American Sherlock

by Kate Winkler Dawson

  “They match up line for line,” he told the jury. “These are the marks on the bullet made by the defects of the barrel.”

  No two guns would contain the same defects inside their barrels, he assured the jury, so no two guns would produce identical grooves on bullets. Colwell’s defense attorney had remained calm through most of Oscar’s testimony, but his mood quickly changed as jurors thumbed through the photos.

  “I will make a general objection to the introduction of any of these pictures upon the ground that it is incompetent, irrelevant, immaterial, and the proper foundation had not been laid for their introduction,” Arthur Lindauer bellowed.

  “The objection will be overruled,” replied the judge.

  Oscar grinned, but not for very long. Colwell’s defense team attacked every bit of his testimony, including how he dismantled and examined Colwell’s gun, how he cleaned the bullets, and even the way he calculated the size of the bullets.

  “Will you compute three-eighths of an inch?” demanded Lindauer. “It would be point 38, wouldn’t it?”

  “No, it is point 35,” replied Oscar calmly. “The reading point 38, that is different from three-eighths.”

  “I understand,” said Lindauer.

  “Well I want to know if the jury understands what I am talking about,” Oscar snapped.

  “I wonder if the jury does,” replied Lindauer snidely.

  Oscar was being undermined over science, and he was incensed. After that curt exchange, the prosecutor dismissed him. As the criminalist sat down, he scanned the defense’s witness list—his old rival Chauncey McGovern, the defense expert who had challenged Oscar during many cases, including Father Heslin’s murder four years earlier.

  Oscar was miffed—now McGovern claimed to be trained in forensic ballistics? It seemed ridiculous. His first appearance at trial as a firearms expert was just a few weeks earlier, during a murder case that still enraged Oscar.

  McGovern had made some incorrect claims on the stand, lies that contradicted Oscar’s conclusions and flummoxed the jury. The murderer had been released.

  And now this trial was matching the two bitter adversaries in court once again. McGovern was about to accuse Oscar Heinrich, the nation’s most well-known forensic scientist, of fraud. Oscar sat close to the district attorney and glared at McGovern. He seethed as the fifty-three-year-old sat in the witness chair. McGovern held up Oscar’s photos of the test bullet and the lethal bullet, photographed side by side, and stared at the jury.

  “Absolutely a physical impossibility,” scoffed McGovern to the jury. “The microscope would not let you take the picture. It is an absolute physical impossibility to place those bullets together into some shape that you can make a photomicrograph showing the lines alongside. You have to make a picture of this, and a picture of that, and paste the pictures together.”

  The jurors listened as McGovern accused Oscar of taking separate photos, trimming them carefully, and photographing them together as a composite—a magic trick, a devious sleight of hand. And if Oscar had fabricated that experiment, none of his testimony could be trusted, concluded McGovern. One juror was confused and raised his hand.

  “Suppose you take a photograph of one and a photograph of the other, how are you going to take that line as to make them correspond?” he asked.

  “You would cut off part of one picture and cut off part of the other picture and put the print parts together, like Mr. Heinrich did here,” McGovern replied.

  The jury still seemed confused about how that one small, perfect black line separating the two bullets could result from two photos that were smashed together. Oscar had offered them a simple explanation earlier: the line was the intersection of the two prisms from the two lenses of the comparison microscope.

  “I just wanted to know how you get the lines on the picture?” another exasperated juror asked McGovern.

  “That is the only way, you cannot get them through the microscope,” replied McGovern, “you have to take them with two pictures.”

  McGovern seemed resolute—a forensic scientist simply could not photograph two bullets under a comparison microscope. Yes, he admitted, he would be able to photograph two bullets under a normal microscope with just one lens, but three-fourths of each bullet would be cut off by the eyepiece. He absolutely refused to believe that Oscar’s photos were authentic.

  As the prosecutor pummeled McGovern over his lack of experience with ballistics, the expert became defensive and then apologetic.

  “I had four hours sleep last night,” McGovern explained to the judge. “I am at your disposal, if it takes us until hell freezes over, very gladly, to use a popular term.”

  Jurors gasped, and Oscar looked surprised. McGovern shrank in his seat and looked over at the judge.

  “Now, I don’t think we need any expression of that kind,” snapped prosecutor Leo Dunnell.

  “Listen, Mr. Expert,” warned the judge, “can’t you express yourself in more respectful words, and indulge in a language that is fit?”

  “I stand corrected, Your Honor,” he replied.

  The assistant district attorney quickly thought for a moment and whispered to Oscar, who smiled. They would set a trap. He asked McGovern if he thought Oscar Heinrich could replicate his experiment in court in less than five minutes.

  “His answer was that I couldn’t do it in five minutes or two hours,” Oscar said to a friend.

  With that haughty declaration, McGovern fell for the ploy. Oscar returned home to retrieve his laboratory equipment. Soon he was carefully setting up his comparison microscope and a camera on a long table in front of the jury.

  “I noticed some of the jurymen look at their watches,” Oscar remembered. “I went right ahead and had the setup complete in four minutes.”

