When foreign visitors, impressed by his versatility and acumen, inevitably compare him to Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Locard beams. He likes to think of himself as a Gallic edition of the fictional English detective. At the first mention of Sherlock Holmes, Locard dips into his desk and whips out a youthful, rather pensive, photographic portrait of himself trickily superimposed on a silhouette of Sherlock Holmes. Recently, when a woman was found murdered in a French hayloft, the leading suspect alibied that he had spent the night sleeping by a roadside. Dr. Locard vacuumed the suspect’s pockets, dug out the grit under his fingernails, and analyzed the minute particles. This revealed not the minerals in road dust, but organic hay dust. The suspect was convicted and guillotined. “Sherlock Holmes was the first to realize the importance of dust,” Dr. Locard explains. “I merely copied his methods.”
Besides copying the master’s methods, and besides forcing his disciples to read all the Sherlock Holmes short stories and novels. Dr. Locard carries his Baker Street fetish even further. In one classic story, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes remark that he had written a monograph “Upon the Distinction Between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos, An Enumeration of 140 Forms of Cigar, Cigarette and Pipe Tobacco.” While the treatise may have been fictional when Sherlock Holmes spoke of it, Dr. Locard has since made it a fact by writing a learned paper on the identification of tobaccos through a study of ashes left at the scene of a crime.
Dr. Locard likes to say that he personally caught the killer who, in real life, almost extinguished Sherlock Holmes before his time. This killer was a thirty-five-year-old Frenchman named Jules Bonnot, whom Dr. Locard regards as the most daring and resourceful murderer he ever squared off against. Bonnot, a mustached man with a pleasant concave face, ran wild in France just before the First World War. Working out of an innocent-looking motorcycle repair shop, which he used as a cover and a storehouse for his artillery, Bonnot committed almost every crime in the book. He forged documents, counterfeited money, kidnapped, robbed, committed arson, and performed twelve brutal murders. His most spectacular murder was that of a Société Générale bank messenger, whom he waylaid, killed, and robbed of half a million francs. Bonnot was well-traveled, and had adopted criminal techniques from every European nation. The Sûreté suspected any number of gangsters, but narrowed their hunt down to Bonnot and one other person on information provided by an informer. But, until the police obtained real evidence, Bonnot was safe. Then, in Lyons, a risky safecracking job was attempted. The Sûreté, acting on another tip, broke in on the thief. In the dark, unseen, Bonnot slipped out of the net and escaped. He even managed to take his torch and tools away with him. Dr. Locard, examining the damaged safe, discovered telltale traces of marks left by the tools. With photographs of this evidence. Dr. Locard secretly made his way into Bonnet’s repair shop, and compared the marks to the tools lying about. In ten minutes, Dr. Locard had found the instruments that fitted the marks. Bonnot was apprehended, almost fought his way free from his captors, but was finally jailed. Under muscular questioning, he confessed to all of his previous sins. The French police bypassed the aristocratic guillotine to execute Bonnot by a firing squad composed of giant African Zouaves.
One day, a short time thereafter. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stopped off in Lyons to chat with Dr. Locard. Eager to play proper host to the creator of his beloved Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Locard escorted his visitor to the three private rooms in his laboratory which only his friends and celebrated guests are ever permitted to see. In these three rooms, his crime museum. Dr. Locard keeps mementos of crimes solved: weapons, tangible clues, and a pictorial gallery of rogues he has brought to justice. As he guided Sir Arthur through the rooms, explaining the offenses committed by the owners of the various profiles in the photographs, he suddenly heard his guest gasp. Dr. Locard turned. Doyle was staring ahead at a large photograph of Bonnot. “Why, I know that fellow!” blurted Doyle. “He was my chauffeur for two months in London. What in the devil’s he doing here?” When Dr. Locard told him what Bonnot was doing here, the creator of Sherlock Holmes shivered, “Actually shivered,” says Dr. Locard. “It was quite a coincidence. That is why I always say that I caught the man who might have abruptly ended Sherlock Holmes’s career. Bonnot chauffeuring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The flesh creeps. Think how close we came to not having all we do have of Sherlock Holmes!”
