“With tireless effort we sought to gather legal evidence,” said the prosecutor. “We are unable to produce any new evidence.”
David collapsed in his jail cell’s chair when he heard the news. After two and a half years behind bars, including thirteen months on California’s Death Row and three full trials, it was over. On April 3, 1936, David Lamson was released.
* * *
—
The five-year-old stared for a moment at the handsome gentleman in the dark suit.
“Who is this man?” she asked, looking over at her aunt.
“That’s your daddy,” Dr. Margaret Lamson sweetly replied.
Bebe glanced at him and her eyes widened.
“Oh, Daddy,” she cried, and ran into his arms. “Where are you going to sleep?”
David grinned. Her vocabulary was so advanced now, one of many big distinctions between a two-year-old and a five-year-old. He kissed her and listened to her litany of statements, questions, and demands.
“You need a shave, Daddy,” she replied. “Please read to me right away.”
And that was that. After three years of separation, David Lamson began to plan a new life with his daughter. After taking a short vacation David turned to the pages he wrote in his San Jose jail cell, the best-selling book that would cement his legacy after prison. In 1937, We Who Are About to Die was adapted into a movie with the same title. David, the perennial writer, helped with the screenplay about a man who was kidnapped by mobsters and then framed for the murders they committed. Condemned by a greedy prosecutor with political aspirations, the man endured Death Row while his friends worked to free him.
David Lamson remarried the year of his release, and his wife, another writer, adopted little Bebe. After the premiere of his movie, David authored another bestselling book, a novel called Whirlpool, which was a fictionalized account of his case. David became a professional writer, publishing more than eighty magazine stories in well-known magazines. In 1975, he died at his home in Los Altos, California, at age seventy-two.
He had earned tremendous professional success after his release, but David Lamson seemed to continue to carry along a weight. His daughter once spoke to a newspaper reporter about her father after he died.
“He never discussed the specifics of the case,” she said, “but he always spoke lovingly of my mother. I had a very normal and happy family life growing up, but the experience clearly had a deep psychological impact on him for the rest of his life.”
By the time David Lamson left San Quentin in 1934, he had grown fond of some of the inmates. But he was also disgusted with American courts. He was free but not exonerated—like a man forced to look at the scars left by his missing shackles. And he was consumed with guilt when he remembered the day he left San Quentin State Prison.
“I looked up at the Row. I waved back to them . . . a little shamefacedly because I was fortunate,” he wrote in We Who Are About to Die. “You feel helpless and bitter, and the one feeds on the other until they merge into an angry, cursing impotence the worse for being throttled.”
* * *
—
Oscar Heinrich was also deeply frustrated with America’s justice system. Despite all his efforts, science was far from accepted in court. But there would be hope.
In 1935, the year between Lamson’s first and second trials, a biochemistry professor at the University of California at Berkeley with an interest in forensic science contacted Oscar—Dr. Paul Kirk. He asked Oscar to present a paper for the American Chemical Society at its microchemical symposium, an event for chemists who specialized in testing minute amounts of materials, like evidence at a crime scene. Oscar confided in Dr. Kirk about his jury problems in the Lamson case and the struggle of all forensic experts to teach science in court.
“As you no doubt have observed in the Lamson case,” Oscar wrote Kirk, “the micro-analyst has a difficult time to present something to a jury which they do not readily understand.”
Oscar had learned a difficult lesson over his decades in forensic science. “What they do not easily understand they reject,” he told Kirk.
Oscar suggested that biochemists, like Kirk, learn from his own mistakes and train chemists to simplify their testimony about complicated tests. Five months later, Kirk was hired for his first murder case—the killing of an elderly shoe cobbler in Tucson, Arizona. Police asked him to analyze hair found in the dead man’s hand, but the case was never solved. With Oscar’s recommendation, August Vollmer encouraged Kirk to join his faculty as a criminalistics professor at UC Berkeley. By 1955, he was a forensics expert who would become a star witness in one of the most infamous trials in American history, the murder trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard in Ohio. It was the case said to have inspired the TV series and feature film The Fugitive.
The similarities of the cases of David Lamson and Sam Sheppard were startling: two prominent, handsome men, both married to beautiful women and both on trial for beating them to death. The national media chased each case, publishing salacious headlines accusing both men of being philanderers. Sam Sheppard claimed he struggled with a “bushy-haired” intruder who later escaped. The jury didn’t believe the neurosurgeon and gave him the death penalty.
Sheppard spent ten years in prison before the United States Supreme Court ordered a new trial, contending that the press coverage had created a “circus-like atmosphere.” In the 1966 trial, Dr. Kirk testified that the bloodstain patterns from his wife’s wounds had suggested that Sam Sheppard was not the killer; Kirk analyzed the blood found on the doctor’s wristwatch, the sprays on the walls, and the height of the various spots. All this evidence, Kirk believed, pointed to another killer. The jury believed him, and Sheppard was acquitted.
