Silent Witnesses

by Nigel McCrery

  Goron sent men to search for Eyraud in the United States and Canada, but they were unable to catch up with him, despite tracking a long trail of his petty crimes, and eventually returned to France empty-handed. But one misdemeanor in particular eventually proved to be Eyraud’s undoing. While in New York he “borrowed” an expensive oriental robe from a Turkish gentleman, on the pretext that he wanted to be photographed wearing it. Needless to say the poor man never saw his robe, or Eyraud, again. He subsequently traveled to Havana, Cuba, and while there tried to sell the stolen robe to a dressmaker. In a stroke of luck for Goron and Lacassagne, the dressmaker recognized Eyraud from having seen his photograph in the paper, and promptly informed the French consul. The hunt was on.

  Police raided Eyraud’s room at the Hotel Roma in Havana. There they found his belongings packed and ready for a quick exit, but no sign of the man himself. Later that night he tried to gain entrance to a brothel, but the madam, suspicious of his ragged appearance, threw him out before calling the police. It did not take long for them to locate him wandering the streets and arrest him. They finally had their man.

  On being brought back to Havana Police Station, Eyraud attempted and failed to commit suicide. He was then transported back to Paris where he confessed and told his version of the story. Contrary to Bompard’s account, Eyraud said she was very much involved and that he had persuaded her to lure Gouffe to a room where he would be lying in wait for him. Bompard would then begin to seduce him and, while he was distracted in this way, Eyraud would strike. Things went according to plan; Eyraud attacked Gouffe, first attempting to hang him and then, when he started screaming, resorting to strangling him with his bare hands. The body was hidden inside the trunk. Eyraud then left in order to break into Gouffe’s office to steal the money he knew to be there—this was the entire motive for the crime. However, for some reason—most likely because he was in something of a panic—he was unable to locate the cash. Later he disposed of the body in the river, thinking that would be an end to the matter.

  Had the two committed the murder in another area, one not served by Lacassagne, it is highly probable that they would have gotten away with it, since without Lacassagne, Gouffe’s corpse would have remained unidentified. Unfortunately for them, they didn’t. After a four-day trial, Eyraud was found guilty of murder and sent to the guillotine. Despite the important part she had played, Bompard was treated more leniently and sentenced to twenty years in prison. The high profile of the case, both in France and internationally, considerably enhanced Lacassagne’s own reputation, not to mention being a huge boost to that of forensic science as a whole.

  The discovery of a corpse in a bag seems more the stuff of nightmares or Hollywood thrillers than real life, and of course such things thankfully only occur extremely rarely. However, a couple of decades after that unpleasant episode in France, New York had its own case of an unidentified corpse that would prove to be every bit as sensational. Although it was not forensic analysis of the body itself that solved this case, the circumstances of the crime and its peculiar nature merit its inclusion in this chapter.

  On September 13, 1913, eighteen-year-old Mary Bann and her eleven-year-old brother Albert were looking out from the porch of their Palisades home on the Hudson River, as they often did. On this occasion, however, they spotted a parcel being carried along on the early morning tide. Even as they watched, it came ashore. Their curiosity got the better of them, and they hurried down to the edge of the water to find out what the package contained.

  Pulling the manila paper apart, they discovered a red-and-blue striped pillow. It had been slit open, and the interior of the parcel was covered in feathers. Whatever childish fantasies they might have been cherishing about what the package contained were about to be utterly destroyed when—digging in among the feathers—they uncovered the headless trunk of a woman. Screaming, they ran home to tell their father what they had found. After he had confirmed their story, he immediately called the police.

  The following day, two crab hunters were searching the banks of the Hudson at Weehawken, New Jersey, about three miles downriver from where the first package had washed up. They too came across a parcel, one that contained the lower part of a torso. As with the previous parcel, there was a pillow stuffed inside, along with a large rock to weigh everything down. The remains themselves had been wrapped in a newspaper dated August 31, 1913.

