American Sherlock

by Kate Winkler Dawson

  “I would say it would be extremely unlikely,” replied Dr. Kneeshaw.

  Bridges sneered.

  “Would you let me try it over the back of your head?” he quipped.

  “No, but I’d make a wager with you if you wanted to try it on someone else,” Kneeshaw calmly replied.

  And that was the theme for much of David Lamson’s murder trial—a zealous prosecutor paraded dozens of witnesses and experts before jurors, while a disorganized defense team struggled to deflect ungrounded rumors. Science became a minor player.

  Oscar Heinrich settled into the low wooden chair to the right of the jury on September 9. The gold chain of his pocket watch dangled near papers on his lap. Edwin Rea asked him to refute Dr. Proescher’s claims that blood was present on the iron pipe found in the bonfire. Oscar was pleased to refute just about everything that the pathologist had claimed.

  “When blood is charred completely, there is no test for absolute verification that it is blood,” said Oscar. “The three most delicate tests cannot be used at all. Others leave too much room for error from other elements, which may give the same reaction as blood and may be in the ashes.”

  He was persuasive, noted reporters. Jurors seemed engaged as he prepared to unveil his most convincing evidence—his series of large photographs. Oscar was pleased with how they turned out. The jurors in the Martin Colwell murder case had swayed him about their importance.

  Oscar pointed to the pictures from the reenactments inside the Lamson cottage starring his assistant George Weber’s wife. He sat in the witness stand in a smart dark striped suit, legs crossed.

  “Doctor, did you perform an experiment at the Lamson cottage demonstrating a fall?” asked Rea.

  “I did,” answered Oscar.

  He began to swivel to his left to address the panel, but he was silenced immediately.

  “The only question is how well we know whether we know it is a similar experiment,” said Judge Robert Syer.

  Oscar glanced at the defense attorney—he knew to stay quiet.

  “The conditions are the same in that bathroom,” insisted Rea, “that we want to show this jury is you can take a woman the same height as Mrs. Lamson.”

  “Objection!” yelled the prosecutor.

  “Your Honor, it is something very important in the case, that goes to the very gist of the case,” pleaded Rea.

  “The only way to prove it would be to kill someone,” insisted Assistant Prosecutor John P. Fitzgerald.

  And with that argument, the judge barred Oscar from testifying about his experiments in the bathroom using a live model. It was disastrous to David Lamson’s defense and ridiculous, thought the criminalist. The academic at the defendant’s table sank into his chair while his attorneys hoped for more luck.

  Oscar brooded quietly on the stand—the ruling was an affront to his hard work. He was incredulous that anyone, particularly a judge without a scientific background, would distrust him. But Oscar remained impassive to the jury, knowing he could offer other evidence, even more reliable proof.

  He carried a long wooden pointer toward the blackboard, where he drew blood spots with little tails facing different ways. He spent hours detailing how the shape and consistency of blood spots could verify a cause of death. Courtroom gossips whispered about his gruesome Holmesian experiments in the seclusion of his lab—it was rumored that Oscar had sliced an artery in his own arm for research. He slyly denied it, but admitted to orchestrating other bloodstain pattern experiments using veins from other live volunteers.

  Oscar pointed to a large photo of the inner door, an exhibit that showed ten blood spots. Jurors nodded, and Oscar’s confidence seemed restored. But when he tried to describe where Allene’s body lay, Judge Syer stopped him once again. Oscar seemed confused. The judge said that Oscar’s personal opinion was not relevant because he had visited the scene two weeks after Allene’s death. The majority of the judge’s rulings were against David Lamson—Oscar felt hopeless.

  Exhausted, Edwin Rea rested his case. Now David could only hope that the jury believed Oscar Heinrich, just enough to create reasonable doubt. On Saturday, September 16, the prosecutor issued a forceful edict to the jury during his closing arguments.

  “We are not going to let this man walk off to go out of here with blood upon his hands,” said Allan Lindsay. “Help us stop this wave of crime. If you don’t, it simply goes out to the world a man can commit a crime and get away with it. More women, more children will suffer.”

