Whenever a body is discovered, the first question asked by any investigating officer is "Who is it?" Because most murder victims are killed by people they know, the answer to such a question often leads directly to the killer, and so murderers often go to extraordinary lengths to conceal their victim's identity. (The serial killer, slaughtering strangers at random, has little need for such circumspection.) Fortunately, bodies are very difficult to dispose of; bulky and cumbersome, they tend to float in water, resist fire, and smell awful, and they are full of clues as to the person's identity. Of these clues, some such as bones and teeth merit individual consideration and are dealt with elsewhere in these pages, but here we are dealing with the unusual and the inspired. As the reader will find, putting names to a few scraps of remains has frequently provided forensic science with its greatest triumphs. 

Martin Thorn and Augusta Nack

DATE: 1897

LOCATION: New York, New York

SIGNIFICANCE: New York's Jigsaw Murder became one of the most infamous crimes in the city's history.

Two boys were swimming in the East River off lower Manhattan on June 26, 1897, when they came across a parcel wrapped in a red oilcloth. Inside was a headless torso. According to the police surgeon, the dissection showed signs of surgical skill. And there was something else: an oddshaped strip of skin cut from the chest, as though some distinctive feature, such as a tattoo, had been excised. Gradually the river yielded its grim secrets. The lower torso was found several miles upstream in Washington Heights; the final piece in this human jigsaw, the legs, surfaced off the Brooklyn shore. Only the head was never found.

The discoveries caused a sensation, one that George Arnold, crime reporter for the New York Journal, was eager to exploit. At the city morgue, he watched the muscular body parts being arranged into something resembling human form. Something about the hands intrigued him; they seemed well cared for yet heavily calloused, a paradox he had noticed previously in masseurs employed at Turkish baths. A survey of such establishments revealed that a masseur named Willie Guldensuppe had not been seen for two days at the Murray Hill Baths. And he had a tattoo on his chest. Arnold traced Guldensuppe to a Ninth Avenue boardinghouse run by a part-time midwife called Augusta Nack. She declared herself baffled by her tenant's disappearance. By this time, the dismembered body had been definitely identified as Guldensuppe by a Dr. J. S. Cosby, who recognized a scar from an operation on one of the dead man's fingers.

Another Journal reporter, armed with a photograph of the oilcloth, searched drugstores close to Guldensuppe's home and struck journalistic gold. One store owner remembered selling just such an item to a stout but handsome woman, a description that fitted Augusta Nack. Police persuaded the portly landlady to accompany them to headquarters, where they attempted to browbeat her into admitting all. A detective took her to view the remains, threw back the shirt to reveal the legs, and demanded to know if they belonged to Guldensuppe.

Nack was equal to the challenge. "I would not know," she sniffed, "as I never saw the gentleman naked."

Her response hardly corresponded with what Arnold had been hearing from other residents of the boardinghouse. They reckoned that Augusta Nack and Willie Guldensuppe had been lovers for years. But recently there had been bad blood between them caused by a fellow lodger, a young barber named Martin Thorn.

Confession

At the barbershop where Thorn worked, police heard from another employee that Thorn, an ex-medical student, had confessed to killing Guldensuppe. The way Thorn told it, Nack had seduced him while her regular lover, Guldensuppe, was away, but the bulky masseur had returned unexpectedly and found them in bed together. The beating that Thorn received put him in the hospital and cost him his job at the barbershop. His attempts to disentangle himself from the situation by moving to another boardinghouse failed signally; Nack would not be denied. Neither would Guldensuppe. Again, he caught the couple in flagrante delicto, and again he thrashed the reluctant paramour. For Thorn, this was the final straw. He bought a knife and a pistol, determined to avenge himself.

