American Sherlock

by Kate Winkler Dawson

  The librarian was a smart dresser, slightly portly with dark thinning hair and a toothbrush mustache, a fussy but brilliant writer and bookish amateur detective. He enjoyed flagging useful articles for Oscar, like a piece on how to identify an authentic document.

  “On page 363 of the LIBRARY JOURNAL is a list of ten tests by which the original may be distinguished from any of the reprints,” wrote Kaiser. “This may be of some value to you at some time.”

  Oscar utilized Kaiser as a sounding board for personal problems, health queries, financial concerns, and criminal cases. When he lectured to students or appeared on the witness stand, Oscar remained unflappable and confident, the embodiment of a savant in criminalistics. But Oscar’s public bravado masked private self-doubts and insecurities that he rarely revealed to anyone but Kaiser.

  “Sometimes I enjoy your insistence in thinking I am a great detective,” wrote Oscar, “and other times I wonder where you get the idea. I remember that I told you in one of my recent letters that I never talk to people. I simply look them over.”

  Kaiser advised Oscar on books and references throughout some of his most challenging trials. The forensic scientist had first appeared in international newspapers about five years earlier, when he cracked enemy codes for the American government during World War I. In 1916, Indian nationalist groups attempted a rebellion in India against Britain, a plan dubbed the Hindu Ghadar Conspiracy. Oscar spent months with tutors, learning the three distinct Hindu dialects that were represented in the letters. It wouldn’t be enough to just translate the codes; he wanted to learn the nuances of the language to decipher the messages and prove their authorship using patterns in word choice and writing style—profiling.

  With the help of more books from Kaiser, Oscar analyzed the handwriting and typewriting on hundreds of documents, and he used chemicals to test ink. Working alongside investigators with Scotland Yard and the American government, they finally solved the case, a conspiracy that involved more than thirty people. By the end of the war Oscar earned the rank of captain in the U.S. Engineers’ Reserve Corps and the admiration of federal investigators.

  In 1920, he testified as an expert in handwriting analysis in heavyweight champion boxer Jack Dempsey’s draft-dodging trial, though Oscar never took the stand, and the “Manassa Mauler” was acquitted.

  Oscar used hair comparison analysis to secure the conviction of two soldiers accused of beating to death a taxicab driver in Salinas with a blackjack (a type of thin club). And with virtually each case, Oscar offered Kaiser a tantalizing, secret glimpse behind the process of forensic investigation.

  “I am enclosing a print showing the hairs as they were found on the blackjack,” Oscar wrote to Kaiser. “I was able beyond doubt to establish these hairs as having come from the head of the taxi man.”

  The pair exchanged books, photos, and opinions. Both were insatiable readers and news consumers. And they shared another interest: studying and collecting stamps. When Oscar was a kid, he had enjoyed deciphering the dates on used stamps as a hobby.

  “Whenever you are ready send the 3Cent Lincoln which you have mentioned,” Oscar wrote the librarian.

  Kaiser and Oscar often sparred intellectually, but they deeply valued their friendship, revealing details about their lives that they didn’t dare tell others, even their wives—especially their wives. The librarian recognized that Oscar’s life as “star witness” was complicated because his friend had been agitated over finances for as long as they had known each other. In 1921, Oscar was expanding his forensics lab, a large space tucked on the ground floor of his three-level house in the hills of Berkeley. With large glass windows overlooking San Francisco Bay, Oscar was finally building a proper laboratory, his first office since he had left Tacoma four years earlier.

  “I now use three rooms,” he told Kaiser, “a combined laboratory and camera room for photographic enlarging and photomicrographic work; a separate fully equipped dark room; and a room for my secretary and auxiliary library.”

  But the expansion was costing the Heinrich family loads of money, and with two little boys and a wife to support, Oscar worried. The 1920 recession had left his business light, so he agonized over bills, much like his father had decades earlier.

  “When I bought the car recently it put such a crimp in the cash account that I will have to work all winter to recover,” he told Kaiser.

