by Bridget Heos
Aileen Wuornos, who was executed by lethal injection for murdering six men
They had discovered the body of Richard Mallory, dead from a gunshot wound. Within the next year, six other gunshot victims would be found—all men. The killer didn’t go entirely undetected. On July 4, witnesses saw two women leaving the car of the fourth victim. They gave a description to a police artist, and Florida detectives released the sketch to the press. The women were identified by callers as Lee Blahovec and Tyria Moore.
At around the same time, a sheriff’s officer was checking pawn shops for the victims’ belongings. He found a camera and radar detector that had belonged to the first victim, Richard Mallory. As required by law, the seller had left her right thumbprint on the receipt, along with her name, Cammie Marsh Greene. Unfortunately, Florida investigators couldn’t find a match in the computer system. Fingerprint expert Jennie Ahern, of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Orlando Regional Crime Laboratory, and colleagues Debbie Fischer and David Perry had to search for fingerprints the old-fashioned way.
They visited local law enforcement agencies and flipped through cards on file. As luck would have it, they found a match at the first place they looked: the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office. The name on the card said Lori Kristine Grody. The experts searched jail records for a photo. It turned out Lori, Lee, and Cammie were one and the same. And none would turn out to be the woman’s real name. When the experts ran Lori’s record through the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, they found a match for Aileen Carol Wuornos, whose record began when she was still a juvenile. Police found Aileen at the aptly named bar the Last Resort and arrested her. She confessed to the killings in hopes that her friend Tyria wouldn’t stand accused. Aileen insisted that she killed the men in self-defense, but the jury didn’t believe it. Aileen was put to death in 2002.
As helpful as fingerprints can be, they can also lead investigators astray. It’s one thing to match a full thumbprint—intentionally left on a pawn shop receipt—to a fingerprint on file. But partial prints are difficult to match. The same questions raised in the Stratton brothers’ case are still being raised today. Is fingerprint evidence reliable enough to convict someone of murder? After all, fingerprints have sometimes led to the wrong suspect.
Exterior shot of the Last Resort bar, where Aileen Wuornos was arrested
One such case involved a terrorist investigation. On March 11, 2004, four commuter trains were bombed in Madrid, killing 191 people and injuring more than 1,800. Spanish investigators arrested several suspects. They also shared fingerprints found at the scene with the FBI. The FBI ran the prints and got twenty potential matches, including Oregon attorney Brandon Mayfield, whose fingerprints were on file because he had served in the US Army. In a side-by-side comparison, Mayfield’s fingerprint was believed to match one of the fingerprints found at the scene.
The FBI ordered 24-hour surveillance on Mayfield. They learned that he was a Muslim married to an Egyptian immigrant and that he had represented a convicted terrorist in a child custody case. These factors would color the investigation moving forward. Though Spanish fingerprint experts did not think Mayfield’s fingerprint was a match, and no other evidence linked him to the attack, the FBI pressed on in their investigation. When reporters began inquiring about a possible American suspect, the FBI feared Mayfield would flee. They detained him as a material witness and then arrested him on May 6. Then on May 19, Spanish investigators matched the fingerprint to Algerian national Ouhnane Daoud. A court released Mayfield to home detention, and on May 24, the FBI dismissed all proceedings against him.
Rescue workers search through the wreckage of a bombed commuter train in Madrid, Spain.
In October of 2004, Mayfield filed a civil action against the FBI, the Department of Justice, and several individuals for violations of his civil rights, the Privacy Act, and his constitutional rights. How could investigators have been so wrong about the fingerprints? An internal investigation by the US Department of Justice said that the FBI fingerprint analysts focused too much on similarities and not enough on differences between the two prints. They tried to explain away the differences, saying, for instance, that the fingerprint must have been overlaid by another person’s fingerprint, even though the evidence showed they were looking at a single print. The report also said that the FBI should have gone back to the drawing board when the Spanish National Police said that the two fingerprints didn’t match. But their judgment was clouded by what they had learned about Mayfield’s personal life.