  Lindsay cradled the iron pipe and raised his voice.

  “Why, you couldn’t fracture a head?” exclaimed Lindsay. He slammed the pipe against the railing.

  “I am not using my full strength,” he said. “Put that in the hands of a one hundred and eighty pound man.”

  The prosecutor struck the railing three more times and stared at the jury.

  “How would you like to have me hit each one of you?”

  * * *

  —

  Nelle Clemence was anxious as she listened to the foreman review the evidence. There were papers on the wooden table mixed with the police’s crime scene photos. Notepads covered with scribblings lay to the side. The white-haired, middle-aged juror was a retired fruit rancher, a businesswoman with strong convictions and a wicked sense of humor, though the local newspapers assigned to her a less appealing description.

  “One can imagine that she will make arrangements to have the cat fed while she is locked up on the jury,” reported the Oakland Tribune.

  Clemence was normally bold, but just a few hours into deliberations, she was suddenly hesitant. Jury rooms in the United States could become uncomfortable, particularly during capital murder trials. Twelve strangers with likely little in common were isolated for days or even weeks, compelled to discuss the details of a disturbing death. Since Colonial America, jury rooms have hosted passionate arguments, personal jabs, and even physical confrontations all later blamed on the hubris of men and women divided over the rightful blame for a horrible tragedy. Unfortunately for David Lamson, he was not blessed with that sort of introspective jury. And that was also unfortunate for Nelle Clemence.

  On Saturday, September 16, 1933, the jury of twelve retired to the chamber inside the Santa Clara County courtroom to deliberate. After several hours of discussion, the panel adjourned for lunch, but right before they left, the foreman, George Peterson, requested an oral ballot. Clemence squirmed—she was the only “not guilty” vote. She looked at each of them. They were all so certain that David Lamson was a killer. The foreman glanced at the older woman through his round glasses. A merchant from Saratoga with a dark toothbrush mustache, Peterson seemed almost zealous in the jury box. Courtroom observers noticed how attentive the stout, older man seemed as the prosecutor laid out his case.

  “My mind was made up almost a week before the case was submitted,” Peterson proudly told the press later.

  He seemed to have no idea how outlandish that statement must have sounded to anyone who believed in the integrity of the American judicial system, but the other jurors agreed with him.

  Even though the judge had banned access to all media, two jurors (including Peterson) flipped through newspapers during a picnic at Oak Dell Park six days into the trial. The jury had been sequestered, but jurors went to movies, attended public lectures, and even visited with their spouses at the jurors’ hotel, the Sainte Claire. The youngest woman on the jury, alternate Ora Conover, went to a party during the trial and declared, “The defendant was guilty and should be hanged without a trial.”

  George Peterson, the passionate foreman, lied during jury selection when asked if he was friendly with the sheriff in charge of Lamson’s investigation. “No,” had been his response. But Peterson had been a guest of the Santa Clara County sheriff during a private tour of San Quentin State Prison—a clear conflict of interest.

  As the jury
discussed the evidence over lunch, Foreman Peterson seemed alarmed over talk of a “not guilty” vote. He issued a threat to another panelist across the table from Nelle Clemence.

  “You know what happened to the juror that was fixed in the Matlock case,” he warned.

  Just two months earlier Joe Matlock had been convicted of gunning down a police officer in San Jose, California, during a traffic stop. Eleven jurors voted for the death penalty, but there was one holdout. The fifty-seven-year-old dissenter argued that Matlock deserved life in prison, not the noose. The debate turned vicious as vote after vote was cast and James Howard refused to waver. After twenty-nine ballots, the other eleven jurors abandoned the argument and agreed to a life sentence.

  Within hours, Howard’s life story was detailed in newspapers across the country—he was heavily criticized and even threatened. And now two of Matlock’s jurors were serving on David Lamson’s jury. Nelle Clemence felt powerless as she sat quietly in her seat during lunch. After the meal, the other eleven jurors seemed exasperated. They all argued with Clemence and, as a group, “attempted to convince her of the guilt of the defendant.” They explained that David killed his wife in a rage after being denied sex the night before.

