The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear, the Real Forensics Behind the Great Detective's Greatest Cases

by E. J. Wagner

  In time, Vidocq’s position became known in the underworld, and he had to place even greater reliance on his skill with disguise. As his notoriety grew, he gained the fascinated friendship of some of France’s greatest novelists, among them Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas ( père), and Victor Hugo. When Vidocq’s highly popular if somewhat lurid Memoirs were published in 1828, it was whispered that his heavily embroidered adventures were influenced by the work of these literary lions. The mixture of styles in the book makes it likely that it was a compilation by a committee. What is certain is that Vidocq’s literary friends made frequent use of his knowledge and personality as components of their work. Alexandre Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and Honoré de Balzac’s Comédie Humaine all revolve around disguise, dramatic escapes, and the tracing of criminals.

  Balzac in particular questioned Vidocq in detail about his use of disguise. Vidocq’s view was that developing a role began with careful observation. A subject’s ways of walking, gesturing, and eating were tools of the trade. “Observe he whom you would become, then adopt his manner.” A costume must be complete, down to the underclothes. “If you would play a peasant, there must be dirt under the nails.” Vidocq suggested that undercover operatives carry a number of different-colored scarves and hats so that they could change their appearance rapidly, a simple but effective technique still used by plainclothes detectives today.

  When it was necessary for him to take an aristocratic role, Vidocq was also prepared, as he notes in his Memoirs, to win the confidence of a female witness:

  I soon determined on the disguise which was best adapted for my purpose. It was apparent that I must assume the guise of a very respectable gentleman, and consequently, by means of some false wrinkles, a pig-tail, snowy-white ruffles, a large gold-headed cane, a three-cornered hat, buckles, breeches and coat to match,—I was metamorphosed into one of those good sexagenarian citizens, whom all old ladies admire.

  Vidocq occasionally used walnut stain to darken his face, made fake blisters out of wax, and imitated facial blemishes with glued coffee grains. We can hear echoes of these practices in “The Dying Detective,” when Sherlock Holmes explains to Watson his technique of appearing deathly ill:

  “Three days of absolute fast does not improve one’s beauty, Watson. For the rest, there is nothing which a sponge may not cure. With vaseline upon one’s forehead, belladonna in one’s eyes, rouge over the cheekbones, and crusts of beeswax round one’s lips, a very satisfying effect can be produced.”

  Vidocq’s picaresque adventures included the creation of the first private detective agency, Le Bureau des Renseignements, during a hiatus in his government work, and he has been credited with encouraging early studies in fingerprinting, ballistics, and crime scene analysis. But it is for his genius at disguise that he is best remembered.

  In 1845, Vidocq, whose Memoirs in English translation had been the talk of London, arrived there to open an exhibit of his memorabilia. The Times of London, reviewing the presentation, remarked on the detective’s extraordinary flexibility. Although in his seventies, he appeared a vigorous twenty years younger. He stood five feet ten inches, the paper wrote, but could change his stature and make himself smaller by flexing his knees under his coat, walking about with casual ease. According to other observers, he was only five feet six inches but could make himself look taller. The one thing certain about Eugène François Vidocq was that nothing was certain. He aged as he had lived, a chameleon.

  Another dashing figure of the period gifted at dissembling and changing his appearance was Richard Burton, explorer, swordsman, linguist, scholar, collector of erotica, and general irritant to the proper British middle class. Forced to leave his studies at Oxford due to all-around bad behavior, he managed on his own to acquire fluency in twenty-five languages, among them Arabic, and an even larger number of dialects.

  Fascinated by Arab culture, Burton was determined to enter the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, which were forbidden to non-Muslims on pain of death. Always willing to flirt with the supreme penalty, he disguised himself as a Muslim pilgrim from Afghanistan, further darkening his naturally olive skin and dressing the part, down to the undergarments, just as Vidocq would have done. Burton accomplished his mission in 1855, and, returning safely, published his account of it, Pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca, to the astonished applause of British intellectuals.

