American Sherlock

by Kate Winkler Dawson

  Oscar wanted to learn more about the chemist—by profiling the victim, he might be able to uncover his killer. The criminalist searched for items to test: beakers, burners, test tubes, and books, but scientific equipment in the laboratory was sparse. Odd, Oscar thought, because those items were necessities to any chemist. And there were no gas or water sources, so how could he work on his formula for synthetic silk? The criminalist glanced around the lab again. He called over the investigators.

  A fraud, Oscar declared. Schwartz was duping lenders. There was no recipe for synthetic silk, and there never had been. Schwartz wasn’t an enterprising chemist. He was a con artist.

  Schwartz’s Ponzi scheme was a dicey swindle. It was also an excellent motive for murder. Oscar picked up his pad. His list of suspects had just lengthened, and there was so much more work ahead.

  He looked down at the floor’s wooden planks and ordered his assistant to start sweeping while he sifted through the debris. Oscar was certain that Schwartz was a highly intelligent grifter, and now he needed to know more about the blaze. Had Schwartz been murdered before or after it was ignited? Where had the killer been standing? Oscar asked the fire marshal, the first investigator on the scene, if there were any flammable materials in the lab on the night of the fire.

  “Five gallon can of carbon disulfide,” he answered.

  Actually, there were two cans of the colorless, volatile, and flammable liquid, and there were more cans lined up beneath a bench where Schwartz’s body was found. Oscar fiddled with the gasoline lantern on the shelf in an adjoining room and then examined the doors to the lab. One of them was open at the time of the fire, while the other was locked.

  “A Sikes office chair was in the path of the combustion,” he observed. “Shows charring of the varnish completely covering the chair including the underside of the seat.”

  He asked himself a series of questions about the origin of the fire, a self-reflective exercise that any detective would use. “Did the explosion start from the gasoline lamp and later spread to the laboratory,” Oscar wrote down on a notepad, “or did it start in the laboratory and later reach the lamp?”

  He stepped into the hallway, just outside the main doors of the laboratory. “Cracks in flooring on east and west side of door show a running through cracks of a volatile combustible liquid poured on the floor,” he noted. “A match dropped on the floor.”

  The fire was started outside the closed doors and had crawled underneath the door—Oscar realized that the killer had hoped to trap his victim. Maybe Schwartz was killed after the fire started because the blaze didn’t move quickly enough? He still needed more information.

  Oscar turned back to the area where the body was found—someone had started a fire there, too, because he discovered rags soaked with benzol. He examined the floor and decided that the fire was at its hottest by the body. “By tracing the flames on the floor, I found that the fire had not started in one place but five different places,” he told the sheriff.

  This proved that Schwartz had been dead before the fire began, Oscar realized. There was a fire directly under the chemist’s body. It was a dreadful ending to a sad tale—Schwartz was a lothario, a cad, and a con man, but no one deserved to die so terribly. He had been bashed on the back of the head and then set on fire like a piece of garbage. It was time to conclude this investigation.

  Oscar looked around the room and spotted a storage closet. He wondered if Schwartz had been inside the small room before he died. He pulled open the door, then retrieved a spray bottle. The mist lightly landed on the wood, and the luminol droplets glowed on the door. Oscar blinked and adjusted his glasses. Large sprays of blood. “Projection group—consists of several large stains ranging from ¼ to ⅜ inches in diameter projecting forward and downward in an angle of approximately 45 degrees toward the inner end of the closet,” he wrote.

  There was an incredible amount of blood, so much in volume that it had dripped through the closet floor and soaked through to the ceiling of the office below. It was probably a head wound, just like the one Schwartz had received from his killer. The chemist may have stumbled inside the closet before he staggered to the workbenches where he died.

  Oscar poked the blood sprays—the red dots flaked. They were long dried—the fire had not been anywhere near the closet. Schwartz’s body was likely secluded in the closet for hours before the fire. He scraped off samples of the blood and wrapped them carefully in paper for testing later. He made notes and then paused.

