by E. J. Wagner
The police were not impressed. Some of his reported victims were indeed missing, but others appeared to be completely imaginary. Haigh had fraudulently collected funds from the genuine victims, and the police believed that his motive was purely monetary and that the vampire tale was merely setting the stage for an insanity defense. Sherlock Holmes had remarked in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” “The idea of a vampire was to me absurd. Such things do not happen in criminal practice in England.” That was very much the feeling among the police investigating Haigh.
A great deal of circumstantial evidence was already at hand, and the police improved on it. Keith Simpson, the eminent forensic pathologist, was asked to inspect the sludge that was spread outside the Crawley “factory.” He went carefully over the ground in very much the same way Holmes examined the ground in Boscombe Valley:
For a long time he [Holmes] remained there, turning over the leaves and dried sticks, gathering up what seemed to me to be dust into an envelope and examining with his lens not only the ground but even the bark of the tree as far as he could reach. A jagged stone was lying among the moss, and this also he carefully examined and retained.
Dr. Simpson observed small pebbles covering the area just outside the six-by-four-foot greasy mass of sludge. He examined the pebbles with a magnifying glass. He wrote later, “I picked one up and examined it through the lens. It was about the size of a cherry, and looked very much like the other stones, except it had polished facets.” Stones with polished facets were not indigenous to the area, and Dr. Simpson concluded that the unusual specimen was a gallstone, originally belonging to the late Mrs. DurandDeacon. And so it proved. Gallstones, it seems, are very resistant to acid.
The sludge, which was carted off to the laboratory, weighed 475 pounds, and within it were found dentures, part of a plastic handbag, a few bone fragments, and more gallstones. The dentures were firmly identified by Mrs. DurandDeacon’s dentist as belonging to the victim.
The defense, which pled insanity, presented psychiatric evidence that Haigh had been reared in a grim atmosphere of religious fanaticism and cruelty and had been plagued since childhood by dreams of blood and an urge to drink his own urine.
The unimpressed jury wasted no time in arriving at a guilty verdict. Haigh, sentenced to death, willed his clothing to Madame Tussaud’s wax museum, with the stipulation that his effigy be shown properly attired, trousers neatly creased, shirt cuffs showing, hair properly parted. The “vampire” had a concern for detail.
The value of subtle trace evidence, demonstrated by Keith Simpson, Edmond Locard, and their fictional counterpart Sherlock Holmes, has only increased with time. In 1974, in the second edition of Crime Investigation, the criminalist Paul Kirk wrote of the criminal:
Wherever he steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves even unconsciously, will serve as silent witness against him. Not only his fingerprints or his footprints, but his hair, the fibers from his clothes, the glass he breaks, the tool marks he leaves, the paint he scratches, the blood or semen he deposits or collects—all of these and more bear mute witness against him. This is evidence that does not forget. It is not confused by the excitement of the moment. It is not absent because human witnesses are. It cannot perjure itself. It cannot be wholly absent. Only its interpretation can err. Only human failure to find it, study and understand it, can diminish its value.
And Holmes, of course, makes certain that the “mute witness” is made to speak. As he tells Inspector Lestrade in “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” “I pay a good deal of attention to matters of detail, as you may have observed.”
Whatever remains
• “The hero of the Long Island Cave Mystery?” inquires Sherlock Holmes when he is introduced to Mr. Leverton of Pinkerton’s American Agency in “The Adventure of the Red Circle.” Holmes thus launched endless speculation among Sherlockians, as it is generally accepted that there are no caves on Long Island in the United States. But in geological terms this is debatable. An old, somewhat obscure definition of “cave” is “any hollow.” About 15,000 years ago on the northern half of Long Island, chunks of ice broke off from a glacier and were imbedded in the earth. Eventually these frozen masses melted, and great hollows in the ground formed in their place. These are known as “kettles.” Perhaps these are the mysterious “Caves of Long Island.”
• Another possibility often mentioned by Conan Doyle scholars is that the Long Island referred to is not the one in New York. If that is the case, an excellent candidate in terms of earth evidence is the Long Island in the Bahamas. Eighty miles long and one to three miles wide, it boasts a rough, rocky shore and many limestone caves.
• Alfred Swaine Taylor, the pathologist, wrote as early as 1873 of the importance of collecting diatoms and other microscopic plant life in drowning cases in order to match them to the body of water in which the corpse was found. He mentioned a case in which the discrepancy between the diatoms in the body and those in the water tank in which the body was discovered indicated that the drowning had occurred elsewhere.
CHAPTER 11
Notes from the Devil
“Let us now see the letter.”
—Sherlock Holmes in “The Man with the Twisted Lip”
Just as he is fascinated by footprints, Sherlock Holmes is intrigued by the study of ambiguous documents. The Sherlockian eye for detail is most penetrating on this subject, as he demonstrates in “The Man with the Twisted Lip” when he says to the wife of a missing man:
“The name, you see, is in perfectly black ink, which has dried itself. The rest is of the grayish color, which shows that blotting-paper has been used. If it had been written straight off, and then blotted, none would be of a deep black shade. This man has written the name, and there has then been a pause before he wrote the address, which can only mean that he was not familiar with it. It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles.”
