American Sherlock

by Kate Winkler Dawson

  Crime rates skyrocketed while suicide rates rose. In 1931, a damning government report condemned Prohibition laws for its negative effects on American society, leading to its repeal. August Vollmer was one of the authors of the Wickersham Report, which castigated police for failing “to detect and arrest criminals guilty of the many murders.” Those accusations stemmed from several high-profile organized crime cases, including the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago, when Al Capone’s gang, dressed as policemen, gunned down seven men. Ballistics expert Calvin Goddard—the inventor of the comparison microscope—used bullet markings to prove that police had not been responsible.

  Goddard was soon offered funding to start the first public, independent forensic lab at Northwestern University’s law school; the University of Chicago was close behind, and then Columbia University wanted a similar laboratory. Forensic experts were creating partnerships at real labs funded by wealthy universities. And police departments were finally admitting that forensics could solve crime.

  That year, Goddard suggested that Oscar apply to teach at his lab at Northwestern. He would be joined by Luke May, a self-taught criminalist and sought-after expert. Chauncey McGovern was no longer problematic for Oscar after being publicly chastised in the Colwell case. But other experts would replace McGovern on Oscar’s list of adversaries. Luke May’s lack of education, flamboyant style, and arrogance absolutely riled Oscar.

  “May is an egotist of the first order,” he wrote. “His love for publicity is almost a disease.”

  And Oscar made public his acerbic opinion of the criminalist when he reviewed May’s newest book, Crime’s Nemesis, for a literary journal.

  “The chapters have a surplus of fact and a deficit of thought and sentiment,” wrote Oscar. “The author has done too little to help the public to comprehend and to realize more clearly and fully ideas on scientific criminal investigation that they now grasp imperfectly.”

  Calvin Goddard, Oscar feared, would inadvertently staff the lab at Northwestern with charlatans, fakes of the first order. And they would destroy the credibility of forensic science.

  “Their tendency to over-emphasize their accomplishments is the one thing that keeps them from achieving the highest success,” Oscar told a fellow forensic scientist. “They do not need to be feared as competitors any more than True Detective Stories need to be feared as a competitor of the Atlantic Monthly.”

  The competition for these faculty positions was vigorous—most criminalists would have coveted a cushy position at a prestigious university like Northwestern. Oscar wasn’t eager to teach at Northwestern because he was considering another position at the University of Chicago.

  “The University of Chicago has the inside track,” he wrote a friend. “I believe their work will be of the most constructive character.”

  Soon a decision was made—and not in his favor. Oscar had never felt jealous of a close friend . . . until now. The University of Chicago selected August Vollmer to teach there in 1929. Ultimately the dean thought the “father of modern policing” was the better candidate than the criminalist. Oscar felt wounded and then bitter. He believed Vollmer didn’t have the forensic chops for a position at the college.

  “I am the only man in these United States eligible to fill out that faculty,” he fumed to a friend.

  But he didn’t let that bruising derail him. Oscar’s confidence and arrogance continued to build with each case he solved, with every newspaper article that mentioned his name. His hubris, though mostly in check in public, was hardening even regarding experts he had once respected.

  “I do not entirely agree with your assertion that any half-witted mechanic could build a triple bullet holder,” Oscar told one ballistics expert. “But I will concede that said half-witted mechanic readily can do so if a Heinrich stands over him.”

  By age fifty, Oscar’s ego seemed healthy, but his stamina was weakening. He could no longer work twelve-hour days. He spent months recovering from acute colitis, an inflammation of the colon made worse by stress. He habitually smoked, ending each evening with a “night-night pipe.”

  In the early 1930s, Oscar’s taxes increased while the fees of all forensic experts were drastically reduced. He had solved more than a thousand cases by this time, but his jobs were cut in half. Police chiefs and attorneys could no longer afford him. Oscar’s experience was akin to the collective investigative skills of an entire police force, but now he was underemployed and saddened from missing his twentieth wedding anniversary.

