“The book which you remember and concerning which you have so kindly inquired is not yet written,” Oscar wrote a friend. “There never has been any difficulty about a publisher for it. In fact, Appleton is waiting for something from me now.”
Crafting stories to both titillate and educate readers would motivate him to carry on at his writing desk. He seemed to hope to die with a pen in his hand, not a magnifying glass.
“As you know,” Oscar wrote to his friend, “writing maketh an exact man.”
It would be decades before he would learn whether that fantasy would become real.
* * *
—
Her tibia lay next to her fibula. A measuring tape stretched out alongside her humerus, her upper arm. It was easy to lose count of so many tiny bones. She had been scattered across the mudflats of Bay Farm Island, precisely where Oscar Heinrich predicted she would be found, about twelve miles from El Cerrito.
Two searchers carrying shovels found the skull pieces buried beneath a drawbridge by a river. Small clamshells adhered to her bones. When Oscar received the evidence at his lab, he felt satisfied, even relieved. Once again, his unique methods worked, separating him from the lesser investigators who claimed to be his peers. No one else could have accomplished this, he crowed to himself. Oscar removed his tweed jacket, rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt, and snapped on his dark rubber gloves once again.
“Examined a skull which has been cut in several fragments with a saw and cast into the waters of San Francisco Bay from the Bridge leading to Bay Farm Island,” Oscar wrote. “Killed by a blow on the top of the head with a blunt instrument and thereafter her body was dismembered and cut up into small units and these units distributed over Alameda and Contra Costa County.”
Oscar slid her upper and lower jawbones in place, completing the skull. Her head faced toward the ceiling with her jaws wide open, as if she was killed in mid-scream. A pair of schoolboys unearthed a bag containing her kneecaps, ribs, and other bones, meaning that someone had tried to remove her flesh using chemicals. The killer also buried a large piece of her torso under the bridge on Bay Farm Island, along with a lung. Police found a piece of a woman’s breast and her abdomen in Rodeo, thirty miles north. The El Cerrito marsh where the scalp was found was about halfway between the two locations.
“It may be tentatively assumed that dismemberment was effected near the scene of the attack,” Oscar noted.
The murderer likely killed her and then mutilated her body in the same location to avoid being caught with a corpse, he thought. As Oscar finished reassembling the mystery woman, an Oakland dentist confirmed her identity using a customized porcelain crown in her lower jawbone: Bessie Ferguson. She had recently been reported missing. Oscar stood to the side while her mother wept. After her family left, Oscar stepped back and surveyed his ghastly jigsaw puzzle.
He had assembled a nearly complete skeleton of a woman who was once beautiful, provocative . . . and devious. Oscar had never met someone quite like Bessie Ferguson. But now he depended on her to reveal her killer.
* * *
—
Her parents were bereaved but perhaps not that surprised—they had been concerned about their thirty-year-old daughter for years. The Fergusons were a devoted family with four girls (including one who had died the year before) and three boys. This was a nightmare for her parents.
William and Annie Ferguson shook Oscar’s hand inside his Berkeley laboratory. He asked about their family background, searching for insight . . . and suspects. Family squabbles that turned deadly were not all that unusual. And the Fergusons’ history was fraught with tragedy.
Bessie’s father was a flour miller until he had been paralyzed after an accident five years earlier. Her older brother, Will, was a thirty-seven-year-old apprentice miller who suffered a stroke after separating from his wife. He struggled as a single father, so Bessie lovingly cared for him.
She was educated, studious, and very attractive, with a styled bob haircut and curvy figure. But somewhere along the way, Bessie’s plan for a wonderful life had shifted. It might have started to veer off course at age twenty-seven, when she married Sidney d’Asquith, a gambler who loved to bet at the racetrack.
“Kept the family broke,” wrote Oscar after talking with her mother. “Lived together for 2 or 3 years.”
Bessie was trapped in an unhappy marriage when she began working for a handsome San Francisco businessman, an employer who would later become her lover. She eventually became a nurse, but she hadn’t worked steadily for at least three years. Bessie was living alone in Oakland, the victim of a string of bad choices despite a supportive family. And soon she would make one final, grievous mistake.
Despite being chronically underemployed, Bessie Ferguson always had spending money, her mother noticed. She was naturally modish, hauling around expensive bags, stylish clothes, and even a diamond ring.
Her mother suspected she was playing a tricky game by carrying on affairs with several men. She used various names, including “d’Asquith” and “Mrs. J. Loren.” One paramour was an accountant, her former employer in San Francisco. There was also a dentist and a physician, both in Oakland. She stashed love letters and provocative notes inside a trunk, in case she needed leverage on her lovers later on.
Many people had love affairs, of course, without becoming victims of murder. But most people weren’t quite as calculating as Bessie Ferguson. For more than seven years, she extorted money from at least three men, each of whom was paying for a child who didn’t exist. One “father” suggested that, because of Bessie’s unstable life, she should send their daughter to family members.
“The only way is to have her away in a good healthy place with the proper people,” he wrote her. “They need not adopt her, but it should look to the public that you are not the mother; you owe that to yourself and family.”
