Silent Witnesses

by Nigel McCrery

  The murder seemed as puzzling as it was brutal—Guesner had been a likeable and popular man. Nothing had been stolen, but for lack of a better explanation, it was concluded that the crime had been committed by a burglar who had panicked after shooting Guesner and fled without taking anything. The only clue that the police recovered was the wadding that had been used in the gun. When they examined it, they discovered it was a page from the Lorraine almanac. Further investigation then revealed a suspect, a former suitor of Madame Guesner’s by the name of Bivert. It was further discovered that Bivert had been very unhappy and jealous that she had married Guesner. The police searched Bivert’s home and soon discovered the almanac, missing the page that had been used as wadding. Bivert was tried and found guilty, and would normally have faced the guillotine. However, French law recognizes a crime passionnel—an offence carried out in the heat of strong emotion—and, given his previous relationship with Madame Guesner, he was instead sentenced to twenty years of hard labor.

  French chemist Roussin was to have the distinction of being one of the first scientists to solve a crime by using chemical analysis of a bullet. He did so in 1869. The victim of the shooting under investigation was the curé of Brétigny, who was shot through the head by an unknown assailant. Suspicion fell on a man named Cadet, a local watchmaker. Cadet was already known to the police and was no friend of the curé’s. The bullet had been recovered from the curé’s head, but had shattered on impact, breaking into numerous pieces. This meant that when bullets were discovered in Cadet’s room, investigators had nothing against which to compare them. Nor did they have anything to match against the caliber (approximate inside width of the barrel) of the two pistols discovered in the room. This initially seemed like a major setback, until Roussin had the idea of chemical analysis. He established the exact weight of the bullets and their melting point, and was then able to work out their exact composition in terms of quantities of tin and lead. This done, he carried out the same analysis with the bullets discovered in Cadet’s room. They matched. Cadet was tried and found guilty of the murder.

  As with other branches of forensics, the science of ballistics has vindicated the innocent as well as convicted the guilty. In August 1876, a British police constable by the name of Nicholas Cock was shot and murdered in Whalley Range, Manchester. Two brothers, John and William Habron, were arrested and tried for the constable’s murder. One of them, John, was acquitted, while the other, William, was convicted and sentenced to death (though this sentence was later commuted to penal servitude for life).

  But this was not the end of the case. The day after the Habron trial, a man called Arthur Dyson was murdered in Ecclesall, a suburb of Sheffield, England. The killer was seen by the man’s wife, who recognized him as Charles Peace, an infamous criminal with whom she had supposedly been having an affair. The motive for the murder was jealousy. Peace (1832–1879) was one of the best-known criminals of his day and was even mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client,” as well as in Mark Twain’s “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.”

  Peace evaded capture for two years after Dyson’s death but was finally arrested after shooting and wounding a police constable by the name of Robinson while attempting to burgle a house in Blackheath, London. He was tried and found guilty of Dyson’s murder and was sentenced to death. Then, on his way to the gallows, Peace also confessed to the murder of Constable Cock and further said that he had acted alone. The police were not convinced, feeling that with nothing to lose he was just trying to get a fellow criminal off the hook. However, they did decide to compare the bullets taken from Arthur Dyson, PC Robinson, and PC Cock. It was soon confirmed that they had all been fired from one gun and that gun belonged to Charles Peace. William Habron was released from prison and compensated for his wrongful conviction and the three years of liberty he had been denied.

  The United States had also played a significant part in the development of ballistics. In 1830, a sixteen-year-old boy called Samuel Colt ran away from his home in Hartford, Connecticut. Like thousands of other boys before him, he went to sea, planning to see a bit of the world. During his travels he carved a wooden hand gun; it featured a revolving chamber that rotated through the action of cocking the hammer.

