The teenager couldn’t afford formal pharmacy classes, so he depended on his innate ability to understand the context of the texts and the math behind dispensing the correct amounts of medication. He relied on his memory and his compulsion to stockpile useful information. When the eighteen-year-old passed his pharmacy state exams, he seemed to be the only one who wasn’t surprised as he slipped on a white coat. Inside the Stewart and Holmes Drug Company he studied drugs, poisons, chemicals . . . and human nature.
“A drugstore is a veritable laboratory in behavioristic psychology,” he said.
He watched male customers slyly leer at women in the store. Some tried to bluff Oscar to secure more medicine without a prescription. Others were desperate, clearly addicted to the medicinal alcohol he could access for them. And a few customers turned mean, even threatening, if they didn’t get their way—when they thought no one was listening.
“I learned what people do in secret,” he said with a smile.
Pharmacy work also offered him another reward—eight years of excellent training in the valuable skill of handwriting analysis.
“I had doctors’ prescriptions to decipher,” Oscar explained. “And doctors are the worst writers in the world. Right then I started in to qualify as a handwriting expert.”
For almost a decade, he watched the other pharmacists quickly calculate the formulas for medicine—and he envied them.
“I was impressed with the difference between the caliber of my work and that of college-trained men,” he said. “Those men were far away from me as technicians.”
He desperately wanted to be a skilled chemist. He needed to secure a well-paying, stable job in Tacoma to help his family. He hoped to spend his life bending over beakers in a lab, but to do that, he had to go to college, and it wouldn’t be easy. Even though he had his pharmacy license, Oscar lacked a high school degree—and despite his years of work, he’d managed to save very little money. Still, he was determined, and he’d heard about a special program for nontraditional students like himself at the University of California at Berkeley that sounded like just the ticket for a driven (but uncredentialed) student like Oscar. With just $15 in his wallet, the twenty-three-year-old planned to embark upon the next phase of his education.
But just three hours before he was scheduled to board the train to Berkeley, a disaster: he received a letter from the university that said he had missed the entrance exams to become a special student by two weeks. The details of the mix-up are lost to history, but true to his enterprising nature, Oscar was determined to achieve his goals. He hopped the train anyway and turned up at the registrar’s office in Berkeley, demanding to be admitted.
“When I presented myself the Recorder of the Faculties listened to my story, looked me over, then told me to go up to the Chemistry College and go to work,” Oscar would later tell his son.
It didn’t happen right away, but finally Oscar’s perseverance and intelligence convinced admissions officers to allow him to join the freshman class of the College of Chemistry as a special student in chemical engineering. It was a good gamble. He quickly became invaluable to his professors as a laboratory assistant in quantitative analysis, and then as an assistant instructor in physics and mechanics. He studied medicine and attended law courses, then took classes in sanitary engineering—a discipline that used science and math to improve sanitation along with the supply of safe potable water.
His Bachelor of Science degree taught him how to uncover nearly invisible clues and become a specialist in chemical jurisprudence who could detect poisons and identify mysterious stains. Amid furious bouts of studying and teaching, he managed to make time to woo a pretty co-ed, a calming companion during his transition from student to independent man.
Marion Allen and Oscar Heinrich met on campus at the University of California at Berkeley as students. They were both involved in Greek life; Marion was prominent with Delta Delta Delta, while Oscar had been elected to the Mim Kaph Mim chemistry honor society and the Acacia club, a social fraternity founded by undergraduate Freemasons. They took chemistry classes together, though Marion never seemed to use her degree for a profession—being married to E. O. Heinrich was likely challenging enough.
Their friends playfully nicknamed Oscar “Heinie,” just to gig the fastidious student, who could be a know-it-all. He seemed stoic much of the time, aloof even in his youth, but those who were close to Oscar, like his wife, knew that he was also witty and loving.
“It may seem delightful,” he wrote to Marion about the fancy Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., “but without you it is all sheer near-beer.”
Oscar and Marion were married at her parents’ home in San Francisco shortly after he graduated in 1908. They immediately moved to Tacoma, where his mother lived, and Marion gave birth to Theodore two years later. She was a homemaker, bright and social—a good writer who kept up with national news, but she didn’t seem to talk much with her husband about his job. Much of the letters involved neighborhood gossip, the boys (a second son came a few years later), and household finances.
Opportunities came in quick succession after Oscar’s wedding to Marion. In Tacoma, he took a job as a chemical and sanitation engineer for the city, where he dealt with paving, bridges, and the development of water and power plant construction. He inspected reservoirs, tunnels, dams, and bridges. He studied the city’s sewer and irrigation systems and then designed two chemical plants. And soon Oscar took the job of city chemist, a position that required him to do quite a lot of investigative work with the coroner and the police in cases involving complex chemicals.
But he was frustrated both with the pay and the lack of equipment, so in 1910 he resigned and opened his own private industrial chemical lab called Heinrich Technical Laboratories, a company that helped develop and manufacture products and create processes for clients. But Oscar’s work with the police and the coroner continued to stoke his interest in forensics, so he received more criminal cases from the city and the public.
