American Sherlock

by Kate Winkler Dawson

  On September 24, Arbuckle stood before a police judge in a preliminary hearing that could decide there had not been enough evidence for a trial. Zey Prevon was presented to a jury once again. She was clearly flustered, but she affirmed her revised story and added more details, like her description of Arbuckle’s appearance as he emerged from the suite.

  “He was fooling with his bathrobe, kind of tying,” Prevon testified.

  As Prevon watched the actor mill around the suite, she noted that the back of his pajamas looked wet. Prevon walked over to the bed as Rappe continued to moan—the sheets were also soaked. Jurors listened as she described undressing Rappe to make her more comfortable while Alice Blake, along with Maude Delmont, joined her as Arbuckle left the room.

  “She said, ‘I am dying, I am dying,’” testified Prevon. “‘He hurt me.’”

  The showgirl testified that Arbuckle, angry and drunk, stormed back into the room.

  “He came over and said, ‘If she can’t stop her yelling I will throw her out of this window,’” testified Prevon. “She stopped then.”

  She described one of the most infamous, heinous scenes that would remain grafted to Fatty Arbuckle’s character forever, a claim repeated from the earlier testimony of Rappe’s manager. Both Prevon and Al Semnacker claimed that the actor had inserted a piece of ice into Rappe’s vagina.

  “‘That will make her come to,’” Prevon testified that Arbuckle said. “Mrs. Delmont said, ‘Oh don’t do the’—shoved his hands away.”

  This was a new allegation, although decades later the story would morph into speculative lore about a vicious, horrific sexual assault, which sometimes involved a Coca-Cola bottle, a champagne bottle, or a broom handle. The prosecutor refused to repeat the allegation about the ice in court because it was simply not true, but the graphic details made years after Arbuckle died transformed him from legendary to notorious. Under aggressive cross-examination Rappe’s manager eventually admitted that he might have been wrong about the ice.

  “Are you aware that there is no medical evidence to back your claim?” asked Frank Dominguez, Arbuckle’s attorney.

  “I saw ice there,” replied Semnacker, now squirming in his seat.

  “But you did not see Mr. Arbuckle put it there,” retorted Dominquez.

  “No, probably not.”

  Now Arbuckle’s defense attorney walked toward Zey Prevon, the state’s most vulnerable witness, as Brady braced himself. Dominguez, a skilled interrogator, unleashed a litany of accusations. He demanded that she admit she had discussed her testimony with other witnesses, like showgirl Alice Blake, against the rules of the court. No, Prevon insisted, and Matthew Brady had not threatened her with a perjury charge.

  Dominguez asked Prevon about Maude Delmont, the woman whose provocative statements had done so much damage to Arbuckle’s defense. The defense attorney characterized Delmont as a pathetic witness who was so crooked and unseemly that Brady refused to let her testify. He accused Delmont of being an opportunistic harlot who became blindly drunk that night. Prevon told police that Delmont had consumed more than a dozen Scotch whiskys during the party.

  “I don’t know what she was drinking,” Prevon told Dominguez from the stand. “She was drinking everything.”

  Arbuckle’s attorneys pivoted to Virginia Rappe, the victim—an inebriated party girl who tried to tear off her own clothing.

  “She was plain drunk at that time, wasn’t she?” yelled Dominguez. “Acting like a hysterical woman at that time, wasn’t she?”

  “No, sir,” insisted Prevon. “I thought she was sick.”

  Arbuckle’s attorney blamed the victim and shamed the showgirls who were now witnesses. Alice Blake testified next. She said that Arbuckle might have been in the room when Rappe said, “I am dying, I am dying, he hurt me.”

  “You are crazy,” Arbuckle screamed, according to Blake. “‘Shut up or I will throw you out of the window.’”

  Prevon’s and Blake’s stories seem to match, which was welcomed news for Matthew Brady. Finally, the district attorney called to the stand a chambermaid who heard a woman’s screams from the suite that night—one of the maids who Oscar had refused to interview because she was “coo-coo.”

