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

  Growing alarmed, the younger Fleming searched the house. One of the doors to the maid’s basement bedroom was locked from the inside, but access was gained through a second door that connected the bedroom to the pantry.

  Jessie lay prone on the floor near her bed. She was nearly naked, and a piece of carpet covered the upper part of her body. She had been hacked and battered by numerous blows. One of them was deep enough to have exposed her brain. There was a great deal of blood in the room, and what appeared to be three bloody prints of a naked human foot were impressed on the floor.

  Old Fleming held his hands up in horror and exclaimed, “She’s been lying there all this time—and me in the house!”

  A doctor was sent for, and, as in those well-ordered days house calls were expected, a doctor promptly arrived. His name was Watson. He pronounced life extinct, and then, contemplating the extensive sanguinary signs of slaughter, he perspicaciously observed, “This is evidently not a suicide—you had better call the police.”

  The police surgeon, Dr. Joseph Fleming (no relation to the now unhappy residents of 17 Sandyford Place), together with Dr. Watson, noticed the presence of bloodstains all through the kitchen and the basement hall, and a trail of blood leading to the bedroom, suggesting that the corpse had been dragged. There were bloody fingerprints on the wall, but as fingerprints were not utilized in Scottish police work in 1862, they were ignored. The doctors were struck by the discovery that the kitchen and bedroom floors, and the neck, chest, and face of the dead woman had all been recently washed. The floors were still damp. The bloody footprints lay just beyond the washed area. A drawer in the kitchen proved to contain a butcher’s cleaver, which bore traces of blood.

  The police were initially highly suspicious of the elderly Mr. Fleming. The medical judgment was that the blows could have been performed by a weak man, and his behavior was most peculiar. He stated that he had heard “squeals” coming from the maid’s room on Friday night but had made no effort to investigate. In spite of claiming that he had no idea where Jessie had been for three days, he had not mentioned this interesting fact to the many people with whom he had contact during the weekend, including Jessie’s “young man,” who had come to the house during that period.

  The milk boy had called at the house on Saturday, and the door had been opened by the old man, although this had always been Jessie’s function. Asked why he had done so, old Fleming replied, “On Saturday morning, ye ken, Jessie was deid, she couldna’ open the door when she was deid!” This was clearly at variance with his claim that he was ignorant of her fate until Monday afternoon. Old Fleming was placed under arrest and confined to jail. But the elderly gentleman pled a shaky memory to account for any discrepancies, and the discovery that some silver and a few dresses of Jessie’s were missing suggested robbery as a motive for the killing.

  The police suspected that the three footprints etched in blood were a vital clue—if they could determine who had left them, they might solve the case. Unlike the Great Detective—who was perfectly competent in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” to identify footprints by sight alone and who announced to Watson, “That left foot of yours with its inward twist is all over the place. A mole could trace it”—the Glasgow detectives needed to proceed with caution.

  The problem for them was that there was no established protocol for the examination and comparison of footprints in a criminal case. The detectives, however, were flexible and inventive, although sadly ill-equipped.

  Alexander M’Call, an assistant superintendent of police in Glasgow, compared the size of the bloody footprints to those of both the deceased and old Mr. Fleming. Lacking a foot rule, he used a stick, keeping his finger and thumb at the appropriate place. It was his conclusion that the footprints had been made by someone outside the Fleming ménage. But who and where was that “someone”?

  Advertisements inquiring about the missing items were answered by a pawnbroker who provided a description of a young woman who had brought the silver to him. A railroad clerk located the missing dresses in a trunk that had been mailed to a nonexistent address by a woman of similar description. Old Mr. Fleming thoughtfully told the police that the description sounded like that of Jessie M’lachlan, who had worked as a domestic servant for the Flemings before her marriage and who was a close friend of the murdered woman. Mrs. M’lachlan denied being in the Fleming house on the weekend of the murder and claimed that the missing items had been given to her by old Fleming, along with a tip and instructions for her to dispose of them as she had.

