When it came to the final trial, the detective told the judge that he wished to correct some of his earlier testimony. When he was asked why he had not photographed the print on the screen itself, he said he had not brought his fingerprint camera with him and the one owned by the Nassau police had broken down.
Ray’s answer to this was that any good camera would serve and in fact he had made his own photographs with a camera borrowed from a local photographer. Furthermore, the British Army had at its air base the finest camera equipment and a very competent photograph department. One of their cameras had been used to photograph Sir Harry’s body and the pictures had been developed at the Army laboratory, where, indeed, Ray had had his own photographs developed.
That fatal fingerprint was fatal to the detective. His testimony and that of the prosecution broke down so badly here that they convinced the jury of de Marigny’s innocence.
Ray did not fail to call attention to the peculiar fact that the chief detective of the local force had been sent on a mission that kept him from testifying. The judge in his charge to the jury commented forcefully on this absence, and also on certain strange changes that some of the prosecution’s witnesses made in their testimony previously given at the police hearing. In fact, one police officer testified concerning a person he had seen on the morning of the murder in the town though that person had sworn he had not left his bed. The policeman was threatened with a loss of his post if he so testified, but he was brave and honest enough to say what he had seen.
The case against de Marigny had broken down utterly so far as the prosecution’s evidence that he was present at the scene of the murder.
There still remained the problem of giving him a good alibi and showing where he was and what he was doing at the time of the killing.
Now, de Marigny had never denied that he had driven within a block of the scene of the murder and at a late hour. But he said, and there were many witnesses to confirm his statement, that he had given a party at his house that night to eighteen or twenty people, some of whom were strangers to him. The day before he had met two British aviators at a hotel and invited them to the party. They could not get away but their wives were present.
His home was small and in the upper story was an apartment occupied by a friend of his, George de Vivolou. This apartment was reached by an outside stairway only.
The party ended about eleven o’clock and de Marigny offered to take back to their homes the wives of the two aviators. It was testified that he tried to get one or two of the men to go along with him so that he would not have to ride back alone. One of them accepted, but later went with someone else.
These trivial matters, familiar when all parties break up, had a mighty influence on the jury. It did not seem probable that a young man about to murder his father-in-law and spend an hour burning his body with diabolic fanaticism would urge his friends to come along for the ride.
It was a long ride, too, in a furious rain storm—about seven miles each way. There were several servants in de Marigny’s little home; for servants are cheap in Nassau. They testified that he was back home within three quarters of an hour after he left.
Ray made that drive himself more than once and timed it both in good weather and bad. He admitted that de Marigny might have stopped off at his father-in-law’s house, emptied a revolver into him, and got back without delay. But he could never had made the drive both ways and paused to steal into the house, find the sleeping man and, without waking him or the other man sleeping two doors away, bash in Sir Harry’s skull, then spend half an hour or more burning his body and bedding with a blow-torch, scattering feathers over the roasted corpse and leaving bloody marks on the walls, the telephone book, and the other man’s doorknobs.
When de Marigny reached his home he parked his car at the far end of the narrow driveway, which was thirty or forty feet long. He was already in bed in the room below when George de Vivolou returned from driving a young lady home, parked his car back of de Marigny’s and went up the outside stairway to his room. He took his car keys with him.
Even if, after that, de Marigny had decided to dash over and slaughter and cremate Sir Harry he could not have got his car past de Vivolou’s. He would have had to go upstairs and borrow de Vivolou’s keys.
When the case came to trial, Ray had a miniature of de Marigny’s house ready, with the driveway and two tiny cars all built to scale. When this was exhibited to the jury it left no doubt in their minds that de Marigny could never have left the house after his return, and he had returned too soon for the murder. Seven witnesses confirmed this.
Ray also had ready an exact replica of the top of the screen from which the other detective claimed to have lifted the fingerprint on rubber tape, and lifted it so completely that its previous existence was incredible. But as the trial proceeded, the whole screen itself was brought into the court and it confirmed the detective’s confession that he must have been mistaken.
Such little mistakes often cause an innocent person to be found guilty of a heinous crime.
In British justice, Ray says he has “one hundred per cent belief.” The judge who gave the charge to the jury was plainly thoroughly disgusted with the conduct of the Nassau prosecution. He demanded that the police department be thoroughly investigated. He also sternly rebuked the American detective whose two testimonies under oath were flatly contradictory.
The jury acquitted de Marigny of every suspicion. And his wife Nancy, whose intervention had saved his life, was present with him the next night at another little party, this time in the home of his lawyer, Sir Godfrey Higgs. Outside the house there was a mob of well-wishers cheering and applauding.
The next morning de Marigny was up betimes. He went back to his cell, shaved, wrote some notes and left his old home after an hour. But there were many who did not regard him or his victim with favor. Their only chance for revenge now was to declare him unworthy of old Nassau.
Fortunately, in proving a man not guilty of a certain murder, it is not necessary to prove him a saint or an angel. He may have been a devil at times, but the prosecution must prove that he was one at exactly the place and time of the crime.