  “I heard a man’s voice say, ‘Shut up,’” testified Josephine Keza.

  Arbuckle’s attorney, fighting for his client’s life, accused Maude Delmont of plotting with Rappe’s manager, Al Semnacker, to extort money from the actor by using Rappe’s torn clothing, which they had saved. The defense attorney discovered that Delmont had a string of criminal fraud charges, and police had accused her of attempting to extort money from another actor who had gotten her pregnant. There were rumors she was a madam. But inexplicably, Dominguez refused to call Delmont to the stand. He also decided not to allow Arbuckle to testify—two potential blunders.

  When the testimony concluded, the judge ruled that there was not enough evidence to put Arbuckle on trial for murder; even worse for the state, the judge was incensed that Matthew Brady’s lead witness, Maude Delmont, was not subpoenaed.

  “Well, I will tell you one thing, Mr. District Attorney,” declared Judge Sylvain Lazarus, “you are taking a chance on a motion to dismiss when you regulate your testimony so strictly that you are only putting in just what you consider sufficient.”

  Despite missing a key witness, Judge Lazarus ruled that Arbuckle should face a trial on manslaughter charges. The actor was to be released on $5,000 bail, and he would immediately return to his Los Angeles mansion to prepare for his trial in November. But first, as Arbuckle prepared to leave the defense table, the judge offered a parting thought.

  “We are not trying Roscoe Arbuckle alone,” said Judge Lazarus. “We are trying present-day morals, our present-day social conditions, our present-day looseness of thought and lack of social balance.”

  6.

  Indignation:

  The Case of the Star’s Fingerprints, Part II

  It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

  —Arthur Conan Doyle,

  A Study in Scarlet, 1887

  The trial of the century opened on November 14, more than two months after Virginia Rappe’s death. Arbuckle’s attorney, Frank Dominguez, had been replaced by Gavin McNab, a well-known provocateur in criminal trials. McNab hired an investigator to probe Virginia Rappe’s past in her hometown of Chicago, an aggressive strategy used to castigate the victim. He was particularly interested in rumors about several abortions.

  In court, both sides quarreled over the recollections of witnesses, along with the cause of Rappe’s death. The jury listened to torrents of information, mostly contradictory. Several physicians testified that the ruptured bladder could have been caused by violence, but perhaps it had happened spontaneously. And still absent from the stand was Maude Delmont.

  Alice Blake’s testimony added little to either side’s argument, but Zey Prevon’s recollections unsettled the case once again when she altered her original story. She refused to confirm that Rappe had accused Fatty Arbuckle of hurting her; she would admit only that the actress said, “I’m dying.” In this new version, the actor had not assaulted Rappe with a piece of ice—he had seemed to hope it would help her.

  “He put a piece of ice on her body and said: ‘That will make her come to,’” testified Prevon.

  The testimony proved to be a disaster for the prosecutor, who regretted his decision to trust a washed-up entertainer. And now each of the showgirls at the center of Fatty Arbuckle’s case would slowly vanish from newspaper headlines.

  * * *

  —

  “Call Heinrich,” declared prosecutor Matthew Brady. Oscar walked across the courtroom, a large roll wrapped in thick paper underneath his arm. He placed it near the judge’s desk as he slid into the uncomfortable wooden chair on Nove
mber 23, 1921.

  “Heinrich was humorless, cold, quiet, statistical, unflattering, as patient as Job,” declared one reporter, “and it was clear that he cared nothing under heaven but the integrity of his theories.”

  Defense attorney Gavin McNab suspected that Oscar Heinrich would be the state’s lead forensic expert—and so it was his job to lash the criminalist in court. Oscar had looked at the witness list for the defense. He snickered at one name: Chauncey McGovern, the handwriting expert from William Hightower’s trial. Oscar was just complaining about McGovern once again to Kaiser, this time accusing his rival of plagiarizing someone else’s invention in a magazine piece on composite photography. McGovern’s arrogance peeved Oscar—he hoped to have a chance to publicly humble him. That day was still a few years away . . . but it would come. For now, he would have to contend with McGovern sneering at him from the sidelines, as he would not end up called to the stand.

