by Colin Evans
This didn’t surprise Kear. His experienced eye could detect no signs of a break-in, no jimmied locks, no shattered windows; nor had the place been ransacked. And there was another inconsistency: if the killer had been a burglar, surprised by the hapless Nancy, then surely after silencing the only witness, he would have stolen something to make his visit worthwhile? All the signs indicated that whoever killed Nancy Titterton had gained access to the apartment by the front door, carried out the murder with willful deliberation, then left by the front door.
While Kear was piecing together this scenario, Dr. Thomas Gonzales arrived. After studying the bathtub from every angle, he began his examination of Nancy Titterton’s rapidly cooling body. First, he carefully cut the ligature from her neck. It was three feet in length and had been fashioned from the victim’s own pink pajama top and a flimsy red dressing jacket, twisted together. Above and below the left eye were ugly weals that might have come from a beating. With the body lying on its left side, Gonzales leaned in more closely. He could make out contusions on both wrists. Either the killer had grabbed Nancy’s arms with particularly vicious strength or—and Gonzales thought this much more likely—he had bound her wrists with some kind of rope or twine at some time during the attack. Once she was dead, he had then removed the bindings. Gonzales glanced about him. There was no sign of the restraints in the bathroom. He asked Kear to check the rest of the apartment. When that came up blank, Gonzales concluded that the killer must have taken the bindings away with him.
Like Kear, Gonzales also believed that the attack had originated in the bedroom and had terminated in the bathroom. But he noticed something else: although the body was moist, the soles of the feet were still dry. Whether the killer had intended to drown Nancy, only to change his mind for some reason—perhaps he’d been disturbed?—or whether the moisture was due to the dripping shower, Gonzales couldn’t tell.
Kear pressed Gonzales for an approximate time of death. Even nowadays, this is an area fraught with difficulties, and probably nothing in the annals of medical jurisprudence has provoked more controversy and more heated debate, but within certain broad limits it is possible to hazard a guess. Here, measurement of the rectal temperature, allied to the level of rigor mortis present in the body, steered Gonzales to the conclusion that Nancy had been murdered that morning, at around 11:30, give or take one hour. Without the benefit of an autopsy it was impossible to say whether Nancy had been raped, but Gonzales had little doubt that Nancy Titterton had been subjected to the full rigor of the killer’s lust. Death, he said, was caused by strangulation. A new test devised by Gettler would be able to let him know whether Nancy had been alive or dead when placed in the bathtub.
Preliminary examination over, Gonzales gave orders for the body to be removed to the Bellevue mortuary. Only then, as the slight frame of Nancy Titterton was being raised from the bathtub, did the most significant clue in the apartment come to light. Scrunched up beneath the body lay a single length of cord, about thirteen inches long and a quarter inch thick. It had been cleanly cut at both ends. Gonzales examined the rope closely, then compared it with the marks on Nancy’s wrists. He had no doubt that at least part of the bindings had been found. Most likely, the killer in his haste had slashed through the restraints, intending to take the rope away with him, only to overlook this single strand. The rope was similar to that used on venetian blinds, but a quick check around the apartment showed all these cords to be intact. Since some indentations had been found on the wooden frame of the disheveled bed, Kear asked if the killer could have used the cord to tie Nancy’s wrists to the bed. Gonzales replied affirmatively.
The two men were still deep in discussion when Lewis Titterton reached the apartment. The scholarly British-born executive could barely countenance what had happened. His face was chalky white and he looked broken by the dreadful news. When shown the length of cord, he shook his head; it meant nothing to him. He was asked if he kept large amounts of money in the apartment. Again, Lewis shook his head dumbly. Gathering his fuzzy thoughts, he recalled that just the day previously he had given Nancy ten dollars, out of which she had paid a maid three dollars, and another couple of dollars had gone to a local cleaners. Since Kear had already found Nancy’s purse and found it empty, Lewis could only assume that the killer had stolen the remaining five dollars. After looking round the apartment, Lewis confirmed what Kear already suspected: nothing else had been taken. The bureau drawers were as tidy as they always had been.