  Finding this explanation unlikely and wanting to construct a solid case for the prosecution, the detectives asked the police doctors to examine the new suspect’s feet scientifically and compare them with the bloody prints. Dr. George Husband Baird MacLeod, a professor of surgery at Glasgow University, who had already advised the police to cut out and preserve as evidence the floorboards that bore the prints, now accepted the challenge of identifying them. In an article that appeared in the Glasgow Medical Journal in 1864, he explained exactly how he did it:

  When Mrs. M’lachlan was taken into custody it was thought most important that a very carefully made comparison should be instituted by a professional man between the impressions and her foot… . [T]he author … tried several experiments on his own foot to test the accuracy of several agents to produce impressions on wood which could be comparable with that under consideration… . Nothing was found which was not open to objection except blood; and so, having obtained a small phial of bullock’s blood, a thin coating of it was placed on wax cloth and the prisoner asked to place her left foot on it and then step on a plank of wood. The accused repeated this several times without the slightest objection… . The early impressions were not suitable as the … wood had been oiled for some other purpose; but when the writer had as closely as possible imitated the conditions in which the original impressions had been made, i.e., had placed the blood on one side of the room, a piece of carpet between, and then an old dry plank of wood ([as at the crime scene] at 17 Sandyford Place …) on which to stand, two impressions were got which corresponded with a degree of accuracy which was quite marvelous with the marks taken from the house. In the minutest detail of measurement and outline did they tally with the original, and in fact each of them was, if possible, closer to the Sandyford footmark than they were to one another.

  Further, several witnesses stated that Jessie M’lachlan had told them that she was planning to visit the deceased at Sandyford Place on the significant Friday, and that, having been gone from her own domicile all that night, she was seen returning home at nine o’clock on Saturday morning. Jessie M’lachlan was charged with murder, and old Fleming was set free to offer testimony against her. (According to Scottish law at the time, this made him immune from future prosecution.)

  The accused pled not guilty, and the prosecution pressed its case vigorously, leaning heavily on the footprint evidence. “We can do nothing … that does not leave its impress behind, for good or for evil, for a blessing or a curse,” declaimed Adam Gifford, the prosecutor. “Our footprints are left,” he thundered, “in whatever we do… . The traces of our actions, good or bad, have life, and they will testify for or against us. And crimes have always left their footprints. In Jessie M’pherson’s bedroom, gentlemen, there are bloody footprints! Whose are those footprints?”

  But although the case against Mrs. M’lachlan seemed damning, it contained huge inconsistencies. There appeared to be no rational motive. The victim’s sister testified that the two women had been close friends. There was no history of a quarrel between them. The missing silver was of little worth, and much more valuable and portable items in the house had been left untouched.

  If the crime had been committed on Friday night and the old man had been unknowingly alone with the corpse until Monday afternoon, who had washed the floor and the dead woman’s face? And why? If Mrs. M’lachlan had done so after the crime to try to hide the blood, why was the floor still wet on Monday? And the
n there were those diligently preserved footprints. If the floor was washed to eliminate evidence, why was no attempt made to erase those clearly damning prints? What about the testimony of a friend of the deceased to the effect that old Fleming had made his maid’s life a misery with his obsessive interest?

  On the last point, Lord Deas, the judge, who had clearly decided from the start of the trial not to allow the proceedings to be tinged by impartiality, did his best to prevent the jury from hearing the sordid details of old Fleming’s debauched habits, although half of Glasgow had gossiped about them. A number of his old acquaintances insisted that he was not eighty-seven years old as he claimed but merely a sprightly seventy-eight, which might serve to explain his energy.

  What is certain is that old Fleming often drank to excess, and when he did (evidently in the grip of incurable optimism), he pressed his amorous attentions on a number of young women. Ten years before, old Fleming, the eldest member of the Anderston United Presbyterian Church, had been chastised by the Kirk Session for the “sin of fornication” with Janet Dunsmore, a domestic servant whom he had impregnated.

