“Bloodhounds today failed to pick up the scent of the desperadoes,” reported the Woodland Daily Democrat. “Other hounds from Seattle, Washington, Salem, Oregon and Yreka are to be given trails later.”
Hundreds of Oregon national guardsmen, peace officers, and volunteers fanned out across the rural county, dragging along sharp tools for hacking weeds and poking at the ground. Lawmen questioned townspeople about their alibis and cautioned families to latch their doors. There was already talk of lynching the men once they were found, but an Oregon State militia was dispatched to stop mob justice. Rumors circulated that the bandits were former railway workers, while witnesses reported seeing a car dash through Ashland about an hour after the murders. Southern Pacific Railroad immediately offered a reward of $2,500.
“Mail Car Dynamited by Bandits in Daring Raid,” read one headline. “Bloodhounds and Posses Trailing Bandits Who Robbed Train and Murdered Crew,” declared another. “Posses Scour Hills for Bandits.”
Investigators were overwhelmed with fruitless leads and unhelpful tips, including analysis from a local clairvoyant.
“It was the boldest train robbery since the days of the Old West,” read an Ohio newspaper.
Newspaper editors seized on every new detail about the failed train heist, a tragedy transformed in print copy to a remarkable, bloody nightmare that hijacked high-society newspapers and low-level rags. Headlines publicizing those unidentified “killers on the run” frightened American readers. The legend of “America’s last great train robbery” was solidifying, no matter that the train had not actually been robbed.
Nearby the Siskiyou tunnel, investigators pulled back weeds on the small area just above the tracks, revealing a blasting machine with two batteries attached lying close to a pair of greasy blue denim overalls. Creosote-soaked gunnysack shoe covers lay nearby. A deputy discovered a revolver in the tunnel, a government-issued .45-caliber Colt. Investigators crawled on the ground and measured three sets of footprints while officers rounded up and released local troublemakers spotted near the railroad yards.
The county had no lack of good-for-nothings to interrogate. Police briefly arrested a twenty-two-year-old ex-convict but soon released him when he provided an alibi. They held two drug addicts, but soon they were also sent on their way. Three hunters admitted to being near the Oregon and California border, but they were also cleared. Investigators winnowed their list to just one suspect—a man now sitting in a local jail thanks to his filthy fingernails.
On the hill near the tracks, a local sheriff’s deputy squatted down near the detonator and examined the batteries. Perhaps they came from a mechanic’s repair shop? The overalls were clearly smeared with grease in several places. Deputies raced to a repair shop in a nearby town, hoping to find a suspect inside; as they carefully approached an employee, he explained that he was the only mechanic on duty.
He denied ever owning the batteries, but his face and his fingernails, the deputies noticed, were covered in grease. He wiped off the grime as he insisted that he had nothing to do with the train robbery, but he had no verifiable alibi. As investigators eyed the mechanic, his denials grew louder. They needed more proof to arrest him, so one deputy pulled out their best evidence, the overalls draped over the detonator. He demanded the mechanic slip the pair over his clothes.
Surrounded by armed men, the mechanic quickly agreed and shoved both legs inside. The overalls fit—not perfectly, but reasonably enough. The mechanic argued that they had no real proof, but it was too late, and soon he was pacing inside a small cell, waiting to see if deputies would issue him the third degree.
The mechanic was lying, insisted the investigators, a butcher no better than Jesse James and his bandits on horseback.
The special agents spent days in the interrogation room with no results, and now they needed Oscar Heinrich to glean anything he could from the items. The criminalist began by examining a .45-caliber pistol, a brown canvas knapsack, burlap shoe coverings, and a pair of blue denim bibbed overalls. The agents explained that as many as twenty other experts had investigated the clues, and other than mechanic’s grease, there were no important discoveries. As his assistant escorted the investigators to the door, Oscar turned to his desk.