  In less than a year, Oscar would work on a huge, lucrative case that would draw him into the spotlight and controversy once again. His contentious theory about the death of an affluent wife on the campus of Stanford University would test the legal system . . . and his skills as a forensic scientist. Oscar Heinrich would usher a fledgling forensic technique into legitimacy, perhaps to the detriment of justice.

  11.

  Damned:

  The Case of Allene Lamson’s Bath, Part II

  I had already come to the conclusion, since there were no signs of a struggle, that the blood which covered the floor had burst from the murderer’s nose in his excitement. I could perceive that the track of blood coincided with the track of his feet.

  —Arthur Conan Doyle,

  A Study in Scarlet, 1887

  She squirmed in her chair as she watched the back of his head. Her brown eyes drooped at the corners—she looked so much like her father. Her hair parted to the right, wavy at the top but falling in curls. It was Monday, June 5, 1933, and Allene Genevieve Lamson, better known as Bebe, was puzzled. Her father sat so close by, just a few feet away, but she wasn’t allowed to hug him. He seemed agitated. She called out, “Daddy!”

  It had been almost a week since her mother last held her. Bebe tried to sit calmly, but she couldn’t resist wiggling. There were more than one hundred men in dark suits and women in fancy dresses all sitting shoulder to shoulder, most struggling to stay hushed. More than a thousand people crammed into the entryway of the courthouse, and even more stood in the square near the county jail. A confluence of excited conversations erupted behind her—the roar seemed almost unbearable, at least to a toddler.

  She rested her hand on the thick wooden railing as the judge, draped in black, surveyed his courtroom. Bebe’s white, lacy dress studded with small beads would have been perfect church attire on another day. She nearly glowed atop her grandmother’s dark suit and stylish black hat—more of a funeral dress than formal outfit.

  “Yes,” her father muttered several times to the judge. Bebe couldn’t understand the questions. She squirmed again. Nearby her sat her middle-aged aunts, Dr. Margaret Lamson and Hazel Thoits. Bebe had been living with Margaret for the past week.

  Quickly her father stood up and slid out from behind the large desk. A man in a black uniform placed a hand on his back before they vanished behind a door. Bebe glanced at her grandmother. The Santa Clara County Superior Courthouse was a bewildering, sad place for Bebe Lamson during David Lamson’s arraignment—and it would only become more troubling, as her father would soon face a jury for beating her mother to death.

  * * *

  —

  By 1933, Oscar Heinrich’s business began to suffer from the impact of the Great Depression, just like the rest of the country, so he redesigned his forensic science firm. He expanded his foreign business by testifying against Germany in a war sabotage case—the American government proved to be a more reliable client than local prosecutors and defense attorneys. He began authenticating artwork in Europe. But these new enterprises still couldn’t offset his dramatic loss in income.

  Oscar complained that 50 percent of banks were frozen in Nevada, a major source of his business. There appeared to be a moratorium on prosecutors there to hire any expert, surely good news for the state’s criminals. Oscar’s California business dropped by one-third, and he had difficulty convincing clients to pay
him quickly. All those circumstances, along with his elder son’s coursework in England, were threatening to bankrupt the Heinrich family.

  The year before, Theodore had traveled to Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other American cities as part of his studies at the University of Cambridge. The twenty-two-year-old sent his father a humble letter that included a list of travel costs.

  “I’ve just been figuring expenses and have come to the conclusion that France is still a comparatively expensive country,” Theo wrote Oscar. “I don’t understand why the money has gone so fast, for I certainly haven’t been extravagant.”

  Oscar deeply loved his son, but he offered little tolerance for money woes after years of being humbled by crippling debt.

  “I fear you are still inclined to live more in a world of make believe than of fact,” he lectured Theo.

  Oscar was traveling more than ever, and he was concerned for his wife’s safety as she stayed alone at their house in Berkeley. He requested routine police protection, saying he was afraid of disgruntled criminals.