Though fingerprint evidence has been used for more than a hundred years, this case shows that mistakes can still be made. Forensic evidence isn’t perfect. Comparing fingerprints requires judgment on the part of the expert, and history shows that bias can cloud that judgment. Since the Mayfield case, fingerprint technology has improved. According to the FBI, its new system for finding fingerprint matches, Next Generation Identification, has a better computer algorithm for generating matches. As such, it has reduced the number of instances that require manual fingerprint reviews by several percentage points. The system also includes 23 million mug shots and, in the future, will allow for identification through iris recognition.
Fingerprinting was well underway at the FBI when another forensic science tool came into play: firearm analysis.
6
Bang! Bang! You’re Dead: The Birth of Firearm Analysis
If poison deaths were rampant at the turn of the twentieth century, gun deaths are now. Every day in America, an average of 31 people are murdered with a gun, and 151 wounded by intentional gunfire. Many more are victims of suicide and accidental shootings. Needless to say, firearm analysis is an important component of forensic science.
Investigators first used firearm evidence to solve a murder case in 1794. A surgeon in Lancashire, England, was performing an autopsy on a gunshot wound victim when he found paper in the wound. At the time, guns fired one shot only. To load the gun, you would pour the gunpowder into the barrel, drop in a round bullet, add a wad of paper to hold everything in place, and then tamp it all down with a ramrod. In this case, the piece of paper had been torn from a street ballad, and the suspect had the other piece of the ballad in his pocket.
He was arrested. Such wads of paper surely could have been traced to suspects in other cases. Unfortunately, new guns were invented that didn’t require paper. Then, in 1888, investigators learned that the bullets themselves were important clues. Alexandre Lacassagne (a familiar name by now) was performing an autopsy of seventy-eight-year-old Claude Moiroud and found three bullets—one in the larynx, one in the shoulder, and another near the spine. He noticed that each had the same grooves. The bullet markings couldn’t have been caused by the body, since each bullet went through a different part. Could the gun have caused the markings? Lacassagne contacted a gun maker, who explained that guns were designed to have spiral grooves in the barrels. These grooves, known as rifling, made the bullets spin, resulting in more accurate shots. The rifling also left indentations on the bullets. It was a lightbulb moment for Lacassagne. It meant bullets could be linked to their corresponding guns.
Round bullets
In the meantime, police had received a tip about the Moiroud case: a woman was hiding a gun for her boyfriend in her home. Officers seized the gun, which belonged to a man named Echallier, and gave it to Lacassagne for testing. Lacassagne fired bullets into a cadaver and found that the bullets had the same grooves as those found in Moiroud. Based on this evidence, Echallier was convicted. Lacassagne also asked a student to research the markings found on fired bullets. Together, the two men published a scientific article on the subject, which matched twenty-six bullets to their respective guns.
Rifling in a machine gun barrel
As usual, France was ahead of the game. In America, the science of firearm analysis lagged behind. The implications of this became clear when an innocent man was sentenced to death for murder. On March 22, 1915, a farmhand, Charlie Stielow, fou
nd his elderly employer, Charles Phelps, and the man’s housekeeper, Margaret Wallcott, shot to death. Police determined the weapon to be a .22-caliber revolver. Charlie said that he didn’t own a gun, which police soon discovered to be a lie. Charlie was arrested. Police called in firearms expert Dr. Albert Hamilton, though both “Dr.” and “expert” were a bit of a stretch. Hamilton called himself a doctor but hadn’t even graduated from high school. He advertised himself as an expert in firearms and more, though he had neither training nor experience in any of these fields. Hamilton “examined” the gun and bullets and declared them to be a match.