  Oscar placed the two bullets under his microscope, and soon each juror stepped forward and peered through the lenses. Colwell’s defense attorney quickly objected.

  “Now, if Your Honor please,” pleaded Lindauer, “not for the purpose of looking through to see the bullets; the purposed is to explain how he took the picture; that is all.”

  The judge overruled the objection and issued a simple request to jurors as they stood up: “Be careful not to jolt the table.” Each man bent over the microscope as Oscar issued instructions.

  “The eye should be brought right close to the lens,” Oscar said. “It is not very safe to put your weight on the table.”

  They nodded.

  “I found that, in working with this microscope and studying it for its possibilities, that if I could put my camera lens in this position, instead of my eye,” Oscar explained as they filed past, “that I would get a photograph on my negative. Gentlemen, that is what I did in taking this photograph.”

  It was clear to each juror that the grooves and ridges on the pair of bullets matched—they were fired from the same gun. But one juror looked up, still doubtful of the funny photographs and the suspicious science behind them.

  “I’d like to see him actually shoot that picture here again while we’re all watching him do it,” said the juror, “and I’d like to look at the picture after it’s been developed.”

  Oscar smiled and agreed. He strode over to his setup and snapped the photos. A commercial photographer was summoned and traveled with him to a nearby darkroom and waited with him for the pictures to develop. Later that afternoon, Oscar stood before the jury with the new photographs—they were identical to the ones he had previously taken in his lab. McGovern fumed as Oscar remained characteristically stoic.

  The jury retired, and after days of deliberating, the panel emerged . . . with no decision. The jurors were deadlocked over the scientific strife between Oscar Heinrich and Chauncey McGovern. The judge declared a mistrial. It was so aggravating to Oscar—how could they not believe him, after all his demonstrations?

  The district attorney l
aunched a retrial in May with the same evidence and the same experts, including Oscar and McGovern. Oscar readied himself for dire news when the jury returned in less than two hours—it might be another hung jury. But it was good news, finally. Guilty. They recommended life in prison for the man who gunned down his former boss.

  Oscar’s ingenious technique using a camera and a microscope established an international legal precedent. It inspired refinement of the equipment so that scientists today can offer more efficient, accurate evidence.

  But like other forensic tools, firearms identification can still be challenged successfully in court because of a lack of scientific study. The 2009 landmark report from the National Academy of Sciences concluded that forensic ballistics can be valuable during criminal investigations, but the panel cautioned that those tests should never be the only source of evidence.

  “The committee agrees that class characteristics are helpful in narrowing the pool of tools that may have left a distinctive mark,” read the report. “Individual patterns from manufacture or from wear might, in some cases, be distinctive enough to suggest one particular source, but additional studies should be performed to make the process of individualization more precise and repeatable.”

  As with most other forensic disciplines, the legal system must demand more tests and more accountability from ballistics analysts. But in 1926, Oscar’s success in the murder trial of Martin Colwell was a massive step forward for forensic ballistics. Firearms pioneer Calvin Goddard begged Oscar to send him the photos from the case to illustrate how the comparison microscope could be used in court. The following year, Goddard would use the same device in the famous Sacco and Vanzetti case. Oscar continued to refine his technique, offering to collaborate with other ballistics experts.

  “I have myself added a comparison eye-piece to my outfit,” he told one expert. “If you will bring your monocular along we can see what can be done toward uniting the images obtained through microscopes of different makes.”

  Microscope manufacturers hired Oscar as a consultant to help adapt their own equipment for legal cases. Attorneys around the country requested him.

  Colwell’s second trial served as an epiphany for Oscar—jurors could be capricious regardless of their jobs, their education, or their religions. But he felt optimistic because he had finally sorted out how to connect with a jury. If he couldn’t seem to explain it to them, then he would show them in every way possible. Jurors were reticent to convict on evidence based on strange science. Now he understood.

  The scars left by Fatty Arbuckle’s case seemed to be finally fading. And Martin Colwell’s trial offered Oscar a belated but gratifying victory over Chauncey McGovern. They would continue to face each other in court for another seven years, but “America’s Sherlock Holmes” would always be the favored expert.

  * * *

  —

  “Happy birthday, old top, and may your shadow never grow less!”

  Oscar greeted his closest friend, John Boynton Kaiser, at the end of 1926 in his annual Christmas letter, which was a customary review of his life. The criminalist was still delighting in the attention from other scientists in the wake of Martin Colwell’s murder trial. His business had swelled, which was welcomed news, but it also proved to be a hinderance to his family life.

  “I get my greatest joy in life out of my family,” he wrote Kaiser. “I see them practically but once a day. This is at dinnertime in the evening.”

  And that trend would continue for two years as he traveled almost constantly.

  “I have been too busy. During the last sixty days I have worked in Colorado, Kansas, Utah, Nevada, Oregon and miscellaneous spots in California,” he wrote a friend. “I find that I haven’t the endurance that I had twenty or even ten years ago.”