  Both sections were taken to Volk’s Morgue in Hoboken where Dr. George W. King examined them. He estimated the woman’s age at around thirty, due to the softness of the cartilaginous joints, and suggested that she must have been about 5 feet 4 inches in height, probably weighing approximately 120 to 130 pounds. He also concluded that the woman had been dismembered by an experienced hand and that she had also only been in the water for a few days. She had given birth prematurely not long before she died.

  Perhaps unexpectedly, it was the rock used to weigh down the second parcel that was to provide a useful lead to investigators. Geologists determined that it was a piece of schist, a greyish-green rock that was rarely found in New Jersey but that was very common in Manhattan. It was irregularly shaped, as if it had been broken off a larger piece by blasting, which, given the massive building program that was underway in New York at the time, would also be consistent. As a result, after some initial disputes regarding who was responsible for it, the case was finally handed over to the New York Police Department.

  It was one of New York’s finest detectives, Inspector Joseph A. Faurot, who took it on, assisted by detectives first class Frank Cassassa, Richard McKenna, and James O’Neil. Faurot was a great believer in forensic science and had traveled to London in 1906 in order to observe Scotland Yard’s use of fingerprinting. Indeed, later that same year, having returned to New York, he arrested a man who had been seen acting suspiciously in the Waldorf-Astoria. The man, who had a British accent and claimed that his name was James Jones, insisted he was only there because he was having an affair with one of the hotel’s guests. Not easily convinced, Faurot sent the man’s fingerprints to Scotland Yard, where they were matched with those of an infamous hotel thief, Daniel Nolan. Incidentally, this was the first time in US legal history that fingerprints were used to find a suspect guilty.

  Faurot began his investigation by looking more closely at the pillows found inside both the packages. On the pillowcase of one he found an embroidered A, about an inch high and obviously the work of an amateur. A tag on one of the pillows had a maker’s name: the Robinson Roders company of Newark, New Jersey. Faurot visited the company, where he was told that the pillows had been a bit of a disappointment; the company had only sold twelve, all to George Sachs, a secondhand furniture dealer. Sachs, when questioned, also said that the pillows had been very slow movers and that he had sold only two. One of these sales had been to a woman who, when questioned, seemed highly unlikely to be connected to the crime. The other had been delivered, along with some pieces of furniture, to an apartment at 68 Bradhurt Avenue.

  The landlord informed Faurot that two weeks earlier he had rented the apartment to a man calling himself Hans Schmidt, who said he was acting on behalf of a female relative; it was apparently for her that he had ordered all the furniture. Faurot had the apartment watched for a week, but no one went in, or even showed any interest in it. On September 9, the police entered the apartment by climbing up a fire escape and jimmying open a window. What they found inside was far from pleasant.

  In spite of someone’s attempts to remove them, dark stains were still visible on the floor and on the green wallpaper. They were obviously blood. There was a trunk, inside of which was a foot-long butcher’s knife and a large handsaw. Both had been recently cleaned. In another trunk, Faurot discovered several small handkerchiefs, each embroidered with a letter A identical to the one found on one of the pillowcases. There was also a bundle of letters addressed to one Anna Aumuller. Most of them had come from Germany, but three had return addresses in New York. Faurot visited each of thes
e addresses, interviewing the people named in the letters. His final visit was to St. Boniface’s Church on Forty-Seventh Street and Second Avenue. The pastor there, Father John Braun, remembered Anna Aumuller well—she was a twenty-one-year-old Austrian immigrant who had worked as a maid in the rectory until she was fired for misconduct. He also knew the name Hans Schmidt. Schmidt had been a priest at the church but had recently moved on to another, St. Joseph’s, at 405 West 105th Street. Faurot rushed over there, arriving just before midnight. It was Schmidt who answered the door. When Faurot introduced himself and told him why he was there, Schmidt almost collapsed. Once he had recovered, much to Faurot’s surprise, he made a full confession.