  He returned home and a few years later, at only twenty-one years old, was producing working models of his gun from his factory in Paterson, New Jersey. Ingenious as they were, however, these prototypes were both complicated—having no fewer than twenty-four cogs, ratchets, and springs—and, at five dollars each, expensive. It was largely because of these issues that Colt’s factory went bankrupt in 1842. However, by then his guns had already proved themselves. A year before the factory stopped trading, Texas Ranger Jack Hayes was ambushed and cornered by a Comanche war party at a place called Enchanted Rock. The war party assumed that once Hayes’s rifle had been fired it would take him a while to reload it, giving them time to attack and scalp him. They advanced carefully until Hayes finally fired his rifle, as they had expected him to. The Comanches immediately charged his position. However, unbeknownst to them, Hayes was also carrying a Colt revolver. He pulled it from its holster and killed them all.

  When he heard of this new gun, Texas Ranger Captain Hamilton Walker realized its potential and decided to lend Colt a hand. Colt had moved from Paterson to New York and Walker traveled there to meet him. Walker proposed that the two of them should go into business together to produce a new gun, based on the five-shot Colt Paterson revolver. Crucially, Walker offered to finance the operation. Colt accepted this offer of help and the partners built a new factory. By 1847 they were producing a newly enhanced revolver that featured a sixth chamber and had just five moving parts, instead of the original twenty-four. The United States Mounted Rifle companies were provided with the new revolvers, which proved to be extremely effective. The gun became known as “the equalizer” because of a popular poem written about it: “Be not afraid of any man, no matter what his size. When danger threatens call on me and I will equalize.” It also made Colt and Walker millionaires.

  With the Colt factory now turning out thousands of guns, they became cheap and easy to get hold of. It is no surprise, then, that they rapidly became the preferred weapon of bank and train robbers such as the infamous James gang, while gunslingers like John Wesley Hardin and Billy the Kid made their reputations as “fast draws” with the weapon. Men like brothers Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp earned equally keen reputations as lawmen. While there were undoubtedly downsides to this abundance of weapons, there was something about the design of the revolvers that would actually prove useful, from a forensic point of view.

  Revolvers included rifling as part of their design—the bullets were given spin by grooves that ran along the inside of the barrel. This meant that the outer case of the bullets picked up the shapes of the grooves, as well as any other imperfections the barrel might have. Alexandre Lacassagne (1843–1924), professor of forensic medicine at the University of Lyon in France, realized that this meant that each gun left a unique ballistic “fingerprint” on every bullet it fired. In 1899, Lacassagne became the first known person to compare the markings on a bullet taken from the body of a murder victim to the rifling found in the handguns belonging to several suspects. During his examination of the bullet, he had discovered that it was marked with seven longitudinal grooves, created by its passage through the barrel. Only one of the weapons he examined had seven matching grooves inside the barrel. Fortunately, it was the gun that belonged to the suspect. As a result of this evidence, the killer was arrested and eventually convicted of murder.

  But it wasn’t until 1915 in Orleans County, New York, that ballistic evidence began to be taken seriously in the United States. It was the infamous case of Charlie Stielow and Nelson Green that proved just how vital it could be in establishing a person’s guilt or innocence.

  During the early morning of March 22 that year, a good-natured but illiterate farmer by the name of Charl
ie Stielow discovered the body of a dead woman on his front doorstep, still dressed in her nightgown. When Stielow looked more closely, he discovered it was Mrs. Margaret Wolcott, the housekeeper of a man called Charles Phelps. Phelps was Stielow’s boss and the owner of the farm he worked on. Margaret had been shot in the chest. It happened that it had snowed overnight and Margaret Wolcott’s footprints were still fresh in the snow. Stielow decided to retrace her steps, whereupon he discovered that she had come from Phelps’s home. He found the kitchen door wide open and, on entering, found ninety-three-year-old Phelps lying on the floor, having been shot three times. Incredibly, he was still alive, though only just. The local police were immediately called and quickly arrived on the scene. However, not used to dealing with crimes of this magnitude, they almost certainly did more harm than good, tramping through the crime scene, destroying and disturbing evidence. In the end, the Orleans County authorities took the unusual step of employing George W. Newton, a private detective from Buffalo, New York, to investigate the killing. After an investigation lasting only ten days, Newton suggested that the culprit was a man by the name of Nelson Green, who was Stielow’s brother-in-law and who lived with Phelps and his wife. He was arrested and before long confessed to the murders, implicating Stielow at the same time. Stielow was then arrested and he too quickly confessed. Interrogation techniques at the time were far more physical than they are today and beating a confession out of someone was pretty common.

