American Sherlock

by Kate Winkler Dawson

  In his three-piece brown tweed suit, David Lamson sat at an old wooden desk with a pen and paper inside his jail cell, less than twenty miles from his home. Scribbling near an oil lamp, he seemed more like an academic than a prisoner. Photos of Allene and Bebe were taped to the walls. David’s cell was on the third floor—the only room on that floor. He looked at his gold wedding ring. He had just fifteen square feet in which to pace, to fret about his trial. He often looked at the iron door with its large bolt. The walls were stone and steel, making the echoes inside the tall building almost unbearable. Lying alone on his cot, David thought about his daughter, Bebe, who was now living with his sister Margaret. His two sisters and their mother all steadfastly believed in his innocence.

  At his desk, David Lamson considered his moderately circumscribed life. He had graduated from Stanford University in 1925 and was immediately hired by the academic press—a promising job that would become a successful career. He had married Allene Thorpe three years later, and they bought the bungalow on campus the following year; their daughter, Bebe, arrived the year after that. David had crafted for himself a predictable but pleasant life of socializing, family activities, and rewarding work. But as in most marriages, Allene and David had struggled with problems. And he kept secrets.

  A San Jose jail cell would be his home for now as he awaited trial. He peered toward the street from his window and gripped the vertical bars. He could glance at Allene’s picture, wistful for days when she was alive. He had few emotions left, and grieving might not have been one of them, because he was scared for his own life. His defense team, some of the most talented attorneys in the state, watched him. They would hire only the best experts, they assured him, men who could expose weaknesses in the evidence gathered by the state’s investigators; those experts would set him free.

  “It never occurred to any of us that anything but an acquittal might result,” David said.

  * * *

  —

  Back at the Lamson house, a brunette was prone, stretched across the tiny bathroom with her face pressed against the floor. The tops of her knees rested on the edge of the white tub. Her head rested just beneath the basin. Her arms, bracing against the floor, held up her body.

  It was June 20—weeks after Allene Lamson had been found dead—when Edward Oscar Heinrich (Oscar, to his friends) waited in the doorway, peering at his “model,” his assistant’s wife, who had reluctantly agreed to play the distressing role of “corpse” for photos. She slowly stood up, readying herself for a new position while Oscar adjusted his small, round wire-rimmed glasses. It was his second trip to the Lamson house in a week. He jotted down notes and glanced at the reddish-brown spots on the wall.

  “The door is liberally spattered below the glass,” he scribbled in his journal. “On the door jamb the drops show a projection southerly and upward which carry back to this same point.”

  Hovering near Oscar was a fellow in a smart, dark three-piece suit sans jacket—Palo Alto criminalist George A. Weber. Oscar could feel Weber’s gaze. Oscar snapped another picture of Jean Weber with her arms flung over the side of the bathtub and her head tilted downward, a replica of Allene Lamson’s pose in death.

  Oscar Heinrich had read books by European investigators about how a body might release its blood when impacted. And he had honed his technique on earlier cases, introducing perhaps the first blood-pattern analysis (BPA) testimony in America during a California murder trial in 1925. He was a professionally trained expert in a multitude of forensic sciences, including chemistry and biology, unlike many of the charlatans he disputed in court. By 1933, he was more experienced in bloodstain-pattern analysis than virtually anyone in the United States.

  David Lamson’s case was stymied by a mismanaged crime scene. Palo Alto police couldn’t untangle the rumors—there were unfounded whispers of an affair with a writer, a tryst with his daughter’s nursemaid, and violent arguments over sex that resulted in Allene ejecting David from their bedroom most nights. The local cops didn’t have the skills to focus on the facts, so they chased phantoms for two weeks. Much of the forensic evidence was lost in a chaotic scene on the day of her death.

