Bertillon’s measurement technique was time-consuming and relied for accuracy on the persons who made the measurements. The fingerprinting technique was simple and fast, and it guaranteed identification. Nevertheless, the process was held back for decades because no one could figure out how to classify fingerprints so that they could be stored on file cards. Finally, an Englishman named Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, conceived a technique of discerning four patterns, based on a triangular figure called the delta, which appeared on almost every fingertip. Galton classified fingerprints as to whether they contained no triangle, a triangle on the right or left, or several triangles. With modification, his technique is still in use today.
Although anthropometry soon fell into disfavor, Bertillon made another major contribution to forensic science by establishing the world’s first criminalistics laboratory as a part of the Sûreté. Again he adapted the tools of science to identify physical evidence found at the scene to help determine the cause and circumstance of death. Still, the primary source of evidence was the body itself. For example, a Roman physician named Antistius examined the corpse of Julius Caesar after death, counted twenty-three wounds, and announced that only one stab wound in the chest had been fatal. (Whether that wound was inflicted by Brutus was either not known or not said.) But for centuries there were no autopsies as we know them today. “Natural” deaths may not have been natural at all, while in cases of “unnatural death” physicians would merely widen the wounds of victims to examine the depth and penetration of weapons.
Possibly the first autopsy was performed in Italy by a Belgian, Andreas Vesalius, an anatomist in the sixteenth century who dissected cadavers to learn the secrets of the human body for medical purposes, not to aid the law. Later in the century an Italian, Fidelis, performed the first forensic autopsies on drowning victims, trying to differentiate between a murder and an accidental drowning. And, at about the same time, a Frenchman, Ambroise Paré, conducted autopsies intended to discover the effects of violence on the inner organs of the body.
The founder of the science of pathology was an eighteenth-century Italian named Giovanni Battista Morgagni, who made a complete study of the internal organs of the body looking for symptoms of the disease that had caused death. Later, with the invention of the microscope, pathologists would discover the hitherto invisible human cell as the basic unit of the body, and further technological inventions would lead to other discoveries of the causes of death.
In 1901 a German professor named Paul Uhlenhuth made a remarkable contribution to forensic science: the identification of blood from analysis of bloodstains. Uhlenhuth found that the blood serum (the watery component of the blood) could be used to distinguish between human and animal blood by the way it reacted to a sample of each in laboratory tests. He was then able to scrape off dried bloodstains, liquify them in a saline solution, and determine whether the blood was human or animal in origin. The first great step in bloodstain identification had been taken.
On another forensic front, Dr. Paul Browarded in 1897 published the first major study which distinguished deaths by hanging from those by choking. He analyzed the rope marks on the throat of a victim who had been hanged, showing the impression of the knot and the strictures of the skin which would occur. If the victim had been throttled with a cord, the mark ran in a complete circle around the neck. Choking with the hands also left characteristic clues: breaks of the cartilage of the larynx, as well as bruises and sometimes fingernail marks.
In 1925 the first major work in another important field of forensic science, ballistics, was published. Text Book of Forensic Medicine, by Dr. Sidney Smith, a New Zealander, covered every aspect of forensic medicine and was the first to include ballistics as part of the science. In those days black powder was used in guns. Smith and other scientists, firing guns at white paper, were able to show the distance of the weapon from the victim. Soot around the bullet wound meant a shot from one-half inch to three inches away. A wound which showed no soot but contained unburned particles of powder indicated a shot up to three feet in distance. In a direct contact wound, both soot and unburned powder were found, together with a blistering of the skin caused by exploding gases from the gun muzzle.
In later years smokeless powder came into use, with traces more difficult to detect. But by then forensic science had developed devices which could detect such traces, even when almost invisible. Further, those devices could analyze the physical components such as lead and antimony and tell police authorities the type and caliber of the ammunition and the weapon, a great aid to detectives investigating a murder.
