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

  One of Constance’s three nightgowns was missing. A bloody “shift” that had been found by the local police near a boiler room had been left there but had disappeared by the time Whicher tried to collect it. Whicher believed the shift to have been the missing nightgown. A search of the young girl’s bedroom was rewarded by the discovery of a pile of old newspaper clippings under her mattress—clippings that told the tale of Madeleine Smith, the Scottish lady who had stood trial in 1857 for poisoning her lover. The calm and collected manner in which Miss Smith faced her accusers was detailed in the press, as was the “Not proven” verdict accorded her.

  Possibly influenced by Constance’s choice of reading matter as well as by the missing nightgown, Inspector Whicher arrested Constance on July 16, to the great shock of the townspeople. In the tradition of Madeleine Smith, Constance remained calm and slightly sorrowful. She immediately became a figure of intense sympathy. Judicial inquiries were held but were largely disorganized. The barrister Mr. Kent hired to defend Constance characterized Detective Inspector Whicher as “a man eager in pursuit of the murderer, and anxious for the reward which has been offered.”

  Constance was released without trial, as the evidence was considered insufficient, and the nursemaid was rearrested—and also released for lack of evidence. The body of the murdered child was exhumed in the hope that the missing nightgown might have been mistakenly interred with the corpse, but this was not the case. Tormented by rumors, the Kent family moved away, having sent Constance to a convent in France. Whicher, excoriated for having placed under arrest a shining example of English maidenhood, resigned from Scotland Yard. After a while, people forgot about the incident.

  And then, five years after the murder, Constance Kent reappeared at a religious retreat in Brighton, England. The retreat housed a home for unwed mothers, and there is some evidence that Constance assisted the midwives. It is certain she spent much time conferring with a minister at the retreat. Perhaps because of that influence, twenty-year-old Constance Kent, in the company of the minister, went to the police and at last confessed to the murder of her little half-brother Francis.

  She described stabbing him. “I thought the blood would never come,” she said. In response, the court sentenced her to death. Because of her youth at the time of the offense and in view of the fact that she had freely admitted her guilt, her sentence was promptly commuted to life in prison. She served twenty years and was released in 1885 into a world that was utterly strange to her. At her release, the whole tragic tale was told again in the press. (Certainly a young doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle must have read the details. Perhaps they provided the seed for “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire.”)

  Constance was forty-one years old, her hair streaked with gray, when she was freed. She possessed a few useful skills, having acquired training as a midwife. We know she was sporadically attracted to religion. (We also know she once had a way with a knife.) There are no available facts as to where she went or how she lived or which of her abilities she put to use. As it was just three years before the Ripper murders terrorized London and the Ripper was believed to be a knife wielder with some medical knowledge, it is tempting to speculate about a connection, but there is no evidence as to how Constance spent the remainder of her life.

  By then, Whicher was working as a private detective, having investigated, among other matters, the past of the Tichborne Claimant. After Constance Kent’s confession, he had been offered the reward, which he declined. In the Kent matter, he had uncovered a dreadful family flaw, very similar to the one Sherlock Holmes found in the case of the Sussex vampire. But whereas when Holmes confronted the tormented father, saying, “You have to face it, Mr. Ferguson. It is the more painful because it is a distorted love, a maniacal exaggerated love for you, and possibly for his dead mother, which has prompted his action. His very soul is consumed with hatred for this splendid child,” and Ferguson sadly but bravely accepted Holmes’s verdict, Detective Inspector Whicher was not as fortunate. As the honest messenger bearing very bad news, he was in the right, and for that, he was wronged.

  Jonathan Whicher was a talented investigator who reasoned carefully from observable facts and had no more patience with vampire tales than Sherlock Holmes. But this adherence to facts was not a universal approach in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Well-trained medical professionals could embrace myth with amazing alacrity and present it in the language of science, complicating police investigations.

  For instance, while the belief that hair and nails could grow after death was taken as evidence of vampirism in some primitive rural communities, some pathologists who rejected vampirism as a cause continued to accept this postmortem growth as a proven phenomenon. Charles Meymott Tidy, usually a careful observer, continued to be taken in by this view to the end of the nineteenth century in spite of well-thought-out papers to the contrary by the pathologists Haller and Chapman. Tidy included in his text, Legal Medicine, the note: “May the hair grow after death? That both the hair and the nails may grow for a time after death has been proved by careful observations.”

  In support of that interesting but untrue statement, he quotes from The French Dictionary of Medical Sciences, which includes the concurring opinions of Drs. Good, Pariset, Villarme, and Bichat. Tidy explains that “there may be molecular life and fecundity of the epidermis and therefore of the hair follicles for a time after somatic death, [which] is what theory would lead us to expect, and observations are ample in proof.” In further support he describes a case presented in the New York Medical Record of August 18, 1877, in which a Dr. Caldwell of Iowa states that he was present in 1862 “at the exhumation of a body which had been buried for four years. The coffin had given at its joints, and that the hair of the deceased protruded. [Caldwell] had evidence to show the deceased was shaved before burial, but the hair of the head [at exhumation] measured 18 inches, the whiskers 8 inches the chest hair 4 – 6.”

