“Wife Stands by Vollmer,” read one headline. “Declares Cave-Man Tactics Described by Mrs. Lex Not Chief’s Style of Making Love.”
It was so humiliating for August Vollmer. He had enjoyed the positive media attention he received after creating the country’s first police lab in Los Angeles, a project inspired by Oscar Heinrich’s incredible feats of forensics during the Siskiyou train heist two years earlier. But this type of publicity was mortifying, and Vollmer declared it a persecution. Reporters even challenged Vollmer to submit to a polygraph exam, the same test he used on William Hightower during Father Heslin’s murder case. Vollmer balked.
“The case is far too serious to use spectacular means to keep it alive,” Vollmer told reporters. “I have nothing to fear either off or on the lie detector.”
Oscar Heinrich was incredulous about the whole thing and mortified for one of his closest friends—a man he revered for his analytical skills and stellar morals. “Please reserve judgment on this for some time,” Oscar told his mother. “He is still somewhat unsettled because of the shock and the surprise but I think that he will be able to show a perfectly clean slate.”
During his own heart balm suit, chemist Charles Schwartz denied wooing the young woman and then accused his competitors of conspiring to steal his synthetic silk formula. “This is merely a plot to discredit me in my business,” Schwartz told reporters. “I defy them to go any further with the action.”
Schwartz said that, in fact, someone else had tried to extort $10,000 from him earlier in the week, and he was now fearful.
That could mean trouble for Schwartz, Oscar suspected. A woman scorned might be willing to do anything to punish a heartless lover. But the Swiss woman’s allegations were difficult to believe because Schwartz had enjoyed such an impressive reputation. He had been born Leon Henry Schwartzhof in Colmar, France, in 1887, a promising student who earned a PhD in chemistry at Heidelberg University in Germany, served with the Red Cross in Algiers, and became a captain in the French army during World War I. He was wounded during battle and soon met and married a young war widow named Alice Orchard Warden in Derby, England. After the couple had their three boys, Alice Schwartz prayed for financial security; her husband, whom she called Henry, assured her that his invention would make them wealthy.
“Someday, my dear,” Schwartz told her, “we will have a great deal of money. Just now you must be patient. My plans are fast coming to a head.”
Schwartz was dapper, tall and slender with short, cropped brown hair and an easy smile. He offered charm and wit to his business investors and influential friends, while assuring them that his synthetic silk, created from wood fiber, was a multimillion-dollar idea. His pitch convinced wealthy influencers, along with banks, to invest in the Pacific Cellulose company. He quickly bought an abandoned glove factory in Walnut Creek and converted it to a private office and laboratory.
In July 1925, Charles Schwartz was still troubled over that heart balm lawsuit—Adam was suing him for $75,000 in damages. But he had so many reasons to be optimistic because, he told the owner of his chemical plant, they would make millions from commercial synthetic silk. He just needed time to perfect the formula.
Draped in a yellow dustcoat, he worked late into the night of July 30 inside the second floor of his lab. The gasoline-fueled Welsbach lantern glowed a white light from another room—he had never bothered to equip the two-story building with electricity or gas. The night watchman set out on his scheduled patrol around the property, tasked with catching Schwartz’s many competitors, who plotted to steal his secret formula. Schwartz called the watchman to the lab and suggested that he stay far away from the building.
“I plan to do some experimenting with ether,” Schwartz warned Walter Gonzales, “and I don’t think it would be healthy for you to be sleeping here. Ether, you know, is tricky stuff.”
Instead of enjoying a family meal at home, the chemist shared an early dinner with a friend. He complained of a horrible nightmare about a dark man sneaking into his lab and beating him on the head. The visions tormented Schwartz—he was afraid they were an omen. When he returned to the lab, he called his wife and told her to expect him home soon. He phoned his business partner to say he would be finalizing the formula that night—alert the media.
Clear liquid sloshed from a vat onto the floor’s wooden planks; Schwartz knew it was volatile, but he ignored the risks. His gasoline lamp flickered and crackled, its light bouncing against one of dozens of windows. Ten minutes later, the walls of the factory shook. The blast ripped the lab’s door off its top hinges and shattered its windows. The night watchman raced toward the factory, screaming, “Doctor!” He grabbed a fire extinguisher and quickly broke through the door. Soon, the sirens of fire trucks howled. Flames shot upward from the floor, some three feet tall. The guard gagged from a noxious yellow gas.
Gonzales had responded quickly, but it was too late. Charles Schwartz—the chemist with so many enemies—was now a charred corpse lying on the floor of his own laboratory.
* * *
—
“There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
In 1925, author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magnum opus, The Great Gatsby, was published and immediately became a flop, a victim of poor reviews and terrible first-year sales. A beautifully crafted novel of critical social history, Gatsby eventually came to represent the decadence and excesses of the Roaring Twenties.
Across the US, young people were learning a new dance called the Charleston, and the Harlem Renaissance in New York City signaled the beginning of a social and artistic explosion for the African American community, while Art Deco marked the era’s modern architectural style.