Oscar quickly realized that chemistry faced limitations in criminalistics—there were so many clues to miss without the right training. He expanded on his expertise, spending nights poring over books. He began studying poisons, fingerprinting, geology, and botany—the studies of a forensic generalist. Inside his lab in Tacoma he solved bizarre cases, like the mystery of a poisoned lemon pie sent to a man who became deathly sick after a small taste. Oscar examined the finely sugared crust under his microscope, which proved to contain poison crystals. But there was one big case that established him as a forensics expert in Tacoma shortly after he opened his lab.
He examined the body of a woman found slumped behind a stove in her kitchen. A revolver lay next to her. Investigators labeled it a suicide, but Oscar wasn’t so sure. Police led him to a wall behind the victim—there was a hole with a bullet hidden deep inside. But Oscar examined it with his tweezers and found dust inside. A bullet had not passed through it recently. He squatted on the floor and examined every inch of the wall and found two important clues: a small indentation with a bit of lead inside and some washed-out blood on the wall nearby. Now his training in ballistics became practical.
He used string to trace the trajectory of the bullet from the wall to a spot where the shooter was standing—it was far away from the woman’s body. He used another string to trace the path where the woman was shot near the wall to where she staggered and fell behind the stove. It was murder. Police arrested her husband, and Oscar was the main witness, securing a conviction. The young, serious-faced chemist was now a star forensics expert.
Soon his constant need to be challenged required a change of career, and it came at a fortuitous time. Through a mutual friend, Oscar would meet an investigator who would help him dissect some of his toughest cases, a cop who was also beguiled by science—American Sherlock’s own Inspector Lestrade.
* * *
—
By th
e late 1910s, August Vollmer was something of a luminary in the Bay Area, Berkeley’s first police chief and the man who had reformed police methods nationwide. He would be later nicknamed the “father of modern policing,” a revered figure in law enforcement.
In cities at the turn of the century, criminal investigations were predominately “solved” on hunches—the instincts of experienced but ill-equipped detectives who sniffed out suspects based on motive, a dangerous guessing game that leaned on mistaken intuition. A gun and a badge were the only requirements to be a police officer, and a hard spray from a rubber hose was still a common way to make suspects talk. American investigators hoped for clues, hunted for witnesses, and bullied suspects into false confessions based on little or no evidence. It was madness for anyone caught in the legal system, particularly for minorities and immigrants.
August Vollmer demanded reform, and his changes were swift and far-reaching. He created one of the nation’s first centralized police records systems, and he was the first police chief to require that cops receive college degrees. Vollmer outlawed the third-degree approach to abusing suspects to get confessions. He argued that a type of truth serum called scopolamine, developed in the early 1920s, was more effective. Vollmer called it the fourth degree. Scientists now know that there is no current drug that can effectively enhance truth-telling, but Vollmer’s endorsement of the serum was enough to encourage police departments across the country to reduce their own brutal interrogation methods.
Vollmer trained and then hired African American cops and female officers. He was the first chief to create motorized patrol, buying motorcycles and cars for his officers so they could cover wider areas. He believed in compassion, but he was often criticized for being too lenient on petty criminals. Vollmer gave sound advice to all his rookie cops.
“Your main job as a cop on the beat is not to make a lot of arrests, but to help prevent crime,” Vollmer told them. “The best way to do this is to start with the children. Make friends with them. Guide them towards law abiding citizenship. Show them that the law is their friend not their enemy.”
But it was Vollmer’s emphasis on science that really endeared him to Oscar Heinrich, whom he met through a mutual friend. They had both read the same books by European forensic experts—they spoke the same scientific language. In his own department Vollmer insisted on using forensic evidence like blood, fiber, and soil to solve crimes, and with Oscar’s guidance, he created the nation’s first police lab, one that tapped the criminalist’s expertise in all forms of forensics. Their philosophies on education were symbiotic.
In 1916, Vollmer recruited Oscar to design an innovative program for police officers, America’s first “cop college.” They wrote back and forth about courses, adding some and scrapping others. They discussed faculty hires, classroom locations, and the most updated methods in forensics. They exchanged syllabi and dissected each line, hoping to improve the other’s descriptions for clarity.
“Your suggestion for instruction in library work is timely,” Vollmer told Oscar, “and will be taken advantage of.”
As Vollmer and Oscar crafted a degree structure together, their friendship grew.
“The course extends over a period of three years, the first-year courses being—physics, chemistry, physiology, anatomy and toxicology,” explained Vollmer. “The second year surely requires a college education—criminal psychology, psychiatry, criminology, police organization, methods and procedure. The third year completes the course with microbiology and parasitology, elementary and criminal law.”
The next year they launched the School for Police at the University of California at Berkeley, and Oscar began teaching the nation’s first criminology classes. Vollmer was incredibly grateful.
“Your outline of lectures is very comprehensive, and should prove of great value to all students of criminal investigation,” he wrote Oscar.
