by Bridget Heos
An 1877 newspaper illustration of a poker game in a Wyoming saloon
Signor came to see what the commotion was about. Now, a certain amount of rowdiness was allowed in saloons, where strong whiskey was the order of the day. Cowboys driving cattle from Texas to Montana—far away from family and home—tended to be a wild crowd. Gambling was allowed in saloons and often led to gunfights. Barkeepers made money off this heavy-drinking crowd, and while the whiskey (and money) was flowing, they accepted some obnoxiousness. But Charles’s behavior had crossed the line, and Signor said so. Undeterred, Charles told Signor to fix him a drink. Signor agreed to, but only after Charles picked up the chairs. Charles wanted that drink immediately. He grabbed Signor by the collar, pulled his gun on him, and said, “Signor, you Poppy Eyed Bastard, I will fix you.”2
But Charles had it backward. Signor, who was bent over picking up a chair, grabbed Charles’s gun with his left hand and pulled his own gun out of his pocket with his right. He shot Charles four times. According to the witnesses, Charles was reaching for a second gun when Signor fired again—shooting the rowdy customer dead and proving that there really is no such thing as a free lunch.
Based on witness testimony, the jury ruled the shooting a justifiable homicide. Today, a thorough autopsy and crime scene investigation would have been conducted to confirm what witnesses said, but even now, the word of several witnesses, all in agreement, holds a lot of sway in court.
On the other hand, if there were no witnesses, a murder often went unsolved. In a typical case from 1889, the coroner and jury rode out to investigate the dead body of a man found in the open country of Wyoming. (In those days, such an excursion was common.) The coroner later described in his report the body of a thirty-five-to-forty-year-old sandy-haired man badly decomposed, his pockets empty. He declared the cause of death undetermined, and the investigation ended. With empty pockets, was the man robbed and killed? Did he die of dehydration? And for that matter, who was this man? All these questions went unanswered. And this wasn’t true just in the Wild West. If a dead body washed up in the East River in New York, it was just as likely that the coroner’s jury would throw up their hands and say, “Who knows what happened?”
This was unfair to the victims and their families and frustrating for the communities where crimes went unsolved. As the Laramie Daily Boomerang stated after a man was found shot to death on the side of the road, “It has become a regular thing for a man to be found dead, family murdered, and nothing has been done to apprehend and punish the guilty ones.”3
From coast to coast, America needed thorough murder investigations using forensic science. That change would come about first in England and the rest of Europe, where the “crowner” (coroner) system had been in place since the year 1000. In those days, the British king was entitled to a share of the property of anyone convicted of a crime. A coroner was a high-ranking official appointed to collect the king’s due. Of course, the coroner first had to determine who committed the crime. The sheriff would call the coroner, and the coroner would investigate.
By around 1300, the coroner was summoning a jury to help with the inquisition. Together, they would “view” the body, which is quite different from examining the body through an autopsy. After all, the coroner was not a doctor. Nevertheless, the coroner and his jury would determine the cause of death, interview witnesses, and decide who, if anyone, was responsible. Then the sheriff would make an arrest. In time, the king no longer collected the property of criminals, and the coroner’s status fell. He became a workaday government official. And he still wasn’t a doctor.
Dr. Thomas Wakley sought to change that. Founder of the prominent British medical journal the Lancet, he crusaded on its pages for all coroners to be doctors. Wakley ran for the office of coroner in his county of Middlesex, but England’s coroners, wanting to keep their jobs, opposed him. After several tries, Wakley was elected, and by the mid-1800s, all of England was electing doctors to be their coroners. It just made sense. By the late 1800s, coroners were investigating any death in which the cause was unknown, violent, or unnatural. A thorough investigation no longer hinged on suspicion or luck. It was now a matter of routine, in England, at least.
