Silent Witnesses

by Nigel McCrery

  It was discovered that there was a counterfeit gang in operation in the local area, forging coins and using them to buy things. The police already had their suspects but no proof of their guilt. They arrested them in any case, but despite being questioned at length, the suspects refused to confess. Frustrated by their lack of success, the police eventually turned to Locard, who saw this as the perfect opportunity to prove his worth.

  He began by examining the suspects’ clothing, carefully going over each garment with his magnifying glass and tweezers. During the course of this exercise, he came across an unusual-looking fine dust in one of the men’s trouser pockets. He gently removed samples of this and placed them onto a large sheet of clean, white paper. He also brushed out the man’s shirtsleeves, collecting the resulting samples on a second sheet. He looked at these samples under a microscope and was delighted to find that under powerful magnification he could clearly observe that the dust contained minute traces of metal. Chemical tests then revealed these to be tin, antimony, and lead, which matched the composition of the counterfeit coins. Furthermore, he found that their quantities were in the same ratio. Similar evidence was subsequently recovered from the clothing of two more members of the gang. When the evidence was presented to the suspects, they confessed.

  The case was an enormous boost for Locard’s reputation, and that of his laboratory. He had proved to the police that methodical scientific techniques could be of real practical value in crime detection. From that day on, his crime lab was never underused again, and he went on to be instrumental in solving a great many crimes. Some years later, in 1922, he outlined some of the more infamous of these in his book Policiers de roman et policiers de laboratoire (Detectives in Novels and Detectives in the Laboratory).

  One of the cases mentioned in the book occurred in 1912, when Locard was involved in investigating the murder of a young woman named Marie Latelle who had been found strangled one morning in the parlor of her parents’ house just outside Lyon. The police were immediately given the name of her boyfriend, Emile Gourbin, as a potential suspect. Latelle was very pretty and her habit of flirting with other men infuriated Gourbin. He had reportedly flown into a jealous rage over it on more than one occasion.

  But while he seemed to have a possible motive, Gourbin also had an excellent alibi. A doctor who had examined Latelle’s body had estimated her time of death at about midnight. On the night of the murder, Gourbin had spent the evening at the house of a friend who lived many miles from Marie’s house. After passing the time eating, drinking wine, and playing cards with several friends, he finally retired to bed around 1 AM. His friends confirmed his story; he was nowhere near her house on the night that Latelle was murdered.

  The local police were at a loss and asked for assistance from their colleagues in Lyon, who suggested Locard might be able to help. He agreed to offer his expertise and conducted a full examination of the body using a magnifying glass. There were marks around Latelle’s throat that the local police had assumed were the marks of the murderer’s fingers. In fact, they turned out to be scratches caused by the murderer’s nails. This gave Locard an idea and he asked to see Gourbin. He inspected his hands and was pleased to discover that he did not appear to have cleaned them properly in recent days. Locard scraped the matter from beneath the young man’s nails and transferred the residue to a section of white paper.

  Locard returned to the laboratory with this new evidence and began to scrutinize it. Under a microscope he was able to observe that the material recovered from underneath Gourbin’s nails included epithelial tissue—skin and blood cells. While this was perhaps a little suspicious, it was by no means damning evidence in and of itself; the cells could have come from Gourbin scratching himself. However, Locard noticed something else mixed in with the epithelial cells: a granular dust composed of regular-shaped crystals. This turned out to be powdered rice, a highly significant discovery since in 1911 this was the basic constituent of face powder. In addition Locard found iron oxide, zinc oxide, bismuth, and magnesium stearate, all of which were chemicals commonly used in the cosmetics industry. The skin under Gourbin’s nails had been covered in pink face powder.

  Under Locard’s instructions, Latelle’s room was searched. A box of face powder was discovered and proved to be composed of ingredients identical to the material found under Gourbin’s nails.

  Confronted with this evidence, Gourbin finally confessed to killing Marie, explaining that he had duped his friends by advancing their wall clock, enabling him to slip out of bed, kill Marie, and still have an alibi. Without Locard’s methodical examination of the trace evidence, it is almost certain that Gourbin’s alibi would have held and that the murder would have gone unsolved.

  At this time Bertillon was still presiding over the forensic science department in Paris. However, in 1929 he was succeeded by the distinguished chemist Gaston-Edmond Bayle. Bayle had made his name in scientific circles with his work on spectroscopic analysis, where a spectrum is studied in order to determine characteristics of its source (for example, looking at the optical spectrum of an incandescent body to determine its composition). He had joined the Parisian police department as a forensic chemist and physicist in January 1915, though it was another nine years before he became involved in a case that really gave him the chance to shine.

  On June 8, 1924, the body of a seventy-year-old man named Louis Boulay—who had disappeared on May 30—was discovered in the Bois de Boulogne wrapped in a sheet. Both his wallet and a gold watch he was known to possess were missing from his person, suggesting robbery as a probable motive.

