American Sherlock

by Kate Winkler Dawson

  Oscar had begun reporting his daily work and domestic expenses in 1910, almost fifteen years earlier, when he first opened his lab in Tacoma. His habit evolved after college graduation from simple bookkeeping to frenetic data gathering. It was all related to his father’s death, though Oscar would never admit it. Logs filled boxes in his office, and while it always seemed excessive, his detailed charting became unprecedented by 1923. His collecting tendencies were almost maniacal as the large personal financial logs became more specific and exacting. He logged transactions with clients, especially those who delayed paying him. He sent one client a letter virtually every month for several years, each note polite but stern. As Oscar’s business expanded, his routine of gathering immense amounts of data—all different types—became obsessive.

  Oscar logged the date, time, and size of each photograph that he took for a case and then created a narrative that explained the facts, described the clues, and revealed his theories. He stored evidence from many investigations, clues hidden in boxes: copper wire from a bomb case, bullet slugs from a murder, and the wax mold he made of a bullet hole from inside a victim’s heart.

  Oscar paid a newspaper clipping service to ship him a copy of any American newspaper where his name was mentioned. He preserved thousands of periodicals still bound in twine, newspapers that were never read. He kept folders of news stories from each rival expert, with an especially large folder dedicated to Chauncey McGovern that spanned almost fifteen years. There were dozens of articles that mentioned McGovern’s cases, ones that didn’t even involve Oscar. It seemed to be the criminalist’s way of keeping tabs on his chief competitor’s wins and losses.

  Oscar demanded that his various lab assistants log their hourly work activities, and for almost five years he kept detailed financial records of his mother’s expenses in Eureka, Washington. In some of his letters to her, he gently insisted that she send him her bank and tax statements. When his mother began renovating her house, Oscar told her how to have her walls painted and then requested receipts for the work done.

  “The paint may be applied to dry walls,” he wrote. “This permission will be good for anything costing up to $100.”

  The financial data had become especially important, because for years he had sent his mother $35 a month. But his information hoarding was not confined to financials or newspapers—he meticulously logged Christmas cards and gifts to and from the Heinrich family. There were graphs on ovulation schedules and notations on every call he made along with the times. Oscar even charted his own urine levels twice a day for one year. He hoped to someday open a clinical laboratory that would handle urinalysis tests and blood work, like the work he did as a pharmacist in Tacoma. All this data collection required incredible amounts of thought and effort, a nearly impossible feat for a man consumed by dozens of complicated cases each month.

  Oscar was also traveling more, constantly bemoaning how he missed significant family events like celebratory dinners, summer vacation trips—he was in Oregon during Mortimer’s ninth birthday.

  “Of course we are glad you are busy but awfully sorry you cannot be with us for the next ten days,” Marion wrote Oscar during a family vacation. “Mortimer got the weeps yesterday and insisted he was going home if you did not come up.”

  Though he had earned $50 a day from his work on the Siskiyou train heist, his domestic expenses were incredibly high. “I hope now that conditions will adjust themselves so that I may take life a little more leisurely,” Oscar wrote his mother. “It doesn’t seem very long, but it is in fact over a quarter of a century that I have been struggling along under high pressure.”

  There were heavy expenses to worry about, debts that had forced him to forgo a trip to Washington State to see his elderly mother the year before. “My work has been very light and expense very heavy,” he wrote his mother, “and there does not seem to be much left over to go through the Xmas period with.”

  When a collector wrote Oscar just a few weeks before the Siskiyou train heist concerning an outstanding debt of almost $400, Oscar initially argued over the bill, but then he requested that the lender reduce the debt by forgoing the compounded interest.

  “His determination to stick to the face value of his notes and all of the accrued interest thereon is something more than the situation either justified or warrants,” argued Oscar.

  The strain of being E. O. Heinrich wouldn’t relent anytime soon, because the special agents assigned to the Siskiyou train robbery had made some significant discoveries: the killers had secured two secret locations, which contained more clues.