  “Say to Mort that I think police protection during my absence will be more efficient with the guard inside the house after bed-time than out,” he wrote Marion.

  Oscar Heinrich felt weak from worry by the beginning of the Lamson investigation. He was fifty-two years old by then and had less stamina than ever. His old adversaries had finally retreated—the crochety old handwriting expert Carl Eisenschimmel had died the year before, while the ever-troublesome Chauncey McGovern would die the following year. But their mutual vitriol for Oscar would be dwarfed by another nemesis, a German physician with charisma who threatened to derail Oscar’s jury in the most crucial case of his life.

  * * *

  —

  Inside his home laboratory the forensic scientist stared at the skull and then at its measurements. He scribbled notes. He adjusted the strings wrapped around it. After nearly two decades of trial work, he knew that preparation would be his most potent weapon in court.

  There was chalk residue on his arm from a giant framed blackboard hanging in his laboratory in Berkeley. There was a crude sketch of a skull on the slate, an oval with no eye sockets or any discernible features except for two squiggles for ears. He drew four lines that swirled out from the center of the head, labeled A, B, C, and D, all meeting in the middle of the skull. Other wayward lines represented the smaller fractures that erupted right before Allene Lamson died. The pathology report spelled it out: there was one large fracture and three smaller ones. The prosecutor believed that David Lamson had struck his wife on the back of the head with a heavy weapon—four hits resulting in four fractures.

  On Oscar’s shelf sat a new book, courtesy of John Boynton Kaiser: Simplified Blood Chemistry as Practiced with the Ettman Blood Chemistry Set, a how-to manual for calculating and then interpreting bloodstain pattern analysis evidence. Oscar scanned the notes from his numerous experiments. They were all satisfying exercises, but he despised the man who had required them to be completed.

  Before the trial began at the end of August 1933, Oscar had agreed to conduct joint forensic tests with Santa Clara County’s pathologist, Dr. Frederick Proescher. Attorneys wanted to parcel out only small bits of evidence for testing. The tenuous concession fostered a competitive and testy dynamic between a pair of star witnesses who were angling for attention on the witness stand—both men with notable credentials and immense egos.

  The fifty-five-year-old German had medical expertise at crime scenes and inside his research lab. He was the most qualified of all Oscar’s challengers in court over the past thirty years. Now Dr. Proescher’s name would be added to the list of Oscar’s rivals, setting off a public feud between a medical physician and a forensic scientist in court.

  The more Oscar studied his notes on the crime scene, the more alarmed he became. On the day of Allene’s death, Dr. Proescher pointed to stains inside the closet of Bebe’s nursery where the little girl’s nurse kept her clothes. Blood, he had assured an officer with him, but Oscar tested the substance himself, and it was negative for blood. It was likely crayon, Dr. Proescher later admitted. The pathologist noted that David’s shirt, one that he had not worn that morning, also had spots of blood.

  “Yes, there was some blood on that too,” the physician told the district attorney.

  But Oscar’s tests concluded those spots were also negative. There are blood droplets on the kitchen door, Dr. Proescher insisted to the prosecutor, but Oscar later confirmed they were spots of varnish. His incompetence was maddening to the forensic scientist—Proscher was a physician who didn’t seem to understand chemistry or biology.

  The morning of Allene’s death, Palo Alto cops sifted through the ashes of David’s bonfire in the garden. They examined charred curtain rods, pieces of garden hose, a small spade, and even some Chinese coins. If an item was rubbish, David Lamson had apparently tried to burn it that weekend. Dr. Proescher phoned Oscar and told him that a piece of cloth from the fire repeatedly tested positive for blood.

  “I made more than one test,” Dr. Proescher said. “I tried hematoporphryin, hemochromogen and benzidin. All positive.”