  He scanned his notes on the interview with the night watchman. Something wasn’t right—there was a problem with the timeline. He found the detail. The guard told investigators that he had seen Charles Schwartz just ten minutes before the fire. If that were true, thought Oscar, then how could the chemist’s body have been inside the closet for hours before the fire? The criminalist had an idea, and if he was right, it would horrify Americans across the country who had followed the case of the murdered chemist.

  * * *

  —

  When police asked Schwartz’s wife to identify his body, she had recognized his watch, a sure sign that the man on the table was her husband. The night guard agreed that this was his boss, because he had watched Schwartz empty his pockets and count his change that night—and the exact amount of coins were found in the victim’s pocket. What else might help identify her husband? asked police. His missing tooth, replied Mrs. Schwartz.

  Charles Schwartz’s dentist had just removed an upper right molar a few weeks earlier, so Oscar reexamined the body. There was indeed a molar missing. He took a cast of the body’s teeth.

  “That’s the tooth I extracted not very long ago,” confirmed Schwartz’s dentist.

  And then Oscar embarked on a gruesome task. Investigators had recovered the victim’s right eyeball inside the laboratory—the sheriff handed it to Oscar.

  “Replaced the eye in socket prior to making photographs,” he noted.

  When Oscar later dissected the eyeball, he noted that the iris appeared to be punctured, perhaps with a screwdriver. But why? Oscar looked at Mrs. Schwartz’s interview notes. He found her statement about a bizarre burglary at the family’s home during the night of the fire.

  “Every photograph of my husband was gone from the house,” she told police.

  Someone was trying to prevent the police from identifying the corpse, Oscar surmised. Still—the findings seemed to tally with Charles Schwartz’s physical details. Or not. Oscar smiled at the report on Schwartz’s physical exam sent by a life insurance adjuster.

  During most murder investigations, detectives pray for at least one aha moment, a key discovery that cracks the case. Oscar Heinrich was about to present this group of detectives with a chest brimming with key discoveries.

  Charles Schwartz was a slight man at just five feet, four inches, according to the report. Oscar reviewed the corpse’s measurements—the man lying on the coroner’s table was actually three inches taller.

  Oscar quickly scanned his notes from the fire marshal, which reported that the body was in rigor mortis when firefighters found it—knees bent. The stiffening of the muscles and joints wouldn’t usually set in until at least several hours after death. Again—he remembered that the night watchman had seen Schwartz just ten minutes before the fire. Oscar gathered more data. He turned to Contra Costa County sheriff Richard Veale, who was leading the investigation.

  “I’d like to know, first of all, what Schwartz ate for dinner the night of the fire,” Oscar asked.

  “Do you think that makes any difference at this point?” the sheriff replied. “Then I can tell you that he ate cucumbers and beans.”

  “There is nothing in the dead man’s stomach but some undigested meat,” replied Oscar. “And there’s not the slightest trace of cucumbers and beans.”

  The criminalist had received a sample of Schwartz’s hair from a brush a few days earlier and c
ompared it to the hair from the scalp of the corpse.

  “Under the microscope I found them to be entirely different,” Oscar said. “There isn’t even the slightest similarity.”

  Schwartz had a prominent mole on his ear, while the corpse had none. The fingerprints of the victim had been removed with acid, which would have been easily accessible to a chemist. But both Schwartz and the corpse were missing an upper right molar, argued the sheriff. Oscar pulled out a photograph of the tooth cavity.

  “The tooth hadn’t been extracted at all,” he said. “It was knocked out with a chisel. You can see the root still imbedded in the jaw.”

  The tooth had been removed after death. Besides those clues, the body’s condition during autopsy made it seem unlikely that Schwartz had died inside a lab filled with fumes from carbon disulfide.

