American Sherlock

by Kate Winkler Dawson

  When police had arrived at 10:10 a.m., Allene’s body temperature was warm and her bathwater had not yet cooled. Dr. Milton Saier gently shifted her head from side to side, checking for stiffening in her joints. Rigor mortis can begin as early as hours after the person died; it’s still a key method for checking time of death. All muscles are immediately affected by rigor, but smaller muscles, like those in the neck and jaw, are affected first. Dr. Saier noted that Allene’s neck joints were still loose. She had died within the hour, which jibed with David Lamson’s story. Oscar thumbed through the autopsy report.

  “Four lacerations on the back of the head, covering the occipital protuberance and surrounding it,” it read.

  The occipital protuberance is one of the bones of the skull, located at the back of the head. It protects the medulla, which controls functions like breathing and heart rate, and the cerebellum, which coordinates motor function and vision. If a blow crushes the occipital bone, it can cause a fatal brain injury.

  “Four lacerations,” Oscar read.

  Lacerations, he knew, didn’t necessarily mean gashes or cuts, but abrasions.

  “Three of said lacerations were somewhat horizontal in direction, two, however, being somewhat curved,” read the report. “One depressed fracture of the skull as well as an un-depressed stellate fracture.”

  One hard hit had likely killed Allene Lamson, according to her autopsy. Several smaller fractures resulted from that head trauma, like piercing the top of an egg with a pin and watching smaller cracks emerge. Three of the four lacerations were horizontal and parallel, while two were also somewhat curved. Oscar looked at the photos from the Lamson cottage. Pictures were visceral evidence for a jury; he had learned that from Martin Colwell’s trial. They would illustrate his theory perfectly. He squinted at the bright white sink basin. The picture showed four irregular surfaces, each with a curved edge: the outer edge of the sink, a ridge, the edge on the inner side of the ridge, and, finally, the inner rim of the sink itself. The four edges of the basin matched the four lacerations on Allene’s head. He called the defense attorney.

  When the prosecutor learned Oscar’s theory, he was infuriated. He argued that if Allene had fallen and hit her head on the basin, that much of her body would have remained outside of the tub. And how could she have flipped around and fallen facedown? David said he found her crumpled over the side of the tub before he cradled her, but he couldn’t remember exactly where she was lying.

  Oscar believed that her body’s center of gravity propelled Allene back into the tub. Perhaps she tried to turn herself over after hitting her head? Or maybe she tried to brace herself on the sink? It was impossible to know.

  The scientist fingered the strings wrapped around the dark skull in his hand. It seemed like a simple case: if there was any possibility that Allene Lamson might have died after hitting her head on the bathroom sink, then David was innocent. Even if both theories were plausible—murder or accident—which seemed more reasonable? Would a murderous husband really be capable of chatting up neighbors just minutes after killing his wife? Why would he invite a real estate agent and her clients inside? Common sense, Oscar Heinrich believed, would prevail in the jury room. But then again, murder was illogical—that’s why motive was less important than hard evidence. And yet Oscar admitted that he might be employed by a wife killer.

  He dropped his pencil on his steno pad. He was ready to reveal charts, photographs, measurements, and most important, he would disclose the truth. He wondered if his inventory list would be another obstacle like it had been in other trials. To most people, science was dull—horribly dull. Even newspaper writers, always armed with cheeky adjectives meant to arouse readers, seemed to struggle to make forensics sound provocative.

  “Battle of Scientists Centers Around Dave,” declared one paper.

  “Heinrich Applies Benzidine Test on Floor,” read another stale headline.

  Even the picture’s caption was tedious.

  “Heinrich, a noted criminologist of Berkeley, California, made an investigation of the Lamson bungalow,” it read, “and through a series of elaborately drawn charts will endeavor to trace bloodstain clues.”

  “Elaborately drawn charts” rarely mesmerized juries, Oscar admitted. And his public image wasn’t buoyed by the media’s contradictory descriptions. He was called a “nationally known criminologist and ace witness” in one sentence but “pale and deliberate” in another.

