Silent Witnesses

by Nigel McCrery

  Thanks to Karl Landsteiner’s discoveries, in modern-day transfusions the blood from the donor and that of the recipient are carefully compared to ensure that the blood types are compatible and will not agglutinate upon transfusion.

  At the same time that Landsteiner was conducting his experiment, a young doctor by the name of Paul Uhlenhuth (1870–1957), at the Institute of Hygiene in Greifswald, Germany, discovered how to distinguish between animal and human blood. It started with a significant discovery on the part of German physiologist Emil von Behring (1854–1917). In 1890 he found that animals inoculated with diphtheria toxin formed defensive substances in their blood serum. In 1900, building on the work of Behring and others (such as the Belgian immunologist and microbiologist Jules Bordet, 1870–1961), Uhlenhuth discovered that if he injected protein from a chicken egg into a rabbit and then mixed the blood serum from the rabbit with egg white, the egg proteins separated from the liquid to form a substance known as a precipitin. However, this only worked with chicken egg white—whites from any other bird would not precipitate chicken protein. Uhlenhuth then tried to create a serum using chicken blood instead of egg white, which again caused the protein to be precipitated out. He had therefore created a serum that precipitated the protein of only one animal. Using the same technique, he began creating serum tests for every possible animal. These discoveries enabled him to differentiate not only between animal blood types, but also between human and animal blood.

  Uhlenhuth then went on to develop safeguards for the test. When faulty results were obtained through the use of serum that had been created in another lab, he standardized the serums by insisting that the only official sources should be his own institute and the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. He also strongly recommended that before any test of an unknown substance, a control test should be conducted against a known sample. When testing a particular bloodstain, it might also be the case that misleading results could be obtained as a result of the underlying material on which the stain lay. Uhlenhuth therefore suggested that any such material should be tested separately first, in order to eliminate the possibility of a false positive. With these safeguards in place, the Uhlenhuth precipitin test worked infallibly every time. Its practical value was first demonstrated in 1901.

  During the early afternoon of September 9, 1898, two little girls went missing from the village of Lechtingen, near Osnabrück, Germany. Their disappearance naturally caused a great deal of anxiety and so a search was mounted by the whole village. Towards evening the body of one of the girls, seven-year-old Hannelore Heidemann, was discovered in some nearby woods. It was a gruesome sight: her body had been dismembered and parts of it scattered around. An hour or so later the remains of her friend, eight-year-old Else Langmeier, were found hidden under some bushes. She had also been mutilated and dismembered.

  A local carpenter by the name of Ludwig Tessnow quickly fell under suspicion, as he had been seen entering the village from the direction of the woods and appeared to have bloodstains on his clothing. He was arrested and questioned by the police, but claimed that the brown marks on his clothes were simply stains from wood dye, which he used in his work. With no way of proving otherwise, the police had to accept this explanation and Tessnow was eventually released. He remained in the district for some time, taking work where he could find it, before wandering further afield in 1899. He finally settled in the small village of Göhren on the Baltic Island of Rügen.

  On Sunday, July 1, 1901, two young brothers from the village, Peter and Hermann Stubbe—six and eight years old, respectively—were found murdered and disemboweled. Their heads had been removed, their skulls crushed with a rock, and their limbs severed. Hermann’s heart had also been removed and was never discovered.

  Once again there was cause to suspect Tessnow. One witness recalled seeing him talking to the two boys earlier that day, while another remembered him returning to the village in his Sunday best with dark stains visible on both his jacket and trousers. When the local authorities interviewed him, he denied any involvement, but a search of his home unearthed recently laundered clothing that bore suspicious stains. As before, he claimed that they were from wood dye and, as before, he was released. However, one of the magistrates remembered Tessnow’s name being mentioned in connection with the Lechtingen murders a few years earlier. A local farmer had also seen a man whose description matched Tessnow run from his field, leaving behind him seven slaughtered sheep. The sheep hadn’t just been killed; their legs had been cut or torn off and tossed about the field. When Tessnow was brought in for a lineup, the farmer had no trouble picking him out as the man he had seen.

  Nevertheless, the police needed real evidence in order to tie Tessnow to the murders. Uhlenhuth had developed his test to distinguish animal blood from human only four months earlier. When the authorities heard about this, they contacted him and asked him to test Tessnow’s clothing and the bloodstained stone used to crush the children’s skulls. Uhlenhuth had been preparing for such a test and applied his method to more than one hundred spots. He then announced the results: while he did find wood dye, he also detected traces of both sheep and human blood, all quite distinct from one another. Tessnow was tried, convicted, and executed on the strength of this evidence.

  It was almost a decade later that blood analysis played an important part in solving a murder in England for the first time.