  Because it has since been well established that the hair and nails do not grow after death, although they may appear to have done so due to the shrinkage of the skin, we may suspect either that Dr. Caldwell’s exhumed subject had been the victim of a grossly incompetent barber or that the wrong coffin had been opened.

  Another fanciful belief much accepted by lawyers as well as medicos of the period was that the retina of a murdered person would retain the image of the last thing he or she focused on— with any luck, the murderer. Andre Moenssens, in his 1962 paper “The Origin of Legal Photography,” quoted from the 1877 case of Eborn v. Zimpelman, a civil matter concerning the admissibility of photographic evidence. During this litigation, an attorney happily promoted that extraordinary idea of the dying image, saying:

  Every object seen with the natural eye is only seen because [it is] photographed on the retina. In life the impression is transitory; it is only when death is at hand that it remains permanently fixed on the retina… . Science has discovered that a perfect photograph of an object, reflected in the eye of one dying, remains fixed on the retina after death. (See recent experiments stated by Dr. Vogel in the May number, 1877 of the Philadelphia Photographic Journal.) Take the case of a murder committed on the highway: on the eye of the victim is fixed the perfect likeness of a human face… . We submit that the eye of a dead man would furnish the best evidence that the accused was there when the deed was committed, for it would bear a fact, needing no effort of memory to preserve it … the handwriting of nature, preserved by nature’s camera.

  In spite of the dramatic hyperbole, “science” had discovered nothing of the sort. But facts aren’t always allowed to stand in the way of passionate legal advocacy. The idea of the dying retinal image was firmly fixed in the minds of many and perhaps was the reason that it was not uncommon for murderers of the period to destroy the eyes of their victims before leaving the crime scene.

  So persistent was this belief that it found its way into a famously mysterious case of murder in New York City as recently as 1920. Shor
tly after eight on a warm June morning of that year, Mrs. Marie Larsen headed for her Manhattan job as housekeeper to Joseph Bowne Elwell, the very wellknown bridge expert and putative author of Elwell on Bridge and Elwell’s Advanced Bridge.

  Separated from his wife, Helen (who, it is believed, had actually written much of the highly successful books), Elwell lived alone. He was an avid investor, racehorse owner, and man about town. His charm, his dazzling smile, his glossy chestnut hair, combined with his enormous skill at cards, made him a much sought-after dinner companion. Mrs. Larsen was pleased to be employed by such a famous figure.

  Knowing that he had been planning to be out late with friends the previous evening, the housekeeper turned her key in the lock quietly. As she entered the town house, she heard the unexpected sound of desperately labored breathing coming from the small room to the right. The source of the sound proved to be an elderly bald man sitting on a high-backed armchair. He was barefoot and was attired in red silk pajamas. His gaping mouth disclosed three widely separated teeth. A bullet hole was situated in the exact center of his forehead, and blood from the wound dripped onto an open letter on his lap. A cartridge from the offending bullet lay on the floor. The wall behind the stricken man was covered with blood, bone fragments, and brain tissue from the exit wound. As the bullet had passed through the dying man’s skull, it had struck the wall and recoiled, and now it rested on a table next to the high-backed armchair.

  Racing from the house, Mrs. Larsen found the milkman making deliveries and asked him to send for the police. An ambulance rushed the stertorously breathing man to the hospital, where he died two hours later without regaining consciousness.

  A search of the town house made the victim’s identity apparent. Hidden in the back of Joseph Bowne Elwell’s closet was a collection of forty expensively made wigs. They were of graduated lengths so that their owner could wear them in sequence and create the appearance of growing hair. A gleaming set of false teeth, carefully constructed to accommodate three genuine ones, rested in a glass of water.

  The dashing bridge expert had never been seen by his friends without his cosmetic aids. So carefully had he kept them a secret that the police at once wondered whom he might have trusted enough to allow them to see him as he was.

  Suicide was considered a possibility, but the .45 caliber gun that had made the wound was missing, and there was no apparent motive. The open letter on the dying man’s lap had been delivered at seven thirty that morning (in those happy days, there was such a thing as an early mail delivery), so the shooting had to have occurred after that.

  It was up to the chief medical examiner of New York City, Charles Norris, to determine the manner of death—accident, suicide, or homicide. As all of New York was fascinated by the case and everyone seemed to have an opinion (after all, it was one of the many cases described in the news media as “The Crime of the Century”), the pressure was enormous.

  The majority of the detectives on the case insisted it was suicide and that the gun had been stolen afterward by an unknown party. This information was leaked to the newspapers, which announced it as fact. Dr. Norris was certain it was murder. In his autopsy report, he had carefully noted the appearance of the entrance wound, examining it in Holmesian fashion with a magnifying glass. There were three inches of powder grains around the wound but no powder burns, which Norris interpreted to mean that the gunshot came from at least four or five inches away. As the wound was centered in the forehead, it was an impossibly awkward angle for a suicidal injury.