  He claimed to have married Aumuller in a bizarre-sounding ceremony that he had carried out himself (for the obvious reason that, as a Catholic priest, he was officially unable to marry). Shortly afterward, on September 2, he killed her by slitting her throat while she slept. The only explanation he was able to give for his actions was, “I loved her. Sacrifices should be consummated in blood.” It is perhaps closer to the truth that, after discovering she was pregnant, he murdered her to avoid the matter becoming public. He also admitted to buying both the handsaw and the knife, and when asked why the cuts were so professionally done, he explained that he had been a medical student before being ordained. He said that having dismembered Aumuller’s body, he had thrown all the various parts into the river—though no more of them were ever discovered.

  When Schmidt’s past was investigated, it became clear that he had always been troubled. Born in Aschaffenberg, Germany, in the diocese of Mainz, he was ordained there in 1906. He was later arrested for fraud but was then declared insane and released. The local bishop defrocked him (meaning that the papers he brought with him to the United States were false). In 1909 Schmidt traveled to the United States, where he presented his papers and was assigned to St. John’s parish in Louisville, Kentucky. However, after several serious arguments with another priest there, he was moved to St. Boniface’s in New York City.

  Apart from the murder of Aumuller, further investigation revealed Schmidt to have had a second apartment set up as a counterfeiting workshop where, with the assistance of a dentist, Dr. Ernest Arthur Muret, he forged $10 bills. Faurot also suspected him of the murder of Alma Kelmer, a nine-year-old schoolgirl whose body was found buried in the basement of St. John’s Church in Louisville, the church to which he had originally been attached. Her body had been burned, but, from the remains, authorities suspected that the killer had initially tried to dismember her. The janitor, Joseph Wendling, had been convicted of the crime and sentenced to life imprisonment, but serious doubts persisted about his guilt. It also later transpired that German police in Aschaffenberg wanted to interview Schmidt regarding the murder of a young girl.

  Faurot now began to think about preparing for the trial. It was necessary to prove the identity of the remains once and for all. Luckily he managed to persuade a girl called Anna Hirt to take a look at the remains. She was another of the servants at St. Boniface’s Church and therefore knew Aumuller very well. She explained to Faurot that Aumuller had a brown mark on her chest, and indeed when she was shown the remains she pointed at once to just such a mark. Aumuller’s identity was thus established beyond all reasonable doubt and the trial could go ahead.

  Schmidt was convicted of the murder on February 5, 1914, and sent to the electric chair two years later, on February 18, 1916. He remains the only Catholic priest in US history to be executed for murder (if indeed he was still truly a priest at the time of the murder).

  Another preeminent figure in the history of the analysis of human remains is Sir Bernard Henry Spilsbury (1877–1947), a British pathologist who is considered by many to have been the greatest medical detective of the twentieth century. He was born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, and was the eldest of four children. His father was James Spilsbury, a manufacturing chemist. In 1896 he went to Magdalen College, Oxford, to study natural sciences, and in 1899 entered St. Mary’s, Paddington, as an exhibition student, specializing in the then novel science of forensic pathology. In October 1905, when the London County Council requested that all general hospitals in its area appoint two qualified pathologists to perform autopsies following sudden deaths, Spilsbury was appointed resident assistant pathologist at St. Mary’s Hospital.

  St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. The hospital was asked to appoint two resident pathologists to handle autopsies and investigations into suspicious deaths. In the course of his work here Bernard Henry Spilsbury solved some of the most horrific murder cases the hospital ever saw.

  As a result of his expertise, Spilsbury became involved in the investigations of some of the most notorious crimes of the twentieth century, including that of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen in 1910, the Brides in the Bath in 1915, and the infamous Brighton Trunk Murder in 1934. However, the case that Spilsbury later confessed was the most challenging he ever encountered is known as the Murder at the Crumbles.

  The Crumbles, a shingle beach between Eastbourne and Pevensey Bay on England’s southern shore, had already been the setting for violence and foul play when, in 1920 Jack Alfred Field and Thomas Gray had killed a young typist named Irene Munro there. Four years later another more macabre murder would follow.