  Oscar was desperate to avoid his father’s fate, haunted by August Heinrich’s demons. He began to closely regulate his family’s finances, curating thousands of bits of information in bound journals. About ten years earlier the scientist began charting his wife’s domestic expenses by collecting reams of paper filled with prices of groceries, insurance, clothing, literature, and anything else that had cost him money. The type of data was not alarming, but the amount of information was incredible. Storing it all made him feel more in control of his money, even when he was not.

  In 1915, the criminalist defaulted on his mortgage for his home in Tacoma, and the legal process had stretched over three years. When the Heinrichs relocated to Boulder, Kaiser began collecting their mail in Tacoma. In 1918, the librarian sent an urgent telegram to Oscar about threats from the bank.

  “Bankers Trust Co has foreclosed mortgage and secured judgment amounting to over eleven hundred dollars,” read Kaiser’s telegram. “Property will be sold unless you adjust matter.”

  Oscar sent a payment and regained ownership of the house, but money struggles continued to plague him. And in 1921, despite his mounting debt, Oscar considered opening an additional lab, a smaller one in San Francisco for clients in that city. It might have seemed like a horrible decision, but Oscar was determined to remain a successful (and competitive) forensic scientist. He had to maintain adequate facilities—the willingness to grow his business was a requirement, but it was also a dangerous risk.

  His father’s sudden death solidified the sixteen-year-old boy’s fate—life would be a constant struggle. His father’s death roused Oscar’s determination to skirt poverty for good. He was determined to offer his two young sons a happier life—a stronger, more stable upbringing than his own, with plenty of toys, food, and joy.

  Now in 1921, Oscar Heinrich was ready for his first case to make “E. O. Heinrich” the star of international headlines. August Vollmer would soon label him “the foremost scientific investigator of crime in the United States.” It was quite a heavy burden for a man already carrying a lifetime of angst and self-doubt. Yet Oscar buried his fears and moved forward toward his first big investigation, one that would put him on the front pages for the first—and definitely not the last—time.

  3.

  Heathen:

  The Case of the Baker’s Handwriting, Part I

  There can be no question as to the authorship. See how the irrepressible Greek e will break out, and see the twirl of the final s. They are undoubtedly by the same person.

  —Arthur Conan Doyle,

  The Sign of Four, 1890

  The fog swallowed tiny Colma, California, in a heavy, gray mist that moistened ragged overalls and settled on the granite headstones that lined Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery. It was August 2, 1921—a chilly Tuesday night that encouraged people to spark small fires inside brick hearths.

  Colma surely must have been haunted. For decades the town had thrived off of death, requiring the deceased to support the living. Back in 1849, hundreds of thousands of people had swarmed nearby San Francisco, prospectors mining for gold but carrying along deadly diseases. Fortunes were made, but not without a significant number of deaths. There were more bodies than the city could handle.

  Within fifty years, San Francisco had banned all burials—the land was too valuable to squander on cemeteries. In 1914, San Francisco began evicting bodies from its graves—thousands of corpses were exhumed and shoved onto macabre streetcars headed south. The “cemeteries line” originated at Mission Street and stopped in C
olma, about ten miles away. The whole process cost families about $10 per loved one; otherwise the bodies were relegated to mass graves.

  In the years that followed, the electric streetcars emerged daily from the fog like props from a gothic novel: dark-colored carriages resembling caskets with curtains draping the windows. Inside, the coffins slid atop woven rugs while grieving families rested nearby on comfortable wicker chairs during the hour-long trip. “Funeral Car” was emblazoned in gold on the fronts of the cars, an unambiguous signal to their purpose when they arrived in the town.

  Colma occupied just two square miles of land, but much of it was covered with graves. Funeral processions were daily rituals, and the interred bodies were some of the most famous in America, legends like outlaw Wyatt Earp and denim magnate Levi Strauss.