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Holmes’s interest in the evidence provided by letters written by hand or by typewriter is well placed. Forgery has an old and dishonorable history, and the evaluation of questioned documents is one of the most complex disciplines in the forensic sciences. The subject was addressed early in English legal proceedings, and the Scottish-born Arthur Conan Doyle no doubt learned as a schoolboy of the notorious Casket Letters, which influenced the fate of a Scottish queen.
The January 1569 court papers of England’s Elizabeth I refer to the subject. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, fleeing political and military chaos in her country, had traveled to England in the hope of support and succor from her cousin Elizabeth. Mary was accused by English nobles of having had a part in the murder of her dissipated second husband, Lord Darnley. The evidence of her complicity was said to be contained in letters of hers found among the possessions of her third husband, James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell.
Mary denied her guilt. She and her advisers were allowed to examine only copies of the letters, and the courtiers who testified as to their authenticity had no particular expertise in the matter. The arrangement of characters and use of language in the copied letters were not typical of Mary. (Holmes takes note of a similar anomaly centuries later in A Study in Scarlet: “The A, if you noticed, was printed somewhat after the German fashion. Now, a real German invariably prints in the Latin character, so that we may safely say that this was not written by one, but by a clumsy imitator.”)
Elizabeth, who for political reasons wished to avoid a conviction at the time, pronounced an equivocal verdict: “Nothing had been sufficiently proved, whereby the Queen of England should conceive an evil opinion of her good sister.” But the issue of the letters tempered sympathy for Mary, making her eventual execution more palatable to the public.
The original letters have long been lost, so a scientifically informed opinion as to whether they were forgeries promoted by the English court is impossible. What is certain, however, is the authenticity of the extraordinary letter of condolence that Eliza
beth I sent to Mary’s son, James of Scotland, after his mother was beheaded. “My dear Brother,” she wrote, pretending that the entire miserable business had been engineered by her nobles against her will, “I would you knew (though not felt) the extreme dolor that overwhelms my mind, for that miserable accident which (far contrary to my meaning) hath befallen.” (The “accident” had included the attentions of a particularly inept executioner who needed three blows with an axe to get the job done.) After a few pages of similar warm familial sentiment, it was closed with “Your most assured loving sister and cousin. Elizabeth R.”
Royal blood did not protect one from suspicions of forgery, and neither did being a member of the social elite. In the middle of the nineteenth century, within the pristine precincts of Boston, Massachusetts, a murder case that riveted the attention of the public on both sides of the Atlantic hinged partially on suspect documents.
In 1849, Harvard Medical School was housed in a two-story brick building that squatted at the edge of the Charles River. The rear of the building was supported by wooden pilings sunk deep in the riverbed. The dissecting room and its disposal vault lay in the back, on an earthen floor. When the river rose, water entered the vault and flowed over the human debris inside, so the discarded bits and pieces, the shards and scraps, rose and fell with the tide.
Just before Thanksgiving, George Parkman, a wellknown physician, businessman, and philanthropist, disappeared. He had last been seen entering the College of Medicine, and it was searched by the police, but to no avail.
As the search widened, a number of letters offering advice and commentary about the case arrived for the authorities. Three in particular aroused the interest of Marshal Francis Tukey, the head of law enforcement in Boston. One was signed “Civis,” was clearly written by an educated person, and suggested that the river as well as the outhouses be searched. The other two were barely legible, seemingly illiterate scrawls: one advising that Parkman had been kidnapped and taken aboard a ship, while the other opined that Parkman’s dead body was to be found on Brooklyn Heights. None of these suggestions bore fruit.
The police may have been stalemated, but not so Ephraim Littlefield, a dissecting room porter of extraordinary industry. Littlefield’s suspicions were aroused, he later claimed, by the unusual gift of a coupon for a Thanksgiving turkey presented to him by John Webster, professor of chemistry. Possibly the porter was motivated by the thought of a reward promised for information regarding the missing man. Whatever his reason, late one night while the students were absent and the laboratories empty, the silence of the medical school was broken by the chink of Littlefield’s chisel, chipping away relentlessly at the brick wall that enclosed the privy vault beneath Dr. Webster’s laboratory. Littlefield’s discovery of a pelvis and other body parts in the privy led to the indictment of Dr. Webster, who, it was discovered, owed Parkman a large sum of money that he couldn’t repay.
At the trial, the prosecutor, George Bemis, argued that Dr. Webster had written the letters in order to distract suspicion from himself. The trial record of that case is one of the first documents we have of expert testimony offered on the subject of handwriting. The first expert to testify was Nathaniel D. Gould, who said:
I am a resident of this city… . I know the prisoner and have known him for a long time by sight but have no personal acquaintance with him… . I have never seen him write but have seen what I suppose to be his handwriting. I am familiar with his signature. I have seen it appended to diplomas given by the Medical College for twenty years. I have been employed as a penman to fill out these diplomas… . I have paid particular attention to the subject of Penmanship, having practiced it in every way and instructed in it for some fifty years. I have also published on the subject.
