The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear, the Real Forensics Behind the Great Detective's Greatest Cases

by E. J. Wagner

  This was a great relief to the town fathers. They reasoned that since the body in question was determined not to be that of Esther, there was no reason to examine the discrepancies between the corpse and the confessions, and therefore the pillaging and destruction of Jewish property could be allowed to proceed in traditional fashion. The accused Jewish elders remained in prison, and the pathetic remains of the girl from the river were buried.

  But the case caught the attention of journalists and became the subject of intense argument throughout Europe. A group of lawyers from Budapest, well educated and knowledgeable about the new world of forensic pathology and skeptical of the concept of blood as an ingredient in matzo, offered to appear for the defense. They demanded that the body be exhumed so that it might be examined by three doctors experienced in legal medicine. This met resistance by Bary, the examining magistrate, who was a great believer in the myth of ritual murder. The state prosecutor, however, supported the idea, as he was uneasy with the sparse evidence and nursed an interest in justice.

  In the icy cold of December, the river body was removed from its resting place, and Professors Johannes Belki, Schenthauer, and Michalkovics of Budapest performed a second autopsy. Their findings differed strikingly from those of the local doctors.

  The experienced Budapest group insisted the body was that of a female not more than fifteen, as shown by the immaturity of her bones. Her swollen genitalia resulted from long immersion in water rather than from sexual relations, and her extreme whiteness was due to the outer skin having been stripped off by the water, leaving only the pale corium, the inner layer of skin, through which the blood had oozed.

  The unusually clean fingernails and toenails, they pointed out, were not the nails at all but the nail beds, the outer portions having been pulled off by the river current. Further, since the intense cold of the water had kept the body from decay, it was quite possible that she had been in her gelid grave for three months. The clothes on the corpse and the other physical details were a match for those of the missing girl. The professors from Budapest concluded that this was indeed the body of Esther Solymossy and that the undamaged throat made it clear that the “confessions” were invented. Thus exonerated, the accused Jews were freed to take up the burden of their lives.

  The new technique of forensic autopsy had commanded justice. It was a beginning. There would be many twists in the path—superstitions and prejudices to overcome, scientific truths yet to be discovered. But the use of autopsy in the pursuit of justice had been established. The idea that a murder victim must be meticulously examined in the context of the crime, that science had an essential part to play in the legal system, was becoming accepted.

  It was the first great building block of the science of Sherlock Holmes.

  Whatever remains

  “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”

  —Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four

  • Physicians who acquired infections from subjects they autopsied could transmit disease to their living patients. A classic example of this occurred in 1847, when the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis became greatly distressed by the high rate of puerperal fever and maternal death in the Viennese hospital in which he worked. Observing that women delivered by doctors were much more commonly infected than those attended only by midwives, Semmelweis began to suspect that the physicians were inadvertently carrying disease to their patients. His suspicion became conviction when his mentor, Dr. Jacobus Kolletscha, acquired a fatal infection similar to puerperal fever after receiving a minor cut during an autopsy. Semmelweis then insisted that physicians scrub with chloride of lime before examining the living, and the death rate fell dramatically. Many of the doctors, feeling pricked in their amour propre, never forgave him. Semmelweis died in an insane asylum.

  • Autopsies were made much less physically strenuous by the development of the oscillating surgical saw. It was first patented by Dr. Homer Stryker, an orthopedist, in 1947, and so is commonly referred to in autopsy suites as the “Stryker saw.”

  • It is not only disease that threatens the forensic pathologist and his team. Shooting deaths caused by explosive bullets are a hazard for the unwary mortuary worker. When such projectiles have failed to explode in the victim, they may do so during the postmortem, and they must be handled with long-handled instruments and great care.

  • The term diener comes from the German and literally means servant. The term “mortuary assistant” is preferred today, diener being seen as patronizing. However, seen in the context of “servant to anatomical science,” it seems both more acceptable and is more accurate historically. In many medical examiners’ offices, the assistants are highly trained—skilled, if unsung—anatomists. They are often former army medics.