  Conan Doyle mentions Burton’s great appeal to women in his story “The Lost World,” and he was certainly aware of Burton’s exploits. Perhaps Conan Doyle was further intrigued by the explorer’s trip to study the Mormons of Utah in 1860. Burton’s book on the subject, The City of the Saints, may well have provided some of the inspiration for the section of A Study in Scarlet that takes place in Utah. Certainly, the Victorian public was intrigued by Burton and his dashing adventures and disguises.

  Disquise, useful to detectives, intrepid explorers, and the dishonest, was the subject of “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” in which Neville St. Clair confesses to Holmes:

  “When an actor I had, of course, learned all the secrets of making up, and had been famous in the green-room for my skill. I took advantage now of my attainments. I painted my face, and to make myself as pitiable as possible I made a good scar and fixed one side of my lip in a twist by the aid of a small slip of flesh-colored plaster.”

  As clever criminals turned disguise to their own advantage, it took imaginative detective work to see through it. Just such talent was found in Detective Henry Goddard. In 1864, he was practicing as a private operative in London when he received an unusual assignment from the Gresham Life Assurance Company. A notice of the death of Edward James Farren, actuary and secretary of the company, had appeared in the Times of London. Shocked that they had received no direct information from the Farren family that their employee was either ill or dead, the directors asked Goddard to investigate.

  They had chosen their representative well. Goddard was a former member of the Bow Street Runners, the organization that was a forerunner of the London Metropolitan Police. He was intelligent, well organized, and intuitive. Learning that Farren had been traveling alone on the continent, that Farren’s wife had received news of her husband’s death only from a stranger’s letter, and that there were certain peculiar discrepancies in the assurance company’s accounts, Goddard suspected fraud. Farren, he believed, had faked his own death to escape with the missing funds and to allow his wife to collect a death benefit.

  Farren was known to have a deformed foot and to walk with a severe limp. Reasoning that if Farren hoped to escape notice the limp would have to be hidden, Goddard visited Mr. Walsh, an anatomical boot-maker who he believed had the skills that might have been useful to the missing man. Walsh easily remembered constructing special footgear for Farren, who had promised him fifty pounds if he could make a boot that would hide his disability.

  As Farren’s heel was about three inches higher than was natural, Walsh had cut a piece of cork to fill the space. To keep this firmly situated, he made a thin slipper to place over the cork and another outer boot to cover the whole thing. A piece of steel was slipped through both boot and cork and held in place by two lengths of iron worn under the trousers on either side of the shortened leg. The complex arrangement was braced with straps. The result was that Farren could walk with only a slight unevenness of gait.

  Suspecting that Farren was still in London, Goddard questioned hotel employees until he found one who remembered a man of Farren’s description who had a very slight limp. This man had ordered traveling trunks of the sort used for long journeys to be delivered to the hotel and had left with them for Liverpool, which was the port from which ships left for Australia as well as for America. Goddard discovered that the suspect was using the name J. Williams and had left behind a discarded note indicating he had paid the shipping line 144 pounds, an amount sufficient for passage to Australia. Goddard assumed that’s where Farren was headed and set out to follow him
.

  Farren had a head start of seventy days. The way to Australia was arduous and Goddard was sixty-four years old, but he was also grimly determined. He pursued his quarry from Liverpool to Marseilles, to Sicily, to Egypt (where he stopped to pay his respects to the Sphinx, which, he noted in his memoirs, was “of colossal Magnitude”). He encountered mosquitoes in murderous numbers, traveled by donkey, was carried piggyback by Arabs, and at last arrived by ship in Australia.

  He began by visiting the spots frequented by English tourists. Knowing that Farren was an ardent music lover, Goddard attended the opera, where he spotted someone who he believed fit the missing man’s description. He followed the subject to Scott’s Hotel and saw him enter.

  The next day, Goddard approached the hotel’s owner, Mr. Scott, and explained the problem. Waiting until Farren/Williams was out for the day, Scott accompanied Goddard to the suspect’s room. In the closet, they discovered several pairs of boots made by Walsh.