In 1889 Professor Alexandre Lacassagne, a Frenchman, had pioneered in another phase of ballistics, the examination of the bullet itself. While an analysis of bullet fragments could identify the types of ammunition and gun, bullet analysis could identify the particular gun as distinguished from all others, much like fingerprinting. Lacassagne noticed seven longitudinal marks on a bullet he found in the body of a shooting victim. He checked a local gunsmith in Lyons and discovered that different guns from various manufacturers had different riflings—the spiral grooves cut into the inner surface of the barrel. The number of grooves would vary, as well as their width and the number of their windings.
Soon, forensic scientists began test-firing weapons to compare their bullets with those found in victims or at the scenes of crimes. And they made a remarkable discovery. Not only did the rifling of the guns vary, as Lacassagne had found, from manufacturer to manufacturer, but from gun to gun. Under the microscope, and later the comparison microscope, it was seen that the rifling of each gun was unique. The cutting machines that made the rifling created minute differences in each boring of a gun, differences that could be observed only under magnification. Thus it was possible by examining a bullet to identify with even greater precision the gun that had fired it. And these principles still guide the profession of ballistics today.
The investigation of unexplained deaths by fire was the province of another pioneer, an Austrian named Schwarzocher. With only a charred body as evidence, how could you distinguish between an accidental burning and murder by burning, or even murder in which the already dead victim was set afire to conceal a crime?
Schwarzocher found that those who were burned alive inhaled soot and carbon monoxide, caused by the combustion of the fire. The soot would be detected in the lungs, and the carbon monoxide in the blood, clues which almost always meant an accidental burning. Murder by burning alive, on the other hand, would often leave clues which indicated violence, even though the body was charred on the outside. For one thing, strangulation marks could be seen even after the fire. For another, it was believed that violence caused fat to be expelled from tissues into the blood. These tiny globules of fat emigrated to the heart, and then into the lungs, where they would be found in the corpse. Finally, in the victim who was killed first and then burned, the crime could be detected easily because no soot or carbon monoxide would be found in the lungs and the blood.
For centuries, poison has been a favorite weapon of murderers, including the infamous Borgias. And of these poisons, arsenous oxide, a tasteless, odorless white powder derived from arsenic, was the favorite. The symptoms of the poisoning were identical to those of cholera and other diseases prevalent at that time.
To combat murder by poison, a new science was founded in 1813 by Mathieu Orfila, who is now known to us as the father of toxicology. Orfila, a Spaniard who had moved to Paris, conducted numerous experiments with arsenic on animals so that he could see where the poison traveled in the body, and thus where it could be discovered in internal organs.
But sometimes the arsenic was impossible to trace, and seemed to have vanished. Orfila lacked a means of finding such invisible arsenic until an Englishman named James Marsh conducted an experiment. He mixed sulfuric acid with arsenic, producing a hydrogen gas containing arsenic elements. This gas was ignited as it left the mouth of a test tube while Marsh held a dish above it. The bla
ck deposit created on the dish was pure arsenic. When Marsh placed in his tube tissues in which arsenic was invisible, the arsenic would become visible, and toxicology could thereafter detect the presence of the poison in the body of a victim.
Arsenic is a metallic poison. Even more difficult to detect are poisons from vegetables and from exotic plants. Because their chemical basis is alkali, they were named alkaloids. And one after another of such alkaloids were isolated—morphine, nicotine, strychnine, caffeine, eventually a list of thousands. The alkaloids worked on the nervous system and left no traces at all in the bodies of the victims that could be detected by scientists in the early 1800s. Experimenting with these poisons, however, toxicologists of the day mixed them with various reagents and noted that each produced a separate color. In addition, many of them formed crystals whose shapes characterized the poisons. Next toxicologists found that when the crystals were placed over a fire, most alkaloid poisons had different melting points. Thus their presence in the body could also be detected.