With news of Thorn's arrest headlining every New York newspaper, police received a call from a Long Island farmer who lived close to where the oilcloth had been purchased. He had a strange story to tell. Apparently, two weeks earlier, he had rented a cabin on his farm to a Mr. and Mrs. Braun. Despite paying fifteen dollars in rent in advance, they had visited the cabin only twice, the second time being on the day that Guldensuppe disappeared. That same afternoon, the farmer noticed that his ducks had turned pink. They had been splashing in a pool of water issuing from the cottage's waste disposal pipe, which had yet to be connected to the main sewer. Closer inspection uncovered what looked to be blood in the water.

Now, details of Thorn's arrest had resurrected memories of the mysterious couple.

A police search of the cottage revealed a murder kit: a gun, some rope, carbolic acid, a carving knife, and a saw. This was enough for a warrant to be issued for Nack's arrest. What was already a sensational murder case assumed international significance when Thorn fled to Canada, but he was soon captured and returned for trial.

He was defended by William Howe, half of the notorious New York law firm of Howe and Hummel, two high-priced attorneys whose efforts on behalf of their clients were rarely encumbered by rules of evidence or other tiresome legal considerations. After consideration of all the facts, Howe decided on a full frontal assault: Not only were the two defendants unacquainted with each other, he thundered, but neither of them had met or even known the victim. Drawing on his considerable reserves of rhetoric, Howe went on to ridicule the suggestion that these assorted limbs belonged to Guldensuppe or Golden Soup or whatever the wretched man's name was. They might belong to any corpse. Indeed, what evidence was there that Guildedsoap had ever existed?

If Howe succeeded in planting any seeds of doubt in the jury's mind— and he was without peer in terms of courtroom persuasiveness— then all his good work was entirely undone by Augusta Nack's decision to turn state's evidence. Pleading a fit of remorse (though some suspected that she had been persuaded by the checkbook of William Randolph Hearst, the Journal's owner), she recounted in gory detail every event that took place at the cottage.

Sexual Promises

As suspected, she and Thorn had rented the place with the sole purpose of murdering her violent former lover. Guldensuppe had been lured to the cottage with promises of a renewal in their liaison, but once the brawny masseur stepped inside, Thorn appeared from a closet and shot him in the back of the head. They had dumped Guldensuppe into the bathtub, and while Mrs. Nack went to buy oilcloth, Thorn, the ex-medical student, got to work with his saw. He left the taps running, unaware that the disposal had not been connected to the sewer. Outside, the ducks, rejoicing in this newfound source of water, turned steadily more pink. Nack said that Thorn had encased the missing head in plaster of paris before pitching it into the river.

Such a betrayal forced Thorn into a corner. Hastily he cobbled together his own version of events, one in which he admitted renting the cottage as a "love nest," but he put all of the blame for Guldensuppe's death on his mistress's broad shoulders. He had arrived at the cottage on the day in question to be greeted with the news that Nack had shot her ex-lover. His dismemberment of the body had been solely occasioned by a desire to aid a woman in distress. For some reason, despite this admission, Howe refused to back off from his insistence that this was not the corpse of Willie Guldensuppe, and the bewildering trial drew to its inevitable close. Both defendants were found guilty of murder. Thorn went to Sing Sing, where on August 1, 1898, he became the twenty-seventh person to occupy that institution's least inviting piece of furniture. Augusta Nack plea-bargained her way to a twenty-year jail term.

Conclusion

George Arnold's employer, press baron William Randolph Hearst, was acutely aware of the public's insatiable appetite for homicide and would dispatch armies of reporters on cases such as this one that were likely to boost circulation. His instincts were rarely wrong.

Patrick Higgins

DATE: 1913

LOCATION: Winchburgh, Scotland

SIGNIFICANCE: This identification tour de force was performed by one of the legendary figures in forensic science.

Two Scottish farmworkers, John Thomson and Thomas Duncan, out walking on the afternoon of June 8, 1913, were circling the Hopetoun Quarry, just a few miles west of Edinburgh, when their attention was drawn to a bulky object floating in the water. Their first impression was that someone had tossed a scarecrow from one of the adjacent fields into the water, but a closer look soon disabused them of that notion. The scarecrow turned out to be two small waterlogged bodies lashed together with cord.