  “I asked myself what effects these vapors could have had on the victim,” Oscar told the sheriff. “If he had battled for his life against them, a lung hemorrhage would have resulted. The autopsy revealed no such condition. This isn’t Charles Schwartz.”

  The police seemed stunned, and Oscar Heinrich felt satisfied. He had outwitted the calculating chemist.

  * * *

  —

  Later that day, investigators gathered to review Oscar’s findings, still trying to sort out how to present the story to the media. Berkeley police captain Clarence Lee, one of August Vollmer’s top cops, quietly listened to the evidence. He quickly felt nauseated, and Oscar soon discovered why.

  Lee and Charles Schwartz had known each other for years, ever since the chemist became fascinated by the cop’s work at the state’s Identification Bureau, the agency charged with collecting data on criminals and creating records. For three years, Schwartz enjoyed dropping by the station for casual chats with investigators; he explained that he was a local chemist who fancied himself a student of criminology.

  “He tried to give the impression that he worked as a detective in Europe,” Lee told Vollmer, “but when I asked him about his experiences, he was always vague in his answers.”

  Lee and Schwartz chatted about historical crimes, cases in the news, and various investigative techniques. But now Lee grimaced as he recalled one frank conversation in early spring. It had been a debate that began when Schwartz leaned against Lee’s desk at police headquarters and mused about murder.

  “What interests me about murderers, captain,” explained Schwartz, “is their lack of forethought. They simply do not think.”

  “Sometimes they don’t have a chance to think,” replied Lee. “Murder isn’t as easy as it looks. Very often it’s just a single bad break in the luck that ruins the whole scheme.”

  “I grant you that,” Schwartz agreed, “but I am not talking about sudden crimes of passion. I mean those cases where the prospective murderer actually does plan the crime long in advance.”

  Lee had only half-listened to Schwartz’s ponderings much of the time, but months later he recalled one strange musing in particular.

  “It’s amazing to me the way they fail to cover up their tracks,” said Schwartz.

  Captain Lee had not been alarmed months earlier by the chemist’s blunt comments, but he certainly was now. Investigators began hunting victim-turned-killer Charles Schwartz using Oscar’s clues. Catching the murderer was crucial, Oscar agreed. But if he couldn’t identify the man lying on the coroner’s table, this case would forever plague him.

  * * *

  —

  The forensic scientist was exhausted when he held up the pamphlet to the overhead light in his Berkeley laboratory and stared at the print on the cover: The Philosophy of Eternal Brotherhood. It had been found on the body. There were light pencil markings above and below the title. Bloodstains had sprayed on the back cover.

  “Two directions of splash shown,” Oscar wrote in his work journal, “as if book shifted between two successive projections, or bleeding object shifted.”

  Schwartz’s secretary revealed two more of his secrets to police. She had watched the chemist shove $900 into his pocket just hours before the fire; more crucially, she said that months earlier, Schwartz had purchased an advertisement in a San Francisco newspaper for a laboratory assistant, a likely ruse to lure a stranger to visit his company’s building. Charles Schwartz took out several life insurance policies, double indemnity policies covering accidental death that totaled more than $185,000. If he died, his wife would be left with the majority of the money. Oscar declared that this was likely a case of insurance fraud.

  He held up another religious pamphlet found on the body: The Gospel of John the Apostle. He could see a faint signature at the end of a confessional phrase, markings unreadable to police investigators—but not to a forensic scientist. Oscar sprayed a chemical on the booklet, and the faint pencil markings grew darker. Under a microscope, he could read the signature “G. W. Barbe.” He compared the pencil writing from the first booklet, and they seemed to match.

  The victim carried with him a small collection of religious literature with numerous passages underlined. He was a traveling preacher, Oscar guessed, a poor man who spread the gospel as he crisscrossed the country. Instead of using his routine approach to profile the criminal, Oscar created a profile of the victim. Lying near the body was a bindle with a small sewing kit and a bar of soap. A bindle was a cloth bag hanging from the end of a stick that could be rolled up after coffee grounds were used—something that a drifter would carry. The victim was wearing worn socks and clothing, but the man’s short haircut and well-cared-for hands and feet meant that he was not a typical homeless man.