  A forensic expert’s first assignment is to preserve the evidence by securing the crime scene. David Lamson’s home had been contaminated by loads of people poking around the house. Oscar considered the case—his good friend August Vollmer, the former Berkeley police chief and now a college professor, would be helpful here, along with the librarian John Boynton Kaiser. Oscar had called on Vollmer’s advice for many cases because he was a cop with incredible investigative instincts who believed that educated police officers could outthink even the sneakiest criminals. Oscar was always pleased when they were able to work a case together.

  “A precise little man,” observed one reporter—Oscar enjoyed an international reputation as a criminalist who could reconstruct a crime by collecting hidden forensic clues, processing them in his lab, and testifying as an expert witness. Most times Oscar was a prosecutor’s savior during tough trials. He was the scientist who had erected the nation’s first private science laboratory in 1910—America’s earliest general forensics lab. By 1919 there was another facility, one specifically for New York City’s toxicology cases, but Oscar’s laboratory was equipped to test all aspects of forensics—the lair of a real-life Sherlock Holmes.

  Oscar Heinrich’s most high-profile cases had been splashed across American newspapers for two decades. Suspected killers confessed when they spotted his name on their case files. Journalists around the world had gleefully compared him to the most famous investigator in history—the greatest detective who never lived.

  “So here is the inner sanctum of Sherlock Holmes,” a newspaper reporter once quipped as he wandered around Oscar’s Berkeley lab in Northern California.

  “Not Sherlock Holmes,” Oscar snapped, shaking his head. “Holmes acted on hunches. And hunches play no part in my crime laboratory.”

  * * *

  —

  After hours of work, Oscar finally summoned the journalists milling outside the Lamson home. He rarely disclosed many details to reporters because he didn’t trust most of them, but the public demanded an update.

  “I have discovered enough evidence to warrant my staying on the case,” Oscar explained. “All action in this case took place in the bathroom, and I can reconstruct it in detail. I was delighted to discover a number of important clues overlooked until now by both the prosecutor and defense.”

  At the end of the day Oscar had gathered all he needed. His hypothesis was sound and his suspect was near, he believed, and he could prove it using pieces of string and hundreds of dried blood drops that freckled the bathroom wall. The height and angle of the blood, along with its trajectory, would reveal the angle of impact. Allene’s every movement, Oscar theorized, would result in a very specific pattern. The strings, the protractor, the calculations, and the drips of Allene’s blood would solve her death.

  “X marks the spot,” he said as he turned to assistant George Weber.

  By 1933, Oscar Heinrich had unraveled countless violent crimes that seemed too puzzling to crack. His notoriety was impressive, but his record was not unblemished. His work over the past decade and his growing reputation for solving so-called impossible cases gave many police officers and jurors confidence in his formidable abilities. But he had also made serious miscalculations in cases along the way, and his occasional aloofness on the stand sometimes stood in the way of getting the convictions he had so fervently pursued. The idea of solving crimes with forensic science was still such a new concept, and he was constantly fighting the perception that his techniques were “unproven,” “untrustworthy,” or “unreliable.”

  Oscar was convinced that Allene’s death could be solved with the cutting-edge forensic tools that he was pioneering in his lab. A person’s life was in his hands, a weight he had carried many times before. Looking back on his
own volatile career—his missteps at trials and his vicious fights with other experts—it pained Oscar to realize that there might, in fact, be room for doubt.

  But before we can understand the conclusion of Allene’s case, we must first go back to the beginning—not of her story but of Oscar’s. And for Oscar, the beginning was a series of formative, and tragic, events in his childhood that would influence and inform all the work that would follow over the next seventy-plus years of his storied career.

  2.

  Genius:

  The Case of Oscar Heinrich’s Demons

  “They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains,” he remarked with a smile. “It’s a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.”

  —Arthur Conan Doyle,

  A Study in Scarlet, 1887

  Edward Oscar Heinrich watched his mother mill around their small kitchen in Tacoma, Washington, as she collected breakfast dishes. It was October 7, 1897. The cups clinked in the sink. The sixteen-year-old slowly ate his meal. Reflected in the drinking glasses was a slight woman with an attractive face, wide-set eyes, and dark hair—the strongest, most steadfast person he would ever know. She was his moral guide, and by the end of that morning, he would become her savior for the remainder of her life.