  For a man who teemed with bravado during trials, Oscar Heinrich was still insecure, even after almost thirty years of experience. As he glanced over his photographs he worried that his stiff countenance on the stand could still be a hinderance once again, like it had been during the trials of Fatty Arbuckle and Martin Colwell.

  John Boynton Kaiser worried about his friend’s low morale. The librarian had spent years shoring up Oscar’s confidence with much-needed reference books and indispensable advice tailored to craft a better version of “E. O. Heinrich” for court. Kaiser gently hinted at Oscar’s pompous language during trials—and he inadvertently shamed an already-sensitive scientist.

  “For years I have been enchained by the profound exactness of expression of my scientific mentors,” Oscar complained to Kaiser, “can it be this that constitutes what you fraternally call my ‘stilted style’?”

  He must remain factually sound in the witness chair, Oscar argued to Kaiser; the panel deserved a frank, measured response to every question. And he was sure that jurors were brighter than attorneys believed. The jury would understand, even appreciate, his precise testimony in this case.

  “I am both puzzled and concerned,” he wrote Kaiser. “Do I persuade all shades of jurymen by being pompous, inflated, formal, stiff and bombastic? I cannot believe it, because they are too canny.”

  Kaiser warned Oscar, fragile from years of abuse on the stand, that he might undermine his own testimony by sounding too “scientific.”

  “Somewhere, somehow you have sensed an obstacle,” Oscar wrote. “I beg of you to ponder to define it. If you say: ‘be natural’ I shall refuse to change.”

  But if he did refuse to change, Kaiser knew, then David Lamson might just be doomed.

  * * *

  —

  The jurors jerked when Santa Clara County’s district attorney smacked the weapon on the thick oak railing of their box. The metal resonated just inches away, four times. It was one of many satisfying, dramatic moments in the murder trial of David Lamson.

  Oscar noticed the jurors as they watched Allan Lindsay palm that pipe during his closing argument—he was wielding the state’s most important piece of evidence. Police found it lying in David Lamson’s backyard bonfire, an item that might convict the quiet academic of murder. Beneath the smoldering pile of trash, investigators had uncovered a ten-inch piece of iron pipe—the perfect murder weapon, declared the prosecutor. He whacked the railing again. It seemed heavy, about three-quarters of an inch thick. The state had tremendous faith in that pipe.

  The district attorney’s case, which started on Monday, August 21, unveiled a litany of motives. But the most titillating storyline portrayed David Lamson as a cheating husband, a philanderer who carried on an affair with his daughter’s nursemaid and made her pregnant. But that seemed unlikely, because Mary Dolores Roberts, still pregnant, actually appeared at the trial to help watch over Bebe. And she was now newly married to the baby’s father. David would later lament about how the media had treated Roberts.

  “I know nothing of her private affairs and consider them none of my business,” he told reporters. “My only interest is profound sorrow that my own misfortunes should drag other lives into painful publicity.”

  Eventually, the state exchanged that motive for a lewder one. David, according to the prosecutor, was enamored of a beautiful and bright writer in Sacramento who had also attended Stanford. A decade after graduation, Sara Kelley and David collaborated
on a series of books about the Great Depression for the university’s academic press. Their working relationship required numerous meetings in Sacramento, which included dinners and meetings inside Sara Kelley’s apartment (though her roommate testified that David never spent the night). He didn’t appear to have hidden those trips from Allene, because she had noted one of them in her diary just months before she died.

  David sent Kelley flowers several times, he said, because she needed to be photographed with them for her gardening column in the Sacramento Union. These were all neat explanations for what might have been a serious affair, Oscar knew, yet the motive was inconsequential because the physical evidence was the only thing that mattered. But the prosecutor knew that the motive would matter to the jury, particularly the women, so he designed his speech to sway the five female jurors.