  Bayle was asked to assist with the case. He quickly established that Boulay had been killed from several blows to the head with some kind of blunt instrument. He then began a careful search for trace evidence. He was not disappointed. Brushing through the hair of the corpse produced a mixture of river sand and sawdust, subsequent analysis finding the latter to be composed of oak and pine. There were also traces of coal dust, not only in Boulay’s hair but also on his shirt. By determining its precise density, Bayle was able to identify it as anthracite. He also found traces of stone dust that he determined came from a grinding wheel.

  Bayle also discovered two pieces of yellow cardboard on Boulay’s clothes, the fibers of which were made of straw. From the victim’s hat he recovered yeast cultures of a sort that you would expect to find in a wine cellar. Finally and most remarkably he discovered two beetles, both of which lacked eyes, indicating that they were a species that lived in total darkness. The man had evidently been battered to the ground somewhere where he had picked up these materials, before being removed from the place of his murder and dumped.

  At first the police struggled to find any leads. Boulay appeared to be a respectable family man and it was difficult to see how he could have found himself embroiled in trouble. However, a newspaper was then discovered in his office with the names of two horses circled in pencil: Libre Pirate and Star Sapphire. It seemed that Boulay was fond of gambling. In fact, the bets involved were small and would have caused him no financial problems if he had lost, but since this was all they had to go on, the police decided to follow up on it.

  They visited all the known gambling haunts in the city, showing Boulay’s photograph at each to see if anyone recognized him. At first they had no luck, but eventually the manager of a bar not far from the Gare St. Lazare recognized him as one of his customers known as Père Louis. It seemed that he was well known as a racing aficionado and was well liked by other customers, to the extent that he often acted as a bookie’s runner, ferrying money and bets for people.

  This was the breakthrough the police had been looking for. Runners might easily end up carrying large amounts of money, and it seemed that both the horses that Boulay had circled in his paper had won at long odds. An elderly man carrying considerable winnings would be a tempting target for an unscrupulous person. Now the police needed to track down the bookmaker’s at which Boulay had placed the bets, and from w
hich he would have had to claim the winnings. This proved enormously difficult. For the next five months the police interviewed dozens of bookmakers, both legal and illegal. Every one of them denied knowing Boulay, and the investigation stalled.

  Then the police got their second break. A clerk working in Boulay’s office remembered him getting a letter from one of the bookies he used, a man by the name of Tessier, offering him a “dead cert.” When prompted with this information, the chief clerk in the office also remembered Boulay mentioning Tessier, saying that he was no longer going to deal with him on account of being unhappy with his office, which was situated in an old cellar. Much to the delight of the police, he was even able to remember Boulay telling him that these premises were situated on Rue Mogador.

  Furnished with this information, the police were quickly able to build a more complete picture. The man in question was Lazare Tessier, a concierge serving 30 Rue Mogador. He was known to be an illegal bookie and had, in fact, already been interviewed about the murder; he had claimed that he had not taken any bets since his arrest a year ago. Now that they knew of its existence, it did not take the police long to locate the cellar from which Tessier did business. Bayle was called in to examine it and during a careful search removed several samples. Analyzing these back at his lab, he found that he was able to match various materials exactly to those discovered on the body—the coal dust, river sand, and sawdust. Bayle was delighted, his only slight disappointment being that nowhere in his search had he discovered any of the sightless beetles. However, given the strength of the evidence he had succeeded in compiling, this was hardly something to worry about.

  Tessier was promptly arrested but, in spite of the now compelling evidence against him (it was even discovered that he had been in debt but had suddenly been able to pay off his creditors), he still denied all charges. Although the police case was already strong, Bayle decided to return to the cellar for one more look, this time bringing a powerful lamp with him. With it he discovered what seemed to be spots of blood close to an area that had recently been repainted. He also found a bloodstain at the foot of the stairs and was subsequently able to prove that this was of human origin using the Uhlenhuth test, which contradicted Tessier’s immediate claim that it had come from a cat. Finally, another tenant in the building mentioned that he had allowed Tessier to use his cellar upon occasion, and that when he had complained about an unpleasant odor emanating from it, Tessier had told him that it was coming from the drains, and that he would have them fixed. However, this was later attributed to the smell of Boulay’s body rotting in the basement. Bayle checked the drains and, inside them, found the sightless beetles he had been looking for.

  Tessier went to trial still denying the murder, in spite of the extraordinary weight of forensic evidence against him. He was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, while Bayle was hailed throughout France for his incredible investigative powers. Ultimately, however, his career would end in tragedy.

  In mid-September 1929, having only just taken up the running of the Forensic Science Department in Bertillon’s stead, Bayle was asked to examine a document that had been used by a traveling salesman, Joseph-Emile Philipponet, to procure money from his landlord. Bayle looked over the document in his laboratory for some time before eventually concluding that it was a forgery. When Philipponet was told, he took the news badly. Three days later, he managed to gain access to Bayle’s laboratory and shot him three times in the back. Bayle died immediately. When he was arrested, Philipponet claimed: “Monsieur Bayle committed an act of bad faith! My document was genuine! What I have done was worth the death of a father of five children!”