  In July 1910, seventy-year-old widow Isabella Wilson was found dead in the back room of her secondhand clothes shop on the High Street in Slough, a town west of London. A cushion had been tied tightly over her face with a scarf so that she suffocated. Injuries were also discovered on the side of her head, indicating that she had been struck several times with some kind of blunt instrument. The motive for the killing seemed clear—it was generally known that Mrs. Wilson kept a purse in the pocket underneath her apron and rumor had it that she sometimes carried as much as twenty gold sovereigns in it. The purse was discovered next to her body, empty. On the table nearby, the police found a piece of brown paper with circular marks on it. Mrs. Wilson was known to keep her sovereigns wrapped in brown paper—clearly the killer had left the paper behind.

  Their enquiries soon pointed the police to a man called William Broome, a twenty-five-year-old unemployed mechanic. He had once been a neighbor of Mrs. Wilson’s, though he had moved away with his family some time previously. On the day Mrs. Wilson died, however, he had been seen in Slough by several people. Broome was tracked down some miles away in Harlesden a few days after the murder. When he was taken to a local police station and questioned, he claimed to have been in London all day, contrary to the statements given by a number of witnesses placing him in the vicinity of the crime. When asked if he had any money on him, he produced only a few shillings but then, quite extraordinarily, explained that he had twenty gold sovereigns back in his room in London.

  Broome also had two scratch marks on his face. He claimed he had received them during a fight with a local bookmaker over a bet on a race he had won. This was also where he had got the twenty gold sovereigns, he said. However, Mrs. Wilson had long nails, one of which was broken. It had been assumed that this had occurred when scratching her attacker in an attempt to defend herself.

  Broome was committed for trial at Aylesbury assizes on October 22, 1910. He maintained his story, insisting that he had been in London at the time of Mrs. Wilson’s murder. The prosecution was already able to produce several witnesses who knew Broome well and who were adamant that they had seen him in Slough, but what really caused a stir was Dr. William Willcox taking the stand—he was already well known for giving evidence in the infamous Dr. Crippen case. The investigating team had asked Willcox to examine several fingernails snipped from the late Mrs. Wilson’s fingers at the scene and also to look at a pair of Broome’s boots and some of his clothing.

  Willcox noted that there was skin attached to one of Mrs. Wilson’s fingernails and that it had blood on it. When he turned his attention to the boots, he fo
und that, although Broome had carefully cleaned and polished them, he had failed to notice stains on the instep. Willcox examined them and said that they were blood of mammalian origin. Asked if this meant the blood could have come from a human, he replied firmly that it could, though he himself did not attempt to establish whether the blood was human or animal, or what group it was. Willcox probably assumed that with the weight of evidence against Broome, he didn’t have to spend much time investigating such details.

  He did, however, examine under a microscope the brown paper found at the murder scene. When he did so, he discovered small specks of gold. Willcox did not merely say this proved that the deceased did indeed wrap her coins in the paper, he made the rather outrageous claim that he was able to tell that the paper had contained twenty gold sovereigns, the exact amount found in Broome’s room. Willcox was an enormous presence in court, and juries would watch him with rapt attention as though witnessing a magician performing a marvelous trick. His evidence certainly sealed Broome’s fate—once the judge had summed up, it took the jury only thirteen minutes to find him guilty as charged. He was sentenced to death.

  The next notable advance in serology took place in Italy in 1915, when Dr. Leone Lattes, an Italian lecturer in forensic medicine in Turin, became determined to prove that you could establish blood groups even weeks after stains had been discovered, long after the blood had dried. His opportunity came in a rather bizarre set of circumstances, when he was asked to settle an everyday domestic dispute.

  A construction worker named Ranzo Girardi returned home from a trip to another town with what appeared to be bloodstains on his shirt. His wife saw them and, in some kind of strange paranoia, accused him of adultery during his trip. He was unsure where the blood had come from but vehemently denied her accusations. However, she refused to believe him and began to make his life a misery. After three months, Girardi was growing desperate and so consulted the Institute of Forensic Medicine for help. Lattes, who worked there, agreed to test the stains and to try to establish a match, even though they were far from fresh. Girardi thought the stains might very well be his own blood, though it was also possible they were his wife’s or even beef blood from the butcher.

  Lattes soon determined that the stains were human, eliminating the latter possibility. He then established that Girardi’s blood was type A and that his wife’s was type O. He also took the blood of a friend of Girardi’s wife, who had been staying at the house at the time and who had been menstruating, his reasoning being that she might have inadvertently transferred some of her own blood onto the shirt. This friend was also found to be blood group A. Despite the fact that the outcome of this marital dispute was of no real significance, Lattes found himself enthralled by the case.

  He soaked the bloodstains out of the cloth with distilled water, going to great pains to determine their precise weight. This might seem like over-zealous attention to detail, but he was determined to avoid “pseudoagglutination,” where clumping occurs because the serum is too strong or because there are too many red blood cells in a test solution.

  Despite the age of the stains, Lattes was still able to manufacture a few drops of liquid blood. These were then placed into small “wells” on dimpled microscope slides, and drops of type A and type B blood introduced. The unknown blood agglutinated with type B, meaning that it must itself be type A. Therefore it was highly likely that it was the blood of either Girardi or the lady visitor. Further examination under a microscope showed none of the epithelial (skin or mucus) cells that would be present in menstrual blood, demonstrating that it could not be the menstrual blood of the visiting friend. It was then determined that Girardi suffered from occasional bleeding brought on by a problem with his prostate. The weight of evidence was firmly on Girardi’s side. His wife was forced to admit that she had been mistaken in her accusation.