Another former lover threatened to cut off her financial support if she didn’t accept proper healthcare. “We never know what you are going to do as your word is not good,” wrote the man. “One thing, young lady, you will line up with a hospital or some institution, or I will not have anything to say to you further.”
Bessie had been sleeping at the Antlers Hotel in San Francisco for more than a week, receiving male callers there. But she was planning to check out on August 19, less than a week before her scalp and ear were discovered in El Cerrito. She asked her mother to meet her at a downtown corner in Oakland. They chatted about nothing really, and then Bessie fixed her fur-collared brown coat and collected her things. She had to dash off to an appointment, one that seemed a bit fishy to her mother. Bessie planned to meet a very prominent political figure in Contra Costa County, a sheriff named Frank Barnet.
“I won’t be with him long, though,” she told her mother. “I’ve got to see the doctor a little later.”
Bessie kissed her goodbye and vanished. The next time Annie Ferguson saw her daughter, she was a skeleton lying on Oscar Heinrich’s laboratory table.
* * *
—
The forensic scientist picked up pieces of Bessie’s skull and ran his fingers along the jagged edges. Just days earlier he had used her bones to confirm a murder, and now he hoped it would help unmask her killer. He called Berkeley police chief August Vollmer to update him, even though it was being handled by Oakland police. Oscar typically discussed his theories with Vollmer, confiding in him even before he discussed the evidence with cops actually working the case.
When Oscar had first examined Bessie’s ear, he suspected that the killer was a hunter or a meat butcher, someone skilled with a knife. But examining and assembling her bones changed his opinion—there was more finesse.
“The work is neatly done,” Oscar wrote. “Seven starts were made with the saw before the operator was satisfied to cut through the skull on the primary separation.”
She hadn’t been h
acked, but the cuts weren’t precise. The killer wasn’t a professional surgeon, but he did have some medical training. Oscar was building the profile of a murderer, much like he had in Father Heslin’s case. Scotland Yard detectives had used criminal profiling almost forty years earlier to analyze Jack the Ripper. They believed he was likely a butcher or a physician, though a pair of London physicians later disagreed. They argued that the serial killer left too many gaping holes in his victims to have any real knife skills. Of course, Jack the Ripper died in anonymity—Oscar certainly hoped this case would fare better.
“The skill shown requires the candidate in this case to have had the ordinary training in dissection such as is given to physicians and dentists during their first year at a medical school,” he told detectives.
The murderer used lime to age the remains, another mark of a scientific education and a calculating mind—this man wasn’t a simple hunter. The killer likely had thick, dark brown hair based on strands found on the clothing that didn’t match Bessie’s hair. Oscar constructed a criminal profile based on those clues, and then he wanted to settle on a motive. If he could sort out why she died, it might point to the killer.
There were several possible scenarios. Oscar wondered if she had died during a botched abortion, because Bessie told her mother that she was planning to visit a doctor. But Oscar examined her torso and found no evidence of any procedure. The criminalist searched her discarded suitcase and discovered sanitary supplies. An unwanted pregnancy was unlikely.
Oscar thought about Charles Schwartz, the calculating chemist. He wondered if Bessie’s killer had read about Oscar’s work on that case. Charles Schwartz was clever, but he had left behind some crucial clues for Oscar.
Bessie Ferguson’s killer had spent great effort concealing her remains in far-flung locations. He murdered her during one of the darkest nights of the month. He burned her flesh with lime—a meticulous cover-up that led investigators toward a disturbing conclusion. Perhaps he had killed before and might kill again.
* * *
—
Oscar Heinrich was happily married, there was no doubt. His wife, Marion, was steadfast, committed, and supportive—a marvelous mother and partner. She often accepted a minor role in his hectic public life; she had accepted that years ago. Oscar was constantly flattered by media attention—the name E. O. Heinrich could be found within most big crime stories on the West Coast by 1925.
But with those cases often came a curious situation that might have made an insecure wife wobble a bit. Heinrich’s former girlfriends sometimes emerged, women who hoped to reconnect with the famous forensic scientist. In fact, the previous summer Oscar had lunched with a former flame named Louise in San Francisco, and he told his mother about it before her death. Unfortunately for Louise, it was a meal that left Oscar universally unimpressed with the women of his past.
“She tried to persuade me by her deportment and her interest in what I was doing and had accomplished in my own personal development that she was just as lovely as I used to think she was when we were young,” Oscar wrote to his mother. “There is nothing which can become so utterly dead as a man’s past love.”
Oscar adored his wife; he had refused to join several professional organizations because their nighttime events had never included an invitation for wives. He was loyal, even as he joked about his priorities in life. “I love my pipe, my books, my wife, my children in about the order named,” he wrote Kaiser. “Marion has been the lure for my spare time relaxations.”
But they were aging and, at forty-three, the forensic scientist was candid about his marriage.
“Marion moves along in an orderly way,” Oscar confided to his mother. “She is a fine mother to the boys and a helpful wife in every possible way. I notice her hair is beginning to turn a little gray. Not enough to cause any concern but yet enough to show that she as well as I are growing up.”