  McNab had earlier called Kate Brennan, a chambermaid at the St. Francis, who testified that she had thoroughly cleaned Suite 1219 eleven days before Oscar Heinrich and his secretary had entered the rooms. The housekeeper became a sensation in the courtroom when she offered the jury a demonstration of her cleaning technique by picking up a dustcloth and polishing the woodwork of the courtroom. She had performed well under a blistering cross-examination in a preemptive strike from the defense to defame an arrogant forensic scientist and his dubious fingerprint evidence.

  On the stand, Oscar unfurled the paper roll, revealing more than ten large photographs. The jurors listened and then squinted at his enormous pictures of the arches, loops, and whorls that formed Arbuckle’s fingerprint pattern. Oscar detailed how he spent three days collecting evidence at the hotel, hauling his large microscope to the suite to examine the floor. He described his substantial discoveries, including “a large amount of dust, many specimens of women’s hair, some phonograph needles, and a white feather.” If the room had been cleaned, as the chambermaid claimed, then she had done a very poor job.

  Oscar also testified that there were scratches on the door paneling, perhaps the result of a struggle. He explained how he used his high-powered microscope to match hair collected inside the suite with threads of Rappe’s hair. But his most compelling evidence was one single photo, an image that he found of two hands superimposed—a clear sign to Oscar that Arbuckle had tried to prevent Rappe from leaving the room.

  Gavin McNab, Arbuckle’s defense attorney, listened closely before springing up when it came time for cross-examination.

  “How do you know that among all the millions—I mean hundreds of millions—of people in this world,” asked McNab, “there are not some who have finger patterns like those of Virginia Rappe and Roscoe Arbuckle?”

  “I do not know that,” answered Oscar. “There may be in the world some people whose fingerprints would be alike.”

  “Then all this is guesswork?” McNab replied.

  “Not guesswork,” Oscar replied. “But deduction gained through the law of averages, scientific experiment, and psychological knowledge.”

  Oscar explained that circumstantial evidence was like a collage that pointed to what really happened during a crime. If the handprints matched those of Rappe and Arbuckle, then it was likely, beyond a reasonable doubt, that they belonged to them and no one else. Before DNA testing was developed, analysis of a finger’s ridges, spirals, and loops was considered the gold standard in criminal investigations. And fingerprinting would play a crucial role in this case.

  Fingerprint patterns were noted by medical academics as early as the 1600s, but they were professors of anatomy, not scientists. In 1858, Sir William James Herschel, a British Civil Service officer in India, used handprints as a signature on contracts to identify natives in the Bengal region. The first known use of fingerprinting as identification in the United States came in 1882, when American geologist Gilbert Thompson in New Mexico used his own thumbprint on a document to prevent forgery.

  In 1892, Sir Francis Galton, an English anthropologist, was able to establish that no two fingerprints were exactly the same by noting differences between individual samples—minutiae points found at the end of friction ridge and bifurcations (the spot where a ridge will split into two ridges). Fingerprinting would swiftly become an invaluable tool for criminal investigators, and “Galton’s Points” became the foundation of the science of fingerprinting. Those points have since been used in automated computer programs to compare the patterns of two fingerprints in criminal cases.

  In 1918, French criminalist Edmond Locard pioneered the science of poroscopy, the analysis of sweat pores on fingerprint ridges and surfaces, for individualization in criminal cases. Locard believed that if twelve specific points were identical on two different fingerprints, then investigators could declare that they belonged to the same suspect.

  By 1921, the accuracy of fingerprint analysis was rarely refuted. But in 2009, researchers with the National Academy of Sciences questioned its accuracy in their report on the state of forensic science.

  “Not all fingerprint evidence is equally good, because the true value of the evidence is determined by the quality of the latent fingerprint image,” concluded the report. “A latent fingerprint that is badly smudged when found cannot be usefully saved, analyzed, or explained.”