Now, gasoline was more difficult to get in Nassau in those days than it was even in the United States. Most of it was flown to Nassau from the United States in planes so heavily overloaded that many of the pilots were killed in landing on the island.
The rationing permitted only enough petrol for a few miles a week. As was not entirely unknown in our own beloved country, those who had the money to buy it, bought it. A bank president and one of the leading real estate dealers and others were convicted of illegal purchases. They were heavily fined—“scolded but not sent away from home.”
De Marigny was fined double the amount and banished. Ray had begged him to depart before he was deported. But he waited to be exiled. And was.
During the trial, Ray himself was threatened with deportation if he spent any time trying to investigate any other suspect than de Marigny. But they could not keep him from longing to return and prove his theory. His appeal to the governor-general, the Duke of Windsor, was icily rebuffed by a letter from the Duke’s secretary. There are many men of business and other interests who do not want the case reopened.
Ray wrote an article on the subject and flatly titled it: “I could crack the Oakes case.” In the course of it, he tells how, one night before de Marigny’s enforced exodus from the island, a party was given for him and Nancy by the Baron Trolle, in whose house Ray was staying, along with Leonarde Keeler, who had brought his lie-detection apparatus with him but had been refused all opportunity to use it.
He was persuaded to bring out his machinery and test the guests. He would have one of them look at a playing card which was not shown to him. Then he would ask such questions as “Was it a spade, a heart, a club, a diamond? Was it the ace, deuce, etc.”
The guest would try in vain to conceal the truth. The needles always gave him or her away. After the
polygraph had amused them all for some time, de Marigny suddenly asked for a test concerning the Oakes case.
It threw the guests into a grim mood, though, of course, even if the lie detector convicted him, he could not be tried again. Keeler and Ray were eager for this, to them, infallible proof, but they proposed that the test be made in private. De Marigny insisted on being put through then and there. He stipulated only that he should not be asked about his past.
The blood-pressure cuff was fitted to his upper right arm, the respiratory cable was fastened around his chest. The pulse measure was fixed to his wrist. The questions began:
“Is your name de Marigny? Do you live in Nassau? Have you had something to eat today?”
These answers were a quiet “Yes,” but it was no more calm than the quiet “No” that followed the stabbing queries:
“Do you know who killed Sir Harry Oakes? Did you kill Sir Harry yourself? Did you put your hand on that screen?”
Ray and Keeler have seen the needles betray many a criminal, but the responses of de Marigny were final conviction that, when he was acquitted, an innocent man was saved from a cruel and odious injustice.
Ray will never be satisfied till he can go to Nassau and run through that polygraph mill a number of persons who would have to tell the lie detector what they know in spite of themselves. For, in Ray’s words:
“Physical clues can rust and crumble with time, but a man’s conscience remains fairly constant as long as he lives. The ability of the subject to differentiate between truth and falsehood and a fear of being unmasked are all that the lie detector needs to point an accusing needle.”
But it is as certain as anything in this wavering world that the fearsome partnership of the polygraph and Schindler will never be invited back to Nassau.
5.
HIS HARDEST CASE
Some people do not like stories of high life. They cannot feel any sympathy for anybody who has fine clothes and a lot of money. And they assume that any mishap to the rich serves them right.
For such readers, here is a story of very humble people. There is a banker in it; but he is a small-town banker and he should be easily forgiven because of the modesty of his prosperity and because he spent more than he could afford trying to save a Negro from going to the electric chair.
The New Jersey villagers had almost unanimously elected the poor wastrel to it, just as the Bahamans chose the Count de Marigny as their most popular candidate for the gallows.
The victim of this murder was the lowliest of the lowly, a little ten-year-old girl seized on her way home from school, dragged into a thicket and outraged, mutilated and slain. And this was not far from the very spot where the accused Negro admitted he was sleeping. It seemed that even so, the screams of the child and the noise of the murder must have caught his ear; but he claimed that he was too drunk to know what was going on.
This appalling business of raping and butchering little girls has grown to be a frightfully familiar commonplace in our America of today; but it is always unbelievable and unendurable when it comes close to home. And it brings out every resource of the mighty engines of justice to avenge it, and keep the enraged people from wreaking vengeance in blind wrath.
On the outskirts of that once fervently religious summer resort, Asbury Park, New Jersey, is the Bradley public school. Among the pupils there was a young girl, Marie Smith, whose modest home was about a quarter of a mile straight down the road. On one side was a small forest; on the other, the gardens, the greenhouses and the home of Max Kruska, who kept a flower shop in the center of the town and lived in the house along with his wife, and a Polish servant, and a young German named Frank Heideman, who worked in the greenhouse and slept on the second floor of the house.
The school classes ended at three in the afternoon and little Marie was always home fifteen minutes later. One raw November day she did not come home on time and her mother went out in the road to look for her. The child was not to be seen. Her mother was worried and made inquiries.
Some of Marie’s schoolmates said they had parted from her at a crossroad, and waved goodby as she struck out for home. The woods had hidden her from them almost at once. The mother’s bewilderment turned to alann. Soon the neighborhood was aroused. Searching parties ransacked the woods and the whole region in increasing bafflement. Day and night they hunted until on the third day they found what they had feared to find—the shattered and frozen body of the little girl thrust under a pile of brush close to a path through the woods.