Most of all, Lewis was baffled as to how anyone could have gained access to the apartment. Nancy, he said, was almost pathologically shy, timid and soft spoken; the notion that she would admit a stranger was unthinkable. The killer must have been someone known to her.
Kear was thinking along the same lines. This bore none of the hallmarks of a random or opportunistic break-in that had escalated into homicide. Whoever killed Nancy not only managed to inveigle their way into the apartment without attracting the suspicion of anyone else in the building but had also come prepared with the means to tie her up. That smacked either of premeditation or…?
Kear let his imagination wander. By his own admission, Lewis worked long hours at the office, rarely home until early evening. All those hours alone might have left Nancy feeling neglected and lonely—perhaps lonely enough to seek solace in the arms of another man? It was an angle worth considering.
Gonzales, meanwhile, was expanding on reasons why the killer had dumped the body in the bathtub. If the intent was to create the impression that Nancy had drowned, then why wasn’t the tub full of water? All Gonzales could imagine was that the killer had been disturbed and fled before he completed the task.
Kear already knew about Staughn’s abortive visit at 11:30 A.M., slap bang in the middle of the time frame that Gonzales had estimated for the time of death. Had his ringing of the doorbell interrupted the killer?
While Gonzales and Kear hypothesized, other detectives continued scouring the apartment for clues. They found no useable fingerprints but the counterpane on the bed did provide a lead; a smear of what looked to be either paint or mud. This counterpane, together with a blue smock, a lavender bathrobe, a bedspread, a pillowcase, a pair of pajamas, and a bra apparently wrenched off during the attack, were sent for analysis to the Police Research Laboratory in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, together with clothing from the body.
The possible paint smear in the bedroom was viewed as extremely significant, given the fact that four painters had recently been employed in the building, and one, a Daniel Kaplan, had actually worked in the vestibule that very day. But when officers rounded up the men quickly, it soon became apparent all four could be eliminated as suspects.
At the end of day one, Kear had no clear leads, no clear suspects, and a whole bunch of headaches. He knew that like most things in life, homicide has its pecking order. Nancy Titterton wasn’t some anonymous wino beaten to death in a back-alley brawl, barely mentioned in the metro pages, with no relative or friend to care whether the crime was solved or not. No, this was entirely different. Nancy Titterton might not have been a household name before her death, but the cocktail-chinking circles in which she—and more especially her husband—moved carried a lot of clout and they would expect a quick resolution to this case. The press, too, would run and run with this story until her killer was found.
As Kear widened his inquiries, he tiptoed edgily around the possibility that Nancy might have been tangled up in an affair. When the suggestion was put to Georgia Mansbridge, she just gaped. Impossible, was her verdict; the Tittertons were utterly devoted to each other. Yes, Lewis worked long hours, but Nancy wasn’t the type of woman to mind the isolation. On the contrary, it suited her ideally, giving her the time to work on that novel of which so much was expected. Even dinner parties were an unwelcome intrusion on her ascetic lifestyle; she had no interest in politics, fashion, or shopping and lived only for her husband and her literature. All of which left Kear scratching his head, as he struggl
ed to fathom out who killed Nancy Titterton.
The next morning Gonzales did his best to fill in some of the gaps. He started his examination of Nancy Titterton’s body at 10:30 A.M. and ended at 1:45 P.M. In an era when few autopsies took more than an hour, this was unusually lengthy, yet another indicator of the hierarchical nature of crime investigation, and the seriousness with which the authorities were treating this case. Gonzales found that the contusions above and below the left eye came not from some beating but were pressure marks caused by the weight of the head resting against the tub’s plug hole. Swabs of the genital area confirmed that Nancy had been sexually assaulted. When Gonzales cut into the body and skull he found that the strangulation had caused a hemorrhage of the larynx and three slight internal hemorrhages of the scalp. Scrapings from beneath the fingernails were labeled and bagged and sent for analysis, along with samples from the bodily organs. Gonzales pored over every inch of Nancy’s frail body and could find nothing to affect his original estimate of the time of death—an hour either side of 11:30 A.M.
