Silent Witnesses

by Nigel McCrery

  But this comfortable picture of a young couple settling down to begin a life together was rent asunder when, during the early hours of July 4, 1954, Sheppard’s wife, Marilyn, was beaten to death in the bedroom of their home. She was pregnant at the time.

  Sheppard explained that, after a dinner party, he had fallen asleep in the sitting room, only to be roused some time later, believing he heard his wife call his name. He immediately dashed up the stairs and saw someone grappling with her. He was then knocked out by a blow to the head. On regaining consciousness he was confronted with the bloodstained body of his wife. He heard a noise coming from downstairs and staggered down to find a bushy-haired man making his escape via the back door. Sheppard gave chase and attacked the figure but was knocked unconscious once more. When he came around he found himself lying on the shore of Lake Erie (which the house backed onto), with his feet in the water and his T-shirt missing.

  In a state of confusion, he returned to the house and, finding that Marilyn was dead, called his neighbor, Mayor John Spencer Houk, before collapsing onto the living room couch. Houk and his family arrived at Sheppard’s house at around 5 AM. Shortly afterward the police were called. They arrived with the Cuyahoga County Coroner Samuel Gerber. Gerber recorded that Marilyn Sheppard was lying face up on the bed, covered in blood and wearing just her pajama top. She had been beaten to death, struck no fewer than thirty-five times. Beneath her body a pillowcase was discovered with a bloodstain that appeared to be in the shape of a surgical instrument, though it was not possible to ascertain what sort exactly. The house had been ransacked, though strangely the intruder had taken nothing, even ignoring several hundred dollars.

  Gerber didn’t believe Sheppard’s story; he became convinced that he had murdered his wife during an argument and then staged a break-in to cover his tracks. The medical evidence pointed to Marilyn having been murdered at approximately 4 AM, yet at least an hour had passed before Sheppard called for help, giving him plenty of time to dispose of incriminating evidence. As a result of Gerber’s suspicions, Sheppard’s story was probed more deeply. If Marilyn Sheppard’s attacker was a burglar who simply wanted to silence her, why would he then go on to hit her thirty-five times, continuing his assault when she was already unconscious? Why would the intruder have remained in the house after his first run-in with Sheppard?

  Additionally, the Sheppards owned a dog, yet it had not been heard barking when the house was supposedly broken into. Furthermore, Sheppard said that after his second encounter with the intruder he had woken up on the beach with his feet in the water, yet there was no sand in his hair, though admittedly his clothes—which were collected by Gerber—were wet. Finally, his bloodstained watch was discovered in a plastic bag in the garden of the house.

  Six days after the murder, the police confronted Sheppard with yet another seemingly incriminating piece of intelligence when they asked him if he was having an affair with hospital technician Susan Hayes. Nancy Ahern, one of the friends who had visited the Sheppards on the night of the murder, had given the police this information. Sheppard denied the accusation, but, as more information about the case began to circulate, the press started to turn against him. It was trial by media. At the inquest, Sheppard again stated that he had not had sexual relations with Susan Hayes. Unfortunately for him, Nancy Ahern gave evidence that Marilyn had told her that she knew her husband was having an affair with Susan Hayes, and that she was convinced that he was going to leave her. The grand jury met to consider the evidence and decided that there was a case against Sheppard. He was arrested and charged with murder. It took eighteen ballots to find a jury, but on December 21, 1954, Sheppard was found guilty of second-degree murder. However, this was far from being the end of the case.

  Sheppard’s defense attorney, Bill Corrigan, was unhappy with the verdict and began his own investigation into the evidence. He contacted Dr. Paul Leland Kirk at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Kirk was an esteemed criminalist who specialized in microscopy and was appointed the leader of UC Berkeley’s criminology program in 1937. He agreed to come to Bay Village and examine the evidence. His conclusions were vastly different from those of the prosecution.

  It being eight months after the crime, Kirk was unable to examine a fresh scene. Instead he focused on re-creating the crime based on the patterns of blood spatters in the bedroom. There were blood spots on two of the walls, which he judged to have been caused by the battering of Marilyn Sheppard’s head, while those on a third wall appeared to be spatter marks from a swinging weapon. Coroner Gerber had previously stated during the trial that he believed Marilyn had been killed by a surgical instrument. Kirk, on the other hand, concluded that the blood splatter from the weapon was almost certainly caused by a heavy object of some sort, such as a flashlight, and not by a surgical instrument. He contended that the stain discovered on the pillow had in fact been made by the pillow being folded while it was still wet with Marilyn Sheppard’s blood and was not caused by any such instrument. Considering the amount of blood everywhere else, the killer must have been drenched, yet there was no blood found anywhere on Sheppard or his clothing. Kirk also determined that the killer must have held the murder weapon in his left hand, but Sheppard was right-handed.

  Even with this new evidence, it took nine years to get Sheppard a retrial. It began in 1966. This time the well-known attorney F. Lee Bailey defended him. Bailey was a master of his art and quickly began to break down the prosecution’s case. He pointed out that the police search of the scene had been less than professional and that they had not tried to get fingerprints from several important items relating to the case. He then accused Gerber of being out to get Sheppard because he was jealous of him. Gerber lost his cool and responded angrily; that didn’t go over well with the jury.

