by E. J. Wagner
[Dr. Wood is shown a hatchet head found with its handle broken off.] Both sides of this hatchet were rusty. There were several suspicious spots on the side of it, but they were not blood. When I received it, there was a white film, like ashes, on it.
The murder weapon was never definitely identified, although most Borden scholars believe it to have been the handleless hatchet. The very absence of positive tests for blood raises questions about the thoroughness of the forensic procedures. A few weeks before his death, Mr. Borden, using a hatchet, had decapitated a number of pigeons that Lizzie was keeping in the barn, as he claimed they attracted vandals. Why was there no sign of pigeon blood? Hatchets and cleavers were routinely used to divide cuts of meat, which would explain the cow hairs on one hatchet, but where was the blood? The handles were wood, and blood would have clung to the crevices. One might suppose that a test as sensitive as spectrum analysis would have provided useful information. Certainly the lack of a proven weapon made it easier for the jury to do what it clearly wanted to do—find Lizzie (who was, after all, the treasurer of the Young Woman’s Christian Temperance Union) not guilty and free to share the Borden estate with her sister, Emma.
As Sherlock Holmes told Watson, determining the presence of blood was only part of the problem. Even spectral analysis would not tell the examiner whether the blood was that of a human. The first attempts at solving the difficulty relied on photography. Dr. Paul Jeserich made important contributions in this area. His technique was discussed in the 1893 Albany Law Journal:
A murder had been committed, and D. was the man suspected; suspicion being strengthened by the circumstance that an axe belonging to him was found smeared with blood, which had been partly wiped off. The man denied his guilt, and accounted for the bloodstained weapon, which he declared he had not taken the trouble to wipe, by saying that he had that day killed a goat with it. The blood was examined microscopically, and the size of the corpuscles proved his statement to be false. A photomicrograph of it, as well as of goat’s blood, was prepared for comparison by the judge and jury. Another photomicrograph was also made from part of the blade of the axe, which showed very clearly by unmistakable streaks, that the murderer had done his best to remove the traces of his crime. It is certain that these photographs must be far more useful for purposes of detection than the original microscopic preparations from which they are taken; for it requires a certain education of the eye to see through a microscope properly, and still more to estimate the value of the evidence it offers. It is certain too that counsel on either side would see through the microscope with very different eyes.
This was an important advance, but it still did not address two problems: if the blood was old and dry, the corpuscles lost shape; and some animals had corpuscles similar to those of humans. The evidence produced by photomicrographs was useful but not infallible.
By 1900, solutions were beginning to be found in Europe. Karl Landsteiner, assistant professor at the Institute of Pathology and Anatomy in Vienna, discovered that the reason early attempts at transfusions often failed was that different types of blood existed. If a patient was infused with the wrong type of blood, it caused a clumping or agglutinating of the recipient’s blood, with fatal results. At first it was thought that only two blood types existed. Landsteiner found a third. Eventually, four separate blood types were distinguished.
The usefulness of blood typing in legal matters was not realized until 1915, when Leone Lattes of the University of Turin established that the blood on the shirt of one Renzo Girardi was Girardi’s type and not that of the woman with whom Signora Girardi accused the unfortunate man of making violent love. In 1916, Dr. Lattes reported on the case in the Archivo di Anthropologia Criminale, Psichiatria, e Medicina Legale.
In 1901, the forensic world was galvanized by the announcement of a new accomplishment. Paul Uhlenhuth, assistant professor at the Institute of Hygiene in Greifswald, Germany, had developed a method for distinguishing human blood from animal blood. It rested on the fact that if an animal, such as a rabbit, was injected with blood from another species, a defensive reaction to that other species’ blood would be produced in the rabbit’s blood. This defensive serum was known as precipitin. The serum from a rabbit previously injected with human blood would react to another such exposure and would react just as strongly to human bloodstains. But the injected rabbit’s serum would react only to the blood of a species to which it had been previously exposed. This made it possible to determine precisely which species was the source of a bloodstain.
By the end of 1901, the new discovery would be put to the ultimate test when a ghastly crime on the island of Rugen terrified the inhabitants. Rugen lies in the Baltic Sea, off the northwest coast of the German province of Pomerania. The island’s irregular shape affords it many coves and beaches, and its landscape is rich as well with woods and white chalk cliffs. Prehistoric graves are common on the island. Rugen had in its past been conquered and ruled by various peoples, among them the Danes and the Slavs, and its complex folklore reflected that history. Trolls and dwarfs, giants and pagan gods were the stuff of the island’s superstitions.
Even at the dawn of the twentieth century, a stubborn belief in werewolves still gripped some of the population. The local version of the lycanthropy legend was that one could become a werewolf by girding oneself with a strap cut from the back of a hanged man. Werewolves were believed to attack and kill horses, sheep, and children, mutilating their bodies in a lupine frenzy.