* * *
—
During the case of David Lamson, Oscar Heinrich faced formidable experts in court, pathologists with expertise at crime scenes and inside autopsy rooms. But in our modern judicial system, their medical credentials should not be enough to qualify them to testify in most criminal cases about bloodstain pattern analysis. BPA demands expertise in applied mathematics and physics, among other complicated scientific principles. Pathologists don’t typically have that type of training, but Oscar Heinrich did. With his chemistry degree and knowledge of biology and physics throughout his previous careers, he was more qualified than any of the other experts. But his conclusions still should have been scrutinized.
“One can tell, for example, if the blood spattered quickly or slowly, but some experts extrapolate far beyond what can be supported,” warned the National Academy of Sciences report in 2009. “The uncertainties associated with bloodstain pattern analysis are enormous.”
Oscar’s bloodstain pattern tests were interpretive—the results were just his opinion, not fact. In contemporary criminal cases many experiments in BPA are conducted not by forensic scientists with experience in fluid dynamics and complex math but by law enforcement officers with no scientific training or applicable credentials. The NAS report warned that only qualified experts must conduct BPA experiments. They should then accurately explain those variables when their conclusions are presented in court. Bloodstain pattern results should still not be used as the sole evidence in a criminal case.
“In general, the opinions of bloodstain pattern analysts are more subjective than scientific,” read the report.
BPA is just too unreliable to risk a suspect’s freedom . . . or life. In David Lamson’s case, there was no satisfactory conclusion. Even if Oscar had conducted a true experiment, a fall against a washbasin that had actually killed a volunteer, there would have still been too many variables. The human body can be unpredictable.
And there is another valid theory—one that might have explained both Oscar’s conclusion that Allene died by striking the sink and the prosecutor’s argument that her death was murder. If David Lamson had killed his wife during a fit of rage, a spontaneous attac
k, why would he have brought a pipe from the backyard with him? What if he had actually thrown her onto the sink basin himself, producing the deadly fracture and the curved, parallel lacerations? It was a theory that no one presented in court—but the evidence proved it was possible.
Allene Lamson’s death would forever remain an enigma. It was impossible to say for certain whether Oscar Heinrich had helped free an innocent man . . . or helped free a murderer.
EPILOGUE
Case Closed
By 1953, Oscar Heinrich’s business, along with those of many experts, had survived the nation’s most turbulent era, and forensic science flourished. The following decades saw the development of computerized fingerprint scans, advances in toxicology, and DNA testing—all sciences designed to help law enforcement solve cases.
Some of Oscar Heinrich’s contemporaries went on to become historical figures in the history of criminal law. August Vollmer, Oscar’s colleague at UC Berkeley, became a leader in the development of the field of criminal justice. Calvin Goddard was responsible for a number of important advancements in ballistics. Dr. Paul Kirk helped Vollmer establish University of California at Berkeley’s School of Criminology, a program available to anyone who wanted a criminology degree.
Edward Oscar Heinrich became one of the most influential forensic scientists in history. Historians and young investigators have studied his celebrated career, and many of his investigations literally became textbook cases that students would examine for decades to come.
A generation after the criminalist used handwriting to profile a priest’s murderer, the federal government trained their agents on how to identify a killer’s habits to reveal his identity.
In the years after Oscar pioneered forensic geology in the case of Father Heslin, it became common practice in solving crimes and convicting murderers.
His method of photographing evidence in the Martin Colwell case using a comparative microscope was revolutionary, a shift forward for forensic ballistics. That method is also still utilized today.
Oscar’s use of forensic entomology in the Bessie Ferguson case—the first in America—is still a powerful weapon for modern investigators. Insects have starred in countless investigations since Oscar’s landmark case in 1925.
His deductive reasoning in the Siskiyou train robbery is still called one of the most astounding examples of how to analyze trace evidence. Forensic historians credit Oscar with developing the first method of meticulously sorting, categorizing, and cataloguing evidence—a better way to be an organized investigator. Oscar’s methodology included defining what happened, where it happened, and when (in what order) it happened. His approach has since been used by thousands of investigators.
Oscar’s stories from the field and inside the lab astounded his college students each semester. And that is perhaps his greatest legacy—Oscar taught criminology classes at UC Berkeley for almost thirty years. Thousands of students learned from him, studied his techniques, and then used those tools in their own careers. As a sought-after professor in the most popular criminology school in the country, Oscar was one of criminal justice’s greatest influencers.
While Oscar Heinrich innovated some of the most groundbreaking methods in forensics, he also advanced some dubious methods, including handwriting analysis and bloodstain pattern analysis—both now considered junk science. In fact, they can be quite dangerous in the courtroom when used as the main evidence, and both methods are becoming less frequently used by investigators to support their theories in criminal cases. Unfortunately, Oscar would not be the last innovator of unreliable science.