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) by Rembrandt
At the same time, doctors were becoming more knowledgeable about autopsies. Medical schools across Europe offered courses in forensic pathology, the study of corpses and causes of death. Alexandre Lacassagne was a pioneer in this field. He joined the Institute of Legal Medicine in Lyon, France, in 1881 and began leading students in dozens of criminal autopsies each year. They learned to read such details on a corpse as whether the victim had been strangled by bare hands or a cord, and from what angle a knife must have been wielded. Besides building a state-of-the-art lab for the student autopsy work, Lacassagne also created a criminal museum at the university. It included fractured skulls, firearms and bullets, a variety of ropes used in hangings, fabrics stained with blood, human and animal hair, and wounded body parts and their corresponding weapons—hatchets, knives, swords, hammers, guns, and more.
Alexandre Lacassagne, pioneer in the field of forensic pathology
At first the public was skeptical as to how forensic pathologists like those trained by Lacassagne could help solve crimes. But in England, the case of Cora Crippen settled any doubts. Hawley Harvey Crippen and his wife, Cora, were Americans living in London. Hawley worked for a mail-order homeopathic medicine company. (Advertised in newspapers and wildly popular, homeopathic medicines were questionably helpful at best and dangerous at worst. Dr. Campbell’s Safe Arsenic Complexion Wafers were one such example.) Cora, who went by the stage name Belle Elmore, was an actress and singer. Hawley at first supported Belle’s career, but he was fired for being too sidetracked from his own work. He became a dentist, and Belle, popular for her dramatic flair on and off the stage, was elected treasurer of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild. The couple grew apart. Each struck up an affair, Belle with a boarder the couple had taken in and Hawley with his eighteen-year-old secretary, Ethel Le Neve.
The marriage turned especially sour when Belle heard rumors that Ethel was pregnant. She threatened to expose the affair, ruining Hawley’s reputation. But the secret would be safe with Belle, because after a dinner party on January 31, 1910, she was apparently never seen again. Ethel delivered a note to the Ladies’ Guild, purportedly from Belle, which said she was resigning as treasurer and moving to America to care for a sick relative.
Cora Crippen (stage name Belle Elmore)
The note seemed fishy to the guild ladies. Belle would have mentioned having a sick relative—the ladies discussed everything together. Their suspicions grew when they saw Ethel wearing Belle’s jewelry. The ladies hounded Hawley with questions until he finally told them that Belle had died. This did nothing to quell the guild ladies’ inquiries. They asked Hawley when the funeral would be. He said Belle was being cremated. But the ladies knew that a cremation would go against Belle’s Catholic sensibility (at the time, the Catholic Church forbade cremation). Continuing their sleuthing, the ladies learned that on the day Belle had supposedly left for America, no such ship had set sail. Furthermore, there was no record of Belle’s death in California.
The ladies brought their mounting evidence to Chief Inspector Walter Dew of Scotland Yard. He paid a visit to Crippen on July 8, 1910, and asked him where his wife was. Hawley said that the ladies’ suspicions were true: Belle wasn’t really dead. Rather, she’d left Hawley for another man. He’d made up the story of her death to avoid embarrassment. Though he’d answered cunningly, the visit had shaken Hawley. Frightened that a police investigation was underway, he fled for Canada the next day with Ethel. When Dew learned that the couple had left town, he conducted a thorough search of the Crippen home.
In the basement, beneath the floor, detectives found a decomposing torso. With evidence pointing to murder, police chased Hawley and Ethel across the Atlantic and arrested them in Canada. Hawl
ey insisted that the torso must have been buried in the basement before he moved into the house. Scotland Yard brought in Bernard Spilsbury to determine whether the body was Belle’s. Spilsbury was a prominent pathologist at St. Mary’s Hospital, which housed the region’s best forensic medicine practice. He found on the torso a scar, which he believed was from a surgery Belle had had. He also found hyoscine, a sedative, in the body tissues.
At the trial, prosecutors put forth the theory that Hawley had called a doctor to say that his wife was ill and then given her hyoscine in the hopes of causing an overdose. Because she’d supposedly already been sick, the death would have looked natural. When the sedative failed to kill Belle, Hawley shot her instead. He then chopped up her body, throwing some parts into the canal, burning others, and burying the torso. Hawley was tried and sentenced to death; Ethel was found innocent of being an accessory. Spilsbury’s work proved to the public that autopsies could play an important role in murder cases. But was Spilsbury right?