  Finally, Bailey brought everyone’s attention to the blood spatters, particularly those on Sheppard’s watch. The face of the watch had blood specks on it, which Dr. Kirk had conceded looked like the splatter of flying blood. This would certainly have been the case if Sheppard had battered Marilyn to death while wearing it. However, Kirk also stated that as the tail on the end of the splatter was not symmetrical, he could not be sure that the spots were indeed “flying” blood spots. Bailey then showed images of the blood spots found on the inside of the wrist strap, which were the same shape as the blood spots on the outside of the watch. It would not have been possible for these blood splatters to match, or even for there to be a blood splatter on the inside of the watch strap, if Sheppard had worn it while committing the crime. The blood on the watch could therefore not be used as evidence that Sheppard killed his wife. This, together with Kirk’s other observations, impressed the jury and Sheppard was found not guilty. Speaking in connection with the case, Kirk later said, “No other type of investigation of blood will yield so much useful information as an analysis of the blood distribution patterns.”

  It’s certainly true that blood distribution patterns can help us to reconstruct the sequence of events in a violent crime with surprising accuracy. On the other hand, we may find it hard to agree entirely with Kirk’s statement, since the various forms of blood testing that have been developed over the years have provided strong evidence to help tie particular individuals to a crime scene—which is arguably of more practical use in actually securing a conviction. And, with the development of DNA fingerprinting by Alec Jeffreys in September 1984, the science of serology would take its biggest leap forward, something which we will explore further in Chapter 7.

  4

  Trace Evidence

  Wherever he steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves, even unconsciously, will serve as a 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 mark he leaves, the paint he scratches …

  Paul L. Kirk, Crime Investigation: Physical Evidence and the Police Laboratory (1953)

  On July 18, 1909, a quiet Sunday afternoon, the body of a you
ng woman was found in a Parisian apartment. Her legs were spread wide and her face had been beaten so badly that she was almost unrecognizable. Police had broken into the apartment, having been alerted that blood was leaking through the ceiling of the café below. The concierge of the building had tried to gain entrance himself but was obstructed by the iron gate blocking the stairs, while the window at the rear proved to be locked tight.

  The apartment belonged to a man named Albert Oursel. The woman was soon identified as sixteen-year-old Germaine Bichon, Oursel’s mistress. Given that the apartment had been completely ransacked, but that the remnants of a meal were found on the table, the police deduced that an intruder had surprised Bichon while she was eating, killed her, then burgled the apartment before escaping. However, as the only exits from the apartment—the window and the staircase—were both secure, it was a mystery how the perpetrator could have gotten out.

  A postmortem of Bichon’s body by medical examiner Victor Balthazard confirmed that she had died from the injuries she had sustained during the attack; she was also five months pregnant. What was more revealing, however, was what he found curled in the palm of Bichon’s hand: light-colored hair that he believed to have come from the head of a woman.

  Given the youth of the victim and the brutality of the crime, the case was clearly going to be very high profile, so Octave Hamard, then the chief of the Sûreté, personally took charge of the investigation. He quickly came to his own conclusions about the circumstances surrounding the crime and became convinced that Oursel had returned to Paris and murdered Bichon because she was pregnant with his child and insistent that they get married. This theory gained weight when the cleaning woman told him that the couple had been arguing for months.

  Locating Oursel became a priority. He ran a domestic servant agency from the apartment during the week but generally left Bichon alone there on weekends, staying instead with his family at their country home at Flins-sur-Seine. As it happened, however, Oursel returned to Paris the very next day. When questioned he turned out to have a cast-iron alibi; he had been at church at the time Bichon was murdered and the priest and many members of the congregation would be able to bear witness to the fact. After leaving church he had spent the afternoon lunching with his family. Even leaving all this aside, upon meeting him, Hamard felt Oursel was an unlikely killer—he appeared weak and nervous. After interviewing Oursel’s secretary, who had left the apartment with Oursel on the day of the murder, Hamard discovered that seven francs had been stolen from a cash drawer and thirty more from a bureau. A gold watch chain had also been taken, as well as a Russian rouble made from gold, worth about forty francs. A fair sum in total, but not much for the life of a young girl. It was back to square one. Over the following weeks, theories and suspects came and went, with the police no closer to catching the killer. Then Hamard got a break.

  It was discovered that on the Sunday prior to the murder, a woman giving her name as Madam Bosch had accosted three servant girls not far from the apartment. She had claimed that Oursel owed her a considerable sum of money. She wanted one of the girls to accompany her to his apartment and witness her claim and his response. They had all refused, not wanting to get involved in such a contentious situation and finding the woman’s behavior decidedly strange. After some investigation, Hamard found out that Bosch was the married name of a woman formerly called Rosella Rousseau, who was Oursel’s previous cleaner.