  * * *

  —

  Oscar Heinrich stood inside the small building in the woods, a dingy shack that could scarcely be called a cabin. About a quarter of a mile from the tunnel, the building, nicknamed the Mt. Crest Cabin, had been abandoned years earlier, but it still managed to hang on to the cheap shingles atop its high-pitched roof. A bucket hung from one of the wooden beams while dirty clothes were tacked to the walls.

  Railway Special Agent Dan O’Connell seemed a bit out of place in his three-piece black suit, tromping around one campsite, now dubbed “Camp No. 2,” about one mile southeast of the tunnel. Oscar snapped photos of charred cooking utensils, a broken wooden chest, and burned beer bottles blackened by a small fire pit. He carried each of the items back to his lab.

  The forensic scientist catalogued a towel from the cabin, two suitcases full of clothing with Oregon tags, a burned coat, a valise, fifteen .45-caliber pistol cartridges, a pair of leather gloves, a cap like the one found lying in the tunnel, and socks. There were no obvious clues to the owner’s identity, but agents had finally caught a break—they had a name, thanks to Oscar.

  The U.S. Postal Service paper that the criminalist discovered from inside the pencil pocket of the overalls was a registered mail receipt for $50 sent by someone in Eugene a month earlier. Agents spelled out the words carefully because the last name was tricky: DeAutremont. Roy had mailed the letter to his brother Verne in New Mexico, and agents quickly learned that there were three DeAutremont brothers in the area during the train heist: Roy, Ray, and Hugh.

  The secret serial number Oscar discovered inside the Colt pistol was traced to Hauser Bros. gun store in Albany, Oregon, where a twenty-one-year-old man who called himself William Elliott had purchased the weapon. The dealer’s record of sale for the state of Oregon was fairly detailed because the receipt required the buyer to provide his occupation, his address, even his height and his eye and hair color. Oscar suspected that William Elliott was an alias, so he requested writing samples from all members of the DeAutremont family. He squinted at his magnifying glass and determined that the signature matched the example from one of Ray DeAutremont’s letters. And despite the problematic nature of handwriting analysis, Oscar was right.

  Special agents visited Paul DeAutremont in Eugene, who believed that his three sons were on a camping trip. They described Oscar’s physical description of the suspect based on his assumptions from the overalls. It was Roy, Paul DeAutremont admitted—a sad disclosure for a father who was worried about his sons. He handed agents several items, including a red sweater once worn by Roy.

  Oscar compared one hair on the towel in the cabin to a hair from Roy’s overalls and another from his red sweater—they were very similar, virtually a perfect match. He continued to compare hairs, fibers, and writing samples to create a case against the DeAutremont brothers. The reward had now increased from $2,500 to more than $15,000. Agents added photos and names to the posters.

  The manhunt was astonishing: more than two million leaflets were printed in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, and Dutch and distributed internationally. Every post office in America pinned up the posters, while planes dropped leaflets into rural areas. Government agents sent to dentists the descriptions of the fillings in the brothers’ mouths, while optometrists were given details about their glasses. Newspapers a
nd radio reports were dispatched daily. Oscar was dubbed by the media “America’s Sherlock Holmes,” a moniker that privately pleased him.

  The hunt went on for months. But soon the media attention waned and the story of the murders of four men at Tunnel 13 near Siskiyou faded from newspapers. By late November 1923, Hugh, Roy, and Ray DeAutremont were in the wind, nowhere to be found and destined to become infamous. Despite the brothers’ escape, Oscar’s impressive revelations sparked letters from around the world. Professors marveled at his discovery and queried about his methods.

  “There is no trick at all to visualize a carload of salt from a milligram of it in a crucible,” he wrote a chemistry professor at a university in Lynchburg, Virginia. “It is equally easy to visualize a carload of salt from a single tiny crystal of it under the microscope.”