Ladies’ Guild members during the trial of Hawley Harvey Crippen for the murder of his wife, Cora Crippen
Recently, forensic biologist David Foran of Michigan State University decided to investigate the case using DNA evidence. He was skeptical of the prosecutor’s theory because in most cases, poisoners follow through with their plan to make the murder look like a natural death. He examined one of the scar tissue slides that Spilsbury described as belonging to Cora. Then Foran took DNA samples from Cora Crippen’s living relatives. The DNA didn’t match. Not only that, but the DNA from the tissue sample belonged to a man. Unless the test was somehow faulty (not likely, as it passed muster with the peer-reviewed Journal of Forensic Sciences, in which it was published), Hawley was convicted based on false evidence.
So who did the body belong to? And where did Cora go? It’s possible that the body belonged to the victim of another murder, though the more cynical answer is that police planted it there. As for Cora, she may have been murdered and her body disposed of in some other way, or perhaps, as Hawley said, she simply ran away.
Spilsbury went on to become a famous, though controversial, forensic pathologist. One of his most interesting cases was known as the “Brides in the Bath.” In the late 1800s and early 1900s, many British men emigrated to America to find their fortunes. By 1910, women in England outnumbered men by 500,000. Women hoping to marry were hard-pressed to find a husband. So Bessie Mundy probably felt lucky when a charming man by the name of Henry Williams proposed to her after only a few weeks of dating. The problem was, his name wasn’t Henry, and he was already married to at least five other women. George Joseph Smith—that was his real name—had left his other wives penniless. He would take even more from Bessie.
“Brides in the Bath” murderer George Joseph Smith posing with his first murder victim, Bessie Mundy
After they married, George asked Bessie to make a will naming him as beneficiary. Bessie had inherited quite a bit of money from her father, a banker. In May of 1912, the couple moved to Herne Bay in the county of Kent on the east coast of England. George had an iron bathtub made for the house and sent his wife to haggle over the price. She would soon die in that tub. George convinced Bessie that she was having seizures and afterward didn’t remember them. On July 12, she saw a doctor and described her “symptoms”—really just the things Smith had told her. The next day, George wrote to the same doctor. “Come at once,” the note said. “My wife is dead.”4
The doctor found Bessie drowned in the bathtub, faceup. It appeared to be a horrible accident, but he made note of a strange detail: her right hand was clutching a bar of soap. The coroner’s jury found that Bessie had had a seizure and drowned. George buried Bessie in a cheap coffin in a common grave, returned the bathtub, and pocketed his inheritance.
A year later, George married Alice Burnham, a nurse. On their wedding day, he romantically bought a life insurance policy for £500. Two months later, George and Alice vacationed in Blackpool on the northwest coast (as far away from the first murder as possible). As with Bessie, he convinced Alice to see a doctor, this time for headaches. He then made sure to talk to the landlady while his wife was supposedly drowning in the boardinghouse tub. He claimed to have found Alice dead afterward, and no suspicions were raised because no one in Blackpool had heard of Bessie’s death. A coroner’s jury found that Alice drowned after fainting.
On December 18, 1914, George, under the name of John Lloyd, married Margaret Lofty. They immediately went on a honeymoon in North London. She, too, was “found” by George, drowned in the tub after having visited a doctor the same day for headaches. The death was ruled an accident. But for George, the third time was not a charm. Alice Burnham’s father read about how Margaret Lofty died and found it eerily similar to his own daughter’s death. He shared his suspicions with police, who arrested George in February 1915.
