by Bridget Heos
Vidocq saw the benefits of a diverse squad of detectives. By 1818, he was employing women detectives—years before other police forces followed suit. Decades later, Kate Warne became the first female private investigator in America, solving several murders on behalf of the Pinkerton Detective Agency and helping to thwart an assassination attempt on President Lincoln. Women detectives didn’t join Scotland Yard until 1933, at which point they focused on high-society crime, drug trafficking, human trafficking, and female crime bosses. They were heralded by an Associated Press article: “Unmarried, athletic and shrewd, the three new operatives of the feminine sex are as much at home wearing evening gowns at a night club as masquerading in disguises befitting the sordid underworld.”2
The female Sûreté detectives, like their male counterparts, had criminal records, allowing them to move with ease through the underworld. One was nicknamed the Nun. She’d gone to prison at the age of twelve for stealing and spent most of her young life there (where she gained a reputation for modesty that earned her the moniker). Then, in her late twenties, she put her skills to better use. She was Vidocq’s expert on burglaries and caught many thieves. She had, as Vidocq put it, the gift of the gab, which led to people telling her all sorts of things in the course of her investigations. The Sûreté’s women detectives became the focus of many crime novels. And Vidocq himself was the model for Edgar Allan Poe’s popular detective Auguste Dupin, along with many other heroes of the page. In fact, Vidocq’s life was so often fictionalized (some say by Vidocq himself) that it can be difficult to separate the man from the legend.
Kate Warne, the first female detective in the United States (standing center)
French writer Alexandre Dumas recorded a story in which Vidocq used firearm analysis to solve the high-profile murder of the Comtesse Isabelle d’Arcy in 1822. If true, it puts Vidocq ahead of his time not just in detective work, but in forensic science, too. Isabelle’s much older husband, Comte d’Arcy, was accused of shooting her to death. His motive: Isabelle was seeing another man. Vidocq didn’t think the count was the murdering type, but would the evidence match his hunch? At the time, medical students were performing autopsies as part of their training, but the public frowned upon any such interference with the dead. So Vidocq acted in secret, asking a doctor to remove the bullet from the head wound. The detective then compared the bullet to the comte’s dueling pistols. It fit neither. Next, Vidocq investigated the comtesse’s amour, a man known as Deloro. The detective hired an actress to feign interest in Deloro so that she could enter his apartment. There, the comtesse’s jewelry was found, along with a pistol that matched the bullet. It was Deloro, not the comte, who committed the murder.
Though Vidocq may have used forensic science, he was primarily a detective. For the first modern forensic scientist, we’ll look to England—but not Scotland Yard. Scotland Yard, so named either because it was the site of a residence that once housed visiting Scottish royalty or because the back entrance opened onto a street called Great Scotland Yard (named for a man named Scott), was headquarters for the London Metro Police and is still a commonly used name for the police force. It was founded in 1829 and deployed its first plainclothes detectives in 1842. While some Londoners viewed these secretive police officers as spies, popular British writers saw them as heroes. Charles Dickens based the kind but tenacious Inspector Bucket from Bleak House on a Scotland Yard detective. And real-life detective Richard Tanner became a darling of the British press when he solved Britain’s first train murder.
On July 9, 1864, two men entered a railway car and found it splattered in blood. Soon after, the engineer of another train saw a man lying on the tracks. It was sixty-nine-year-old Thomas Briggs, a banker. Unconscious and badly wounded, he died the next night. The murderer had apparently robbed Briggs of his gold watch and chain and a pair of glasses and then thrown the man off the train. Before fleeing the scene, the robber made a crucial mistake. He put on the victim’s hat and left his own behind. Before mass production, something like a hat could be traced to its maker. In this case, the address of the hat maker was inscribed inside. The shop was located in the Marylebone neighborhood of London. If Detective Tanner could link the hat maker to the hat owner, he would find the murderer.