  That meant that a latent (hidden) fingerprint found on the handle of a gun or a drinking glass would not be the same high quality as a print sample recorded by the Department of Motor Vehicles used for identification and security. And many times, even those sample prints have to be collected multiple times for accuracy. There is simply no quality control over fingerprint evidence.

  There’s also a severe lack of scientific validation, according to the NAS report. Fingerprint analysis is a technique that is vulnerable to incorrect interpretation because the analyst might be poorly trained or simply wrong, even while using a sophisticated computer program.

  But in 1921, Oscar Heinrich was confident that he was right—Fatty Arbuckle had tried to stop Virginia Rappe from leaving his suite that night. The problem with that belief, we know now, is that Oscar was depending on flawed evidence.

  * * *

  —

  The most anticipated witness of the actor’s manslaughter trial took the stand on November 28, 1921, to testify in his own defense. Arbuckle explained his version of what happened that night, a simple narrative meant to transform his public image from sinner to savior. He testified that he had retreated to Suite 1219 that night to change his clothes, and as he locked the door behind him, he heard strange noises coming from the bathroom. When Arbuckle swung open the door, it hit Virginia Rappe, who was wet from vomit and writhing in pain on the floor. He described carrying her into the bedroom and laying her on the bed at her request; he had offered her two glasses of water, but she rolled around violently and fell off the bed.

  “She turned over on her left side and started to groan,” Arbuckle testified, “and I immediately went out of 1219 to find Mrs. Delmont.”

  Both Maude Delmont and Zey Prevon claimed that they were knocking and kicking at the door before he finally responded, but the actor refuted that story: “She was tearing on the sleeve of her dress, and she had one sleeve just hanging by a few shreds,” he said. “And I says, ‘All right, if you want that off, I will take it off for you.’ And I pulled it off for her; then I went out of the room.”

  Arbuckle also confronted the most salacious, controversial accusation—the claim from witnesses that he sexually assaulted Rappe with a piece of ice. Arbuckle testified that he did in fact see a piece of ice lying atop her abdomen. When he picked it up and questioned Maude Delmont, she replied sharply.

  “‘Leave it here; I know how to take care of Virginia,’” Arbuckle recalled. “Mrs. Delmont told me to get out of the room and leave her alone, and I told Mrs. Delmont to shut up or I would throw her out of the window.”

  He had thr
eatened to throw Maude Delmont out of the window, not Virginia Rappe, the actor explained. Arbuckle seemed composed and earnest, but he was also a canny actor. The jury was required to stay focused on his statements, not his apparent sincerity—that edict seemed difficult, considering Arbuckle’s magnetism. The actor offered the jury a believable version of Rappe’s illness. And now Gavin McNab hoped to discredit Oscar Heinrich’s scientific evidence, the double handprints that supported his unequivocal conclusion that the actor was a killer.

  “At any time of that day did your hand come in contact with her hand on the door?” asked McNab.

  “No, sir,” Arbuckle replied.

  By the time he had stood up from the witness chair, Arbuckle had successfully revised the theme of the trial—he was innocent and being punished because of his celebrity status. After three weeks of testimony, both sides issued their closing arguments, passionate pleas for justice and retribution. Oscar’s scientific findings were rubbish, proclaimed the defense, and there was no trustworthy evidence to convict Fatty Arbuckle. On December 2, the case was sent to the jury, and a panel of seven men and five women would decide the actor’s fate.

  Jurors, locked in their room, discussed the testimony, the scientific evidence, and Arbuckle’s own story. They argued for forty-four hours . . . and then gave up. They were deadlocked ten to two for acquittal—the majority of the panel didn’t believe the prosecutor. One of the two jurors had waffled for much of the deliberations, while the other was a steadfast holdout who refused to be swayed. And she credited Oscar Heinrich with convincing her that Arbuckle was guilty.

  “It was the matter of fingerprints purely in the final analysis that decided me,” said Helen Hubbard. “Arbuckle failed to convince me with his story absolutely. Therefore, I voted for conviction and no power in heaven or earth could change my fixed opinion.”