  Along the beach were a few cottages, once owned by the local coastguards but now available to vacationers for a few pounds per week. In April 1924, a man using the name of Walter took up the lease on the cottage known as Officer’s House for two months. His real name was Patrick Mahon, and he had rented the cottage as a secluded love nest for him and his mistress, Emily Kaye.

  Kaye, a blonde woman of thirty-seven, was a shorthand typist—just like Irene Munro—and arrived in Eastbourne on April 7. She was pregnant with Mahon’s child. She moved into the bungalow expecting it to be the beginning of an exciting new life with Mahon, whom she had met when working at an accounting firm in London; they had quickly embarked on an affair.

  Kaye was fully aware that Mahon was married—to an Irish woman named Mavourneen—but this did not diminish her attraction to him, particularly as he had led her to believe he was unhappy in his marriage and would soon leave his wife. Kaye was also aware that Mahon was an ex-convict, having been jailed for five years for a bank raid when he was younger. However, she was pregnant, in love, and thrilled at the prospect of a new start with this dark, handsome man. What she was not aware of was Mahon’s incessant womanizing and the fact that in addition to bank robbery, he had committed fraud at various points in his past.

  Mavourneen, on the other hand, was certainly aware of her husband’s numerous indiscretions, but stayed in the relationship nonetheless. Mahon himself, however, had pushed his luck too far: he now faced the reality of having impregnated a woman who expected him to leave his wife—not something he was planning to do.

  Indeed, Mahon continued to return to Mavourneen on most weekdays. He even found time to engage in a new affair, this time with a young woman in Richmond named Ethel Duncan, whom he agreed to take to dinner the following week. All the while, he was concocting a horrifying scheme to deal with Kaye. On April 11, he went to Eastbourne, moving Kaye’s trunk to the Officer’s House where she was staying. Telling Kaye he was returning to London to arrange a passport application, he in fact went to an ironmonger’s in Victoria where he acquired a butcher’s knife and a tenon saw. He returned to the Crumbles that same evening and spent the next three nights with Emily. On the evening of Tuesday, April 15, he bludgeoned his lover to death, swept her body into the spare room, and locked the door.

  Next, in one of the most extraordinary parts of the case, while Kaye’s body was still in the spare room slowly decomposing, he invited his new lover, Ethel Duncan, to stay in the cottage over the Easter weekend. She agreed. Mahon now knew he would have to work quickly. He returned to the cottage on Good Friday, prior to Duncan’s arrival, and began to dismember Kaye with the knife and saw he had picked up in London. This done, he wrapped up
each of the portions of the body and stowed them away in the trunk before leaving this in the spare room once more.

  That evening Mahon met Duncan at Eastbourne station and the pair went on to spend an apparently normal weekend together at the cottage. Duncan even saw the trunk after wandering into the spare room. Mahon, in a slight panic, told her it was full of rare books that he was looking after for a friend, before locking the door shut to prevent further awkward questions. On Easter Monday Duncan returned home, still oblivious to the fact that she had spent the weekend a few feet from a corpse.

  Once she had left, Mahon continued his efforts to dispose of the body. He put the head and several other body parts into a fire. He cut the torso into smaller pieces and boiled it in saucepans to render it down. Finally, he carried some remaining parts of the body to London in a Gladstone bag and dumped them just outside Waterloo Station. It was here that Mahon made his first and only mistake. He left the bag at the luggage office in the station. Shortly afterward his wife, who knew of his tendency to see other women, found the luggage ticket while searching his suit for clues of infidelity. Her suspicions aroused, she hired a private detective named John Beard to look into the matter further.

  On May 1, she and Beard traveled to Waterloo together and collected the bag. When they opened it, they discovered bloodstained clothing, a butcher’s knife, and a canvas tennis racket bag bearing the initials EBK inside it. Beard, who was an experienced detective, called the police at once. Mavourneen, still not aware of the serious implications of what had been discovered, was instructed to go home and replace the luggage ticket in Mahon’s suit without saying anything about it to him. They then returned the bag to the luggage office and set a trap.