The ancient legend seemed to stir to terrifying life in July 1901. Herman and Peter Stubbe, eight and six years old, did not return home for supper. A search party set out to find them that night, pressing deep into the forest by the light of torches but without success. The following morning, with the daylight to guide the searchers, a large rock stained with blood was discovered. A stench hovered in the air, leading them to a thicket not far away. There they found what remained of the children. The boys’ limbs had been severed and their bodies slit open. The internal organs had been removed and scattered throughout the woods. The children had been decapitated. The anguished search party plodded through the forest, gathering the bloody pieces.
It was remembered that on June 11, only a month before, a number of sheep had been killed in a field on Rugen. The animals had been cut open and their parts scattered. The farmer who owned the sheep had seen the perpetrator running away but had been unable to catch him.
The vicious bloodiness of the crimes and the utter lack of understandable motive inevitably evoked memories of the old werewolf stories. Rugen was in a turmoil, and suspicion was everywhere.
A fruit seller told police that she had seen a carpenter named Ludwig Tessnow talking to the dead children on the afternoon before they disappeared. Tessnow, who traveled about doing odd bits of carpentry, had been seen by another witness shortly after the crime. The witness stated that Tessnow’s clothes had been covered with brown stains. Tessnow was arrested. The clothes he was wearing did indeed bear a mixture of stains of various shades of brown. He explained that they were wood stains, acquired as he worked, except for some stains on his hat, which were cattle blood.
The mention of wood stains reminded the examining magistrate of another murder that had occurred in September 1898 in the small village of Lechtingen. Two little girls, aged seven and eight, named Hannelore Heidemann and Else Langmeir, had not returned from school. Their worried parents discovered that the children had never arrived at the schoolhouse that morning. By dusk, a search party had found the little girls’ bodies in a nearby wood. As in the Rugen case, the corpses had been dismembered and some of the organs scattered. A man whose behavior was suspicious and whose clothing was covered with dark spots had been arrested. There were no forensic facilities in the little town, and once the suspect explained the spots were only wood stains, he had been freed for lack of evidence. The suspect’s name had been Ludwig Tessnow.
The Rugen authorities now holding Tessnow displayed him to the owner of
the mutilated sheep. The farmer promptly and firmly identified Tessnow as the sheep killer. Convinced that Tessnow was a compulsive, sadistic murderer, the Rugen prosecutor pondered how to prove his theory.
A magistrate in Greifswald read of the case. He was aware of the new test for human bloodstains and arranged to have the suspect clothing sent to Uhlenhuth. There were over a hundred spots and stains that needed examination. After four days of effort, it was determined that although a large number of spots were wood stains, nine of them were sheep’s blood, and seventeen of them were the blood of human beings. Ludwig Tessnow was convicted and sentenced to death. There were no more sadistic killings of children on the island—science had shown that there was no werewolf on Rugen. There had been instead an even more frightening predator—a twisted human being.
By 1904, the precipitin test was a basic instrument of forensic laboratories. Science was learning to understand the voice in the blood.
Sherlock Holmes may have overlooked some details, but his belief in the usefulness of a reliable test for blood was vindicated. It’s a great pity it took so long to develop it. What Holmes said to Watson about the fictional “Holmes” test was exactly true of Uhlenhuth’s test: “Now, this appears to act as well whether the blood is old or new. Had this test been invented, there are hundreds of men now walking the earth who would long ago have paid the penalty of their crimes.”
Whatever remains
• The domestic postmortems carried out in the Borden case were not unique to American medical practice. They were performed frequently enough in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century to justify a chapter on the subject in Practical Pathology, a text published by Professor Sims Woodhouse in 1883. He was of the opinion that a firm kitchen table covered with a “stout macintosh” was useful, and that the physician’s hands should be washed with water and turpentine, followed by a dash of carbolic acid.
• Rubber gloves did not come into common medical use until well after 1890.
• Home autopsies required different instruments from those ordinarily carried in a doctor’s black bag. Desirable portable equipment included a saw, a spine wrench, scissors, assorted scalpels and knives, and needle and suture for tidying up afterward. Most instruments used for postmortems were discards from the operating theaters.
• Franz Müller may have been the first to commit murder on an English train, but he was not the last. Percy Mapleton, a writer of short stories, shot and stabbed Frederick Gold in 1881 on a train going from London to Brighton. The motive appears to have been robbery. In 1887, on the train from Feltham to Waterloo Station in London, a dead woman occupied one of the second-class compartments. Although the police identified her as a Miss Camp, and located a bloodstained pestle on the train tracks, the murder was never solved. In 1910 a porter noticed blood running from under the seat of a train when it arrived at Alnmouth and traced its source to the huddled corpse of John Nesbit, who had been shot five times. Nesbit had been carrying a large sum of money, which was missing. John Alexander Dickman was convicted and executed for the murder.
CHAPTER 13
Myth, Medicine, and Murder
“Is it something in the blood?” —Ferguson to Holmes in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”
The question of why some individuals seem driven to crime is one of the great unresolved issues in criminal investigation. Sherlock Holmes was certainly aware of one creative nineteenthcentury attempt to solve the problem, the “science” of phrenology, or craniology, as it was originally called. Invented by the Viennese anatomist Franz Joseph Gall in the late eighteenth century, the system was based on the belief that both intellectual ability and moral character are innate and can be observed in the shape of the skull. (Holmes refers to the concept in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” when he says, “It is a question of cubic capacity; a man with so large a brain must have something in it.”)