He fingered the cloth, felt its stiffness, and then smelled it. He held up the overalls to a wooden door and gently pushed six pins into the denim fabric, spreading it out as it suspended just above the floor. He leaned the door against his bookcase, which had been stuffed with references sent by John Boynton Kaiser that included Catalysis in Organic Chemistry and The Properties of Electrical Conducting Systems. He reached over to his desk for two measuring tapes, stretching them horizontally and vertically before jotting down numbers, details about the length and width: five feet by twenty inches. He chronicled each experiment with his camera.
Oscar discovered the tag from the manufacturer—“United Garment Workers of America”—and then noticed the bottom of the turned-up cuffs of the legs. He asked his lab assistant to fetch a special pair of worn leather boots with thick laces, a set he had saved for years. He placed them on storage boxes underneath the overall’s cuffs, which hung just five inches above, and made more notes.
“The overalls were quite new and had not been laundered,” he noted.
The left-hand pockets were used more frequently, and the suspenders were handled almost exclusively from the left-hand side.
“Suspenders on left fastened and unfastened habitually,” he scribbled on a small slip of brown notepaper, “by oily condition of inner edge of bib on left side and oil on buttons; also oil and wear on suspender end and buckle—absence thereof on right side.”
He frequently jotted notes on scraps of paper he found on his desk or at hotels, a cost-saving measure he had adopted years earlier. It may seem haphazard to store such important clues on discarded paper, but he secured each note, synthesized the details, and produced a thorough report for every case. Using his magnifying glass, he spotted hairs caught in the buckles of the overalls, slid them under his microscope, and enlarged them. They were medium to light brown in color.
“Every individual, particularly a man, accumulates dust and dirt typical of his occupation, at various points about his clothing, particularly the pockets,” he told another college professor. “Careful search of a suit of clothes also will almost invariably reveal head and body hair.”
Oscar’s gaze traveled up the garment, and he stared at the engine oil on the left pocket, evidence that had convinced federal agents that a local mechanic was the killer. Oscar scraped off some of the dark sticky goo, spread it carefully on a glass slide, and placed it underneath his microscope. He adjusted the oculars and rotated the magnification dial. It wasn’t grease, he was sure, because he didn’t spot any of its standard components: mineral oil, vegetable oil, lime, or emulsified soap. He dripped a reagent on the slide and watched the chemical reaction—the goo was a purely organic substance.
With his pencil Oscar made the most important note of the case, a scribble on the back of an old envelope that would save the mechanic’s life: “Pitch—not oil on left pocket.” The grease on the overalls came from a tree, not a vehicle. And soon Oscar would determine that the pitch actually came from a Douglas fir, a tree found in western Oregon, the same type of naturally occurring, sticky resin used to caulk the seams of wooden sailing ships for centuries. Oscar turned out the pockets of the overalls carefully as little chips, caught in the fabric, reflected the light of his small flashlight.
“No larger than the size of half a pea,” he wrote. “The pockets carried tiny chips, earth debris, and botanical debris peculiar to the western Washington and western Oregon forests.”
The suspect lived in the western part of Oregon, he concluded. Oscar used a small electric suction device, like a mini vacuum cleaner, to collect any other trace evidence. He could later sort through the material and catalogue it. Also inside the pockets were
small, hard white chips—fingernail clippings. The man trimmed his nails, a strange habit for a lumberjack.
“A man who carries a fingernail file,” Oscar told the agents, “is usually fastidious not only so far as his nails are concerned, but about his general appearance.”
Oscar understood human nature—a man’s habits reflected his personality. This suspect took pride in his appearance, the criminalist was certain. Overalls typically included numerous pockets for storage of various workman tools, including a pencil, so Oscar knew he would need to search each one. He adjusted his glasses.
“Pencil pocket at the left side of the bib watch pockets, on the left front bib of the overalls,” he wrote on a steno pad.