The effort to identify alkaloids took on greater intensity as the years progressed, because now toxicologists were searching not only for poisons used in murder, but for synthetic alkaloids developed by drug manufacturers to heal, cure or ease the pain of various maladies, from insomnia to headaches. Unfortunately, these alkaloids could also be used to commit suicide or could result in accidental death when ingested in too great a quantity. Then in 1906 a Russian physicist, Isvett, reported that dyes traveling down a chalk column separated according to color, each one stopping at a different point in the tube. He called his discovery chromatography, which means, in Greek, color writing. Soon his discovery was taken up by toxicologists as a means of identifying alkaloids by coloring them with reagents that produced certain colors. Since then ultraviolet light and, later, electronic devices came into use to aid us in our search for these deadly poisons.
A pretty ladyfriend of a professor named Adolf Baezer in Berlin in 1864 gave her name to a chemical composition which has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. Her name was Barbara; the substance was barbituric acid. Physicians found it useful as a sedative, and the toll of suicides from barbituric acid began almost immediately to rise, as did accidental deaths and even, occasionally, homicides.
Today, more than a hundred years later, the number of unexplained deaths from all causes continues to spiral upward as we forensic scientists struggle to keep pace. The great scientific breakthroughs made by our pioneers have given us the principles of forensic analysis in every field, and have led to the development of sophisticated devices embodying these principles. But the war goes on, and in the following pages I will describe various battles in that war, deaths which were a mystery, and murders in which cunning killers could not be found, until forensic science analyzed the evidence and provided the answers.
A CURIOUS CAUSE OF DEATH
The Case of Dorothy Dandridge
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Dorothy Dandridge was one of the first great black entertainment stars to emerge in motion pictures. Often compared to Lena Home, Dorothy was beautiful and possessed a lilting voice that delighted audiences everywhere. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1923, the daughter of a minister, she began her singing career at the age of four. She and her sister, Vivian, were billed as “The Wonder Children” and played in small clubs in the area.
As Dorothy approached adulthood, her beauty was evident to all, and the little girl from Cleveland made the journey to Hollywood. In those days of discrimination, the forties, blacks were almost always either relegated to “Stepin Fetchit” roles or clumped together in all-black films. Nevertheless, Dorothy was special, and she appeared in a legendary Marx Brothers film, A Day at the Races.
In the fifties, she reached the zenith of her career, starring in two classics for director Otto Preminger, Carmen Jones, a black, jazzy version of Bizet’s opera Carmen, and Porgy and Bess, the great musical drama written by George Gershwin. She won an Academy Award nomination for her role in Carmen Jones. At the same time she was one of this country’s premiere nightclub entertainers, commanding huge fees in Las Vegas, Miami and other expensive resorts.
But a hint of the discrimination that Dorothy faced in those years would emerge later, in 1957, when she sued a scandal magazine, Confidential, over an article provocatively titled “What Dorothy Dandridge Did in the Woods.” The story alleged a love tryst with a white bandleader, Daniel Terry, during a two-week singing engagement at Lake Tahoe in 1950. In her suit, Dorothy pointed out that there were “restrictions on Negroes” at the resort which limited her social activities with whites, and she was “never alone” with a white man.
But by the early sixties, discrimination of all kinds in America had eased, and Dorothy should have been poised for even greater successes. Instead, her personal life brought her disaster. Twice she tried marriage; both times the marriages failed. Even more disastrously, she lost all the money she had saved over the years of work in a get-rich-quick oil investment that turned sour. In 1963 she was forced to declare bankruptcy, citing debts of $127,000.
Two years later, on May 21, 1965, Dorothy Dandridge handed a note to her manager, Earl Mills. It read: “In case of my death—to whoever discovers it—Don’t remove anything I have on—scarf, gown, or underwear—cremate me right away—If I have anything, money, furniture, give it to my brother.” Mills later said Dandridge told him at the time, “You keep the note, Earl, because I know you will be the one who discovers me.”
The note certainly suggested that the famed black singer was contemplating suicide. But by September 1, 1965, things were looking up for Dandridge. Her manager took her to Oaxaca, Mexico, where she signed to play in two films for Mexican producer Raúl Fernández. And she was set for a singing engagement in New York’s most prestigious jazz club, Basin Street East, beginning September 9.