  These embarrassing issues were avoided at the trial. As the prosecutor tartly observed, “The guilt of James Fleming is not the subject of this inquiry.” The judge delivered a four-hour charge to the jury that contained not one word favorable to the accused but did discuss at length the “bloody marks of naked feet.”

  The trial had lasted three days. The jury, deliberating with dispatch, returned a guilty verdict in just fifteen minutes. The judge, who had arrived at court handily equipped with the black cap worn when pronouncing a death sentence, was irritated by the defense counsel, who slowed the proceedings by the announcement that the accused wished to have a statement read. The judge had to agree. This was her right, although defendants were not allowed to testify during the trial.

  Jessie M’lachlan was only partially literate, and her statement, which she had dictated, was read aloud by her counsel, Rutherford Clark. She admitted she had visited the deceased on the fatal Friday night and had spent a good part of the evening in the kitchen drinking whiskey with her and old Mr. Fleming. They ran out of the libation by eleven, and Fleming sent her to the pub to purchase more. The pub was closed. On her return to Sandyford Place, she found Jessie M’pherson on the floor of her bedroom, half undressed, stunned, and bleeding from cuts on her brow and nose. Mrs. M’lachlan asked her host to bring water so that she could aid the injured woman. While Fleming was attending to this, the victim regained her senses and confided that he had made a sexual advance toward her that she had repulsed, as she had previous such attempts, and that in a rage he had struck her with something sharp.

  Fleming returned with a basin of water, some of which spilled, drenching Mrs. M’lachlan’s dress, shoes, and stockings, so she removed them and was barefoot as she washed her friend’s bloody wounds. Fleming refused her request to send for a doctor, saying he would send for one in the morning and that he would make amends to the injured woman by making her comfortable the rest of her life. Helped into the warmth of the kitchen, Jessie M’pherson lay down in front of the fire but seemed to grow weaker.

  Mrs. M’lachlan, now determined to have a doctor, dressed herself to go out and find one, only to discover that the front door had been locked. She heard a noise in the kitchen and rushed back to it, where, she said, “I saw the old man striking her with something which I saw afterwards was the meat chopper … he was striking her on the side of her head … he took the body by the oxters [armpits] and dragged it … [to the bedroom] … and took the sheet and wiped the blood with it… . I saw the chopper all covered with blood. I beseeched and begged of him to let me go away and I would swear I would never reveal what I had seen.”

  The statement goes on to say that the old man claimed he was sure that his maid would die anyway, and if a doctor came and heard her story, he would be arrested, so he had to kill her; that if Mrs. M’lachlan were to report the matter to anyone, she would be blamed, too; and that she was to take the silver and sell it so that he could claim a burglary.

  In his incisive 1938 account of the case, the great legal historian William Roughead commented, “On each and every point in which Mrs. M’lachlan’s statement was capable of confirmation, its truth was clearly established; in no single instance was it in any respect contradicted. It fitted the proven facts so perfectly as to render its fabrication incredible.”

  But Lord Deas, having brought the black cap with him, was determined to wear it. Denouncing Jessie M’lachlan’s statement as “a tissue of wicked falsehoods,” he condemned her to die at the end of a rope in three weeks’ time. He expressed the wish, in traditional fashion, that “the Lord will have mercy upon your soul.” Mrs. M’lachlan cried in response, “Aye, He’ll hae mercy, for I am innocent!”

  The statement became public knowledge, and sentiment rapidly grew in favor of the convicted woman. The newspapers were inundated with letters on her behalf, several of them making the point that the wet floor must have been the result of the old man washing it just before the body was discovered and that he had deliberately spared the footprints with the purpose of incriminating Mrs. M’lachlan. “When once your point of view is changed, the very thing which was so damning becomes a clue to the truth,” Sherlock Holmes says in “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” and so it was in the Sandyford case.