  “Everyone knows that if the husband starts to go out with a lady friend, it’s not very long until the whisper comes home,” said Assistant Prosecutor John P. Fitzgerald. “I don’t believe there is a woman, a lady, present that is not going to be just a little bit sore, a little bit provoked, upon hearing of these conditions.”

  Untrue, David Lamson told his attorneys. They agreed and never called Sara Kelley to the stand, allowing jurors to speculate about their unusual relationship.

  There were other theories from the district attorney; he claimed that David and Allene were close to divorcing and bickering over custody of Bebe. A deputy sheriff believed that he overheard David say to his sister at the cottage: “My God! Why did I ever marry her!” The claim was later refuted. David appeared to have small scratches on his face and neck, a sure sign of a struggle, but the defense claimed they likely came from trimming rosebushes.

  District Attorney Allan Lindsay believed that these incidents all culminated with a violent argument on the morning of Allene’s death. David demanded sex, and Allene refused because she was menstruating. When he suspected she was lying, he snatched a piece of pipe and hit her on the back of her head four times as she stood in the bath—a rage killing. He tossed the pipe in the bonfire to hide the evidence. And then the prosecutor also offered jurors one more example of his anger. David Lamson had killed before.

  Almost twenty years earlier, thirteen-year-old David went on a hunting trip with another boy, Dick Sharpe, near David’s family farm in Alberta, Canada.

  “Sharpe and Lamson were shooting crows one Sunday afternoon when Sharpe stepped in front of Lamson just as he shot at a bird,” read one newspaper report. “Soon after the accident young Lamson, with his mother and sister, moved to California.”

  Police in 1914 never charged the teenager because it was ruled an accident, but David Lamson, the prosecutor said, was capable of murder. And then Allene’s leather-bound diary was submitted as evidence—a mortifying thought for anyone who had ever jotted down private thoughts in a journal. Now Allene’s most intimate reflections were printed in newspapers around the world.

  “Mother’s Day with silk hose, candy, flowers and all,” she wrote less than two weeks before she died.

  According to the short passages of her diary, Allene was content with her husband.

  “Dave packed and it was a beautiful trip,” she wrote four months before her death, after a trip to the seaside with Bebe. “She wore Dave out climbing cliffs.”

  And then her private life became even more exposed. Just days after she died, the media unearthed some salacious gossip about Allene’s love interests during college, other men who had been enamored of her. There was an engagement to another student during her first year at Stanford before she met David.

  “Suddenly the betrothal was broken,” reported one paper. “When Miss Thorpe returned to school here the following term, Lamson proposed.”

  Another story revealed Allene’s sexual harassment accusations against a former janitor at the Stanford University Press who sent her endless love notes. Police considered neither man a suspect, but the tabloid fodder would have embarrassed any wife, particularly a private woman like Allene.

  In early September, the Lamsons’ friends, who were some of the most affluent in Palo Alto, filed past David. The couple had a loving, supportive relationship, they all testified. Very few would say a cross word about David Lamson.

  During the three-week trial, both sides had batted the air quite a lot with the fire-blackened iron pipe. Over the summer, Dr. Proescher had analyzed the would-be weapon, claiming he had discovered blood in its tiny threads. Proescher had handed over a piece of the pipe to Oscar two months earlier, who braced himself for the result of his benzidine test. If blood was on the pipe, then his client was likely guilty. Oscar would have to resign from the case.

  “The benzidine test was negative,” Oscar concluded. “That settles the proposition that there is no blood.”

  Oscar’s tests proved that there was an organic material on the pipe, but it was not likely blood—probably plant material or even rust. Other tests all had mixed results, so the substance on the pipe was inconclusive. As Oscar eyed Dr. Proescher in court, he felt uneasy. He noticed a disturbing pattern with the pathologist, a clear motive to manipulate evidence. When they tested clues together, the results were negative for blood. But when Dr. Proescher analyzed evidence on his own, the results were largely positive. The two experts were constantly contradicting each other. Which scientist would jurors believe? At the end of August, both experts were called to testify, and neither man was assigned a flattering portrait in the media.