Oscar stood up and hunted for what seemed like a curious tool in a forensic lab: a crochet hook. He suspected that the federal agents had not actually searched all the pockets—and this was a small one. He delicately slipped the hook inside the pencil pocket and fished around, occasionally removing it to check for progress.
“I aim to return evidence as intact as it is when it first comes into my laboratory,” he explained to investigators.
After several minutes of searching, something in the inside seam became caught, and he carefully removed a slip of paper “about the size of a cigarette paper.” He held it in his hand—it was stiff, a tiny ball. He needed to unravel it very slowly; otherwise it would disintegrate. There was the slight clinking of glass from beakers as Oscar brushed a chemical over the packet, hydrating the paper before unrolling it and then carefully ironing it under a low heat. The words and numbers from the clue emerged: September 14, 1923, #2361. It was a U.S. Postal registered mail receipt from Eugene, Oregon—a traceable bit of evidence that might reveal its owner. Next Oscar examined the Colt .45-caliber, which had contained loads of information for the right detective.
“Pink stain in grip—toothpaste. White stain—shaving soap.”
Much of the serial number was scratched off, leaving just three numbers: “C _ _ _ 763.” Oscar remembered something that few investigators knew—for years, firearms manufacturers had inscribed a second set of serial numbers inside their guns to help establish ownership. When Oscar dismantled the pistol, he found the duplicate serial number inside the gun:
“Colt secret number under firing pin,” he noted.
The mystery serial number was C 130763, and now investigators might be able to trace who had purchased it.
Oscar Heinrich spent nine hours examining the evidence and then another nine hours inside his lab the next day. When he finished, Oscar dictated a letter to his assistant, which was addressed to the chief special agent for Southern Pacific Railroad Company, Dan O’Connell. Oscar explained that he had discovered a wadded-up receipt for ten cents from the U.S. Postal Service that might be traced back to its purchaser. He had also recovered a hidden serial number inside the discarded .45-caliber Colt that could likely lead to the buyer. But O’Connell had made it clear that he needed specifics about the suspect, a way to describe him to the papers and eventually convict him—a profile. O’Connell and a federal agent with U.S. Postal Service traveled to Berkeley.
“A lumberjack,” said Oscar. “The wearer and owner was a lumberjack employed in a fir or spruce logging camp. A white man not over five feet ten inches tall, probably shorter. Weight not over 165 pounds, probably less.”
“Not so fast, professor,” said the postal agent. “Do you mean to say that you found all of this out merely from examining those overalls?”
Oscar explained that he could estimate the weight of the owner because lumberjacks frequently bought their overalls in a larger size so they had room to shrink in the wash. These overalls appeared to be new.
“Hence the owner is undersized rather than an average sized man,” he concluded.
The special shoes that his assistant retrieved earlier were logging shoes, and when he placed them underneath the overall’s cuffs, they were the perfect length for a logger hoping to keep his clothes from being ruined while climbing trees.
“Lumbermen always wear their pants legs turned up in a deep cuff about halfway between the ankle and calf and outside the boot,” Oscar noted.
He measured the distance from the cuffs’ creases to the shoulder straps to estimate the wearer’s height. He also knew that the owner’s left shoulder was three-fourths of an inch higher than the right, based on how the straps were adjusted. The suspenders were handled exclusively from the left-hand side, and the pockets were most frequently used on the left side—though that didn’t necessarily mean that the man was left-handed.
The suspect was Caucasian, according to the charts Oscar used to classify the two strands of hair. And while he was not able to use the hair to conclusively identify the suspect, his assertion of the ethnicity of the owner was scientifically valid. He had created a physical sketch of a killer—an incredibly accurate profile based on a single pair of overalls. Oscar’s description tallied precisely with Roy DeAutremont—a brown-haired lumberjack with a slight build and height, a fastidious man who worked in western Oregon on spruce and fir trees.
“Putting these things together required no great stretch of the imagination to classify the occupation of the owner,” he explained, with his normal trace of bravado.