  Within a month, a formal inquiry found that legal ethics required that Mrs. M’lachlan’s life be spared, but that as she was an accessory after the fact, the judicial view of simple decency required a sentence of life at penal servitude. She served fifteen years before she was released. She had been a model prisoner who never ceased to insist on her innocence. Her son had been three years of age when she was sentenced. At her release he was eighteen. Mrs. M’lachlan eventually emigrated to America and died in Michigan in 1899.

  No legal charges could be brought against old Mr. Fleming, but the stigma that attached itself to the priapic paterfamilias made life in Glasgow socially unpleasant. As a result, he and his family felt it wise to move away and so vacated the atmospheric premises of number 17 Sandyford Place.

  Although the footprints in the M’lachlan affair had pointed in the wrong direction, the publicity elicited by the case aroused interest in footprints as evidence. In 1882, when the British forensic pathologist Charles Meymott Tidy published his text, Legal Medicine, he included a lengthy section titled “Marks of the Hands and Feet.” He reported that having made numerous experiments, he had established that footprints may be larger or smaller than the boot or foot that produced them. In the case of a footprint made in soft sand or soil, he noted, the particles at the edge of the print collapse into the impression as the foot is withdrawn. In wet clay, the impression is larger, as the foot is lifted in the opposite direction from the one in which it was first placed. Therefore, not only is the print important, but the material in which it is left is also highly relevant.

  Tidy suggested methods for taking plaster casts of footprints— a technique Sherlock Holmes perfected, as the Great Detective modestly implies in The Sign of Four: “Here is my monograph upon the tracing of footsteps, with some remarks upon the uses of plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses”—as well as for examining them for bloodstains or other biological markers, and advised removing floorboards that show bloody footprints to serve as evidence, just as had been done in the Sandyford case.

  Tidy evidently would have disagreed with the footprint evidence offered in the Sandyford case, as he was dubious about the worth of naked footprints. He wrote, “In the case of a naked foot, supposing the blood to have been washed off, and there be no peculiarities in the conformation of the foot and toes corresponding to the stain, the evidence of a blood impress on a floor can of itself be of very little value re identity.” (This, of course, was before the study of skin ridges was developed.)

  There was also a great deal of disagreement among specialists in medical jurisprudence as to the relationship between
footprints and the feet that produced them. Tidy remarked, “[Dr.] Mascar of Belgium contended that the footprint is generally smaller than the foot, while [Dr.] Caussé claimed it was generally larger.”

  Although in the nineteenth century most footwear was individually made, and the marks left by boots and shoes were therefore distinctive, evidence drawn from these marks was not effectively used in court. Through the end of the nineteenth century, there was still no generally accepted protocol for the collection and study of footprints. Sherlock Holmes might have been able to draw definite conclusions about the physical size of individuals from their foot marks, but physicians disagreed with each other on the subject. Paul Topinard, the French anthropologist, included in his text, Anthropology (which appeared in English in 1890), a section titled “The Proportions of the Hand and Foot.” It contained a table that concerned the ratio between foot size and height, but the variations were so wide that they had little practical use in forensic work.

  The legal effectiveness of footprint evidence was further limited by creative criminals who made use of footprints to foil investigators. Allan Pinkerton, the American private eye, wrote in his 1884 memoir, Thirty Years a Detective, that clever burglars, when attempting to enter homes that were “surrounded by soft and yielding ground, in which the shoes they wear would make an impression which might lead to detection, wear [as a form of disguise] extraordinarily large shoes.” They would discard the misleading shoes in a nearby well after the job was completed.

  Infrequently, a less than astute burglar would leave behind his own compromising footwear, to the delight of law enforcement. An instructive example of this occurred in Falkirk, Scotland, in the autumn of 1937. A particularly agile thief was found inside a shop that he had illegally entered. He was in his stocking feet. His shoes had been left outside near the drainpipe that he had climbed to gain access. There had been two similar burglaries in the area in which the police had collected discarded shoes, but the climbing burglar denied any knowledge of them. The pathologist Sir Sydney Smith was asked if he could determine whether the footwear left at the other scenes had been worn by the same man.