  CHAPTER 2

  Beastly Tales and Black Dogs

  “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” —Dr. Mortimer in The Hound of the Baskervilles

  In arthur conan doyle’s novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes ensures the triumph of fact and science over fantasy and superstition. Many of Holmes’s real-life counterparts in the British Isles, striving to do the same, found it a rough road. Long before crime was the subject of scientific study, the physical evidence of mysterious events was observed and discussed but was interpreted only through the murky lens of superstition and folklore. Tales of witchcraft, ghosts, werewolves, and vampires were not merely entertainment for a cold winter’s night, they were attempts to explain occurrences that filled people with terror.

  After all, superstition hallowed by the centuries can be not only seductive but also, in a gifted storyteller’s hands, quite lucrative. Certainly Conan Doyle was to find it so.

  In 1901, the author visited the north coast of Norfolk,

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  England, with his friend, Bertram Fletcher Robinson, a young journalist whom Conan Doyle had met on a sea voyage from South Africa. (Robinson was affectionately known to his friends as “Bobbles.”) Robinson entertained his famous companion with tales of the grim folklore of his native Devon, dwelling on the legend of the Great Black Dog that was said to haunt the region. So fascinated was Conan Doyle by the image that he conceived of the idea for a new story, to be called “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” and although he finally wrote it on his own, his first intention was to collaborate with Robinson on the project.

  With this story in mind, the two traveled to Dartmoor, Robinson’s home. It was a land of moors and mires, bogs and Bronze Age ruins. Dartmoor Prison was not far away, giving rise to rumors of dangerous escaped prisoners lurking in the desolate countryside. All this was intriguing background, but it was the Black Dog that provided Conan Doyle with the essential literary shudder.

  The Black Dog has many names in Britain: Padfoot, Hooter, Barghest, Old Shuck, Galleytrot, the Shug, Hairy Jack, and Gurt Dog, among others. Not limited to Devon, Black Dog stories are told in all parts of the British Isles. In the old tales the dog is usually a “fetch” or a psychopomp—that is, a presence whose purpose is to warn of approaching disaster or to accompany a human to the afterworld. It is often described as having flaming eyes and slavering, foaming jaws, and being of enormous size.

  It is this fearsome legendary creature that Conan Doyle evokes in The Hound of the Baskervilles. “A hound it was,” he writes, “an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen.” And in this tale, of course, perhaps the best known of the Sherlock Holmes series, the fearsome hound is believed to bring death to the Baskervilles who meet it. As Mortimer recounts the Baskerville saga to Holmes and Watson in their rooms at Baker Street,

  “[S]tanding over Hugo, and plucking at his throat, there stood a foul thing, a great, black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon… . [A]s they looked the thing tore the throat out of Hugo Baskerville, on which, as it turned its b
lazing eyes and dripping jaws upon them, the three shrieked with fear and rode for dear life, still screaming, across the moor. One, it is said, died that very night of what he had seen, and the other twain were but broken men for the rest of their days.

  “Such is the tale, my sons, of the coming of the hound which is said to have plagued the family so sorely ever since.”

  This was intensely dramatic storytelling. Conan Doyle made full use of the mythic background, and while he freely changed the details of geography to suit his story, the time he spent wandering through Dartmoor is evident. Just as there was a prison near the Robinson home, so there was in the Baskerville environs. “Then fourteen miles away the great convict prison of Princetown. Between and around these scattered points extends the desolate, lifeless moor. This, then, is the stage upon which tragedy has been played.”

  And just as there were Bronze Age ruins in Devon, so they appear on the fictional moor of the Baskervilles, as Stapleton explains to Watson:

  “Yes, it’s rather an uncanny place altogether. Look at the hillside yonder. What do you make of those?”

  The whole steep slope was covered with gray circular rings of stone, a score of them at least.