  In their written confessions—which were very much alike—the two said that they had knocked on the kitchen door and shot Phelps when he answered it before making for the bedroom, where they believed Phelps kept his money. While they were doing this, Mrs. Wolcott ran from her room and dashed out through the kitchen door, slamming it shut behind her. At this point either Green or Stielow (it is impossible to say which since they both confessed to doing all the shooting) apparently opened fire at the housekeeper through the glass panel in the kitchen door, cutting her down before returning to the bedroom to search for the money. Each man’s statement then said that he had found $200, which he had given to the other to keep. Both agreed that when they returned home they heard Mrs. Wolcott calling for help but ignored her pleas and left her to die. Newton also discovered that both men had lied about owning guns, and that Stielow had given both a .22 caliber revolver and a .22 rifle to a relative to hide. The victims had been killed with a .22.

  Stielow was tried first. He retracted his confession, saying that he had been forced to sign it, but in spite of this it was admitted into evidence. To tie everything up, all that was needed was to link the bullets removed from the bodies of the victims to one or both of Stielow’s guns. The prosecution brought in the self-styled ballistics expert Dr. Albert Hamilton from Auburn, New York. He was, in fact, a fraud—he styled himself a doctor but was in reality a hawker of patent medicines with no qualifications at all in any field of science or medicine. Since nobody had ever challenged him, he was able to become an expert witness in everything from toxicology and bloodstains to handwriting, and also conducted autopsies. For the right money he would go along with anything the police told him to say, and unfortunately his lack of any real knowledge was not discovered for a long time.

  Hamilton testified that he had microscopically examined Stielow’s revolver and discovered nine defects at the end of the muzzle that matched nine scratches found on each of the four bullets taken from the victims. When cross-examined and asked why these scratches didn’t show up on the enlarged photographs of the bullets, he simply replied that due to some error the marks were on the opposite side of the bullets to those photographed. For some extraordinary reason nobody, not even the defense, asked him to provide new photographs where the scratches were visible; they just accepted him at his word. The defense then asked why it was that only the defects at the very end of the barrel would mark the bullets. Hamilton was a seasoned con man and could sound very convincing when he needed to. He blinded them with pseudoscience. This was his reply: “The cylinder fitted so tightly against the rear of the barrel that there was no leakage of gas at the breech. The full force of the gas following the bullet out at the muzzle, the lead expands as it leaves the muzzle, fills in any depressions existing at the outer edge of the bore, and receives scratches from the elevations existing between said depressions.”

  Perhaps this explanation seemed detailed enough to be plausible, since no one challenged it. The jury found Stielow guilty of murder in the first degree and he was sentenced to death in the electric chair. Green, wishing to avoid the same fate, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment. In February 1916, an appeals court upheld the convictions, stating that “from an examination of the record, it is inconceivable that the jury could have rendered any other verdict.”

  While awaiting execution at the infamous Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Stielow managed to convince the deputy warden, Spencer Miller Jr., that he was innocent of the crime. Miller passed on his concerns to Louis Seibold, a reporter with the New York World. He in turn hired a Buffalo detective called Thomas O’Grady to reexamine the case.

  O’Grady discovered that both the defendants were illiterate and would therefore have been incapable of writing out their own confessions. He also found it difficult to believe that they would have used some of the sophisticated phrases found in their statements. He then discovered that both Newton and Hamilton were working on a contingency basis—that is, they would not have been paid unless both Stielow and Green were found guilty.