Mr. Bemis then directed the witness, “Please look at the three letters and state if you can in whose handwriting they are.”
Edward Sohier, the defense counsel, argued that a proper foundation had not been laid for the testimony. He pointed out that the witness hadn’t seen the prisoner write and that “this class of evidence was exceedingly liable to error.”
The court ruled that Mr. Gould was allowed to respond. “I think,” Gould said, “it is Dr. Webster’s handwriting… . [T]here are some circumstances which may appear trifling to a person who has not attended the subject, but yet I consider them important.” (Here he seems to be foreshadowing Holmes’s remark about printed evidence in The Hound of the Baskervilles: “But this is my special hobby, and the differences are equally obvious.”)
Gould continued, “Every man who undertakes to disguise his hand must do it either by … carelessly letting his hand play entirely loose … or by carefully guarding every stroke that he makes.” He goes on to say that it is impossible to keep this up very long: “[A] single particle or character, will furnish a key for detection of the real writer … [such as] in these letters the small letter ‘a’ the small ‘r’ … and the character ‘&’ which Dr. Webster almost uniformly makes in one peculiar manner and which he almost always uses in lieu of the written word.”
Gould points out a number of other peculiarities he identifies with Webster. “I can detect similarities, which may escape the eyes of another, just as a naturalist can see peculiarities in a shell which would escape my observation… . My practice in comparing handwriting is to look first … to see how many letters are similar and then how many are dissimilar.”
Another expert, George G. Smith, was called by the prosecution. “I am an engraver,” he said. “I have been called frequently, to give an opinion of handwriting, as an expert in court… . In regard to the Civis letter I am compelled to say …that it is in Professor Webster’s handwriting… . I am very sorry to say that I feel quite confident of this.” Smith was not confident of the origin of the other letters.
The testimony concerning the letters, while not the most crucial of the case, was extremely damaging to the defense. In spite of Dr. Webster’s contention that Littlefield was a body snatcher who had planted the grim remnants of his trade in the privy, Dr. Webster was convicted of murder. Webster then dictated a confession of sorts to a helpful minister, claiming that the killing was an unplanned act of passion. Since the body had been dismembered and parts of it burned, it could not provide supporting evidence for the lesser crime of manslaughter. Although the evidence as well as the confession was riddled with enough inconsistencies to keep crime historians busy to the present day, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was not distracted and hanged Dr. Webster on August 30, 1850.
The scientific evaluation of written evidence stood on a somewhat shaky foundation in the nineteenth century, but its importance was beginning to be recognized. And then an explosive case in France dealt a serious blow to the growth of the discipline.
In 1894, a “bordereau,” or memorandum, listing French military secrets, was recovered from a wastepaper basket in the German embassy. Casting about for the culprit who had written the document, a cabal of French military officers decided a convenient scapegoat would be Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus was favored as a suspect—in spite of compelling evidence that the bordereau had been written by an officer named Esterhazy—because he was fluent in German (he had been born in Alsace), was reserved in his manner, and, most importantly, was Jewish. One could be a staunch French patriot and at the same time indulge a hidden taste for anti-Semitism.
Handwriting experts gave conflicting evidence as to the authorship of the bordereau, and the famous Alphonse Bertillon was called on for his opinion. Questioned documents were far from his area of expertise, but he felt this was no reason to decline. He delivered a complicated, meandering opinion, complete with diagrams. He concluded that the suspect writing was that of Dreyfus and that it differed from Dreyfus’s usual hand in some respects because Dreyfus had forged his own handwriting. Just for good measure, Bertillon threw in some mathematical formulae on the subject of probability. Wrapped in the mantle of scientific certainty, he exercised his prejudices.
&nbs
p; No one understood what Bertillon said, but his stature was such that conviction was assured. Alfred Dreyfus, stripped of his rank and separated from his family, was sent to Devil’s Island to suffer solitary confinement. His guards were forbidden to speak to him.
All of France took sides on the trial, and violent demonstrations resulted. Emile Zola, the novelist and journalist, wrote a passionate dissection of the entire affair in the paper L’Aurore in the form of an open letter to the president of the French Republic. Entitled “J’Accuse” (I Accuse), it said about the evidence:
How flimsy it is! The fact that someone could have been convicted on this charge is the ultimate iniquity. I defy decent men to read it without a stir of indignation in their hearts and a cry of revulsion, at the thought of the undeserved punishment being meted out there on Devil’s Island. He knew several languages. A crime! He carried no compromising papers. A crime! He would occasionally visit his birthplace. A crime! He was hard-working, and was well informed. A crime! He did not become confused. A crime! He became confused. A crime!
After marshaling arguments against the members of the military who had engineered the trial, Zola focused on the handwriting experts:
I accuse the three handwriting experts, Messrs. Belhomme, Varinard and Couard, of having submitted reports that were deceitful and fraudulent, unless a medical examination finds them to be suffering from a disease that impairs their eyesight and judgment.
Why Bertillon was not included in this cri de coeur is not clear—perhaps Zola concurred with a popular view that the father of anthropometry had simply lost his mind.