But 1925 wasn’t an optimistic time for all Americans. Farmers still struggled with poverty from the collapse of agricultural prices from five years earlier. Lenders seized farms, leaving rural families destitute. Many coal miners were unemployed, and a record number of Americans abandoned the countryside and moved to big cities as urban areas expanded. And in those big cities, more women were employed, many in clerical jobs.
There was large-scale development of telephones, radios, movies with sound, and more-modern automobiles. Aviator Charles Lindbergh embarked on the world’s first solo nonstop transatlantic flight, while improved technology connected Americans across the country. Traditional mores continued to wane, though Prohibition was still the law. There was now an insatiable need for more innovative goods.
During the Roaring Twenties, department stores expanded in big cities, offering customers generous lines of credit or installment plans. Consumer debt was at its highest in history. Inventors like Charles Schwartz found easily accessible loans—their ideas didn’t even need to make much sense because there seemed to be plenty of money available.
Before his death Schwartz had explained to his funders that his formula would produce silk at half the price of other cellulose-spun fabrics. He sold stock in the company, but soon investors demanded a salable product. Schwartz stalled for months, offering excuses and requesting more funds.
“I have faith in my invention,” he told investors, “but we cannot start production on a shoestring. We’ll need more money. This thing cannot be hurried.”
In 1925, America was still bullish, but the catalysts of the era known as the Great Depression were joining and strengthening. And soon Oscar Heinrich and the field of forensic science would feel the effects, just like the rest of the country.
* * *
—
August Heinrich’s suicide in 1897 had tormented Oscar and his mother for much of their lives. They both fretted over money, but for different reasons. Albertine worried about paying bills, even after she remarried a few years after her husband’s death. Oscar became increasingly morose over his own fluctuating
income, because even a successful forensic scientist could become crippled under the weight of countless financial burdens. Oscar confided in his mother for years about his money troubles, mostly to explain why he could offer her only a modest monthly allowance.
“I will send you something extra a little later as my money comes in,” wrote Oscar. “I have about $2,000.00 outstanding which should have been in over a month ago. Most of them are government accounts so that I can’t hurry them up very much.”
Oscar and his mother talked about his travels, his sons, and his angst over criminal cases. When Albertine died at age seventy, Oscar lost a beloved parent and a loving confidant, a mother who understood the cost of her son’s past fiscal mistakes because she had paid a penalty for her husband’s own blunders.
“The funeral expenses of dead horses have cost me close to fifteen thousand dollars,” Oscar wrote his mother before her death. “Creditors have remained rapacious, interest has mounted, penalties have mounted.”
He would miss his mother terribly, but Albertine’s passing also removed another reminder of his distressing childhood. The criminalist, who had been lauded in newspapers around the world for several years by then, felt a bit restless as he reviewed his work calendar. Even though his caseload had seemed enormous since the Siskiyou train robbery two years earlier, he still needed more clients, more money.
Between 1923 and 1925, he had investigated a bobsled accident in Colorado, a bank robbery in Tacoma, and the murder of a police officer in Boulder. He was mentioned in hundreds of articles—his stack of newspaper clippings spilled from his shelves, with many focusing on the train robbery. The magazine Redbook featured him in a four-page spread entitled “Manhunt,” while a Washington, D.C., paper touted his methods in “Why Criminals Cannot Avoid Leaving Their Tell-Tale Cards.” Oscar traveled more frequently during this time, to the chagrin of his family, but Oscar’s professional reputation depended on his readiness to report to a crime scene or inside a courthouse.
“My professional calls require me to travel any time on short notice anywhere from seven miles to seven hundred miles or more,” he told a friend. “I think no more of taking a train on a half hour’s notice for a thousand miles’ journey than I do of taking the street car to go to the theater in the evening.”
Oscar also turned his attention to professional writing, a necessity for anyone teaching at a university. He published titles like Checkmating the Forger in Court, The Expert vs. the Alibi, and In Re Questioned Documents, well-received books used by police departments across the country. The Cooperation of a Library Staff with the Criminal Investigator was a nod to John Boynton Kaiser, his irreplaceable reference librarian in Tacoma. He proved to be a better academic writer than a novelist, unfortunately. A career as a respected fiction author was still elusive, but perhaps that might change? His dream—his legacy, he thought—would be to write cautionary tales for boys before they had the chance to become criminals.
“I have an idea that I could write stories for boys that would set the stage for life a little more realistically than it does in most juvenile fiction,” he once said. “And I’d cast the criminal in the role not of the hero but of the victim.”
Boys would surely not want to be victims, Oscar’s theory went. But for now, there were bigger worries then publishing children’s books. His bank account always seemed depleted, yet he still insisted on a summer vacation. Marion requested a trip to one of their favorite spots, a peaceful sojourn that might calm Oscar’s anxiety, even just for a few days. On the afternoon of Saturday, August 1, 1925, the four Heinrichs loaded up the car and drove seventy miles north, to one of the most beautiful places in Northern California, each hoping for a lovely time.
* * *
—
The room was spacious but very bright, almost too bright. Oscar Heinrich glanced at the guest of honor, noting his bright white teeth and blank expression. He peered through the small window at the other end of the room, but there was nothing but darkness.