  Most of the living people in Colma were employed in some type of cemetery work, and within twenty years the town of a few hundred residents had inherited 150,000 bodies. In 1924, it was designated a necropolis, one giant cemetery dubbed the “City of Souls.” The constant presence of mourning families compelled the churches to comfort the bereaved, so priests in tiny towns like Colma were revered in 1921, seemingly untouchable by evil.

  Father Patrick Heslin, the priest for Holy Angels Catholic Church on San Pedro Road, sat quietly in his study as the fog swirled around the street just feet from his front door. His housekeeper of seven years, Marie Wendel, flitted around the kitchen of their parish house, a large building connected to the church. The fog in the waning twilight muted the car headlights of the few drivers who braved the road.

  At fifty-eight years old, Father Heslin was handsome, tall, and husky, with thinning dark brown hair and an Irish brogue. A native of County Longford, the priest was a kind but authoritative leader behind the pulpit on Sundays. Father Heslin and his housekeeper had been in Colma just ten days, but while at his previous church in Turlock, about one hundred miles away, Heslin had provided guidance for the devout, counsel for couples in turmoil, and education for young believers. The priest hoped to do the same in his new parish.

  Across the street from Father Heslin’s home, a motorcar’s engine hummed and then switched off. Footsteps crossed the road. The home’s doorbell rang, followed by a loud knocking and a frantic pounding. Father Heslin listened as the housekeeper unlatched the lock and swung open the door.

  “There’s a man who wants you to minister to a dying friend,” the housekeeper told the priest.

  Marie Wendel was clearly unsettled. The visitor was fidgety, just moments from becoming unhinged. He was dressed bizarrely for nighttime travels, and he had firmly refused to come inside despite her insistence.

  “I’m in a hurry,” he anxiously explained in a heavy accent.

  Wendel felt unnerved, while Father Heslin appeared puzzled. He walked toward the front of the house, curious to hear from a stranger who might venture into a thick fog for a good friend. As he approached the entryway, the priest’s eyes widened.

  The man was almost smothered by a huge slouch hat. He wore a large, heavy coat with the collar turned up, shielding his face. He seemed to have tanned skin—a signal to the housekeeper that he wasn’t American. He wore dark-colored goggles, a common accessory for drivers tooling around in open-air 1920s touring cars, but during nightfall and in this gloom the eyewear seemed ludicrous. A nosy neighbor eyed the stranger’s car parked in front of her house as she stepped outside. She strained to hear the conversation.

  Wendel relocated her housework to another room to offer them privacy. The visitor explained that his friend had suffered from tuberculosis. He was doomed, the stranger believed. He desperately needed his last rites read to prepare his soul for death. Father Heslin nodded—he agreed to pray with the dying man and allow him to confess his sins.

  Tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, the American Lung Association was created in 1904 specifically in response to the deadly disease. In the 1920s, tuberculosis, also called “consumption,” was a death sentence, one that afflicted mostly poverty-stricken city dwellers with fatigue, night sweats, and violent coughs before finally killing them.

  Father Heslin knew it would likely be a perilous trip because tuberculosis was extremely contagious—even some doctors refused to treat sufferers—but the priest’s beliefs were grounded in self-sacrifice. Wendel returned to the entryway and quietly asked Father Heslin if he was responding to someone who was dying. Yes, he replied.

  “I will be back as soon as possible,” the priest assured her.

  Wendel latched the front door as the peculiar man settled into the driver’s seat of his small Ford touring car and pushed the button to start the engine. She peeked from behind the heavy curtains of the front window when he swung the car around toward the nearby highway and parked again to wait. The housekeeper watched the priest quickly open the passenger door. Within seconds Father Patrick Heslin had vanished.

  * * *

  —

  National magazines had bolstered the popular notions of the twenties as a decade of glamour, jazz, bathtub gin, and swinging speakeasies, but for many Americans the new decade did not roar like one of Jay Gatsby’s parties.