  “What are they? Sheep-pens?”

  “No, they are the homes of our worthy ancestors. Prehistoric man lived thickly on the moor, and as no one in particular has lived there since, we find all his little arrangements exactly as he left them. These are his wigwams with the roofs off. You can even see his hearth and his couch if you have the curiosity to go inside.” “But it is quite a town. When was it inhabited?” “Neolithic man—no date.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He grazed his cattle on these slopes, and he learned to dig for tin when the bronze sword began to supersede the stone axe. Look at the great trench in the opposite hill. That is his mark.”

  The Hound of the Baskervilles was an enormous success, not least because of its eerie resonance with ancient folklore. But the very prevalence of superstitions such as Black Dog tales sometimes proved a hindrance to the investigation of very real crimes. One such instance, a particularly bloody murder, took place in 1945 but had its unsavory beginnings in Warwickshire, England, in 1885.

  Two years before Sherlock Holmes made his first appearance in literature, a fourteen-year-old farm boy named Charles Walton walked in the gathering twilight toward his home in the small English village of Lower Quinton. As he reached a crossroads, he was disturbed to see an extraordinarily large black dog seated in the path, staring at him. He had seen the same dog on several other evenings. It wore no collar and, as far as Charles knew, belonged to none of the villagers.

  Charles was well schooled in the local lore regarding mysterious black dogs as harbingers of misfortune, and he shivered. As he later recounted the incident, the dog walked beside him for some time, making no sound. As the last light faded, it seemed to Charles that the dog changed shape, until it appeared to become a woman wearing a black cloak. The lady paused and then slowly drew back her hood and turned toward the boy, who observed with horror that her cloaked dark figure was without a head.

  Charles ran the rest of the way home frantic with fear, only to learn upon his arrival that his sister, who that morning had been in apparent health, had just died. The tale was told often in the village and was believed to be the reason that Charles disliked dogs forever after, although he had a peculiar affinity for other animals and was believed by many to converse with them in a strange language.

  The story was recalled with shudders sixty years later when Charles Walton, then a rheumatic old man of seventy-four, was found dead close to the spot where he had claimed to see the spectral dog. Evidently he had been taken by surprise at his job of trimming his neighbor’s hedges, and his throat had been cut with his own billhook. His body was pinned to the ground with his pitchfork, and a cross had been deeply carved in his chest. His blood soaked the ground.

  Whispers about witchcraft immediately spread. The location of the murder scene, in the shadow cast by Meon Hill, was near the Neolithic circle of stones called the Whispering Knights. Tradition claimed it was a gathering place for witches. Meon Hill itself was said to have been created by the devil in an angry passion because an abbey had been built nearby. It was claimed that the phantom hounds of a Celtic king sometimes raced there in the light of a full moon.

  The grotesque nature of Charles Walton’s wounds and the way in which his body was pinned to the ground and exsanguinated recalled the ancient method of killing a witch to prevent it from rising from the dead. It was well remembered in the village that in 1875 a local woman named Ann Turner had been similarly butchered with a hayfork by a young man called John Hayward, who was firmly convinced that she had bewitched him.

  But by 1945, when Charles Walton was murdered, the matter was investigated not only by the local constable but also by Detective-Superintendent Robert Fabian, the best Scotland Yard had to offer, and the corpse was autopsied by pathologist J. M. Webster. Every attempt was made to examine the Walton case in the objective light of forensic science. Forensic science, however, still had to contend with tradition and tease grim fact from frightful fancy.

  Lower Quinton is part of Warwickshire, which lies in the midlands of England. It is Tolkien country, where you may easily picture hobbits and other magical beings scurrying beneath the earth. It is in the very heart of Shakespeare’s country, rich with farmland, gently rolling hills, hedgerows, and the halftimbered thatch-roofed cottages that have stood since the Tudors ruled Britain. It is also rich in a history of ancient beliefs about magic and witchcraft. The atmosphere was heavy with these strange concerns and myths when Robert Fabian of Scotland Yard arrived in Lower Quinton to investigate the murder of old Charles Walton. Even in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, the villagers were reticent, unwilling to talk freely to the detective.