  So ended the life of one of the finest exponents of forensic science; it was a great loss to criminal detection.

  The United States was not slow to realize the usefulness of the microscope and the enormous crime-solving potential of trace evidence. Probably the finest example of these techniques being successfully used in the United States is the case of the murder of New York novelist Nancy Titterton in 1936.

  Thirty-four-year-old Titterton lived with her husband Lewis (an NBC executive) at 22 Beekman Place, in an area popular with New York’s literary set. She was a well-respected book reviewer and was considered a promising novelist. On Good Friday 1936, two men from a local furniture upholsterer’s climbed the stairs to the fourth-floor apartment carrying a couch that the Tittertons had sent to be repaired. On arrival they found the door unexpectedly open. The older of the two, Theodore Kruger, called out to announce their presence. When he received no reply, he tentatively entered the apartment, followed by his young assistant, John Fiorenza. They found no one inside and, since that seemed rather unusual, began to check the other rooms.

  Looking into one of the bedrooms, they found the bed disheveled, with the bedspread and ripped underwear strewn across the floor. Moments later they realized that the bathroom light was on and the shower was running. They stood outside the door and called out repeatedly, but once again there was no response. By now they had the definite feeling that something was amiss. Slowly they opened the bathroom door and peered inside.

  Nancy Titterton’s naked body was lying face down in the empty bath. She had been strangled with her own pajama jacket, which was still wrapped tightly around her throat. Understandably appalled by the dreadful scene, Kruger turned off the shower and hastened to call the police.

  Because of Titterton’s relatively high profile and the importance of her husband, a sixty-five-person team was formed to investigate the crime under the leadership of Assistant Chief Inspector John Lyons. Several significant discoveries were made almost at once. Traces of green paint were found on the bedspread, and mud on the carpet. The biggest clue, however, came when Titterton’s body was lifted from the bath. A cleanly severed thirteen-inch length of cord was discovered beneath it. Given the bruises evident on Titterton’s wrists and the torn underwear in the bedroom, it seemed clear that the crime was sexually motivated and that the cord had been used to tie her hands before she was raped.

  After murdering her, the killer had cut the cord in order to take it away from the scene with him, thereby leaving as little evidence as possible. Such careful planning suggested that perhaps the killer wasn’t new to this; leaving the body in the bath with the shower running was also a clear attempt to destroy forensic evidence. Luckily for the investigative team, in his hurry to flee, the killer had failed to notice the stray section of cord hidden beneath the body.

  In spite of the fact that there were several evidential leads to follow up on, initial forensic analyses of the scene proved disappointing. The mud on the carpet was discovered to contain traces of lint of the sort commonly found in upholstery shops; it had clearly been brought in by the two delivery men. The traces of green paint were revealed to have come from a decorator’s can—the outside of the building was being painted. Apparently there were four men involved in this work, but other tenants in the building confirmed that only one had been in on the day of Titterton’s death, and that he had been working on another floor at the time when the murder must have occurred.

  Given these disappointments, the police began to pin a lot of hope on gleaning some information from the length of cord. They started by checking with all the cord manufacturers in the New York area, to see if it had come from any of them. This proved fruitless, and they were forced to expand the search to cover not only New York but three more states as well. Tracing the cord might yet prove to be useful, but it was clearly going to take some time.

  In the meantime John Lyons continued to ponder the case. There were a number of elements that puzzled him. First, the fact that the cord had been brought to the scene clearly showed that the murder had been planned, yet nobody had seen anyone suspicious in or near the building on the day. Besides, Nancy Titterton was a nervous woman, and it therefore seemed unlikely that she would have let a complete stranger into the apartment. That meant either the killer had broken into th
e apartment somehow and surprised her or she had known the person. Lyons was convinced that it was the latter—but who was the culprit?

  A discovery made by Dr. Alexander Gettler, a chemist from the city’s toxicology department, at last began to guide Lyons towards a solution. Gettler had subjected the bedclothes in the disarrayed bedroom to close scrutiny with a magnifying glass and had been rewarded with the discovery of a stiff white hair about half an inch long that he was unable to account for. Examination under a powerful microscope allowed him to determine that it was a horsehair of the sort used to stuff furniture. When it was compared to the hair used to upholster the sofa that Kruger and Fiorenza had delivered on the day of the murder, it was found to be a clear match. This might not appear to be of particular significance; after all, there were bound to be a few bits of the horsehair from the sofa in the apartment. However, the hair was too heavy to have simply blown into the bedroom, meaning it must have been carried there in some way.

  Working on Locard’s basic principle that “every contact leaves a trace,” Lyons pondered this development. It was of course possible that one of the detectives examining the scene had carried the hair into the room with them, but Lyons felt it was more likely that either Kruger or Fiorenza had done so, since they would have had a great deal more contact with the sofa and the horsehair it was stuffed with. However, both had stated that they hadn’t actually entered the room, only stood by the door looking in for a short time. What, Lyons began to imagine, if one or even both of them had visited the apartment earlier that day? It was something of a long shot, but in the absence of any other evidence, he decided to explore this theory.