During interrogation, the farmhand confessed. The cards were stacked against him, though. For one thing, he was a native of Germany and spoke little English. He was also considered to be learning disabled (though that assumption may have been due to the language barrier). At trial, his attorney argued that the confession was coerced, but the judge allowed it into evidence. To make matters worse, Hamilton testified that Charlie’s revolver had definitely fired the bullets. He said that he had found nine bumps in the barrel of Charlie’s revolver and nine corresponding indentations on the bullets taken from the shooting victims. He explained that the jury would be unable to see these scratches with their own eyes. “I can tell because I am a highly technical man,” he said. “I can see what the jury cannot see.”1
Charlie was found guilty and sentenced to death. But while he awaited execution, several good Samaritans investigated his cause. They learned that two tramps, Erwin King and Clarence O’Connell, had been in the area at the time of the murders. The tramps confessed to police but later retracted their confessions. Nevertheless, New York governor Charles Whitman granted a stay of execution so that the case could be reexamined. Charles Waite, who worked for the New York attorney general, was brought in to reexamine the firearm evidence.
Waite took the gun and bullets to New York City police firearms expert Henry Jones, who immediately saw the problem. Charlie’s gun hadn’t been fired in years. Nevertheless, Jones fired the gun and examined the bullets. They looked nothing like the bullets found in the body. Based on this evidence, the governor ordered Charlie to be released from prison.
Though the story had a happy ending, Waite was struck by the fact that an innocent man was imprisoned and nearly put to death due to unscientific firearm analysis. Inspired to change the system, he cataloged all American handguns, and then the European models sold in America. To examine the insides of gun barrels, he used a newly invented helixometer, a tube with a magnifier on the end. Waite, along with Calvin Goddard and other colleagues, established the Bureau of Forensic Ballistics in New York in 1923.
Waite died just three years later, but Goddard went on to analyze firearms in several major cases, including the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists accused of robbery and murder. April 15, 1920, was payday at the Slater & Morrill shoe factory. Around three p.m., paymaster Frederick Parmenter and armed guard Alexander Berardelli were carrying two boxes containing wages totaling $15,776.51 from the company’s office to its factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Two men shot and killed Parmenter and Berardelli, and as they did, a getaway car pulled up with several men inside. The two gunmen loaded the boxes into the car, jumped in, and sped away. The getaway car was found two days later in the woods.
Police at the time were investigating a similar robbery in nearby Bridgewater. In that case, the getaway car—a Buick—had sped off toward Cochesett. In both cases, witnesses said the gang members were Italian. So police were looking for an Italian owning a Buick in Cochesett. This led them to Mario Boda, an anarchist, and his friends Nicola Sacco, twenty-nine, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, thirty-two, also anarchists.
In the late 1910s and early 1920s, anarchists were a formidable group. They believed that the capitalist system oppressed laborers and needed to be overthrown, and that the war in Europe was immoral. Americans feared that anarchists would attempt a revolution similar to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which led to the deadliest civil war in history and the brutal assassination of the royal Romanov family. In America, during a period known as the Red Scare, several anarchists were arrested, detained, and deported based on their beliefs alone. To protest these arrests, anarchist groups planned attacks against government officials and wealthy businessmen like John D. Rockefeller. For instance, anarchist Carlo Valdinoci, a friend of Boda, Sacco, and Vanzetti, blew himself up in a suicide bombing of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s home on June 2, 1919.
That bombing only escalated the arrests, and another friend of the three anarchists, Andrea Salsedo, was detained by the US Department of Justice for several weeks and beaten until he gave information. He jumped from the Justice Department building (or possibly was pushed) to his death on May 3, 1920. Worried that Salsedo might have shared incriminating evidence against them, the three planned to hide their anarchist literature—and possibly the supplies for a planned attack—and warn others to do the same. To carry this out, they headed to the garage to pick up Boda’s car. A garage worker informed the police, and the police then tracked down Sacco and Vanzetti, and a third man, Riccardo Orciani. Boda escaped.
Sacco, Vanzetti, and Orciani were now held as suspects in both robberies. Orciani had an alibi and was released. Sacco, who worked at another shoe factory, had worked the day of the first robbery, but taken the day off on April 15. Vanzetti, a fishmonger, said he had been working, but the police didn’t believe him, and so he would be tried for the Bridgewater robbery. Both Sacco and Vanzetti were indicted for the Braintree robbery. To protest, Boda set off a bomb in a horse and buggy in Manhattan, killing thirty people and injuring many more.