Gall published his ideas in 1796, and in 1804, accompanied by his dissectionist and disciple, J. G. Spruzheim, he began touring Europe to lecture on the subject. By 1814, Spruzheim and phrenology had arrived in Britain, where they aroused much
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controversy. Interest in the system waxed and waned, but by the time Sherlock Holmes and his magnifying glass sprang from the pen of Arthur Conan Doyle, it was once again in favor.
In “The Final Problem,” Holmes describes his first meeting with his nemesis, the archcriminal Professor Moriarty:
“His appearance was quite familiar to me. He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a white curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head. He is cleanshaven, pale, and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion. He peered at me with great curiosity in his puckered eyes.
“‘You have less frontal development than I should have expected,’ said he at last.”
In phrenological terms, this remark is less than complimentary. Specific parts of the skull were associated with specific abilities, and “frontal development” referred to the area that was associated with comparison, or analytic ability. Samuel Wells, in his 1873 work, How to Read Character: A New Illustrated Hand-Book of Physiology, Phrenology, and Physiognomy, explains why, in this matter at least, size counts: “[If ] Comparison [frontal development, is] Very Large, [it indicates] you possess remarkable powers of analysis; ability to reason from analogy and to discover new truths by induction; can clearly trace relations between the known and the unknown which escape common investigators”—the very qualities upon which Holmes prides himself. Clearly Moriarty was not only the “Napoleon of Crime” but also an adherent of phrenology, as were an amazing number of educated people at the time.
The British Phrenological Society was established in 1881. The distinctive model heads designed by the American exponent, Lorenzo Fowler, illustrating the various “organs of the faculties,” were a common sight in physicians’ consulting rooms. Young couples often had “readings” before marriage to determine their compatibility, and “gentleman scientists” collected interesting skulls with “bumps” that delineated the arcane traits of their original owners.
James Mortimer, the surgeon who brings the problem of the Baskerville hound to Holmes’s attention, is such a collector, as he forthrightly says to Holmes when he first consults him:
“You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supraorbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.”
Phrenology might have acquired a new acceptance in the late nineteenth century, but it rested on an extraordinarily shaky foundation. It is quite true, as Gall first postulated, that there are individual parts of the brain that control particular functions, but the corollary he suggested—that the brain influences the shape of the skull and that the talents and moral qualities of a human being can be determined by measuring the contours of the head—is without merit.
How was it possible for so many intelligent researchers and physicians to accept a pseudoscience as a realistic approach to explaining character? The troubling fact is that medicine has had a long history of dancing with myth and magic. In ancient times, terrified by death and disease, and having little understanding of the causes of either, human beings tried desperately to find explanations that might quell their fear. They were highly motivated to understand that which threatened, but they had not developed a logical method for doing so. Quacks, alchemists, and primitive physicians armed with anecdotes and herbals were dangerous guides. They convinced a credulous public, among other things, that the wounds of a murder victim bled in the presence of the murderer, that the heart turned bl
ack if poison was the cause of death, and that a souvenir bottle of urine from a faraway loved one would provide a clue to his emotional and physical well-being.
During the Middle Ages, when repeated waves of the Black Death destroyed millions of Europeans, no one observed that the teeming hordes of flea-bearing rats that arrived with the sailing ships carried the dread plague. Instead, popular opinion offered a number of inventive explanations as to the cause of the disease. One was that witchcraft, promulgated, of course, by elderly women, was to blame. (The elderly who survived the plague were suspect simply because they did not succumb, but it is very likely that they had acquired resistance during previous cycles of disease.) The second explanation rested on the common understanding that dragons spread plague. Winged dragons, some dark folktales explained, copulated only while airborne. Their preferred trysting places were over still bodies of water: lakes, ponds, or wells. As the mating dragons hovered, quivering in reptilian ecstasy, dragon semen, which was well known to be highly poisonous, sometimes escaped into the water below, making the water a source of death. Less sophisticated citizens insisted that the water poisoning was carried out by the Jews. Mass murder by burning of the Jewish population resulted.
The study of disease was largely a matter of reasoning from one or two incidents to a large and erroneous conclusion. In the middle of the seventeenth century, an English knight, Sir Kenelme Digby, provided posterity with a perfect example of this manner of problem solving when he experimented with a new approach to the treatment of wounds acquired on the battlefield. He knew that such injuries had once been treated by the application of complicated unguents that included ingredients such as eunuchs’ fat and crocodile dung, sometimes delicately moistened with urine. In spite of what was strongly believed to be cutting-edge medicine, some of the wounded stubbornly did not respond to the treatment. Military physicians then switched to the use of weapon ointment, which involved leaving the patient in peace and baptizing the instrument that had made the wound with the ominous elixir instead. This was an apparent success, as fewer of the wounded died, but there was great difficulty in locating the correct weapon in the postbattle chaos. As a result, the technique faded from use, army physicians went back to spreading the unsavory salve directly on the wound, and the death rate rose.