  The conclusion of World War I in 1918 did not revitalize the economy as the government had promised. Soldiers returned home traumatized, angry, and often with little hope of finding jobs. Most people struggled to provide for their families—the unemployment rate had more than doubled to nearly 20 percent in the twelve months following the end of the war. The go-go, prosperous twenties wouldn’t really begin until 1923; in the meantime, widespread poverty swept across the country, unalleviated by Warren Harding’s recent election to the White House.

  The year 1921 also marked the first anniversary of Prohibition, another reason for despair among many Americans. Since the law had been enacted, the national crime rate had increased by almost 25 percent; police were cracking down on illegal alcohol consumption, and criminals crowded the prisons. Police were preoccupied with enforcing strict anti-drinking laws, so the Bureau of Prohibition “deputized” Ku Klux Klan members, who used their power to harass poor immigrants, along with black Americans.

  Despite the ban on alcohol, drinking had become an epidemic, and arrests for drunken driving rose by 80 percent. Other criminal enterprises flourished as well. In the 1920s, loosely formed gangs forged an organized crime syndicate that produced a dramatic increase in criminal activity. American mafia leaders like Al Capone thrived as bootleggers, particularly in large cities like New York and Chicago. The Newton Boys, the most successful train bandits and bank robbers in history, hit six trains in the 1920s, though bandits were more frequently met with armed guards. All across the US, detectives struggled with increasingly difficult investigations, and in August 1921, the mystery of the missing priest simply bedeviled the brightest minds in law enforcement.

  Marie Wendel fretted when Father Heslin didn’t return by midnight that foggy night. She rambled around the unfamiliar two-story house, trying to stay distracted with sewing projects. She finally reasoned that last rites could be a long process if the victim had been reluctant to die. Wendel fell asleep, hopeful that she might hear the church’s lovely bell toll in the morning—ringing it was one of Father Heslin’s many duties. But the next day, when Wendel found the belfry silent and the priest’s bedroom empty, she phoned the archbishop’s office in San Francisco.

  “He left with a small, dark man, probably a foreigner,” she told his clerk.

  Archbishop Edward Hanna dismissed Wendel’s concerns; a priest not notifying his housekeeper of his schedule did not seem cause to raise an alarm. But soon his clerk shuffled back into his office, carrying a special delivery note with a two-cent stamp. Hanna quickly opened the letter and carefully read it over. Now it was the archbishop’s moment to feel unnerved.

  * * *

  —

  O
scar Heinrich adjusted his glasses as his eyes followed the curve of the letters scrawled on the paper in his hand. He stood silently in the U.S. Postal Service’s San Francisco office, gently holding a letter. It was just days after Father Heslin had disappeared, and the criminalist could sense the overwhelming urgency from the investigators hovering nearby. Sometimes detectives were valuable, like Berkeley’s brilliant chief of police, August Vollmer. But much of the time, cops (who loved to call him “Doc”) just addled his process. Oscar hadn’t taken the time to assess this group just yet.

  The forty-year-old steeled himself for their unreasonable, emotional reactions; the police in San Francisco were sensitive to a potential backlash from an alarmed public. Only a devil would hurt a Catholic priest, thought Oscar.

  He suspected that hiring him had not been the investigators’ idea. The archbishop summoned him because detectives were baffled by the strange, almost incoherent letter that arrived at the parish office shortly after the priest’s disappearance.

  “Had to HITT him four times and he unconscious from pressure on brain,” it read. “So better hurry and no fooling. TONIGHT at 9 clock.”

  It was a ransom note, more than six hundred words long, both handwritten and typed—as if two people were quarreling over control of the letter. The author demanded $6,500, which seemed like an odd amount to Oscar. Most kidnappers tended to round up or down. The typed sentences were well composed, while the handwritten demands were misspelled and confusing.

  Act with caution, for I have Father ______ (of Colma) in a bootleg cellar, where a lighted candle is left burning when I leave, and at the bottom of the candle are all the chemicals necessary to generate enough poison gas to kill a dozen men.