  “Impossible,” insisted Clemence.

  She glared at the male jurors and wondered if they would bludgeon their own wives if they were denied sex. The men were enraged.

  “You know David Lamson is a moral degenerate,” hissed J. A. Harliss.

  Peterson and another member yelled that they would vote “guilty” to “protect their daughters and society from such fiends.” They accused Clemence of shunning the safety of the public while two jurors furiously scribbled notes, threatening to keep them as evidence.

  “She can be held for contempt of court,” declared Viola Brown. “We can send for one of the alternate jurors and have her disbarred entirely. We had better have her replaced and have another juror sent in. That is what alternate jurors are for.”

  Of course, she was wrong. And while most of the arguments were ludicrous, their attacks against Clemence had been relentless. Juryman George Hegerich assured her that it was actually illegal for the district attorney to prosecute an innocent man for murder.

  To further convince Clemence to change her vote, Foreman Peterson settled on circumventing the court’s strict rules. The jurors built a crude model bathroom in the jury room with chairs and desks, all meant to replicate the Lamsons’ own tiny bathroom. There were a few issues, most notably the absence of walls. The real bathroom was very small, with so little space that it seemed impossible for anyone to stand behind Allene and swing a pipe with much force. Nonetheless the prosecutor’s maps, charts, and crime scene photos were rounded up and delivered to the room. One by one, the twelve jurors “fell” from the “bathtub,” each trying to simulate Allene Lamson’s accident.

  “All of us tried to fall out of that tub in some way so that we could hit our heads on a washbowl hard enough to dash our brains out,” said Hegerich. “We succeeded only in convincing ourselves that it couldn’t be done.”

  In contemporary times, that sort of exercise in a jury room would likely cause an immediate mistrial. David’s defense attorneys called it a careless, dangerous experiment—unsupervised and uneducated. The judge had refused Oscar’s experiment, yet the jury seemed free to conduct its own.

  The jury also discussed the defense’s star witness, the most crucial expert in the trial. They debated Oscar’s bloodstain pattern evidence, his complex arithmetic that required a cardboard dial and some string—the proof that David Lamson was not a killer. And they rejected all of it.

  “We knew that dead women don’t jump around, spattering blood over everything,” said Hegerich. “E. O. Heinrich, the defense criminologist, didn’t convince us of anything.”

  Oscar’s entire testimony was unsound and even ridiculous, according to jurors. They each gripped the iron pipe found in David’s bonfire, studied its weight and length.

  “We looked at it, practiced hitting with it,” said Hegerich. “Then we remembered that Mr. Heinrich had said that those blows couldn’t have been inflicted with that pipe and we knew he was wrong there.”

  The jurors had misunderstood much of the expert testimony from both sides. The argument was not that a pipe couldn’t kill someone—it was that a pipe had not likely caused these fractures. The key for jurors was not David’s criminal history, his arguments with Allene, his friendship with Sara Kelley, or his erratic memory of details with police or family members. The motive didn’t seem to influence their discussion, and that was, in fact, the sound path to follow. The cornerstone of the jury’s decision rested with their understanding of the physical evidence. And that was dire news for David Lamson.

  “Lamson virtually convicted himself,” insisted Peterson. “If he had not washed her body and then put it back in the tub he would not have been convicted.”

  The jury had remembered the phrase “washed blood,” a description Dr. Proescher used many times during the trial. Jurors thought it meant that David had washed Allene’s body, but “washed blood” actually referenced how bathwater had diluted Allene’s blood. The jury misunderstood the meaning, and so had the press.

  “There was evidence of attempts to wash out the blood,” reported the San Jose Evening News. “This was taken to imply that someone had tried hurriedly to hide evidence of a crime.”

  After arguing all day, the jury was escorted by bailiffs to dinner, and as they walked back, a female deputy sheriff invited Clemence to walk ahead with her.

  “I know David Lamson is guilty,” whispered Leonora Ghetti. “I know it is to be a fact that David Lamson is a moral degenerate. I also know that he confessed to his lawyers right from the beginning, but the lawyers would not allow him to go on with the confession.”