Dr. Locard possesses a large rectangular ledger in which he records every criminal assignment that crosses his desk. In forty years, he has scrawled 9,253 entries in this ledger. He has not solved them all, but his successes are fantastic. He enjoys a clever crime, and he likes to solve it in a subtle way. “The great difference between crime in the United States and in France,” he says, “is that American murders are usually merely physical and violent. Here in France our killers tend toward finesse. They always prefer to mix their murder with a bit of forgery or with a swindle or with melodramatic trickery.”
Dr. Locard is never aroused by a straight unimaginative homicide. When Vacher, a runty Frenchman who looked exactly like a sweet little Arab, but had slaughtered twenty-nine farmers and shepherds, was caught while opening the stomach of his thirtieth victim. Dr. Locard considered the catch routine. “Vacher was merely mad,” he says, in a masterpiece of understatement, “and therefore thoroughly uninteresting.”
Another crime which Dr. Locard regarded as routine, but which had Paris in an uproar, began when one Charles Weber accused his sister-in-law, Jeanne Weber, of strangling his year-old son while babysitting, as well as of murdering her own children and her two nephews. The bodies of the youngsters were promptly exhumed, but autopsies revealed neither strangulation nor poison. Several months later, a hysterical neighbor reported to the police that her only child had died in the night while Jeanne Weber was baby-sitting. Again, autopsy revealed neither strangulation nor poison. In subsequent months, more youngsters died in the night, and though people referred to Miss Weber as “the Ogre of Goutte-d’Or,” there was not a shred of evidence against her. At last, deciding to employ a dangerous strategy, the police found a friend of Miss Weber’s who felt that she was absolutely innocent and who was willing to risk his two offspring with her for a night. As the friend left the house, Miss Weber was placidly baby-sitting with his two-year-old boy and ten-year-old girl. But when the police broke in shortly after midnight, they found the little boy almost dead of suffocation. His sister quickly came out of hiding to describe how Miss Weber, in an uncontrollable fit, had climbed atop the child, and pressed both hands down on his chest until he could not breathe. At her trial, Jeanne Weber provided a field day for Freudians when she stated that since childhood she could not stand the sight of a youngster. “When I am near one, I hear a voice telling me to kill. Before I know what I am doing, I have killed.” After she had served a few weeks of her twenty-year term, Miss Weber completely lost her sanity. “It was a crime sans cause,” says Dr. Locard. “Terrible, but it involved cleverness on neither her part nor ours.”
Dr. Locard prefers his crimes to be unusual and challenging. He likes to remember the murder near Tours which he solved by observing the pattern of a corduroy jacket smeared on a dust-covered marble slab; or the criminal that he caught through tooth prints because the famished culprit had bitten into a pastry from which a plaster cast could be taken; or the fugitive who was found because he fell on a sandy beach while fleeing the police—the clear impression of his copper-buttoned vest, which was left, brought him to justice in three days.
One of Dr. Locard’s favorites Involves the robber who, leaping from the first-floor window of a villa, fell to his knees, rose and escaped. “I examined the spot where he fell,” recalls Dr. Locard, “and found two clearly visible knee marks. They showed he wore striped velvet trousers. One set of stripes seemed broader, proving to me that one of his knees had a patch of slightly different material. This gave us a perfect picture of the man. We had him in twenty minutes.”
Another time an engineer was found murdered in a mead-o
,w outside of Lyons. There were no clues. Dr. Locard studied the immediate, surrounding terrain with the greatest of care. The day following, when suspects were paraded in and out, Dr. Locard was about to dismiss a burly man when he noticed a tiny seed clinging to the suspect’s sleeve. “I identified the seed. It was scorzonera lumilis,” says Dr. Locard. “That was one of the plants beside the corpse in the meadow. Of course, our man confessed. He was guillotined.”
One of Dr. Locard’s most highly prized crimes occurred thirty-seven years ago. A sixty-five-year-old prostitute named Coco-la-Cherie was found in her tiny room, her throat cut, her body a sieve of stab wounds. She had had countless clients, so the suspects were many. “When we examined her corpse, we found hordes of rare parasites attached to her,” says Dr. Locard. “I thought I’d take a few of these insects. Perhaps the criminal would have had enough contact with Coco to have caught them. The second day after the murder, a drunkard was brought in. He was one of those who’d slept with Coco on the fatal night. He thought he might have killed her, but he wasn’t sure. He’d been too drunk. I examined him, found parasites, but of an entirely different kind. We released him. The third day another suspect, a boy of twenty named Mayor, was brought in. In his hair, I found the same rare parasite Coco had on her person. Mayor denied the crime. But when his fingerprints corresponded with those in her room, he confessed. He had killed her, and then stabbed her thirty times in a fit of fury, because she wanted fifty centimes for sleeping with him instead of the thirty-five centimes he offered. Incidentally, the fingerprint that convicted him was the prettiest I have ever found. In France, we require that twelve points on a suspect’s fingerprint correspond with prints found at the scene of the crime, in order to convict. Well, this fellow Mayor’s print had one hundred corresponding points. It was delightful.”