The pitiful thing had been dragged into the woods, beaten over the head, and strangled with her own stocking cap, then beaten to death and outraged in hideous fashion with fiendish malice.
The first suspect was Thomas Williams, a Negro, an exconvict who used that very path through the forest regularly on his way to cut wood for a woman living just beyond it.
On the very afternoon of Marie’s disappearance, he had been seen going into the path and carrying a small axe. But he had not appeared at the house where he was expected as a wood-chopper.
He told the police that he had sat down on a log to take a drink, had emptied a flask of whiskey and fallen asleep. He could not or would not explain what had become of the axe and he guessed that he ‘must have lost it somewhere.” The axe could not be traced but a bloody towel was found in his room. And his mistress, with whom he had quarreled, gave him a reputation worse than his own and even said that he had told her he was “out after a little white girl.”
What more evidence could be asked? Who can wonder that the townspeople, even of Asbury Park, were wrought up to a lynching fury? Such crowds collected at the jail that the Negro was slipped out secretly by a back door and hurried off to a prison in another town.
The county prosecutor, John B. Applegate, felt that the traditional speed of “New Jersey justice” was called for as never before and made ready for a swift trial. There was no excuse for delay. The evidence was clear and unmistakable.
But the county sheriff, Clarence Hetrick, had a doubt in his mind. The proof of Williams’ guilt was a little too pat. He saw gaps in the evidence. He told his worries to Randolph Miller, vice president of a bank and president of the company that employed the father of little Marie. And just because Williams was worthless and good riddance, it seemed to those two just men that his guilt of murder should not be lightly assumed.
Miller proposed that a private detective be called in to work on the case secretly. He offered to share the expense with Sheriff Hetrick. So Ray Schindler was engaged and three weeks after the murder was committed, he reached Asbury Park with his brother Walter and a few helpers. Nobody but the sheriff and the banker knew of their errand.
They did not dare even to ask for a look at the evidence collected by the prosecutor. They had only what had been given to the public.
And now the Schindler method showed itself. The report of the autopsy stated that the girl had been hit on the head with a blunt instrument. But it did not say what kind of an instrument, of what shape or what weight. It said nothing of the number of blows or the angle from which they came. The wound was described as “from two to four inches long.” Where was the all-important accuracy? There was no suggestion of a hunt for fingerprints.
Fortunately, the girl’s body had been taken to Brooklyn for burial and it was possible for Ray to secure an exhumation and a careful autopsy without notifying the Asbury Park prosecutor.
Also, he had the little forest gone over by his brother with the utmost minuteness, and a detailed map was made of it.
Next, the process of elimination was begun. It had to be conducted with great care to avoid arousing suspicion. Thirteen people could have seen the little girl after she waved goodby to her playmates. One by one they were ruled out, women as well as men. There was a woman who, Ray suspected, might have heard some useless gossip, since she was a clairvoyant and astrologer by trade. To get her to talk freely, Ray had an advertisement inserted in a local paper calling for just such services
as hers, and saw to it that the bait reached her. She bit at it and he sent a woman operator to talk to her.
Nothing came of all this trouble, but it is part of a detective’s work to put bushels of chaff through the sieve with often not a grain of wheat to show for the toil.
At least she was eliminated both as a suspect and an aid. So were twelve others who might just possibly have had some knowledge.
With the sheriff’s assistance, Ray also put a young Negro operative into the cell next to that where Williams hopelessly awaited his doom. For weeks this detective applied every known method of making him betray himself if he were guilty. All unwittingly Williams merely convinced his cellmate of his innocence.
The home of Max Kruska was the only house the little girl had passed, and all its occupants were studied. But the florist had been at his shop all the fateful afternoon; his wife had been seen shopping. The Polish maid had been busy in the kitchen, and also said she had seen Heideman working at his tasks all afternoon.
Young Heideman had the best of reputations. He had come from Germany and for three years had worked on the place and lived with the family. He never went out nights for dissipation and had saved most of his wages.
On being questioned he said he had known Marie Smith by sight but had never spoken to her and had not seen her on her last afternoon alive. In fact he had joined the searching parties and was one of those who discovered her. The prosecutor had ruled him out of consideration.
But Ray took no chances on appearances or reputations and he cabled to Germany. The answer stated that Heideman had been a rather gloomy boy, and had once been complained about for making indecent advances to a young girl. The magistrate had let him go with a warning; and before long Heideman had left for America.
He withstood all the tests Ray dared put him to, including the surprise confrontation with a bloody axe. Heideman took it calmly.
His employer refused to discharge him so that the detectives could get at him to question him thoroughly and “rope” him. In his desperation Ray remembered Conan Doyle’s “Hound of the Baskervilles,” the famous story in which the howling of a hound breaks the nerve of a murderer. He was reminded of it by the big and ferocious watchdog kept on the Kruska place. At night his chain was attached to a wire so that he could run the whole length of the yard and warn off possible marauders. Ray decided to try a bit of plagiarism.
The Complete Detective Page 11