  His business became more robust, which was uplifting news for a family in constant need of money, but the Siskiyou train robbery mystery had exhausted him. The forensic scientist moaned about his age, and while he smiled when the media praised him, the escalation of public attention still shook him. He had become distressed after Fatty Arbuckle’s case, and over the summer of 1924, he began to lament his choice of profession.

  “I feel a strong desire to sit on the bleachers and each other play the game instead of mixing it so hard myself,” he sadly told his mother.

  He began hinting at retirement, a surprising disclosure from a man who was just forty-three years old. He hoped to pursue other passions, to move away from the horrible crimes he seemed to pursue. Oscar jotted down more ideas for novels as he waited for an answer from the publisher on his short story. And in the fall of 1924, one year after the train robbery, Oscar received a short reply from the editor who read The Black Kit Bag: “About this story: it is cast in the usual form of a detective story, but lacks the usual elements of complication and denouement,” he wrote. “To my mind the best detective stories are like personally conducted chess games, full of mysteries, surprises, beautiful maidens and heroic youths.”

  It was dreadful news—and ironic. The brilliant criminalist who had solved some of the most perplexing crimes in America couldn’t seem to write a convincing detective story. The editor recommended a college class on short story writing to hone his prose, but Oscar didn’t seem interested. Penning fiction was one of the few career ambitions he had failed to meet, so a career as a forensic scientist would have to suffice for now.

  * * *

  —

  “Real Sherlock Holmes, with Four Slender Clews, Pulled Net Around DeAutremonts,” read the News-Herald headline. It was a flattering article—a tribute to Oscar Heinrich’s dogged investigation into the failed Siskiyou train robbery. And now four years later, he was finally receiving retribution.

  “The last person in the world one would have picked as a relentless man hunter,” said the copy, “stands revealed today as the super-detective whose work brought about the arrest of the three D’Autremont brothers, who bombed a mail train and killed four men in the Oregon mountains in the fall of 1923.”

  Roy, Ray, and Hugh DeAutremont were caught in 1927 after four years on the run and an intensive investigation that had cost American taxpayers about half a million dollars. Hugh DeAutremont, the youngest brother, had escaped to the Philippines by joining the United States Army. A fellow soldier on leave spotted the youngest brother on a wanted poster in California, and Hugh was arrested in February. Forever loyal, he denied knowing where Roy and Ray were hiding. As Hugh faced a first-degree murder trial in June, the FBI arrested his brothers in Ohio, who were living as Elmer and Clarence Goodwin. The twins had built their lives working in coal mines and mills, toiling at various odd jobs. Ray had married a sixteen-year-old girl, and they had an infant son.

  Once Roy and Ray learned about the evidence gathered by Oscar Heinrich, they both pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. The three DeAutremont brothers were given life sentences, and decades later, they were all paroled. Ray was released in 1961 and lived in Eugene, Oregon, for another twenty-three years until he died at age eighty-four. Hugh left prison in 1958 and became a printer, but he died of stomach cancer soon after.

  Roy DeAutremont had the saddest fate, because, more than twenty years after his conviction, prison doctors diagnosed him with schizophrenia. He was transferred to the Oregon State Hospital, the same facility where he had once worked. Surgeons performed a frontal lobotomy to help with his mental illness, but the dangerous procedure left him unable to care for himself, and he died in a nursing home in Salem at age eighty-three.

  In 1923, the botched train robbery in Oregon had turned Edward Oscar Heinrich into a legend both in newspapers and within the competitive world of forensic science. He was now the most sought-after criminalist in the country. But Oscar could not help but wonder what else might be out there for him besides, of course, another murder.

  8.

  Bad Chemistry:

  The Case of the Calculating Chemist

  Holmes was seated at his side-table clad in his dressing-gown, and working hard over a chemical investigation. A large curved retort was boiling furiously in the bluish flame of a Bunsen burner, and the distilled drops were condensing into a two litre measure.