  Restoring marital bliss to a home might not be as dramatic an outcome as bringing a violent criminal to justice in the way some other forensic breakthroughs have, but it was nonetheless a triumph for Lattes—he had demonstrated that it was possible to determine the blood group of stains even three months old. The fascination with blood analysis that he developed during the case afterwards led him to specialize in serology and its application to crime detection.

  Lattes soon followed up his success with Girardi by proving the innocence of a man charged with murder; using the same technique as before, he demonstrated that the blood group found on the suspect’s clothing actually matched the suspect’s own group, and not that of the murder victims. He then went on to invent a greatly simplified method of testing—placing tiny flakes of the dried blood he wanted to test onto the microscope slide, adding fresh blood, and then placing another slide on top. The serum in the fresh blood would do all the work of dissolving the blood that was to be tested, eliminating the time-consuming process of making up a liquid sample beforehand. If the bloods were of different groups the same clumping would still occur. Finally, in 1922, Lattes published his treatise on The Individuality of Blood, which went on to become a classic in the field. However, it was not until 1926 that he really became a household name in Italy (and indeed the rest of the world). It was in that year that he became involved in the Bruneri-Canella affair, a strange case that was to last for over forty years.

  It began in a Jewish cemetery in Turin. A local caretaker witnessed a man acting suspiciously; at first he thought the man was praying but on closer examination realized that he was trying to steal a bronze funeral vase from a grave. When the man became aware he had been spotted, he took off. He tried to conceal himself inside the church and then attempted to commit suicide, though the caretaker managed to apprehend him before he could succeed.

  When questioned the man claimed to have lost his memory, and the local magistrate ordered that he be detained at the Collegno Mental Hospital, where he was listed as Unknown, Number 44170. The magistrate also arranged for the man’s photograph to be printed in the local newspapers in the hope that someone might recognize him.

  Sometime later, a woman by the name of Giulia Concetta Canella saw the photograph and became convinced that the man was her long-lost husband, Professor Giulio Canella. Canella had been a teacher and scholar of philosophy. In 1909 he had cofounded the Rivista difilosofia neoscolastica (Neoscholastic Philosophy Review) and in 1916 cofounded Corriere del mattino (Morning Post). He then married Giulia, who was his cousin and the daughter of a wealthy Brazilian businessman. They had two children together.

  Canella had disappeared while on the Macedonian campaign during the Great War. The only information his wife had about him was that during the battle of Monastir Hill he had been shot in the head and seriously wounded. According to his comrades, he had survived the injury but had been captured and made a prisoner of war. The fact that his body had not been recovered from the battlefield seemed to confirm this story. However, there was no record of him being taken prisoner, either.

  Giulia asked to visit the asylum, and on February 27, 1927, she was granted a meeting with the unidentified man. Extreme care was taken—it was decided that, to avoid putting the man under unnecessary stress, the initial encounter should appear to be accidental. He was therefore taken for a walk through the cloisters of the hospital; it was arranged that he would pass by Giulia Canella. But he showed no emotion or recognition when this occurred. The same could not be said of Giulia, however—she insisted that there was no doubt whatsoever in her mind that the man she had seen was her husband.

  As a result a second meeting was engineered. On this occasion the man told his attendants that he had a vague sense that he knew Giulia and that he felt that his memory was stirring. On the strength of this, a third meeting was arranged. This time Giulia, apparently unable to control herself any longer, broke down in tears. In response the man took her into his arms in a very familiar fashion. The doctors were finally convinced that the patient in their care was indeed Giulio Canella, especially following a fourth encounter, which occurred lat
er that same afternoon, during which he talked about his recollections of his children.

  Officially recognized as Professor Canella, the patient was sent back to Verona with his wife in March 1927. Given the dramatic nature of the reunion, the story unsurprisingly received a lot of press attention, with the Turin newspaper La Stampa, for example, running the headline “A cry, a shiver, a hug, the light.”

  On March 3, 1927, just a few days after the apparently happy ending, a government employee in Turin received an unsigned letter stating that the man was not Canella at all, but rather a man called Mario Bruneri, a typist from Turin, born in 1886. He was an unscrupulous anarchist and con man who had been wanted by the Turin police since 1922 for acts of violence. He was also wanted in other cities, including Pavia and Milan. His extensive criminal record included theft and fraud, and he had previously been incarcerated for both. Bruneri had been missing for six years, having apparently fled his family in order to live with his mistress.

  The records held on Bruneri were quite wide-ranging and included a detailed physical and psychological profile, which perfectly matched the character and aspect of the man now claiming to be Canella. On Sunday, March 6, 1927, the government employee, firmly convinced he had been duped, arranged for the arrest of the man. He was brought back to Turin the same day.