  Oscar had watched his mother suffer through much of his childhood. Albertine had been just twenty years old when she and twenty-eight-year-old August Heinrich, both natives of Germany, married in the Trinity Lutheran Church in Wisconsin. A year after having a little girl, Adalina Clara, Albertine gave birth to a boy they named Gustav Theodor Heinrich. The baby lived only a month, a tragedy for the young family. Another girl, Anna Matilde, came shortly after Gustav’s death, and soon Oscar arrived on April 20, 1881.

  He would be the Heinrichs’ last child; and to honor the brother he never met, Oscar later named his eldest son, Theodore, after him. Oscar later remembered his mother warmly—she was a solid, secure presence in the young man’s life, and he admired her moxie and her deep sense of duty to their family. She leaned hard on both attributes, because from the time she was married, the family struggled with money.

  “We kids earned our pennies by gathering old whisky bottles outside the factories and selling them,” Oscar remembered. “We were paid a penny for small ones, two cents for larger ones. That was our only source of spending-money.” There was never enough money to go around, but even for a young immigrant family there were always ways to scrounge up a little cash. And Oscar was nothing if not resourceful.

  When Oscar was nine, August moved the whole family out west to Tacoma, Washington, for better opportunities promised by the newly finished railroad. But life there wasn’t much easier, and Oscar grew frustrated as he found himself surrounded by privileged and entitled children in the then-booming lumber town. His father wasn’t able to provide him with an allowance, so Oscar became determined to earn his own money. He was soon hired for a newspaper route, a lucrative job, but one that took him to the city’s red-light district.

  Oscar had never strayed much beyond his family circle, and his forays into Tacoma’s underbelly to sell news to the area’s less reputable denizens were enlightening. He kept his eyes open—and his sense of decorum intact.

  “Our family’s solidarity and my mother’s teachings served me well,” he said. “When I approached women in saloons and offered them my papers, I always had my cap in hand. They seemed to respect me.”

  That entrepreneurial flair, linked with his own love of the written word, led young Oscar to embrace journalism of all kinds. Not content to merely hawk the news, the teenager reported and penned a newspaper story about the new game of handball for the Tacoma Morning Union in 1895, when he was in eighth grade, moving from delivering the news to actually writing it. But his moneymaking endeavors weren’t just an adventure: they were increasingly a necessity. That same year, patriarch August Heinrich lost the family’s savings during a recession, and fourteen-year-old Oscar was forced to leave high school for a few months to take a janitorial job in a pharmacy, an entry-level post that would eventually serve as the foundation of his career.

  Oscar read constantly in his off-hours: English literature, scientific tomes, and language primers. He also began tinkering with fiction writing—rudimentary, silly detective stories. He liked making money in his janitorial job, but he knew he wanted more of an intellectual challenge out of his work. Luckily, his family’s finances improved somewhat, and he returned to school less than a year after withdrawing with dreams of moving overseas. But when Oscar confided his plan to his father, August Heinrich stared back and issued a stern warning that portended difficult times ahead.

  “You have no brothers,” he cautioned. “If anything happens to me, it’s up to you to support your mother and sisters.”

  With broad shoulders and callused hands, Oscar’s father worked as a skilled carpenter in his woodshed behind their Tacoma home, pushing saws and driving nails into boards for hours. But the forty-nine-year-old struggled to find steady work. August was handsome, even with scruffy brown hair and a ragged beard that framed his face—the antithesis of the cultivated public image Oscar would later strive to achieve (and would always demand of his own sons). He and his mother thought that things were improving with his father and their fortunes. But the reprieve was short-lived.