In 1932, the FBI’s first director, J. Edgar Hoover, created the federal crime laboratory and began hiring many of its own experts and special agents, which reduced the need for independent forensic scientists like Oscar Heinrich. But in 1997, the Justice Department criticized the FBI lab for using flawed scientific practices, like comparative bullet-lead analysis, that might have tainted dozens of criminal cases. “The investigation found that the laboratory’s explosives, chemistry-toxicology and materials analysis units were rife with substandard performance that had forced F.B.I. officials to review several hundred past and current cases to determine how many might have been jeopardized by faulty work,” reported the New York Times.
Oscar Heinrich warned that sloppy work from poorly trained scientific examiners would undermine criminal justice, and he was right. Recent studies conducted by the Innocence Project have shown that misguided lab technicians or bad science techniques, like bite mark evidence or shoe print comparisons, were responsible for almost 50 percent of wrongful convictions.
The 2009 report from the National Academy of Sciences offered scathing evidence that crime labs across America needed overhauling, including standardized techniques and better-trained examiners. It targeted much-used forensic disciplines like fingerprinting, firearms identification, bite marks, and BPA, along with handwriting and hair analysis—all tools used for decades to catch criminals.
The training of experts can vary wildly from agency to agency, creating a lack of consistency that should be frightening to anyone involved in a criminal case, according to the NAS. There is also no consistency in their certification or in the accreditation of crime laboratories. The majority of jurisdictions don’t require forensic practitioners to be certified, or even formally educated in these techniques. And most forensic science disciplines have no mandatory certification programs. Judges on cases involving bloodstain pattern analysis have allowed “experts” to take the stand whose credentials have included only a forty-hour course.
Another issue, according to the report, is that state and local law enforcement agencies sorely lack resources like funding, staff, and equipment “to promote and maintain strong forensic science laboratory systems.”
The NAS recommended many changes, including rigorous independent testing of all forensic techniques that currently have little scientific support, which are virtually all of them except DNA and toxicology. Much of forensic science was developed within law enforcement agencies, and the techniques are not subjected to the rigorous, systematic tests and peer reviews like other scientific techniques. That has to change to maintain the integrity of the criminal justice system.
The academy suggested that the advent of an independent federal agency would standardize forensic science by financing research and training, hoping to join more closely the pursuit of truth by both the scientific community and law enforcement. An aggressive initiative would take tremendous support from Congress and the White House—as of 2020, that is unlikely to happen.
Attorneys are more often requesting Daubert Hearings to test the credentials of experts. Judges are asked to evaluate the admissibility of an expert, a forensic method, testimony, or evidence while the jury sits nearby. But judges are generally not versed in scientific techniques, and they are ultimately the gatekeeper. Junk science is still admitted to trial.
In 1992, Cameron Todd Willingham was convicted in Texas for setting a fire that had killed his three young daughters—a two-year-old and one-year-old twins. Willingham had always maintained his innocence, but police investigators claimed that they could prove that the fire had been started by some form of liquid accelerant. Almost twenty years later, leading arson experts concluded that the evidence was unreliable, and further evidence in the case exonerated Willingham. But it was too late—Cameron Todd Willingham had been executed in 2004.
Shoddy forensic techniques can also lead to far-reaching tragedies. In 2014, a former crime scene analyst committed suicide in California after his DNA was erroneously connected to the sexual assault and murder of a fourteen-year-old girl in 1984. After Kevin Brown’s death, a federal judge ruled that his DNA was likely present on the victim’s body because of cross contamination, probably due to now-outdated standards used in his crime laboratory. Brown died believing that he would forever remain a murder suspect.
We can still learn so many crucial lessons from the nascent development of forensic science. Investigations must start with honest, intelligent officers willing to do good detective work in the field. The public should question law enforcement without impeding its progress, and jurors shouldn’t be swayed by an expert’s reputation—they should evaluate if his theory makes sense. America should continue to lead the way in the development of forensic science through federal funding and research. Confessions should not be enough to convict. In fact, false confessions are at least partially responsible for more than 25 percent of wrongful convictions, while eyewitness misidentification is another leading cause.
All forensic science is fallible, even DNA testing. Americans can only hope that investigators will doggedly gather reliable evidence, clues that can get to the truth rather than settle on an outcome that will appease the public or free a guilty suspect. Investigators in the field and inside the laboratory must continue to develop their arsenal through meticulous research in forensic science, psychology, and profiling, and then those methods need to be rigorously tested against scientific standards for reliability. If they fail, then little stands between criminals and the rest of society. And even one innocent person behind bars means the judicial system has failed.
Oscar Heinrich never forgot the David Lamson case, one of the most controversial of his career. In the end, the scientific evidence confused jurors more than anything. David Lamson’s life was spared not because he was innocent but because some of the nation’s top forensic experts could not agree on the evidence.
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