  O’Grady’s investigation continued, but meanwhile the second and third appeals for a new trial were denied. Time was now running out for Stielow. Fortunately, by now the state governor had taken an interest in the case and on December 4, 1916, he commuted Stielow’s sentence to life imprisonment. He also appointed a Syracuse attorney named George Bond to reexamine the case. Bond promptly employed yet another investigator, Charles Waite, to do the legwork.

  Bond and Waite quickly established that the confessions made by the two men did not correspond convincingly with the facts of the case. The statements that Stielow and Green had signed said that Margaret Wolcott ran past them, but if that was so, then she must have recognized them, as she knew them both well. Why, then, would she have run to Stielow’s house to find help, knowing that he was one of the men who had attacked her? Both men had also said in their confession that Margaret Wolcott was alive when they emerged from Phelps’s bedroom and ran back to Stielow’s house, yet given that she had been shot in the heart, this seemed more than a little unlikely. And if these circumstances were not bizarre enough, it was also noticed that the angle at which the bullet had entered her body was geometrically impossible given the immediate geography, as anyone visiting the scene would have noticed at once.

  Stielow’s .22 revolver was then examined by ballistic experts from the New York Detective Bureau. It was their expert opinion that the gun had not been fired for at least three or four years. They wrapped a sheet of paper around the gun and fired a single round. The paper burst into flames, ignited by the hot gases discharged—an obvious contradiction of Hamilton’s statement that there was no leakage of gas at the breech. Next the gun was discharged into a cotton-filled box. The bullets were recovered and taken to Dr. Max Poser, an expert in microscopic examination at the Bausch and Lomb headquarters in Rochester. Not only was Poser unable to find the microscopic scratches that Hamilton had sworn in court were there, he also discovered that the bullets had been fired from a gun with a manufacturing flaw. One of the five grooves that were supposed to line the inside of the barrel of that particular model was missing. Stielow’s gun had no such defect, and therefore could not have fired the bullets that killed Phelps or Margaret Wolcott. When this evidence was presented, both Stielow and Green were pardoned. They were released on May 9, 1918.

  While forensic ballistics had certainly helped to save the life of a man who had been falsely accused, the conclusion of this case is perhaps not as satisfying as we would lik
e. Another man did come to be suspected of the crime instead but was never prosecuted; neither were Hamilton and Newton, who had lied under oath and thereby almost caused the death of an innocent man. Stielow and Green were never compensated. Alas, true stories rarely have quite the ending that we would like them to.

  Still, as a result of this case, the authorities began to see that the ability to accurately match the bullets taken from a crime scene with a particular gun had extremely useful practical applications. Charles Waite, whose involvement in the Stielow and Green case we have just mentioned, began to assemble data on all manufactured guns—their bore diameters, the pitch and direction of their rifling, and anything else that might help match a bullet with the gun that fired it. A survey of only American-made guns soon proved to be insufficient. At the end of the First World War, the United States was flooded with cheap, mass-produced foreign pistols, mostly from Europe. In order to broaden his database to accommodate the circulation of these weapons, Waite therefore traveled to Europe and spent the bulk of his time there for several years.

  During the 1920s, while Waite was compiling his database, ballistic expert Calvin Goddard and chemist Philip Gravelle were busy perfecting the comparison microscope. This is a binocular device where each eyepiece views a different area through a separate microscope. A simple early model had already been used to compare such things as grains and ground pigments. Goddard and Gravelle modified it so that bullets or shells could be compared side by side. It was a revolution in the science of ballistics. In 1925, Goddard and Gravelle teamed up with Waite to establish the now legendary Bureau of Forensic Ballistics in New York. From here they offered their services to police forces throughout the country, specializing not only in ballistics but also in fingerprinting, blood-typing, and trace evidence analysis—in just about any forensic technique, in fact.