  Just after six on the morning of October 6, 1897, August pushed his chair back from the breakfast table and picked up his kit of tools, informing his son and wife that he would be leaving for a carpeting job on C Street. He glanced toward his woodworking shed at the back of the house and wished them a good day. As he walked through the back door, Albertine had no inkling that she would never see her husband alive again, no idea that at forty-two years old she would be abandoned with a teenaged son and two unmarried daughters.

  After August disappeared in the backyard, Albertine noticed that her husband had left behind his dinner bucket. She walked swiftly toward the shed and swung open the building’s door. She screamed so loudly that most of their neighbors heard.

  In less than a decade, Oscar would become one of the greatest forensic scientists in history. But at that moment, standing in his parents’ kitchen, he was just minutes away from seeing the first of many, many corpses in his career. The scene would plague Oscar until his own death, a ghastly reminder of what might happen if he surrendered to his own flaws.

  The teenager sprang up from the table when he heard his mother’s wailing; he raced through the backyard and stood in the doorway of his father’s woodshed. Oscar looked upward as his mother collapsed. His father was hanging from a wooden beam near the ceiling with a window cord tied around his neck, dead from suicide.

  As his mother sobbed, Oscar did something extraordinary for a sixteen-year-old boy. He gently led his mother to the kitchen and settled her in a chair so she wouldn’t faint. He phoned the police, retrieved a knife from the kitchen, and returned to the woodshed; Oscar climbed the stepstool that his father had used to slip on the noose. August’s body shook and swayed from the violent hacking of the knife. It finally dropped to the ground. Exhausted, Oscar dragged him to the house. Soon the police arrived, followed by local newspaper reporters, who collected details on the family tragedy.

  “Suicide at Glendale,” read the Tacoma Daily News. “August Heinrich Hangs Himself in His Workshop.”

  “No reason for the deed can be discovered,” read the copy, “and his wife and family, as well as many of his acquaintances, are at a loss to explain the cause of the suicide.”

  But Oscar’s family knew the truth: his father had been distressed over finances for years, yes, but he had also been plagued with an ongoing darkness that clouded his life, one he had always struggled to overcome. The coroner determined that August had died from strangulation, not a broken neck—a more prolonged, painful death. It was an agonizing end for the flawed father Oscar loved so much.

  Over the next
six decades Oscar secretly fretted that he might also suffer from his father’s same anguish, his same craven weaknesses. But that fear also shaped his future—it spurred on his determination and helped craft his acumen for controlling every aspect of his life. Oscar transformed frustration into resilience. His deficiencies, such as his obsessive compulsions, became attributes . . . until they threatened his career, his family—even his life.

  “Among my earliest recollections, the most prominent are those of the brutal ways in which I have been robbed of all my illusions,” Oscar wrote his best friend, John Boynton Kaiser. “It stirs resentment, suggests revenge and breeds caution.”

  * * *

  —

  After his father committed suicide in 1897, sixteen-year-old Oscar was immediately assigned immeasurable responsibility, almost more than he could bear. Reporters knocked on his door, demanding answers about his father’s death, the first of many secrets Oscar Heinrich would protect until he himself died. His father’s grim fate would haunt Oscar for decades, testing his relationships with his children and challenging his own mental health.

  When he became the patriarch of the Heinrich family, there was no hope of returning to high school for his final two years. He studied at night to become a pharmacist, a steady career for a young man who needed to support his family. By the turn of the century, pharmacists were still sometimes called apothecaries. They dispensed medications, prescribed remedies, and even gave some treatments that were difficult to self-administer, like enemas. Going to a pharmacy school wasn’t needed to take the state board exams, but apprenticing under a licensed pharmacist was required, usually for at least a year.

  The pharmacy curriculum of the early 1900s leaned heavily on chemistry. It trained a pharmacist not only to prepare medications but also to practice clinical chemistry, which was the analysis of bodily fluids, like conducting a urinalysis. The training was Oscar’s first step toward becoming a forensic scientist—a career he never initially intended to follow.