  Hamard brought Bosch in for questioning. She completely denied any involvement with the incident the servant girls had described, and unfortunately they were unable to identify her with certainty. But even though he lacked any hard evidence, Hamard could not shake the feeling that something was wrong. He decided to dig a bit more deeply into Bosch’s background. It didn’t take him long to find out that she and her husband were heavily in debt, to the extent that they had been in danger of being thrown out of their home. Yet, the day after the murder, they had suddenly been able to pay their rent. A neighbor also mentioned that Bosch had told him that she was going with her husband to a local shop to sell something valuable. Hamard’s detectives found the dealer in question, who told them that Bosch had wanted to sell him a gold coin but that he had become suspicious and refused to buy it. It seemed a strong possibility that this was the Russian rouble Oursel had reported as missing.

  Bosch was brought into the police station again. Hamard was now more determined than ever to find irrefutable evidence that would connect her to the crime. At this point the strands of hair discovered by Balthazard in Bichon’s hand finally came into play. While she was in the police station, samples of hair were taken from Bosch and handed over to Balthazard for comparison. It did not take long to establish, using a microscope, that her hair was the same color and width—0.07 mm—as that recovered from the scene. Although this wasn’t absolute proof that the hair was hers, the chances of it having come from anyone else were extremely small (see Plate 8).

  While conducting his examination of the hairs, Balthazard remembered another important detail. Some of the hair that he had taken from the scene had been in a clump with blood on one end. He was convinced that this had happened when Bichon had literally ripped the hair from her murderer. The following day he paid a visit to Bosch, who had been remanded in prison. He examined her head and before long he found what he was looking for: slightly to the right of one temple was a clearly defined area where a tuft of hair had been pulled out.

  Confronted with this evidence, Bosch finally broke down and confessed to the murder. Growing desperate as her financial situation spiraled out of control, and facing eviction, she had decided to steal from Oursel, her former employer. She knew that on weekends he was away from the apartment and that she would only have Bichon to worry about. Her initial plan was to get someone else to distract the girl while she gained entrance to the apartment—that was the reason she had approached the servants on the street. She then planned on hiding in the flat until Bichon left before carrying out the theft. When they refused to help, she knew she would have to risk doing things on her own. She hoped that she would be able to slip into the apartment quickly while Bichon was out and make her escape before she returned.

  The first part of this plan went well and she gained entrance to the apartment without incident. Unfortunately, however, she lingered too long and Bichon returned. Bosch managed to conceal herself in a cupboard and decided that she would have to remain there overnight and wait for another chance to plunder the apartment. The following day she thought her opportunity had come; Bichon seemed to have gone out for lunch. Bosch crept out carefully from inside the cupboard only to discover to her horror that she had been mistaken—Bichon was sitting at the dining-room table, eating. Understandably shocked by the appearance of an intruder, Bichon attacked, driving Bosch back into the kitchen. She picked up an axe in order to defend herself, but in the struggle Bosch managed to pull it from her grasp and struck her across the face with it. As the young girl went down, Bosch subjected her to a flurry of blows, causing horrific injuries. She then forced open the cash box before ransacking the wardrobe and making her escape using Bichon’s key to open the locks and secure the door behind her.

  At her trial in February 1910, Bosch withdrew her confession, claiming that the police had forced it from her. She also tried to plead self-defense, saying she was fighting for her own life. It did her no good. The jury found her guilty and she was sentenced to death.

  We have already referred to Edmond Locard earlier in this book. This brilliant forensic scientist made a very simple statement: “Every contact leaves a trace.” This expresses the simple fact (now usually known as Locard’s Exchange Principle) that even the cleverest criminals will almost certainly leave some small trace of their presence at a scene, or else take some small trace from the scene away with them. It is an idea that lies at the very heart of forensic science even today, for it is through such traces that an individual can be linked to a crime scene. The conviction of Madame Bosch is an elo
quent demonstration of this principle in action.

  Of course the kind of evidence we are referring to in such cases may sometimes be very hard to detect; to the naked eye, many crime scenes appear spotless and devoid of clues. It is for this reason that the gradual emergence of the use of trace evidence in forensic detection goes hand in hand with the development of microscopes and other such instruments; these tools made it possible to analyze crime scenes in minute and painstaking detail.

  Although glass existed in the ancient world and was used decoratively by various peoples, such as the Egyptians, its optical properties were not much explored at that time. The Romans did note its ability to magnify—the philosopher Seneca described how, when looking through glass filled with water, writing underneath the glass appeared enlarged. (However, it is believed this effect was attributed to the water rather than the glass.) It was also the Romans who discovered that lenses could be used to concentrate the power of the sun’s rays to the point that it was possible to start a fire. As a result of these two properties, the first lenses were often referred to as either “magnifiers” or “burning glasses.”

  But although such lenses were interesting, it wasn’t until much later, at the end of the thirteenth century, that a widespread practical use for them was discovered. It was then that the first pair of spectacles was created in Italy. The invention is generally acknowledged to have been the work of an Italian man named Salvino D’Armate in 1284.