Vollmer and Oscar subscribed to the same philosophy: educated police officers were America’s most valuable asset in law enforcement. Vollmer hired experts like Oscar to teach elementary law, criminology, and forensic sciences like fingerprinting, handwriting analysis, and ballistics. Police departments across the country sent their officers to UC Berkeley. They listened to Vollmer’s lectures on police organization, administration, methods, and procedure. Students lauded Oscar’s courses on chemical jurisprudence, judicial photography, applied optics, handwriting analysis, and the use of chemistry and physics in evidence.
He was a demanding, dynamic educator who boasted of his packed classes—though he refused to be called “professor.” He believed that while he had earned the title, it was a bit too stodgy for a worldly criminalist who tracked killers. Oscar’s unique gift to his students was his breadth of field and lab experience coupled with an astounding amount of book knowledge.
“I’ll take you all from a thrill to a shudder,” Oscar promised a crop of fledgling police officers. “But a chessboard in police station is more valuable than crime books. There is nothing that I know of in English that will quickly enable a man to see situations and analogies.”
Only an educated, scientific investigator could catch criminals, Oscar and Vollmer believed—everyone else had to pray for luck.
“The investigation of crime is merely a special case of the study of behavior,” Oscar told his friend. “Success in it depends upon the development to a high degree of the powers of perception and to an almost equal degree the powers of memory and ratiocination [reasoning].”
His students, who were exclusively police officers at the beginning of the program, were frequently skeptical. Luckily, August Vollmer and Oscar Heinrich were intellectual equals, both committed to crime solving and teaching future detectives. They forged a lifelong partnership, a union of trust and support. They became close friends, bonding over similar upbringings. Like Oscar, Vollmer was born to German parents, and he had also lost his father at a young age.
They would work together on many cases, including a murder trial in San Francisco involving a gang that planted a suitcase bomb during a parade, killing nine people. Oscar helped establish that the bomb parts found at the scene matched the material found in one suspect’s room. Vollmer helped Oscar match handprints in the trial of a man accused of murdering his wife by shooting her in the back of the head. They leaned on each other countless times over the years. But soon their loyalty to each other would be tested over a coveted position teaching alongside legends in forensics.
* * *
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By 1917, teaching young law enforcement officers wasn’t enough to satisfy Oscar’s deepening interests in policing. At the age of thirty-five, he was named the police chief of Alameda County in San Francisco Bay despite having no formal experience in law enforcement. In California, he restructured the police department, and he dabbled in forensics by studying handwriting with Thomas Kyka, the famous trial expert.
Each of Oscar Heinrich’s careers required perfection, orderliness, and a rigid attention to detail. They demanded an incredible ability to synthesize thousands of crucial pieces of data and then recall where they were all stored and how to use them. He hoarded information in every corner of his laboratory—along bookshelves, atop desks, and inside cabinets, all classified to his standards. Oscar’s measured methodology was a remarkable system that provided his students and colleagues with a blueprint for how to organize evidence to solve a crime. But the more stress he endured, the more compulsively he organized—his lists and charts became a salve for the anxiety and insecurity he had felt since childhood.
From the first day he had slipped into the white jacket of a pharmacist two decades earlier, Oscar had evolved into an efficient, potent, and hyper-organized investigator, a criminalist who could survey a crime scene and determine which of his myriad of tests might solve the case.
By 1918, he and his wife, Marion, had two sons, eight-year-old Theodore and four-year-old Mortimer, and he n
eeded a new challenge. In January, Oscar defeated more than one hundred other applicants to become Boulder, Colorado’s first city manager and commissioner of public safety for about $5,000 a year, but the job lasted only a year. When his mentor, Thomas Kyka, suddenly died in San Francisco, Oscar returned to take over his questioned-documents business while teaching at UC Berkeley with Vollmer. And he strengthened an already close relationship with a brilliant cohort, a reference librarian from his days in Tacoma—his own Dr. John Watson.
Oscar vented often about other competitors, but not to his wife or even to his colleagues at UC Berkeley. He griped in hundreds of letters to John Boynton Kaiser, his closest confidant.
“His propaganda is partially for the purpose of personal publicity rather than the scientific value his alleged discoveries may have,” Oscar complained of one rival expert.
Oscar and Kaiser had written almost weekly since they met in Washington State in 1914. Kaiser wasn’t just a close friend—he was also an outstanding researcher and a published author. The thirty-four-year-old had written well-respected guides for librarians on organizing municipal and legal documents, on the national bibliographies of South American republics. And he enjoyed criminalistics, writing an article for the Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology about people who bought and sold children.
Kaiser received a master’s degree in library sciences from the illustrious New York State Library School in Albany in 1917. After school, Kaiser was appointed librarian at the Texas State Library before moving on to a bigger position at the University of Illinois and then finally to Tacoma. The researcher became Oscar’s meticulous adviser, a font of material who sent him hundreds of books paired with loads of advice over four decades. Kaiser often happily played the role of problem-solver for Oscar.
American Sherlock Page 4