Scotland Yard asked the public for information regarding the hat and the stolen watch and chain. A jeweler, rather thematically named John Death, told police that a German man had come into his shop and exchanged the dead man’s chain for something else. A cabdriver then provided the next clue. A family friend, Franz Muller, had brought a small cardboard box—bearing the jeweler’s name—to the man’s home and given it to one of the children. Franz had been engaged to the cabdriver’s oldest daughter but had left London for New York on July 15. The cabdriver also explained that he had bought the Marylebone hat found on the train and given it to Franz as a gift. The cabdriver gave police a photo of Franz, and Death confirmed that he was the same man who had traded the gold chain. Though Franz was en route to America, Tanner caught up with him and found that the robber still had the missing watch and hat. He was busted.
It was gumshoe detective work at its best, but not exactly forensic science. Soon Londoners, and people around the world, were reading about a different kind of detective—one based not on the real-life investigators of Scotland Yard but on the imaginings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, in 1887. In it, Dr. John Watson is in London recuperating from a war injury and seeking a roommate. A friend introduces him to Sherlock Holmes at his place of employment: a hospital chemistry lab. Watson describes the strange things Holmes does in the lab. For one thing, Holmes announces that he has discovered an “infallible test for blood stains . . . old or new.”3 (This was before such a test was available to police.) He also warns Watson that he works with strong poisons. Watson’s friend adds that he once saw Holmes beating a cadaver in the hospital dissecting room to see how bruises form after death.
Back at their shared apartment, Watson describes Holmes’s knowledge base. He knows nothing of literature, philosophy, or astronomy—not even that the Earth revolves around the sun! But he is well versed in chemistry, anatomy, British law, poisons, the different soils of London, and “every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.”4 Who would have such interests as these? A forensic scientist, of course.
Illustration of Sherlock Holmes from the first edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet
When Scotland Yard asks Holmes to help solve a murder, we see what a specialist he really is. From this point, the story reads like an episode of CSI: Victorian London. Holmes uses a tape measure and magnifying glass to examine the crime scene, explaining to Watson, “They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains. . . . It’s a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.”5
Holmes then smells the lips of the victim, Enoch J. Drebber—and detects poison. He even does a bit of handwriting analysis. “Rache” has been written on the wall in blood. Scotland Yard thinks the killer had begun writing Rachel but was interrupted. Holmes, however, knows that Rache means revenge in German. But the letters are not written in the way Germans form letters. So that clue was meant to throw detectives off track.
Outside, Holmes observes wheel marks and foot impressions and deduces that two men arrived in a cab, one tall and the other well dressed—the victim, Drebber. Because hoof marks show that the horses wandered aimlessly, he knows that one of the men who went inside was the cabdriver. He even judges by the ashes left at the scene that the man smokes Trichinopoly cigars (he’s done a study on this, and at this point, the reader would expect no less).
As Holmes solves the crime (which was indeed done for Rache), Holmes explains to Watson that whereas most people think forward, detectives must think backward. If x happened, then what had to have happened before it? “There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life,” he says. “Our duty is to unr
avel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”6
Unlike most crime-novel sleuths of the day, Holmes was based not on a real-life detective but on a doctor. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle attended medical school at the University of Edinburgh, where he was an assistant to Professor Joseph Bell. Bell used deductive reasoning to diagnose patients. He could also tell a person’s profession just by looking at them. For instance, a woman holding a vial came to see him, and he knew before speaking to her that her husband was a tailor. Bell explained that the vial was stopped with the papers around which tailors typically wound their threads. He could also guess where in the city a person had been based on the mud on their shoes. Bell inspired Doyle to write about a different kind of detective. He said, “If he [Bell] were a detective, he would surely reduce this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer an exact science. I would try if I could get this effect.”7
In the Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle went beyond describing the work of real-life detectives. He predicted the type of work they would do in the future. Some of the first forensic scientists said that their work was inspired by Sherlock Holmes. One such man was Edmond Locard, who opened the world’s first crime lab and was known as the French Sherlock Holmes. His focus was on crime scene evidence.