  Like the prince seeking Cinderella, Goddard had brought with him all the way from London a copy of the boot that Walsh had made for Farren. It corresponded exactly with the boots in the closet. The boots had holes in their sides to accommodate the rivets that held the prosthesis. The very disguise that allowed Farren to leave London unnoticed served to identify him now.

  Goddard noted in his Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner that his trip home was pleasant and that his bill to the assurance company “amounted to a goodly sum. It was paid, and most liberally.”

  There is no public record of any punishment or penalty inflicted on Mr. Farren. It may have been that the Gresham Life Assurance Company preferred to dispose of the matter with genteel discretion, as Sherlock Holmes and the police were to do in “The Man with the Twisted Lip.”

  Disguise among criminals was a serious enough matter for Hans Gross, the famous Austrian legal expert, to address the subject at length in his great work Criminal Investigation, which was first published in the late nineteenth century and has had a lasting influence on forensic science. He noted that generally “a novice commits a crime and then disguises himself; an expert criminal disguises himself before the offence.”

  Gross describes a case of bank robbery in which the teller insisted that the thief was very short. The suspect apprehended with the stolen money was quite tall. It seems the robber had worn a long coat and that, like Vidocq, he possessed the ability of walking easily with his knees bent.

  Gross warns investigators to be wary of descriptions of scars, limps, and other deformities, as criminals often adopt these to carry out crimes only to discard them afterward. And in a case reminiscent of the false beggar in “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” Gross writes of a man who asked for charity because of blindness, a condition he simulated by inserting drops of erserine in each eye, which caused the pupils to contract severely and gave the eyes a damaged appearance.

  Gross suggests testing for pretended deafness by dropping a heavy object just behind the subject. A truly deaf person, he writes, will react because he feels the vibration in the floor. A malingerer will not respond, as he thinks that that will be convincing.

  Gross’s book was translated into English by 1907, but although it was widely read by scientists, it was evidently ignored by one medical practitioner who would have benefited from the chapter on seeing through disguises. His name was Hawley Harvey Crippen (although his wife insisted on addressing him as “Peter”), and in 1910, his home at 39 Hilltop Crescent became the scene of domestic disaster.

  Dr. Crippen, a very small man with a large mustache and thick glasses, was an American who had acquired somewhat dubious medical credentials in his native land before taking up residence in London. He worked for both a patent medicine firm and a dental practice, with no great professional success.

  The large and demanding wife with whom he unhappily lived was known as Belle Elmore. Previously she had called herself Cora Turner. Mrs. Crippen, who harbored theatrical aspirations, evidently felt that the name with which she had been graced at birth, Kunigunde Mackamotzski, lacked a certain je ne sais quoi.

  As Mrs. Crippen indulged in expensive clothes and jewelry, finances were strained in the Crippen ménage. To make ends meet, they took in occasional boarders, whom Mrs. Crippen intimately entertained.

  Dr. Crippen was responsible for most of the ensuing housekeeping chores. After a long day of mixing complicated but useless elixirs and pulling occasional teeth, he came home to a dark basement kitchen grimly redolent of meals long past and was required to tidy up.

  He was temporarily distracted from the difficult situation by Ethel Le Neve, a young typist in his employ with whom he had formed a romantic attachment. But when Belle announced she planned to remove her savings from their joint account, tension grew.

  On January 31, 1910, the Crippens, who had no boarders at the time, entertained a couple named Martinetti as dinner guests. The visitors said later that it was a very jolly evening. They left at onethirty in the morning, waving farewell to Belle as she stood under the gas lamp near the front door. They were never to see her again.

  Ten days before, Dr. Crippen had ordered and received five grains of hyoscine, a potent narcotic, from the chemists Lewis and Burrows. A few days after the dinner with the Martinettis, Crippen pawned most of his wife’s jewelry. He informed their friends that his wife had gone to California. He later told them that Belle had been stricken with a sudden illness and had died in America.

  Ethel was seen with Crippen wearing a brooch that had belonged to Belle. The Crippens’ friends, suspicious, reported the matter to the police.