  When newspapers across the country printed the profile of the murder victim, an undertaker in Placerville, California, told police that he had known a preacher who had answered a newspaper ad for a laboratory assistant. Gilbert Warren Barbe was a World War I veteran, a college graduate . . . and a traveling preacher. He had perfectly fit Oscar’s victim profile. Meantime, Charles Schwartz was still a dangerous murderer on the run, a killer chemist who hoped to outsmart police by murdering an innocent man and then faking his own death.

  * * *

  —

  As police continued to investigate Charles Schwartz, his public image evolved from scientist to scoundrel. Heidelberg University in Germany denied that he had ever received a chemistry degree, though police did find a certificate that indicated some study at a minor university in France. He had earned just enough education to make his elaborate plans seem plausible to investors.

  His wife accused him in the newspapers of being a louse, a serial cheat who had begged for forgiveness when his mistresses confronted her. The woman who sued Schwartz, Elizabeth Adam, said he had gifted her with more than $1,000 during the course of their relationship. She denied that she had been intimate with Schwartz, no doubt to protect her own reputation, but he had bragged about their liaisons. Schwartz’s former employer accused him of stealing a bottling machine along with almost two thousand pounds of scrap iron. Schwartz had also threatened a co-worker with a .25-caliber automatic pistol. The press eagerly reported on it all as the manhunt for Schwartz continued.

  With all that attention, he couldn’t stay hidden for long. After his “death,” Schwartz had rented an apartment in Oakland under an assumed name—Harold Warren—creating the persona of a handsome structural engineer who enjoyed entertaining guests with elaborate meals and card games. And that’s how Schwartz spent his final week of freedom, attending parties with neighbors that included loads of laughs and losing at games of cribbage. But on August 3, American newspapers revealed that Schwartz was suspected of murder. Soon, one of “Harold Warrens’” new friends recognized Schwartz from a newspaper photo. And on August 9, Berkeley police captain Clarence Lee, Schwartz’s old acquaintance, tracked him down at his secret apartment around two thirty a.m.

  “Open that door—police!” Lee yelled.

  As the police captain kick
ed in the back door, he heard a shot. He rushed to the living room and found Schwartz lying on the floor with blood pouring from his right eye. A German pistol lay nearby as he gasped—soon his breathing slowed and then stopped.

  A suitcase nearby was partially packed with books and maps inside that hinted he had hoped to travel to Mexico or South America. Poison tablets were beside his bed, and police discovered a tearful note left for his wife. As always, the chemist was determined to dictate the details of his own story, including its finale. In the letter, he told his wife that Gilbert Barbe had indeed visited his lab, hoping for work. When Schwartz turned him away, the preacher suddenly attacked and the chemist beat him to death in self-defense.

  “The only thing I did was I tried to burn him, to wipe out and go,” wrote Schwartz. “I kiss this spot in bidding and kissing you goodbye. My last kiss is for you, Alice.”

  It was a tragic, pointless ending for a killer who had once brimmed with such promise and potential. And no one was satisfied. His wife eventually recovered some of the money after several court fights with the insurance companies, but after legal bills, it was unlikely she was left with much.

  Schwartz’s account of being attacked in his lab was deemed unreliable, but there would be no judicial justice for Gilbert Barbe or his family, either, though he was given a grand military funeral. As the Schwartz case concluded, investigators wondered about possible accomplices, perhaps even his wife, but police captain Clarence Lee shook his head. “Schwartz was too familiar with crime detection through his constant interest in work being done in the identification bureau to dare the risk of accomplices,” he replied.

  And Oscar Heinrich agreed, based on the elaborate murder plan. “It was too perfect to have been the work of more than one,” he concluded.