  These were all valid chemical tests using substances that changed color when mixed with hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells. Proescher insisted that all three tests confirmed blood on the cloth, but Oscar was skeptical. Come to Berkeley, he replied. In June 1933, Dr. Proescher arrived at Oscar’s lab carrying several samples of evidence from the bonfire. The pathologist demanded vindication—the cloth from the bonfire had tested positive for blood in his own lab. Oscar studied him as he handled a pair of scissors.

  “Dr. Proescher took the sample and cut off about two-thirds of it, powdered it and made the benzidin test,” recalled Oscar. “That was negative. From the residue of the powder I made a Leucomalachite Green test and that was also negative.”

  Now it was Oscar who was vindicated, because two tests had confirmed his findings—no blood. Dr. Proescher seemed to have a vendetta against David Lamson, Oscar thought.

  After Dr. Proescher left Berkeley, Oscar returned to his own tests, and he made a crucial discovery using bloodstain pattern analysis. There were pools of blood on the floor, “passive stains” that typically resulted from gravity acting on an injured body; blood flows and drops would also be passive.

  There were dozens of spots of arterial blood—the exclamation points with a head and tail that he believed could make that prediction through basic physics—on a man’s coat and trousers, an outfit of David’s that had been hanging on the inside of the bathroom door just inches from Allene’s body. These were categorized as “impact or projected stains” because they typically traveled through the air and landed on an object.

  “Measurements in a direct line from the point at which Mrs. Lamson’s head was assumed to have lain show that all of these spots could have spurted from that point without interference,” read details of his argument.

  Oscar studied the trajectory of the blood from her head to the coat; the spurts were unobstructed and moving upward (the tails on the exclamation points were pointing up). This proved, he believed, that no one was standing behind Allene, because the killer’s body would have created a void in the blood spatter on the coat hanging behind him in the tiny bathroom. There was no void—blood droplets were found up and down the coat.

  Oscar addressed one of his most critical pieces of evidence, which was where Allene’s body was located at the moment of impact. He examined the arterial blood spurts. One of the theories of bloodstain pattern analysis was that blood droplets traveled in a specific way. Oscar theorized that if Allene was hit from behind while standing in the tub, the tails of the blood spots would point downward on the suit hanging from the door. But the tails on these spots were all pointed up, as if they were released when she was hit at a lower location—like the porcelain sink basin. She might have slipped as she tried to cl
imb out of the tub and hit the back of her head against the sink.

  Oscar studied the pathologist’s report detailing the injuries to the back of her head. Just one hit could have caused those four fractures, he believed, and if the impact of the basin had ruptured an artery, then it might explain such a large amount of blood loss. And microvessels in the scalp can bleed quite a lot when they’re broken. The impact was great, and it wasn’t clear to experts in 1933 whether a slender woman’s body could produce that much force during a simple slip and fall. Even modern pathology experts can’t say conclusively.

  But Oscar was resolute. The forensic scientist checked over his notes again. His theory meant that there was no deadly weapon, no vicious murderer. David Lamson, Oscar told the defense attorney, was innocent.

  * * *

  —

  Oscar settled in his lab once again to run more experiments. He analyzed the blood found on David Lamson’s clothes. “Hemolyzed,” he wrote. That meant that the fluid contained red blood cells that were broken open, perhaps when Allene’s blood mixed with her bathwater. It seemed like a small point, but it would mean a win for the defense. There was no arterial blood on David’s clothing. Allene’s body was recounting the story of her death and helping Oscar untangle a mystery. An acquittal, Oscar assured himself.

  Both sides agreed that there were several pieces of indisputable physical evidence. Allene Lamson had died in the bathtub that Tuesday morning on May 30, 1933. A head trauma caused her blood to gush profusely, splashing throughout the bathroom—the floor, the ceiling, and each wall. Some blood had mixed with water, while other spurts were undiluted because they came straight from her artery. And each medical expert agreed that just one fracture in the wrong place could create that amount of blood.