Often, employing the same methods. Dr. Locard is able to disprove a crime. Not many years ago, a spinster businesswoman named Lea Camelin was found on the floor of her train compartment, gagged and drugged with ether. Recovering, she explained that near Brotteaux, two men had attacked her and stolen her wares. Dr. Locard, studying the bottle of ether, found only one set of fingerprints on it. He was not surprised to learn that they were Miss Camelin’s own prints. She had invented the assault because, she confessed, she was unhappy and wanted to commit suicide, but since she was Catholic she had to make the suicide look like murder to be buried in hallowed ground.
When a French general, on a hunting party in occupied Germany, was shot through the head, the military authorities requested Dr. Locard to find the murderer. Dr. Locard studied the general’s skull, hair, and the fatal bullet. Then Dr. Locard proved that the killing was not a murder, but an accident. Someone had shot at a wild pig, and the bullet had ricocheted off the pig and penetrated the back of the general’s skull. The proof was simple. The coarse pig bristles were still imbedded, along with the general’s hair, on the bullet.
Above all, however. Dr. Locard relishes an exotic case. It may deal with murder, or with a lesser crime, but if it is sufficiently weird. Dr. Locard will give it all of his energies. For instance, he glows when he recalls the events that led to the capture of Dr. Pierre Marain, of Venissieux. The good doctor, experimenting with quack cancer cures, used his wife as he would a laboratory mouse. When the robust lady died suddenly, and Dr. Marain prepared to collect handsomely under her will, the police became suspicious. Dr. Locard moved in on the case, and located two wills. In one, dated 1913, the deceased had left her money to her church. In the other, dated 1917, she left this money to her husband. Using intelligence, and ultra-violet rays, Dr. Locard went after the second will and proved that the 7 in 1917 had formerly been a 1, which Dr. Marain had forced his wife to alter. Then, even more sensationally, an invisible sentence in the will—“I died murdered by my husband”—was brought to light. It had been written, apparently, with a hairpin dipped in milk. This ended the career of Dr. Marain.
Sometimes Dr. Locard has his fill of gore, and then he enjoys nothing more than relaxing over some case that requires only giving his authoritative opinion. Recently, a rich Parisian, whose hobby is collecting authentic strands of hair from the heads of historical personalities, nervously appeared with a single hair enclosed in a velvet box. He had bought this tiny hair for 20,000 gold francs. It was the prize of his collection, a hair purported to be from the head of Napoleon Bonaparte. Now that he owned it, the collector wanted a certificate of authentication to show his friends. Dr. Locard studied the strand of hair intensively, and came up with his report. The hair did not come from Napoleon. It came from a cow.
But Dr. Locard is not infallible. Even though, in forty years, he has rarely fumbled, he has once or twice failed in a tricky experimentation, or found himself stumped by a brilliant swindle. Dr. Locard and the Sûreté eventually trap most swindlers. But occasionally, a gang will come along that operates successfully for years.
“The slickest couple I’ve ever run into,” says Dr. Locard, “pulled off their fanciest job in the Rue de la Paix in Paris. A gentleman with an appearance of extreme wealth visited a famous jeweler in the Rue de la Paix and shopped for a diamond. He selected a small but rare item, priced at $4,000, but insisted that he also wanted a matching diamond, and would pay a higher price for the second. The jeweler said the diamond was an oddity, and would be difficult to match; however, he would do his best. In three days, the gentleman reappeared, explained that he was eager to get the matching diamond since he wanted to present the pair soon as a birthday gift, and even though he’d paid only $4,000 for the first, he offered to pay as high as $15,000 for the second one. The jeweler again said he would do his best. After only two days had passed, the gentleman appeared a third time, demanding the second diamond. The jeweler confessed that he had had no luck yet. Providentially, two weeks later, a young lady, whose clothes were good but shabby, wandered in, red-eyed, with a story that her husband had left her, and that since she had no money, she would have to sell her diamonds. She brought out several. The jeweler examined them, and to his amazement and delight, he discovered one stone that was the exact twin of the diamond his client was trying to match. The young lady asked $10,000 for it, and would not take a sou less. Although the jeweler had sold a similar diamond for only $4,000, he reminded himself that he could get $15,000 for this twin. Here was an easy profit. Quickly, he bought the diamond, cheerfully paying the $10,000.