  —Arthur Conan Doyle,

  The Naval Treaty, 1893

  He may have seemed lonesome as he labored by himself inside his laboratory on a hill in a sleepy Northern California town. He slowly stirred the mixtures as the fumes fogged his plastic goggles. His closest friends and colleagues respected him as a gifted chemist, a scientist who enjoyed refining his formulas late into the night as his wife and young sons slept. Rarely did he allow people to peer over his shoulder as he quietly measured chemicals and sparked burners, so no one really understood his struggle with science. His secretary occasionally handed him paperwork for lab supplies, while a night watchman spent evenings patrolling the building’s perimeter. But for much of the time he was left with only his solvents and reagents—a determined chemist who vowed to shape history, but in secret. He settled in for a long night’s worth of work in July 1925.

  A few weeks earlier, Edward Oscar Heinrich picked up a copy of the Oakland Tribune and glanced over a small article, just thirty-one words long: “The Pacific Cellulose company, manufacturers of imitation silk, has completed a $50,000 plant at Walnut Creek, and will start manufacturing within a short time, according to Dr. [C.] Schwartz, general manager.”

  Oscar read it several times. He was intrigued by the idea of such a clever scheme; a formula to create “imitation silk” was sure to become a triumph for the chemist, Charles Schwartz, who had concocted it. In the 1920s, there was a race among scientists to synthesize rubber, timber, and other natural products for commercial use—and none had more monetary value than silk.

  Natural silk was pricey because the process to produce it was dependent upon thousands of silkworm caterpillars entering their pupation period; in about forty-eight hours, the three-inch-long pupae would each build a cocoon made of one thread of white or yellow silk averaging about one thousand yards long. Silkworm owners would then preserve that valuable filament by killing the silkworm with hot air or steam, which allowed the cocoon to open. It could take thousands of cocoons to make one woman’s silk dress, which would retail for about $25 in the 1920s.

  Silk was also becoming an asset in the emerging automobile and aeronautics industries. The first synthetic silks were produced in 1884 from cellulose fiber, but they were too flammable. No one had succeeded in creating artificial silk for commercial use except, Oscar noted, Dr. Schwartz of Walnut Creek. But that name also made Oscar grimace. Just a week earlier, Schwartz had been featured in a very different type of article from the same newspaper—a disgraceful tale of infidelity and extortion. The thirty-eight-year-old chemist was being sued for $75,000 by a twenty-two-year-old beauty from Switzerland, simply because he had broken her heart.

  Elizabeth Adam had arrived in Oakland, Cali
fornia, two months earlier and quickly met a handsome, wealthy scientist who introduced himself as “Mr. Stein.” They fell in love, and he quickly proposed. The couple made the announcement to their friends, declaring that their wedding date would be set for June 6. But Stein was a cheat, as Ms. Adam soon discovered. His real name was Charles Schwartz, a married father of three boys. Melancholy settled over the young woman, a sorrow that quickly turned to rage. Adam sued Schwartz for “breach of promise,” better known in the 1920s as a “heart balm” lawsuit, a legal punishment wielded mostly by jilted women.

  For hundreds of years, a marriage engagement was seen as not just a promise but a legally binding contract. When one person broke that agreement (usually the man), the offended party had the right to sue for damages. Men decried heart balm suits as a weapon for scorned lovers. But some fiancées needed financial protection—engaged women sometimes chose to have premarital sex with their future husbands, a taboo during an era when virginity before marriage was coveted. Being left without virgin status after a broken engagement could hinder a woman’s chance to find another husband, and a heart balm suit would at least ensure that she was financially compensated. Oscar squirmed as he read that phrase and immediately thought of Berkeley police chief August Vollmer.

  Vollmer was embroiled in his own broken heart lawsuit, a scandal that shocked Oscar Heinrich. A woman was suing the country’s “father of modern policing” for $50,000, inflicting a very public indignity. She accused the forty-nine-year-old police chief of proposing to her and then marrying someone else the year before. It was an unseemly public scandal, it seemed to Oscar, one that played out in the newspapers and nearly devastated Vollmer’s policing career.