  He was trying to limit his time at work to just eleven hours a day, a nearly impossible goal, and now he felt even more financial pressure. When Theodore turned eighteen in 1928, Oscar considered his request to spend six months traveling throughout Europe. His elder son hoped to develop a keen eye for artwork and architecture while fulfilling a language requirement for his upcoming graduate studies at the University of Cambridge in England. Oscar scoured his many financial logs and sketched out numerous budgets before reluctantly agreeing. Theo spent months traveling England, Germany, Italy, and France. He sailed through the Panama Canal and studied inside the world’s most famous museums. His trips drained Oscar of thousands of dollars, and the fiscal strain was affecting his business.

  “I am returning several book lists that have been on my desk, I wanted to possess them,” he wrote Kaiser. “I have heard from Theodore, have arranged to bring him home and am now temporarily broke. You can draw your own conclusions.”

  Mortimer, Oscar’s younger son, was now fourteen, and both boys were becoming expensive dependents.

  “Each had to be shoved through the hospital for an appendicitis operation. Then they had to be supplied with vacations to recuperate,” he told a friend. “Next Mortimer became tooth conscious and now is having teeth fixed. On the other hand, Theodore provided a hot finish to his vacation by burning up his Studebaker car.”

  But Oscar also greatly admired his maturing son, because Theodore was developing into a prolific writer, like his dad, by publishing articles about gardening in high-profile magazines.

  “Perhaps I was a little sentimental about it,” he wrote a friend, “but the boy had just sold another article to House Beautiful on his own initiative and merit.”

  Eventually Theo would find more success in national magazines than his father. He was a bright student with a seemingly charmed life—a gift bestowed by a parent who had little growing up.

  “I shall be with you in spirit, proud that you have a purpose to become useful to the world, ready with my meager reserve of strength to support you,” he wrote Theo. “If you succeed I too shall do so vicariously. If you fail to come back to me, I shall not grumble. I shall do as we always have done—mop up, reorganize and start over.”

  But his son continued to spend money without submitting financial reports, despite Oscar’s repeated frantic requests. He had even threatened to withhold Theo’s monthly allowance.

  “If you don’t pay attention I shall delay getting off a remittance until you take the time to satisfy me,” Oscar wrote.

  For years he worked too much with no rest, drowning under financial debt. And soon pride in his sons slowly developed into resentment. “I cannot avoid feeling somewhat uneasy about the time you have given over to roistering on the Mediterranean to the seeming abandonment of parts of what I understood to be your program,” Oscar warned Theo. “California is now entering the effects of the depression. What you must do to cooperate is to study economics during your spare time and prepare yourself to skid along the bottom with the rest of us.”

  Oscar was mildly encouraged by the hint from Theo that he considered being an engineer, like his father once had been, but Oscar was also concerned about his son’s sense of responsibility, his lack of urgency over money. Theo didn’t seem to understand how the fear of financial failure had deeply affected his father—or his grandfather August Heinrich. Oscar tried to explain to Theo how his own father’s incompetence had almost doomed the teenager before his life had really begun.

  “Your grandfather was creative but without training, and died a poor man leaving your father at your present age to win fame and fortune unaided with advice or guidance,” Oscar wrote, “and with the added handicap of having to apologize for some of your grandfather’s blunderings.”

  Oscar was exhausted from obsessing over personal budgets and an erratic income. And he fretted now over Theo’s future.

  “If I should die tomorrow there would be no support for you and to carry out your present ambitions you would find it necessary to work your way as I did,” he warned Theo. “I am approaching that age where I begin to feel my energies curtaili
ng.”

  Oscar often felt conflicted over his children, and it was troubling, especially as he grew older. He wanted to offer his sons a privileged life, a chance to pursue their own satisfying, lucrative careers. He pressured them to succeed, but he also warmly welcomed them home; he complimented both sons often. They strived to please him, an often-futile effort. Oscar was constantly running from his father’s demons, abused by his own insecurities. He confided in August Vollmer that somedays he felt simply beaten.

  “I must overcome the fear complex which I acquired in the early days of my professional career when I was being chased by the sheriff every ninety days or so to yield unto my creditors what I had hoped might be bestowed upon my hungry dependents,” Oscar told Vollmer. “It was then I learned to live each day so that I could tell the banker to go to hell.”

  By his late forties, Oscar seemed unsatisfied with his own life despite incredible professional success. He spent afternoons gazing through the large picture windows of his laboratory overlooking the Golden Gate.

  “I am persistently and continually beset with the desire to see for myself what the ships meet with beyond the horizon to the west,” he wrote a friend. “Someday I am going to follow the lure of the sun and trek westward-ho.”

  But he wasn’t destined for that kind of life. And in less than three years, America and Oscar Heinrich would struggle with so much more than simply lost dreams.

  * * *

  —

  In 1929, a disastrous string of events created the country’s worst economic crisis in its history. In March, the stock market had a correction, stunning anyone who had invested money they borrowed on margin from their stockbrokers. Millions of people went bankrupt, and nearly 25 percent of the labor force was jobless by 1933. Banks closed as Americans rushed to withdraw their money.

  In October, the Black Thursday stock market crash sent stock prices plummeting by almost 25 percent. It would cost investors $30 billion, which was almost the expense of World War I. The profits of the Roaring Twenties were wiped away. It would become the longest and most severe depression in the history of the industrialized Western world.