4
Not without a Trace: The Introduction of Crime Scene Evidence
While Sherlock Holmes was solving murder cases on the page, Hans Gross was prosecuting criminals in Austria. But it was Gross’s manual for police officers that would live on in history. In 1893, he wrote the book Criminal Investigation: A Practical Textbook for Magistrates, Police Officers, and Lawyers. It was groundbreaking, providing for the first time step-by-step instructions for conducting crime scene investigations. In a way, many of the TV-mystery story lines owe themselves to Gross. For instance, he writes that the investigating officer should secure the perimeter of the scene and preserve all evidence. Then the officer should take notes, realizing that even the smallest observations may be important.
“The zealous Investigating Officer will note on his walks the footprints found on the dust of the highway,” Gross writes. “He will observe the tracks of animals, of the wheels of carriages, the marks of pressure on the grass where someone has sat or lain down, or perhaps deposited a burden. He will examine little pieces of paper that have been thrown away, marks or injuries on trees, displaced stones, broken glass or pottery, doors and windows open or shut in an unusual manner. Every thing will afford an opportunity for drawing conclusions and explaining what must have previously taken place.”1
Murder in the House (1890) by Jakub Schikaneder
Gross encourages the officer to keep an open mind, even if he has been told what happened. He describes a case in which two men, whom he calls Sp. and B., encouraged an old man, T., to walk with them to a cattle market one autumn. The next day, T. was found beaten and unconscious. He came to and told police what little he remembered. The morning of the attack, he, Sp., and B. had set out for the market and stopped by the roadside for lunch in the afternoon. They rested until around three p.m.—he was certain of the time because he had heard church bells ringing—and then continued on. About an hour later, Sp. and B. said they wondered if the market would be closed because of a cattle plague. Perhaps they should ask in a nearby village. But T. said they had no reason to believe that the market was closed, and anyway, they could ask at an inn along the road. They would have more updated information than the villagers.
But Sp. and B. insisted on going to the village, and so T. said to go without him. (Walking was hard for him, and he didn’t want to make the extra trip.) He would continue walking, and they could catch up with him later. After walking for a while, T. sat down on a milestone to wait. It was then that he felt a blow to his head from behind and blacked out. He was found unconscious, his money to purchase cattle gone. T. died several days later, and investigators suspected that Sp. and B. had killed him. They guessed that Sp. and B. knew that T. wouldn’t make the extra trip and had used the ruse of the detour to plan their attack and sneak up on him.
The men insisted that they really had gone into the town to ask about the market. They had looked for T. along the road but couldn’t find him. Sp. and B. said it was dark by the time they passed the spot where T. was found, and so they didn’t see him lying in the ditch. Sp. and B. had continued to the market without T. and only learned of his attack on the way back, when a peasant asked them to come to his house to identify the poor man. Villagers confirmed that the men had been in town and that it would be impossible to make the trip from point A (where they had stopped for lunch) to point B (the town) and finally to point C (where T. was found unconscious) before dark if they’d left at three p.m. Still, police prosecuted Sp. and B, and they were convicted.
The next spring, however, the men appealed the case, pointing a finger at a young man with a bad reputation who’d been hanging around the neighborhood at the time. The appeal hinged on whether the men would have seen the unconscious T. lying beside the road. The townspeople said it would have been too dark. So perhaps Sp. and B. were telling the truth. Police arrested the other young man instead. But the investigating officer decided to see for himself whether it would have been too dark to see. He asked two astronomers which day that spring would mirror the same day in the fall that the crime took place. On that day, he set out along the road at three p.m. and took the detour into town. He lingered there for a while and then returned to the spot on the road where T. had been killed. It was still light out. He then walked along the road many times to see if the ditch was ever out of sight. It wasn’t. Finally, night fell, and the lights went out on the possibility of Sp.’s and B.’s innocence.
