, he was proven wrong.

  DNA fingerprinting, if available then, could have provided conclusive proof in the case of Crippen and of Webster, if—that is-known genetic material of Belle Elmore and of Dr. Parkman had existed. It wouldn't have helped in the case of Ball, because nobody argued that the blood was not that of Mrs. Ball or that Mr. Ball had not disposed of his mother's body; the question rather was one of how Mrs. Ball came to be a body; nor would it have helped in the Camb case, as no one disputed that the body fluids in the bed were those of Gay Gibson. In the Haigh case, it probably wouldn't have helped; and in the Scott case, it certainly wouldn't have.

  But we're just now on the cutting edge of DNA experimentation, and what will be possible twenty years from now none of us can begin to guess. So let's think, now, about the gene test that can —at least theoretically—prove conclusive identity.

  Well, almost conclusive. Although in general DNA fingerprinting can distinguish between siblings, Jay Henry of the Utah State Crime Laboratory pointed out to me that it cannot distinguish between identical twins, as they would, of course, have the same DNA material —that is, the same genetic heritage

  The technique called DNA fingerprinting—the name was coined by Sue Jeffreys, wife of English scientist Alec Jeffreys, who invented the process—is the descendant of a long line of work. But what does it mean?

  DNA Fingerprinting

  When I was in junior high, I was taught that human beings have forty-eight pairs of chromosomes in every cell of their bodies except reproductive cells, each chromosome consisting of a long string of genes. That was not quite correct; scientists had miscounted, and we now know that human beings have forty-six pairs of chromosomes. These strings were originally called chromosomes because, under extreme magnification, they look extremely colorful (the prefix chrome refers to color). The genes are composed of spiral-twisted strands of deoxyribonucleic acid, the chemical that carries the computer codes, so to speak, that tell the body how to develop not only in humans but in all animal and plant life.

  Now bear with me a minute, because if you're up on your biology you know all this. Here's where you get these sets of chromosomes: the reproductive cells, unlike all other cells, have single chromosomes rather than pairs. When the spermatozoa, the male reproductive cell, and the ovum, the female reproductive cell, join, the first thing they do is produce a zygote, a new cell that joins the single chromosomes from the ovum and the single chromosomes from the spermatozoa to produce new pairs of chromosomes. So each human being is produced by a code that comes half from the father and half from the mother.

  Now, if exactly the same chromosomes from each pair went into each ovum or into each spermatozoa, all the offspring of one set of parents would be just alike. But in fact, either chromosome from each pair can go into each ovum or spermatozoa; furthermore, genes possess the ability to "jump" from one chromosome to another, so that a chromosome that came mainly from a person's father may contain genes that came from a person's mother. As each human chromosome contains about a hundred thousand genes, this means effectively that the genetic heritage in each zygote is going to be different from the genetic heritage in any other zygote. And as that zygote turns into a fetus, which turns into a human being, each human being—again with the exception of identical twins or other identical multiples, who develop from a single zygote—every human being is going to have a different set of DNA from every other human being.

  This means many things. First, it is possible to identify an individual from very small samplings once a suspect has been developed by other means. That handful of hair the victim snatched, the scrapings under the fingernails where the victim scratched the assailant, the blood where the assailant got a nosebleed — even the semen left behind by the rapist—all these can be matched to the individual they belong to.

  Earl Ubell, writing in Parade magazine, told of the first case solved by Jeffreys's method: A man suspected of the rape and murder of two fifteen-year-old girls was innocent; the semen stains on the bodies did not match his DNA. Police then asked for blood samples from all the men living in the neighborhood. Obviously, the men could not be required to give these samples, but their failure to do so might raise certain questions in the mind of investigators. One man asked a friend to provide a blood sample in his place. That naturally roused the curiosity of the friend and hence of the police, and court orders were eventually obtained. When the DNA of the suspect, Colin Pitchfork, was compared to the semen, it matched.

  There are other uses for DNA fingerprinting. In questions of

  paternity, it is possible to prove with very close certainty who is and is not the parent of the child in question. In one very sad case, it was able to show that parents had left the hospital with each other's baby, but by the time the switch was discovered one girl was ten years old and one girl was dead. Another time, British authorities thought that a citizen of Ghana was trying to enter England on a passport owned by a resident of Ghana with British citizenship. DNA fingerprinting of both parents and of the young man proved' that the young man was exactly who he said he was; half his DNA had clearly come from his purported mother and half from his purported father.

  In 1991, scientists proposed opening Abraham Lincoln's tomb and obtaining genetic scrapings in order to check for the Marfan's syndrome gene and finally determine for sure whether Lincoln did indee
d have Marfan's syndrome.

  What Is Marfan's Syndrome?

  Marfan's syndrome is a hereditary ailment of the long bones, connective tissue and blood vessels. The most obvious symptom externally is very long legs and arms; the most serious symptom is a tendency toward spontaneous rupture of the aorta, the largest blood vessel in the body, and as a result Marfan's victims rarely live past middle age without surgical intervention. Modern medical historians, examining Lincoln's portraits and what is known now about his body measurements (easily determined, as some of his clothing still exists) insist he was a Marfan's victim. Other historians aren't so sure.

  Marfan's syndrome may be useful in fiction because a rupture of the aorta is excruciatingly painful, and although the victim will usually bleed to death internally within ten minutes, it has happened that a victim, bleeding internally and in great pain, has grabbed a pistol and shot himself (in this case, rarely herself). In that case, for insurance purposes, the question of whether the person died from suicide or from the ruptured aorta may become crucial.

  And of course, if someone else muddies the water further by taking away the pistol... there's a lot you can do with that.

  But DNA fingerprinting is not yet fully accepted. So far, more than 400 cases have gone to trial, and no one knows how many cases have been settled without trial because DNA evidence was available. But in a nonbinding precedent, Judge Douglas Keddie of Yuma County, Arizona, ruled that DNA tests were not yet acceptable in his court, despite the contentions of the FBI agents who had performed it that the test was conclusive. According to Judge Keddie, the fact that the test is supposedly so conclusive means that it "puts a fist on the scale of justice." Because it is "so likely to sway a jury, it must be subjected to the strictest scrutiny" (Kolata).