It was five o’clock—he should have been able to spot the waning sunlight of dusk bouncing off the ripples of the Russian River, where his boys liked to splash on the shore and chase birds. The family’s vacation spot in Sonoma County’s Summerhome Park was splendid. It was such a shame that he wasn’t there that night.
Oscar squinted at the charred body of Charles Henry Schwartz, the eminent inventor, ambitious chemist, and blatant philanderer. Schwartz smelled dreadful as he lay on his back in the undertaker’s room in Walnut Creek. His large teeth were bone white in contrast to the remainder of his blackened body. Much of his muscle tissue and flesh was burned off. He certainly looked like the victim of an accidental fire, thought Oscar.
Oscar measured each of Schwartz’s body parts, along with his height. Oscar poked the inside of Schwartz’s stomach and collected a small amount of its contents, evidence from his final meal. He jotted down the number of teeth and noticed that an upper right molar had been skillfully removed. He carefully lifted each of Schwartz’s fingers and noticed there were no fingerprints. Odd, thought Oscar. The fingerprints should have been still visible, despite the fire. He peered at the body’s eye sockets and noted that the eyeballs were missing.
Schwartz lay prone with his mouth open, his neck tilted back. The deputy coroner had bound his hands, while his legs were tied with cloth. His knees were bent from rigor mortis. There were specks of black material littered around the table, flecks of skin. Oscar documented the evidence with his camera, producing negatives of three profile shots of the head and two shots of the entire body. His camera focused on the soles of the feet.
“Exposures were made in each case with filter A on panchromatic plate G.D. 12 inch lens at stop U.S. 32 8 minutes each,” he wrote.
The criminalist peered inside Schwartz’s skull through his mouth—empty. He used surgical scissors to carefully remove part of the scalp. As the skin and hair lay on the table, Oscar squinted and bent over Schwartz’s head. He reached for measuring tape and glanced over at the undertaker. Part of the skull was cracked along a fissure as if someone had hit him several times with a hammer or a hatchet. Schwartz had not been killed by a botched lab experiment, like police suspected. He had been murdered. This was officially a homicide investigation.
Now it was Oscar’s job to identify the killer. Was it a resentful lover, a begrudging competitor, or perhaps a jealous wife? The suspect list could be long, which was never good news to Oscar.
* * *
—
Murder? Schwartz’s wife was hysterical after she had identified the chemist’s body. She wept over the details of their last conversation.
“He called me on the telephone just a little while ago,” Schwartz’s wife told investigators. “He said he had almost finished his work and was coming home soon.”
It was certainly her husband, she cried, before collapsing on the floor. The family’s physician examined the body and nodded. “I’ve seen the body and it’s that of Mr. Schwartz,” confirmed Dr. Alfred H. Ruedy.
Charles Schwartz was dead, Oscar was sure. And a murderer would surely escape the noose if the criminalist and his forensic tools didn’t work quickly enough.
The house on Oxford Street was silent at ten o’clock as Oscar opened the door to his office on the ground floor. He stepped inside one of his two dark rooms and flipped off the switch. He plunged the glass plates from his camera into a solution and transferred them to a washing bath concocted to remove chemical residue. By midnight, the negatives were hanging on a drying rack, ready for printing in the morning.
Oscar unwrapped the sections of scalp he had removed from the corpse and placed each piece in separate containers before carefully covering them with a 10 percent potassium hydroxide solution for maceration. The chemical would soften the scalp pieces, making them more malleable for experiments, a technique still used by modern forensic scientists. In other murder cases, Oscar
used the same solution to remove the tissue from body parts to reveal bones. After sleeping just a few hours that night, Oscar Heinrich and his assistant stepped inside Charles Schwartz’s lair the next day, a dead chemist’s own private laboratory.
The science of chemistry had seduced Oscar decades earlier, when the teenager shadowed druggists who blended medicines at the pharmacy where he had worked in Tacoma, Washington. Since then, the forensic scientist had honed his skills in a wide array of sciences, but of all disciplines, chemistry held his deepest appreciation—it dazzled him. And he admired any chemist’s journey to discover a new drug, a unique test, or a fresh way to uncover a complicated chemical reaction. Dressed in smocks, gloves, and goggles, chemists handled dangerous substances daily—most were either flammable or poisonous. It was a perilous career at times but one that Oscar valued. Truthfully, he might have been content with toiling inside a chemistry lab for the remainder of his life, but forensic science drew him into a more lucrative, intoxicating world.
In early August 1925, as Oscar wandered around Charles Schwartz’s massive lab in Walnut Creek, he began to visually reconstruct the scene. His first assignment was to answer the most crucial questions: How had the fire begun and where? A member of the district attorney’s staff and the deputy state fire marshal eyeballed glass beakers and crouched near mysterious liquid on the floor. They reviewed their suspect list, which included Schwartz’s furious fiancée and the envious chemists in Europe who had threatened him. Suicide was briefly mentioned, but he was beaten on the back of the head. His wife subscribed to the theory that murderous rival scientists had killed him.
“He was murdered by people who wanted to get his secret formula,” she told the sheriff. “I’m sure they set fire to the plant to hide their crime.”
American Sherlock Page 18