“The following day, the jeweler went to call personally on his wealthy gentleman client at the address he had been given. There was no such gentleman at the address. There never had been. The jeweler studied the diamond he had bought for $10,000, and, too late, realized it was precisely the one he had sold for $4,000. When he came to us with his story, we showed him our gallery of swindlers. He identified the couple at once. They had a long record of more flagrant crimes. Of course, we did not catch them, and never have. Perhaps they are trying the same trick today in Rome or in New York.”
Dr. Locard credits most of the successes he has had in his 9,253 cases to the thorough education he received under his old mentor, Professor Alexandre Lacassagne, who taught legal medicine at the University of Lyons. Professor Lacassagne, a short, handsome man with a vast white mustache, preceded Dr. Locard as head of the laboratory in Lyons, until he was killed by an automobile in 1924. Lacassagne became a legend in France for his work in helping such Sûreté stars as Bertillon and Goron solve the first internationally publicized trunk murder, one committed by the pretty Gabrielle Bompard and her hypnotist lover Michel Eyraud.
Dr. Locard dates his own interest in crime from an incident that occurred one afternoon in Lyons when, as a lad of twenty-two, he accompanied Lacassagne on an assignment to treat an injured workman. Returning home, the two were caught in a windstorm, and sought refuge in a hallway. “We had nothing to do but twiddle our thumbs,” Dr. Locard remembers. “I happened to have a Spanish magazine in my pocket. Even then I knew many languages. I gave it to the professor to read. Since he knew only Fre
nch, he asked me to translate aloud to him. So as we stood there in the hallway, I translated aloud from a Spanish book review about a volume dealing with fingerprinting in South America. It was fascinating. When I had finished translating the review, I began to discuss fingerprinting, and crime in general, with the professor. At that moment, I decided to specialize in criminal investigation.”
Dr. Locard spent time, as a student, in police laboratories in Lausanne, Berlin, Turin, and Rome. He even worked in Paris under Alphonse Bertillon, founder of the world’s first system of criminal identification. “He was the greatest genius I’ve ever met,” says Dr. Locard. “He concentrated fiercely. He did not like to explain things. One had to learn by watching him.”
Dr. Locard officially became a member of the French police on January 10, 1910, and eight years later, he was sent on a trip around the world to study advances made in work on fingerprints, palmprints, footprints, as well as on teeth, hair, and anatomy, in other nations including even faraway China. In 1918, he visited San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. Of his only visit to the United States, he remembers most fondly not the skyscrapers but the case of a New York doctor who solved his mother-in-law problem by slipping typhoid bacteria into her food.
By 1922, Dr. Locard was famous enough to be invited to serve on an international committee headed by General Pershing, to oversee an election in Arica, Chile, an area then claimed by both Chile and Peru. Dr. Locard was assigned to detect ballot forgeries. In the years following, his reputation grew so rapidly that he was appointed editor of the Revue Internationale de Criminalistique, a trade paper to which detectives of every land contributed their most noteworthy crime cases and discoveries, written in their own tongue.
During World War I, Dr. Locard was a member of the French secret service. In the Sherlock Holmes tradition, he would amuse Allied dignitaries by glancing at a muddy soldier and the soil stains on the man’s uniform, and then announcing exactly in what area he had been fighting. Once, during this period. Dr. Locard was almost assassinated. Late one night, a French femme fatale, a spy in the pay of the Germans, worked her way into Dr. Locard’s private office and began going through top-security papers. At this moment, Dr. Locard walked in on her. Immediately she hurled herself at him, brandishing a knife. Acting on instinct. Dr. Locard kicked her in the wrist, knocking the dagger to the floor, and then he pinned her to the wall until his men took her away. Today, Dr. Locard keeps the blade on his desk as a good-luck piece and likes visitors to feel its sharpness.
The Sunday Gentleman Page 42