As Oscar grew older he became most wistful about his youth and curious about the remainder of his life.
* * *
—
When he stepped inside the hunting lodge, Oscar could smell death. Gordon Rowe owned the small cabin; he was a San Francisco businessman who had been Bessie Ferguson’s employer before he became her lover. He was missing, for now, but investigators were tracking him down. Police had found letters in Bessie’s trunk, love notes that indicated Rowe’s willingness to “support his child,” as Oscar wrote in his field journal. Of course, there was no child, and police theorized that he might have discovered Bessie’s scheme. Oscar knelt on the floor of the lodge, searching for blood. Later he would discover quite a lot, but not a drop was human blood—another dead end.
“I have inquired into his history and his training and into his behavior during the early days of this investigation,” Oscar told investigators. “I have found nothing at all.”
Oscar was discouraged—Gordon Rowe was unlikely to be the killer, and this case was proving to be exhausting. The criminalist reread his notes from his interview with Annie Ferguson, Bessie’s mother. He noticed her especially terse language about another suspect, Alameda County sheriff Frank Barnet, the political figure who was on Bessie’s appointment list the night she disappeared. Annie Ferguson believed that her daughter had told Barnet that she was pregnant. It appeared Bessie was running the same extortion scheme yet again. But this time, had she picked a less pliant victim?
“Says Barnett wanted her to go to a doctor, Bessie refused to go,” wrote Oscar in his notes. “[Mother] claims Bessie was thoroughly disgusted with him.”
The married sheriff was a strong suspect because of his public standing and criminal justice background. But the forensic scientist had taken soil samples from Barnet’s home, and the organic material didn’t match the sand he found at the crime scene. Oscar thought that Barnet might have been capable of killing a mistress, but this murder was too sophisticated for a simple sheriff without a partner.
“The skill shown in the dismemberment of the body to my mind excludes Barnett as the dismemberer,” concluded Oscar. “The idea of two people being associated in this work one of whom has done such a complete job of dismembering at the behest of another seems to me too remote seriously to be entertained.”
Oscar scanned his list of suspects, men who might have wanted Bessie Ferguson dead. The criminalist had dismissed Gordon Rowe and Sheriff Barnet, but there were five other names. One was a relative of the Fergusons who was a butcher, but he had provided a convincing alibi. Oscar was now left with four strong suspects: a successful physician, a respected surgeon, and two dentists. But soon he would focus on just one name—a curious man who had admired Bessie Ferguson from afar.
* * *
—
“Talking will fatigue men. The minute some important function of the body begins to get fatigued, it reacts upon your mind, upon your mental ability to resist and to maintain a lie.”
The students stared back at their professor as he stood at a blackboard during his forensic science course at UC Berkeley. Since he began teaching eight years earlier, Oscar had developed a compelling lecture style that was energetic and engaging, especially when he explained how to interrogate a suspect.
“Where a man is willing to take the time to make his subject tired, he can get that result,” he told the class. “Now that wasn’t torture, but it comes as close to the third degree as anything we have.”
After almost a decade of teaching, Oscar was one of the most popular instructors in the university’s criminology department, a recent offshoot of the cop college that Oscar had helped create in 1916. His influence in the classroom was expanding because now he was educating criminal attorneys, social workers, bank officials, and other students of criminology.
Oscar held up photographic enlargements to illustrate how to detect forged signatures using the light and shade of handwritten letters. He pointed to the tiny tails on blood droplets during anoth
er class on bloodstains. These college courses provided the criminalist with a steady source of income, and by 1925, he was teaching hundreds of students.
John Boynton Kaiser was impressed with Oscar’s progress as an educator, but he was also a bit alarmed by the quick education he had offered. He gently cautioned Oscar about giving students too much false confidence—good advice from a bright friend who had counseled plenty of blowhard researchers.
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” Kaiser warned. “One cannot be a finished psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and criminologist as well as a chemist and lawyer in five weeks.”
The librarian was concerned that Oscar’s students could claim to be experts, when in fact they were amateurs who might convince juries to convict on dubious evidence. And that’s what soon began to happen, much to Oscar’s dismay. Oscar described to Kaiser a frustrating encounter in court with a firearms “expert.” “Typical of the policeman who has been sold in scientific investigation,” he complained. “He seems to feel that with a microscope, a camera and a book or two that he can take the spotlight and hold it.”
During the nascent era of forensic science development in the 1920s, just about anyone could market themselves as an expert witness—a dangerous trend in criminal justice and a potent threat to Oscar’s financial future.
“The moral seems to be that if we show these fellows very much,” he told Kaiser, “we will soon have as many ballistics experts as gunsmiths.”
Oscar found himself increasingly at odds with other forensic specialists. Four years earlier, Oscar began writing Albert Osborn in New York, the country’s foremost expert in document examination and forged document analysis. Their correspondence was cordial, but in 1925, Oscar became increasingly threatened, even paranoid of the other criminalist’s motives.
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