  Chief Inspector Walter Dew interviewed Dr. Crippen at home. Crippen confessed that he had been lying—his wife had left him for another man, and he had been too humiliated to admit it. He made no objection to the inspector’s searching the house. Sympathetic to the clearly distressed little man, Dew made a casual inspection that produced nothing suspicious.

  A few days later, Dew returned to check on some minor details and learned that Crippen and Ethel had disappeared. A thorough search of the house was ordered. In the coal cellar beneath some loose bricks lay a mass of putrid human flesh and hair. The limbs and head were missing, as were the bones.

  One of the medical experts who examined the remains, Bernard Spilsbury (who was just making a name for himself in the forensic world), identified a mark on the skin as a surgical scar, which corresponded to surgery that Belle was known to have undergone. A large amount of hyoscine was recovered from the tissue. The location of Belle seemed clear. The question now was, where were Crippen and Ethel?

  A vessel named the Montrose was slowly making its way from Europe to Canada. Its captain was Harry Kendall, a meticulously observant gentleman with an interest in detective stories. He was curious about two passengers named Robinson—a father and his son. The elder had a pale patch above his lip, as though a mustache had recently resided there. Faint marks on either side of his nose seemed to indicate the recent presence of glasses.

  Young Master Robinson, who was said to be sixteen, seemed to have a very high-pitched voice. His walk appeared odd. Kendall observed them closely. The young boy’s suit fitted poorly—it was split up the back and held together by safety pins. The elder man was most solicitous of the younger, cracking nuts for the boy at dinner.

  Kendall had a copy of the newspaper that was published the day the Montrose sailed. It featured a story on the Crippen murder and a large photo of Crippen and Ethel. Kendall noticed that “Mr. Robinson” reacted slowly to his name if called from behind.

  The captain reached the obvious conclusion. His ship was one of the few that boasted a wireless, and he made use of it. He sent a message detailing his observations. Scotland Yard dispatched Inspector Dew on the Laurentian, a faster ship than the Montrose. The chase across the Atlantic was featured every day in the papers, although the “Robinsons” were blissfully unaware of it. Often, according to Kendall, the elder suspect would sit on deck, look up at the wireless antenna aloft, a
nd say, “What a wonderful invention it is!”

  Before the Montrose reached the dock at Quebec, she was approached by a pilot boat and boarded by its crew. One of them was actually Inspector Dew. He was disguised as a harbor pilot.

  The inspector greeted “Mr. Robinson” on the deck, saying cordially, “Good morning, Dr. Crippen… . Do you remember me?”

  Crippen was returned to London, where he was found guilty of the murder of his wife. The jury deliberated for twenty-seven minutes. He was hanged at Pentonville Prison on November 23, 1910. Ethel was acquitted and lived an apparently uneventful long life.

  Hawley Harvey Crippen was the most hapless of criminals. Not only did he have to contend with Captain Kendall, who possessed both Sherlockian acuity and a wireless, but Dr. Crippen couldn’t help betraying the classic sign of the novice criminal when he clumsily disguised himself after the fact.

  There are times, as Sherlock Holmes observed while identifying the poorly disguised villain in “A Case of Identity,” when “There is no possible getting out of it… . It is quite too transparent.”

  Whatever remains

  • Dr. James Barry was a brilliant and much-respected Victorian-era physician who had obtained a diploma as Doctor of Medicine from Edinburgh when only fifteen years of age, and who served with distinction in the British army in such exotic locations as St. Helena, the Ionian islands, Malta, and the West Indies. Easily angered, the touchy doctor had fought a duel with a fellow officer. Upon retiring from the military, Dr. Barry was appointed to the prestigious civilian post of inspector of hospitals. When James Barry died at the age of eighty in 1865, a postmortem examination disclosed the fact that the doctor was a woman. She had lived her entire adult life in disguise. Since inheritance rights, access to professional training, and voting rights often hinged on gender, there was ample motivation for such dissembling, and a number of similar cases appear in the medical texts of the period.