The trial began May 31, 1921. It would last seven weeks and make news worldwide. Some believed that Sacco and Vanzetti’s arrest and prosecution had nothing to do with the robbery, but was punishment for their anarchist activities. Indeed, their political beliefs were targeted by the prosecutors, who questioned the defendants about dodging the draft (both Sacco and Vanzetti had fled to Mexico to avoid going to war) and owning anarchist literature. Even the judge seemed set against the defendants. At one point, he was heard saying outside the courtroom, “Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day? I guess that will hold them for a while.”2
Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti behind prison bars before their executions
The trial itself was a battle of the eyewitnesses. Fifty-nine people testified for the prosecution and ninety-nine for the defense. They told very different stories. For instance, six witnesses said they saw Vanzetti selling fish in Plymouth on April 15 at the time of the crime, but another four said they saw him near the scene of the crime. Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard law professor who would go on to become a US Supreme Court justice, was a vocal supporter of Sacco and Vanzetti. He explained that the reliance on eyewitnesses in the case was unwise. Eyewitness identification of strangers, particularly those of a “foreign race” (referring to the fact that Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian), is notoriously unreliable, he said. Case in point: One of the prosecutor’s star eyewitnesses, Lola Andrews, identified Sacco as being near the scene of the crime at the time of the shooting. But a shopkeeper testified that she told him she’d never seen either suspect. He recalled the conversation at trial:
Protestors showing support for Sacco and Vanzetti after their conviction
I said to her, “Hello, Lola,” and she stopped and she answered me. While she answered me I said, “You look kind of tired.” She says, “Yes.” She says, “They are bothering the life out of me.” I says, “What?” She says, “I just come from jail.” I says, “What have you done in jail?” She says, “The Government took me down and want me to recognize those men.” she says, “and I don’t know a thing about them. I have never seen them and I can’t recognize them.” She says, “Unfortunately I have been down there to get a job and I have seen many men that I don’t know and I have never paid any attention to anyone.”3
&nbs
p; Another witness who positively identified Vanzetti testified that he “thought at the first glance that the man was a Portuguese fellow named Tony.”4
Frankfurter said that many of these positive identifications were rooted in the faulty police lineup—or actually the lack of any lineup at all. Normally, police have witnesses try to identify suspects from a lineup of similar-looking men or women, but in this case, the police brought in only Sacco and Vanzetti and asked witnesses if they had seen the men at or near the robbery.
Other key evidence brought to trial was the way Sacco and Vanzetti lied to police after being arrested. This type of behavior is known as the consciousness of guilt. But the men may have been acting guilty because they actually were guilty of what they believed they were arrested for: being anarchists. With both eyewitness accounts and the defendants’ guilty behavior being questionable evidence, the more scientific firearm analysis was especially important in this case.
Sacco and Vanzetti both owned guns. Sacco said it was because he was a night watchman at the shoe factory, and Vanzetti claimed his was for self-defense (he testified that as a fishmonger, he at times carried $100 or so, $1,000 today). Sacco owned a .32-caliber Colt automatic. Vanzetti owned a .38-caliber revolver. Six bullets were found in the dead bodies. One came from a .32-caliber Colt automatic like Sacco’s gun. The other five came from neither type of gun.
Captain William Proctor of the Massachusetts State Police was the expert witness for the prosecution. When he testified that the bullet had come from the same type of .32-caliber Colt that Sacco owned, the prosecutor told the jury that this meant that the bullet came from Sacco’s gun. But after the trial, Proctor explained that he never found evidence that the bullet had come from Sacco’s specific gun, only a gun like his. “Had I been asked the direct question: Whether I had found any affirmative evidence whatever that this so-called mortal bullet had passed through this particular Sacco’s pistol, I should have answered then, as I do now without hesitation, in the negative,” he said.5 But the differentiation was too late. Sacco and Vanzetti had been found guilty, and no new trial would be granted.