Kent police thought Bessie Mundy’s death might also be related. The bodies were exhumed, and Spilsbury conducted the autopsies. With three newlyweds found dead in bathtubs, intentional drowning seemed likely. And the fact that Bessie Mundy was found holding a bar of soap offered a further clue. If she’d had a seizure, it would have slipped out of her hand. She must have died suddenly instead. But if the killer had knocked the women out before drowning them, they should have had head or neck trauma. If he hadn’t, the bodies should have shown signs of a fight. Spilsbury found no such suspicious injuries and no signs of poisoning. To find out what happened, Spilsbury did experiments with a “very fine lady swimmer,” as he described her.5 Based on this work, he developed a theory that Smith must have pulled the women’s legs sharply up and out of the bath, causing their heads to go underwater. This would have sent water rushing down their throats, putting pressure on the vagus nerves in their necks and slowing their heart rates until the women passed out or died.
Spilsbury testified about this theory in court. Tall, handsome, and well dressed, he had a way of persuading the jury. But in this case, not much persuading was needed, as five of George’s surviving wives also testified. One said that he had made her steal, landing her in prison. Three others said he stole their cash, jewelry, and clothing before running off, and a fifth said she thought she was still married to George—he’d lived with her on and off for the past seven years. He was found guilty and hanged in 1915.
Sir Bernard Henry Spilsbury, famed pathologist
The Brides in the Bath case was a bit of a slam dunk. George Smith was an extremely likely suspect in the deaths. After all, what were the chances that three wives would accidentally die in the bathtub, their husband having married them under false pretenses and gaining financially each time? That’s to say nothing of the man’s five other wives, most of whom he’d robbed penniless. The Crippen case had also seemed cut-and-dried. It was possible that the body belonged to someone else, but unlikely given the fact that Crippen’s wife had recently disappeared, and he had lied to her friends about the circumstances and fled the country when police began asking questions. Of course, thanks to DNA, we now know that Crippen may have run off when he saw the writing on the wall: he was about to go down for a crime he didn’t commit.
In cases that were less certain at the time, Spilsbury often came under fire. Several times, the public accused him of basing his testimony not on science but on his own assumptions. In 1925, twenty-five-year-old Norman Thorne was accused of killing his girlfriend, Elsie Cameron. Her dismembered body was found on his chicken farm. Norman at first told police that Elsie hadn’t visited the farm on the day of her disappearance. When her body was found on the property, he changed his story. He said she had come to the farm claiming to be pregnant and demanding that he marry her. They fought, and he left in a huff. He returned to find that she had hanged herself. Thinking he would be accused, Norman panicked. He cut up the body and buried it.
Police digging for evidence in the Elsie Cameron murder
Spilsbury said the autopsy told a different story. He said the neck showed no sign of strangulat
ion. Rather, Elsie appeared to have been beaten to death—probably by a blunt object like a club. Here’s where Spilsbury’s testimony became strange. He said that although Elsie had no bruising on the surface of her skin, she had bruising under the skin. Defense experts said that this theory was ridiculous. If the victim had been beaten by a club, she would have had more than just bruising under the skin. She would have appeared battered, and her bones and skull would be fractured. Moreover, the defense said that there were, in fact, signs of strangulation from the hanging. They called Spilsbury’s autopsy methods outdated, as he relied on the naked eye rather than the microscope. The defense experts said the bruising, less severe than Spilsbury claimed, was probably a result of the body falling to the floor when Thorne cut the rope from which Elsie hanged. They argued that she had died of shock soon after being cut down.
The jury was faced with two competing medical theories. After debating for just half an hour, they found Thorne guilty. But was the verdict really based on scientific evidence, or was it a popularity contest for the pathologists? The defense’s pathologists were unknown to the jurors. Spilsbury, on the other hand, was a celebrity. He had been knighted for his work. The judge even referred to him several times during trial as “the greatest living pathologist.”6
While the jurors seemed to have been taken by Spilsbury, others were skeptical of his findings and outraged at the verdict. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself commented on the case, saying that Thorne hadn’t been proven guilty “in view of the medical evidence.”7 Before his execution, Thorne wrote in a letter to his father, “Never mind, Dad, don’t worry. I am a martyr to Spilsburyism.”8