  At the crime scene, the body was pinned to the ground with such force that it took the combined efforts of two police officers to free it. Walton’s throat was cut so deeply that his head was partially severed. The weapon was left buried in the wound. Walton’s walking stick, covered with blood, was found at the scene. “His injuries were hideous,” Fabian wrote later in his memoirs. “It looked like the kind of killing Druids might have done in ghastly ceremony at full moon.”

  Alec Spooner, the Superintendent of the Warwickshire constabulary, told Fabian of a book of local folklore that recounted the tale of Charles Walton as a young lad and his encounter with the black dog. Fabian was unimpressed.

  The full investigative resources available at the time were put to use. Fabian had brought one of the nine brown leather “murder bags” innovated by Scotland Yard. Each was packed with everything thought to be needed at a murder scene at the time: rubber gloves, handcuffs, bottles for samples, screwdriver, magnifying glass. Plaster was used to make casts of the many boot marks at the scene. A Royal Air Force plane flew overhead, taking photographs of the corpse and the surrounding area. In the fields, men with mine detectors slowly swept the area, looking for an old tin watch missing from the dead man’s pocket. The postmortem examination had disclosed no dog hairs on the corpse.

  It was noted that a prisoner-of-war camp stood not far from the crime scene, and one of the prisoners had been seen trying to scrub blood from his jacket. Although he claimed it was the blood of a rabbit he had poached (security at the camp was evidently somewhat casual), he was promptly detained, and the Birmingham Laboratory was asked to determine the source of the blood.

  Fabian looked forward to closing the case and dispatching the whispers of witchcraft and black dogs. Working at top speed, the laboratory announced that the blood on the jacket was that of … a rabbit.

  Fabian worked on. He and his men took four thousand statements, most from unwilling villagers. They sent twenty-nine samples of clothing and hair to the laboratory, to no result. During the investigation, Fabian reported that he saw a black dog that ran out of sight down Meon Hill. A farm l
ad came along just then and Fabian asked him, “Looking for that dog, son? A black dog?” The boy turned pale and ran.

  Shortly afterward, a black dog was found dead, hanging from a tree. The people of Lower Quinton became even less willing to discuss the murder. “Cottage doors were shut in our faces,” Fabian wrote. “Even the most innocent witnesses were unable to meet our eyes … some became ill after we spoke to them.”

  Who would kill an old man with his own tools? Who would pin him to the earth with a pitchfork? What reason could there be, unless it was bizarre ritual, to pin a witch to the ground?

  The crime was never officially solved. The old tin watch turned up in 1960 in what had been Charles Walton’s garden. It bore no useful prints.

  Before he died, Fabian was said to have confided that he suspected the villager who found the body had killed Walton because he owed the old man money. The villager’s fingerprints had been on the weapon, but he had explained this by saying he tried to remove the hook from the body. Fabian theorized that the ritual aspects of the scene had been deliberately arranged to terrify the townspeople into silence about any suspicions they might have had.

  Fabian believed this because he felt he had eliminated the impossible, and he saw the staged crime scene as the one possibility left. But even using the impeccable logic of the Great Detective, Fabian couldn’t get past the persistent fear caused by tales of haunting black dogs, so he couldn’t prove his theory.

  Which brings us to the question of why tales of spectral black dogs were so prevalent and so widely believed well into twentiethcentury Britain. It is sometimes argued that the prevalence of black Labrador Retrievers, a breed common in Britain and often allowed to roam the countryside, provided the source for Black Dog stories. But St. John’s Dogs, the progenitors of black Labradors, were first imported to England from Newfoundland in the early 1800s, and Black Dog tales may be traced back further than the twelfth century.