Deputies released the mechanic from jail, and now special agents focused their search on a lumberjack from Oregon.
* * *
—
In the Superior Court at the state capitol Charlie Hicks had been battling for the widow all day long. Throughout the day his case had gone against him. Even a good dinner in the famous hostelry of the capitol failed to cheer him.
Oscar Heinrich stared at his typewriter, determining if he might tighten that section. Charlie Hicks had proven to be a difficult character to define.
He ordered mechanically; chewed belligerently; ate without tasting. Dinner over he wandered into the hotel lobby. He settled himself before the fireplace and truculently perused a newspaper.
“The Black Kit Bag. By E. O. Heinrich” was neatly printed on the first page, one of many detective stories he had written in his spare time, usually late at night after he finished his lab work.
He occupied himself with tearing his newspaper into odd shaped sheets, rolling each fragment into a tight paper wad and savagely flipping it at a blazing knot in the fireplace.
Oscar’s passion for writing was first stirred during his teenage years; for the past thirteen years, Oscar had squirreled away fragments of paper with fictional story ideas along with longer ruminations on creative magazine articles and books. He kept a hidden folder of poems he had once penned for an old girlfriend in Tacoma before he met Marion—lines written with romantic intention.
Does your smile still dance out spritely,
From beneath your temples’ steeps,
Skip about your eyes a moment,
Ripple down across your cheeks,
Lit with dancing beams of love light.
The verses seemed like a startling contrast to his tightly wound public persona. Writing was a venue for Oscar to spill secrets on paper that only he would review later in life, perhaps during wistful times when he thought of his youth. Those years weren’t all bad.
Another folder held scripts to several plays he hoped might be produced. He completed a manuscript titled Why I Want to Travel, though it was never published. But his detective novels were the most intriguing, stories like The Curse of the Gleaming Eye and In the Chapel. He hoped they would be published so he could be an author or someone more artistic than a forensic scientist.
“I am interested in working out those defects in our American life,” he wrote his mother, “which breed crime and explaining them to our future parents through fiction.”
He enjoyed other unscientific interests, like singing solos for his local social club’s choir, studying jiujitsu, and nurturing his large flower
garden on his property in the Berkeley Hills. It was all amusing to Kaiser, the reference librarian, who joked that Oscar’s passions were eclectic.
“Your special interest in babies, weeds, legal aid societies and spy bibliographies,” Kaiser quipped, “shows a cosmopolitan grasp of the world’s affairs.”
Oscar was ecstatic about his new set of stories. He frequently had a difficult time expressing himself to just about everyone, including his wife, but his frank friendship with Kaiser was the exception, so he sent the librarian the drafts for his opinion.
“I have two, and possibly three novels in pregnant quickening,” Oscar wrote.
The scientist was confident about the plots, the structure, and his characters because they were drawn from his own career. “Out of my reading and my experiences there has fruited a guide to expression,” he confided to Kaiser. “It appeals to me; it stirs me with desire.” His detective stories, now waiting at a printer’s workshop, were a cathartic exercise, a venue to tap a section of his brain that he infrequently used in his career.
“I am not wishing to write to win fame or fortune. They are to me nothing more than a guarantee of bread and butter, and my wants for such are well supplied already,” he wrote Kaiser. “I want my illusions. I want to play in the fields of fantasy and hunt for the buds of joy. And I want to know whether it be moat or gulf that keeps me from it.”
Writing was his joy, and being published would be an honor, so Oscar submitted The Black Kit Bag to a major book publisher in New York and hoped for a favorable reply.
* * *
—
Carfare on Thursday had cost him twelve cents. He spent five cents for books that same day and then fifteen cents for bread and cakes on Friday. Oscar’s domestic spending logs had been piling up in his lab for years—loads of large, heavy journals each the size of a large bread box, containing thousands of handwritten charts with notes in black ink: “meat—8 cents on Saturday.”
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