Just a few blocks away, at Beekman Place, a battery of experts armed with microscopes, chemicals, measuring instruments, and special fingerprint cameras, were examining every square inch of the crime scene, all the furniture, rugs, walls, closets, doors and windows, even the fire escape that led down from the Tittertons’ apartment. Never before had New York witnessed such a consolidated scientific assault on one crime scene. The twin bed nearest the bathroom was dismantled and taken to the laboratory along with the bed clothing. All these items would be subjected to the silver nitrate method of developing fingerprints, a technique that had featured prominently at the Hauptmann trial. This process—still in use today—works best on surfaces such as cloth or paper that do not respond well to conventional dusting powder. Say the test item is a piece of wood. Any fingerprint on its surface is most likely invisible. But because the body sweat inherent in fingerprints contains common salt, should this item be sprayed with a 10 percent solution of silver nitrate, then any salt present, under the action of the silver nitrate, becomes silver chloride, which is affected by light. When exposed to ultraviolet or even bright sunlight, the silver chloride darkens and the print emerges in its customary appearance of a series of black concentric lines against a white background, ready for the photographer and the classification expert.
Although the silver nitrate process was devised in the 1910s, its popularity is mainly credited to Dr. Erastus Mead Hudson, a New York physician, who first came to prominence in the Lindbergh kidnapping, with his claim to have recovered more than five hundred latent prints from the notorious ladder that conventional fingerprint testing had missed. (By the time Hudson was brought into the case, his contribution was virtually worthless, since so many people had handled the ladder.)
In the Titterton case, the silver nitrate test proved disappointing. Although fingerprints were lifted from the wooden bedstead, they were too smudged to be of any use. Better results were obtained from those items of clothing subjected to ultraviolet light scanning. This brought out several stains not visible to the naked eye.
As the investigation unfolded, a turf war broke out over just which official agency should be analyzing the samples of evidence. Although no one doubted the competence of the Police Research Laboratory technicians, pressure grew for the trace evidence to be analyzed by Alexander O. Gettler at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Since his triumph in the Becker–Norkin case, the OCME’s chief toxicologist had become recognized as the top forensic chemist on the East Coast. Credentials such as these made him the obvious choice to handle such a high-profile case. After some interdepartmental bickering, common sense prevailed and Gettler, aided by his assistant, Harry Swartz, began analyzing the body samples.
While test tubes bubbled and scientists huddled over microscopes, Kear pursued the routine work of crime detection. With a team now numbering fifty detectives under his command, he began by compiling a list of suspects. Since most murder victims are killed by people they know, Kear put Lewis Titterton’s name at the top of the list, closely followed by Nancy’s closest acquaintances. With the press hounding him on all sides, Kear, in off-the-record briefings with reporters, let slip that he had not entirely eliminated the secret affair angle. Nancy could still turn out to be the victim of a lover’s quarrel gone wrong. Although not intended for publication, Kear’s musings inevitably found their way on to the front pages, much to the fury of Nancy’s family and friends. Besmirching her name in such a fashion was reprehensible, they said. No one was more devoted or faithful than Nancy Titterton; any suggestion to the contrary was a poisonous libel. The complaints became louder. Instead of peddling this muck, they raged, Kear should be investigating that mysterious prowler who’d recently been seen in other buildings along Beekman Place. In the latest alleged incident, the stranger had tried to force his way into one apartment, and only a well-aimed kick by the family maid had sent him packing. This maid, together with a clutch of Nancy’s friends, now went to police headquarters to view mug shots of known sex offenders, voyeurs, and burglars, but a positive identification was not forthcoming.