  “Heinrich is meticulous of speech and rigorously impersonal and logical in manner,” read one paper. “Proescher is excitable, leans forward in his chair, smiles and scowls with rapidly changing expression, and talks two languages at once at express train speed.”

  While Proescher’s sketchy diction irked the overworked court reporter, it had amused Oscar. A bewildered newspaper writer turned to him and remarked, “You are fortunate—you speak German.” Oscar nodded and smirked.

  “I understand English and I understand German,” he replied, “but I get along better when the two languages are not scrambled together like eggs.”

  Oscar glanced at the jury panel as they stared ahead. The members seemed dazed over phrases like “benzidine” and “hematoporphyrin.” Oscar was antagonistic during the pathologist’s testimony, often furiously jotting down notes for the defense team. He would glare at Dr. Proescher and then lean forward to quietly coach Edwin Rea, David’s lead defense attorney. The portly man with small round glasses would then rise and relentlessly badger the doctor. Finally, the pathologist erupted when his testing methods were challenged.

  “Do you doubt my integrity?” demanded Dr. Proescher, in his heavy German accent. “Do you think I’d put something else in there?”

  “Well, now, doctor, that’s a serious charge,” said Rea.

  He paused dramatically and then replied, “Well, yes, doctor, I do.”

  “Look out,” yelled a spectator. “Somebody’s going to be busted on the nose.”

  Dr. Proescher was clearly livid, but he remained quiet and professional—only his tapping foot gave him away. The confrontation had just compounded the anxiety in the courtroom.

  The prosecution presented its most compelling evidence for the state’s finale in early September—proof of murder. The jury eyed the long piece of pipe.

  “One knock would crush the skull,” Dr. Proescher testified.

  Two other state experts said the same thing—one said the pipe was heavy enough to kill, “even if the weapon was wielded by a 12- or 14-year-old child.” But another doctor, a prosecution expert who had performed Allene’s autopsy, also admitted that an accidental fall was possible. No one could say for sure, and the state rested after almost two weeks of testimony.

  When it was time for the defense to unveil its strategy, the attorneys made a controversial decision—David Lamson would testify. They believed he might connect with the jur
y by telling his own story. How could they believe such a bright, charming man was a killer?

  But he would also be vulnerable to a shrewd prosecutor’s cross-examination. David stepped onto the stand on Wednesday, September 6, 1933, and it was a mess. He was a dreadful witness for his defense attorneys but a godsend for the district attorney. David’s answers were vague—his memory was hazy.

  “What was your wife’s position in the tub when you first saw her?” asked Allan Lindsay.

  “She was half in and half out of the tub,” David replied.

  “Just where on the tub?” Lindsay asked.

  “Towards the middle of the tub, I believe. I don’t have a clear recollection.”

  “Why didn’t you call a doctor?” asked Lindsay.

  “I don’t know how to answer that, Mr. Lindsay,” he meekly replied.

  David repeated, “I can’t remember” and “I don’t know how to answer that” more than a dozen times. As he slid into the chair next to his attorneys, the prosecutor reminded the jury that he had been an amateur theatrical actor. The case would rest on Oscar Heinrich’s expert testimony. The forensic scientist gripped his charts and photos as he sat near the defense attorney.

  The clash of the experts reached a crescendo by Saturday, September 9, when the defense began calling its own experts. Oscar smiled at a familiar face—he was relieved to have an ally, a well-known and respected physician who supported his belief that Allene had died from an accidental fall. Dr. R. Stanley Kneeshaw was the first defense witness to defend Oscar’s accident theory. The fractures, he testified, were not unusual for someone who had fallen.

  “The injuries are typical of what we call an explosion fracture,” Kneeshaw testified, “such as results from contact with a flat surface.”

  “Do you say it is impossible that those wounds could not be produced by that pipe in the hands of a man weighing 180 pounds?” retorted Herbert Bridges, for the state.