  In an effort to convince the police and the district attorney, Dr. Norris called on Captain Cornelius W. Willemse, commander of the First Detective Division of New York, to help him demonstrate the impossibility of a selfinflicted wound. In front of an audience that included Assistant District Attorney Dooling, Dr. Norris, and a gunshot expert from the U.S. Army, Captain Willemse repeatedly fired a .45 caliber revolver, similar to the one that killed Elwell, at a piece of human flesh donated from the mortuary. At a distance of four to five inches, the resulting wound exactly resembled that on the victim. A closer range caused powder burns. The police now accepted that the case was a homicide and that there was work to be done.

  Time, however, had been lost. And matters grew worse. The newspaper coverage had been intense and now included the dramatic statements of one Roland Cook, an elderly physician, who took to appearing in front of the murder house and delivering himself of opinions to the seething horde of reporters. As crime historian Jonathan Goodman recounts the matter in his book on the Elwell case, Dr. Cook was of the firm view that Dr. Norris had been gravely remiss for not having photographed the dead man’s eyeballs at autopsy, as it was a fact that the retinas of the dead retained images of what they last saw. Greatly excited by this news, Mr. Goodman tells us, the New York Times printed an article entitled “How Paris Would Treat the Elwell Case,” which suggested that Dr. Norris had indeed ignored this important medical procedure.

  Reporters then questioned Assistant District Attorney Dooling about the matter. Knowing nothing about the subject, Dooling promised he would look into this “very interesting” theory and said he would “speak to expert photographers and medical men on the subject.” This issue provided yet another time-consuming distraction for the hard-pressed medical examiner, who pointed out tartly that the retina retention concept was without merit, but even if it were true, the victim had not died immediately, so any image on his retina would have been of the medical personnel on the ambulance sent to aid him. What we can be sure of is that well into the twentieth century this medical myth was considered worth discussing.

  The murder of Joseph Bowne Elwell has never been solved. It would be heartening to believe that the misalliance between myth and medicine is at an end and that today murders are examined only through the prism of the scientific method, but this is a comfort we may not have. In Britain during the last decade, a much-respected pediatrician formulated what became known as his “law” concerning sudden unexplained deaths of infants for which no cause could be found. This law stated, “One such death in a family was a tragedy, two were suspicious, and three constituted murder.” Like many aphorisms, this is pithy, easy to remember, and incorrect. It assumes that there is no underlying hereditary condition as yet undiscovered that might be responsible.

  The physician went on to state that the chance of a repeated crib death in a single family was as rare as one in seventy-three million. On the basis of this opinion, in spite of a complete lack of any corroborating evidence of a crime, a number of British women who had lost babies to crib death had their subsequent children taken from them and placed in adoptive homes. Three women, including the solicitor Sally Clark, were convicted of murder and sent to prison. These cases were overturned on appeal, as statisticians came forward and testified that the figure of one in seventy-three million was grossly mistaken. Indeed, having lost a child to crib death makes a family much more likely to suffer an additional loss, and the usually accepted figure for recurrence of this dread event is one in seventy-seven.

  The eminent pediatrician, like Bertillon in the Dreyfus case, had reached outside of his specialty to dabble in a field in which he had no expertise. And as in the Dreyfus case, the innocent suffered as a result. As Holmes said in A Study in Scarlet, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence.”

  But a single physician, perhaps well intentioned but disastrously mistaken, could not cause such a debacle without the aid of a credulous justice system. The easy acceptance of an opinion just because it is offered by a man who claims science as his shield is dangerous, just as myths stated as scientific fact are dangerous. It needs to be remembered, as Sherlock Holmes warned Watson in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” that sometimes “we come into those realms of conjecture where the most logical mind may be at fault.”

  Whatever remains

  • Madeleine Smith, the determined young lady tried for murdering her lover Emile L’Angelier by lacing
his cocoa with arsenic, sat for a phrenological examination, although it is not clear at what period in her interesting career this took place. The findings appear in the published account of her trial. She is credited by the phrenologist with talents in mathematics, engineering, and architecture. He concludes: “Owing to her strong affections and healthy temperament, she will make a treasure of a wife to a worthy husband.”

  • In an attempt to streamline examinations, nineteenthcentury phrenologists developed a dismayingly complex instrument called the psychograph. It contained 1,954 parts cocooned within a walnut case. The device contained calipers used to measure a subject’s head. The psychograph would then emit a stream of tape listing twenty-eight personality traits including benevolence, caution, and conjugal love. There are three psychographs in working order in the United States.

  • In 1873, the writer and humorist Mark Twain, while visiting London, noticed an advertisement for the phrenological techniques of a fellow American, Mr. Lorenzo N. Fowler. Twain visited Fowler using an assumed name and left the examination room of that worthy with a chart Fowler had made of Twain’s head. Three months later, Twain, using still another name, returned to Fowler’s lair, and had the exam repeated. He left with a second chart, which bore no recognizable resemblance to the earlier one.

  • In nineteenthcentury America, bereaved relatives sometimes physically disinterred their own loved ones in the hope of preventing vampire-caused disease. Such cases have been reported not only in New England but as far west as Chicago, and as recently as 1875.

  Contents

  algor mortis. The cooling of the body after death.