One day before that engagement, Mills telephoned Dandridge’s second-floor apartment at 8405 Fountain Avenue in West Hollywood. She didn’t answer, and by 2 P.M. he was worried and went to the address. He found her apartment door unlocked, but bolted by a chain. He used a crowbar borrowed from the building manager to pry the chain lock loose.
Inside he found Dorothy Dandridge in bed clad in a light-blue nightgown. There was no pulse, no heartbeat. She had apparently died in her sleep.
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The Dorothy Dandrige case was a human tragedy: a talented young black struggling against all odds to achieve success, then having its fruits snatched away, but fighting back, anyway, to rebuild her life—all to end in sudden death. But in my years in the Los Angeles coroner’s office, it is remembered for another reason. It sparked one of the most heated scientific controversies ever to occur in our office.
As a deputy medical examiner under Dr. Theodore Curphey, I found myself embroiled in that controversy. The autopsy surgeon’s verdict stated that Dandridge had died from a rare medical phenomenon. It seemed that she had sustained a broken toe a few weeks before her death. The autopsy surgeon believed that the accident to the toe released fat from its bone which traveled to the lung and plugged the blood vessels so that the blood could not be oxygenated. Therefore he ruled that the death was caused by a pulmonary fat embolism.
This type of fat, as pathologists know, has its origins as bone marrow, the spongelike substance within the bones of the body which produces red and white blood cells, as well as platelets. The white cells are the fighting soldiers against infection. The platelets produce blood clotting in case of injury. The seeds of these blood cells mature and multiply in the marrow, then are released to general circulation in the bloodstream. Bone marrow is present in all persons during their youth, but when they reach adulthood the marrow in most bones (except spine, ribs, breastbone and pelvis) turns to fat. It was this fat from a broken toe bone which the autopsy surgeon believed to be the cause of Dorothy Dandridge’s death.
It was an extraordinary theory, many pathologists in our office believed, myself included. Pulmonary fat embolisms occur because of fract
ured bones such as the thigh or the shin—but from the toe? There couldn’t be more than a teaspoonful of fat in the toe, we thought. What little evidence was available, we believed, pointed to suicide.
Others in the office backed the autopsy surgeon, and arguments raged. On that side of the controversy was a unique sociological fact: suicide is very rare among blacks. Sociologists theorize that they are more resigned to the vicissitudes of life which sometimes tempt Caucasians to suicide. Blacks learn early to endure hardships and shrug them off.
Arguments among the staff over the cause of death are a rare phenomenon nowadays in medical examiners’ offices because sophisticated equipment enables us more precisely to prove the truth or falsity of most scientific theories. But in those days, the Los Angeles coroner’s office did not have such sophisticated devices. The toxicology laboratory, for example, consisted of only a few test tubes and one old-fashioned gas chromatography device. With these instruments the toxicologist was unable to discover any toxic drugs present in Dandridge’s blood.
Thus Dr. Curphey, despite his own doubts, signed the autopsy report which stated that Dandridge’s death had occurred because of a pulmonary embolism. But then he took an additional step to resolve the conflict. He sent the liver, the kidney and samples of blood to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, which did have sophisticated toxicology devices. There Dr. Leo Goldbaum analyzed the organs and the blood samples and discovered a fatal level of a tranquilizer drug in Dandridge’s body fluids.
On November 17, 1965, Dr. Curphey announced that the department was revising its earlier report, a very rare occurrence. It now ruled that Dorothy Dandridge had died from an overdose of drugs—and not from a broken toe.
Partially because of that broken toe, Los Angeles would soon have a modern toxicology laboratory, as all of us on the staff realized how vital such a laboratory was in our work. When I became Chief Medical Examiner in 1969, and we built our new Forensic Science Center, the toxicology laboratory was one of our first priorities.
The Coroner Series Page 29