The relentless media pressure forced Lyons to add yet another fifteen detectives to the investigation. This was now the biggest single homicide investigation in New York history. The main focus was directed toward tracking down the source of the scrap of cord found in the bathtub. Gettler’s microscopic examination had identified it as made from low-grade Italian hemp and containing a small amount of jute. Various rope experts were called in to give their opinion. All agreed it was what the trade called “60 size,” a five-ply cord with a diameter of one eighth of an inch. Immersion in water had caused the sample to swell to almost twice its original thickness. Now it was a question of tracking down the maker. Since one of the major rope manufacturers in the northeast was the Schlichter Jute Cordage Company in Philadelphia, a message was sent to the local police asking them to visit company officials to see if the twine had been made in their factory.
Just three days after she was murdered, Nancy Titterton was laid to rest. More than two hundred mourners filled the University Funeral Chapel on Lexington Avenue, while a further seven hundred lined the street outside. At Lewis’s request, Nancy’s wedding ring, which had been taken for forensic examination, was returned to him and buried with his deceased wife.
Every scientific twist and turn received front page coverage from a fascinated press. Readers were treated to full details of a test that Gettler had devised in 1921 to determine if someone had been alive when they were immersed in water. It worked by taking samples of blood from the left and right sides of the heart and comparing the plasma chloride levels therein. Gettler reasoned that if the person entered the water alive, then the water must cross the alveolar bed and reach the left heart, thereby causing hemodilution there and a lower chloride level when contrasted with right heart blood. This only applies if the drowning occurred in fresh water; in salt water drowning the reverse would apply. On this occasion, Gettler’s formula showed thirty-five milligrams of salt less in the left heart than the right, suggesting that Nancy had been alive, though barely, when thrown in the bath and had inhaled water. (Curiously, this contrasted with Gonzales’s autopsy findings, which recorded no evidence of water in the lungs.)
Knowledge is never static, and subsequent research would cast doubt on this theory. It was discovered that, in practice, chloride undergoes radical changes after death. This means that Gettler’s test, like every other test designed to ascertain if someone died from drowning, is not considered definitive, although some believe it can provide confirmatory evidence of drowning if the body is recovered and the tests performed within a few hours of death. The important element here is time. Because nonuniform and unpredictable changes in blood electrolytes always occur after death, the plasma chloride test loses effectiveness the longer the interval between death and recovery of the body.
Rather more definitively, Gettler was able to state he foun
d no trace of alcohol in the body. Nor could he find any evidence to show that Nancy had been overcome by an attacker using ether or chloroform. The attack, in all its hideous brutality, had been carried out while the victim was fully conscious.
Each morning, Kear steeled himself for his daily grilling at the hands of a ravenous press, and humble pie was the only dish on the menu. “I regret to say that…in this case, clues are very scarce,” uttered on the day of Nancy’s funeral, was a typical quote. And there was further bad news two days later from Philadelphia; executives from Schlichter reported that the rope found in the bathtub had not originated from their factory. Kear’s response was to widen the search for the rope manufacturer to other states.
Gettler continued analyzing the samples. On the skirt and bathrobe he found several strands of blond hair, all of which appeared to be from Nancy’s head. What really caught his eye, though, was a single strand of hair that lay on the counterpane. To the unaided eye it looked as if it had been shed by Nancy, but the magnifying glass revealed a quite different picture. Barely a half inch long, the hair was white and strangely stiff. Carefully, Gettler removed the hair with tweezers and placed it under the microscope. After a few minutes’ study, he decided it was most probably a horsehair, of the type used for stuffing furniture.
Immediately this refocused attention on the sofa that the Tittertons had sent to be repadded. Kear obtained a sample of horsehair from the couch, and when Gettler examined the two, side by side, he found them to be microscopically indistinguishable (not identical, because no one can state categorically that two fibers are exactly the same, only that they appear that way).