  Ghetti had continued to harass Clemence by plying her with false information about David’s sister, the physician.

  “Dr. Lamson was bringing in dope to Dave ever since he’s been in here,” insisted Ghetti. “Dr. Lamson says that her brother is a hopeless case, and that she has had a lot of trouble with him.”

  When they reached the courthouse, the bailiff opened the giant wooden doors and the jurors filed through. The lock turned behind Nelle Clemence. The others eyed her as the foreman demanded a third vote—a final ballot. Clemence scribbled her answer, and it was now unanimous. The jury declared David Lamson guilty of first-degree murder. Nelle Clemence had to relent.

  The jury could have offered leniency by recommending life in prison instead of the death penalty, but the panel chose to send David Lamson to California’s Death Row. His fate had rested with suspicious jurors who were confounded by a scientific expert’s strange bloodstain pattern experiments. Oscar Heinrich’s testimony had failed David Lamson, and now he was destined to die in the gallows. The criminalist was disgusted, then distressed. And he blamed Dr. Proescher, yet another rival who had undermined him in court.

  * * *

  —

  “We are in for a critical winter which may even pinch us and cause new means to be sought to keep ahead of the sheriff,” Oscar Heinrich wrote his son Theodore in 1933. “I have been growing more and more disgruntled day by day over the failure to receive your financial report.”

  The stress of the David Lamson case had tested Oscar’s patience, particularly as he was trying to encourage his son to be responsible with his limited budget. Theo was attending graduate school at the University of Cambridge in England, one of the most expensive colleges in the world, while Mortimer was now an undergraduate student at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Despite the cash windfall from the Lamson case, Oscar’s business had been reduced by more than half. He was beginning to resent his twenty-three-year-old son’s frivolous spending.

  “The steady drain on our resources to maintain your program has been and is most devastating to our economic security and
to our hopes for Mortimer’s program,” he wrote Theo. “At first glance it would appear that you were over-indulgent of yourself with your funds.”

  Oscar’s grip on his sons’ lives was tightening as they grew older. He began criticizing Theo’s expensive European trips, his travel companions, his curiosity about varied careers, and even his choice of women. “A good wife during such a period can be, like your Mother was to me, a gorgeous inspiration,” Oscar told Theo. “But platinum blondes, born with golden feeding spoons, can’t qualify.”

  The criminalist seemed to be convinced that his sons, without his guidance, would meander through life without embracing responsibility or earning professional respect.

  “Please do not allow a woman to rush you at this critical stage in your career,” he told Theo. “Get your academic business done and tell the girl that for the moment you have work to be finished.”

  * * *

  —

  Tiny shards of glass lay on the concrete. The older man delivered a superb upper cut to his opponent’s jaw. They both bellowed profanities, wildly flinging their bodies as a crowd of more than one hundred gawkers retreated to give them sparring room. Both men had deep slices on their faces. The scene was appalling—and also quite embarrassing, because the two boorish men were middle-aged, highly educated attorneys who were fistfighting in the Santa Clara County Courthouse . . . all over a woman.

  “I’m sixty years old, but I’ll take you on right now,” screamed defense attorney Edwin Rea as he flailed on the ground, the victim of a knockdown shot.

  “You ought to be disbarred!” bellowed the county’s prosecutor Allan Lindsay before Rea sprung to his feet and lunged.

  At forty-five years old, Lindsay was fitter, but Rea boasted of holding a heavyweight championship boxing title while at Harvard University. After exchanging about a dozen blows, the only person who could break them up was Allene Lamson’s brother, and he still needed help from some scrappy court officials and a few brave newspapermen. One week after a jury had convicted David Lamson of first-degree murder, both sides were now back in court thanks to Nelle Clemence. She was the lone juror who believed in David Lamson’s innocence—the one who voted “guilty” after nine hours of pressure. In a sensational affidavit “bristling with charges of coercion and misconduct,” Clemence accused the other jurors of bullying her during deliberations.