Reading Gross’s advice, you can’t help but imagine that he would have launched a different kind of investigation in the Wyoming barroom shooting of Charles Davis. Sure, three witnesses said they saw Signor act in self-defense. But what if those witnesses were just saying that because they were friends with Signor? That’s not to say that their testimonies should be dismissed. But the evidence has to be examined, too. And at the time that Gross wrote his manual, that part of murder investigations was lacking.
Besides thoroughness on the part of police, Gross urged the use of forensic science experts in murder cases. He said toxicologists, botanists, chemists, and handwriting and firearm experts should all be called on when needed. In particular, microscopists should examine the evidence left behind. The idea wasn’t unheard of. As far back as 1847, the microscope was used to solve the murder of the French Duchess of Choiseul-Praslin, Fanny Sebastiani.
Early one morning, Fanny’s servants heard crashing and screaming and ran to their mistress’s room to investigate. Minutes later, they were joined by Fanny’s husband, who claimed to have come running, like the servants, when he heard the commotion. He soon became a suspect, after investigators learned of the couple’s unhappy marriage.
The duke, Charles Laure Hugo Theobald, employed a governess, Henriette Deluzy-Desportes, to care for the couple’s nine children. At the trial, Henriette explained that the duchess didn’t like spending time with the children, preferring to be by herself. That left Henriette and the duke to walk in the gardens with the children and relax as a family together in the playroom.
Fanny’s diary entries and letters to her husband told a different story: that the governess had essentially moved into the house—and along with the duke was keeping the children away from the duchess, who was now relegated to her bedroom quarters. Fanny asked that the governess be dismissed so that Fanny could care for her own children. Barring that, she asked to be allowed to travel to escape the troubling situation.
In an undated letter to the duke, Fanny wrote, “You are, doubtless, free to do what suits you; but you are not free to have my daughters brought up by a person whom I despise as her shameful conduct deserves. For a long time I have sought an explanation with you; I have done what I could to obtain it, but you refuse it. I demand, then,
that you authorize me to travel, to avoid greater scandals. During that time you will reflect on the course it will be suitable for you to adopt. The day will come, Theobald, when you will return to yourself, and will perceive how unjust and cruel you have been to the mother of your children, in order to please a crack-brain who respects nothing.”2 The crack-brain she referred to was, of course, Henriette.
Fanny’s primary beef with Henriette seems to have been that she had usurped her role as mother to the children. But rumors were spreading that Henriette wasn’t just hogging the children, but snogging the husband, too. Fanny’s family got involved, and finally, the duke was forced to dismiss Henriette. She did not go willingly. Afterward, she wrote letters to the children proclaiming her motherly love for them and asking, by the way, how their father was holding up. She also mentioned that she wished she were dead—so badly did she miss them. The children genuinely loved their governess and hated that she had been sent away. So the rift between mother and children continued.
Though she pined for the duke and his children, Henriette did wish to go on with her life. She’d been offered a job at a school, but only if she could prove that the rumored affair never happened. For that, she needed a letter of recommendation from the duchess. The duke told Henriette to come by the house to pick up the letter on August 18. But by that date, the letter hadn’t been written yet—and never would be. Because that was the morning Fanny was found dead.
The duke first told investigators that he had entered Fanny’s room only after the servants. But when police found the duke’s bloody pistol under a sofa in Fanny’s room, he was forced to change his story. Now he said that he had arrived at the scene before the servants, carrying his pistol to fight off an intruder. Seeing Fanny lying in a pool of blood, he dropped the pistol and cradled his wife. Since she couldn’t be helped, he went back to his room to wash up, only to return to the scene once the servants arrived. People may lie, but pistols don’t. Under a microscope, pathologist Auguste Ambroise Tardieu found hair and skin tissue on the gun. It had clearly been used to beat the duchess. Police theorized that that morning, Theobald had asked Fanny to write the letter. She had refused, and he’d flown into a rage, killing her. The duke was convicted, but he poisoned himself before he could be sent to prison. Or, if you believe the conspiracy theorists of the day, he faked his own death and escaped with the help of the royal family.