Bloated and misshapen, barely recognizable as human, the remains were taken to Linlithgow mortuary for examination by Professor Harvey Littlejohn, head of forensic medicine at Edinburgh University, and his assistant Sydney Smith. This was Smith's first major case in a career destined to span five decades, but rarely, if ever again, would he face such a formidable forensic challenge.

As he cut away the remnants of clothing, his eyes beheld an extraordinary sight—almost all of the body fat had been converted to adipocere, a whitish, suetlike substance caused by prolonged exposure to moisture. Only the feet, encased in boots, were left intact. Adipocere takes between four and five months to develop on the face and neck and a little longer on the trunk if the body is in damp ground; in water its progress is governed by the temperature.

The level of adipocere development that Smith noted here was consistentwith immersion in water for at least eighteen months, possibly as much as two years. Only during the autopsy was Smith able to establish that both of the victims were young boys. Measurement of the bones and dental features enabled Smith to say that the taller of the two, at 3 feet 7.5 inches, was between six and seven years old. There was a small injury to the scalp, though it was impossible to state whether this was caused before or after death. The second boy, some five inches shorter, was between three and four years old. Both had close-cropped brown hair, evidently cut shortly before death.

Final Meal

An informative side effect of the development of adipocere was the quite remarkable way in which it had preserved the stomach, so much so that Smith was able to clearly identify what the children had eaten last: green peas, barley, potatoes, and leeks, the ingredients of traditional Scotch broth. Reasoning that the vegetables would have been consumed when fresh— either late summer or fall—and factoring in his earlier estimates regarding the adipocere, Smith estimated that death had most likely occurred in the latter half of 1911. He further thought that the meal had been eaten about one hour before death. This suggested that the boys had lived locally, because the only practical way of getting two victims to such an isolated spot was by foot. While examining the clothing, which was of the cheapest quality, Smith found a faded stamp on one of the shirts. It had formerly belonged to the Dysart poorhouse in Fife. This information enabled the authorities to put names to the corpses.

William Higgins had been born in December 1904, his brother John in 1907. After the death of their mother in 1910, their father, Patrick Higgins, a habitual drunkard and occasional laborer, had applied for their admission to the Dysart poorhouse. Failure to pay for their modest upkeep resulted in his being jailed in June 1911 for two months. On being released, Higgins removed his sons from the poorhouse and dumped them onto a woman named Elizabeth Hynes. Again he neglected his financial obligations, preferring to squander every penny on liquor, so Mrs. Hynes reported him to the Inspector of the Poor. Reminded of his responsibilities and the consequences of failing to meet them, Higgins took his boys away from Mrs. Hynes. At the beginning of November 1911, the two lads vanished.

In conversations with friends, Higgins had made several attempts to explain his sons' disappearance, all contradictory and none plausible.

At his trial in Edinburgh, which began September 11, 1913, his defense was temporary insanity caused by epilepsy, and the main evidence was concerned with proving or disproving this condition. Ultimately the jury adjudged him guilty of murder but with a recommendation to mercy. Nevertheless, on October 2, 1913, Higgins was hanged.

Conclusion

The rarely seen level of adipocere development in this case so impressed Smith that he thought it should be preserved for teaching purposes. He arranged for the specimens to be transferred to the Forensic Science Museum at Edinburgh University, where they have since served as exemplars for generations of budding pathologists. 

Hans Schmidt

DATE: 1913

LOCATION: New York, New York

SIGNIFICANCE: This bizarre murder was investigated by one of

America's finest early detectives.

On September 5, 1913, a young sister and brother, gazing out from the porch of their Palisades home that overlooked the Hudson River, spotted an unusual bundle being carried along by the early-morning tide. As it bobbed ashore, curiosity got the better of them, and they went to investigate. Inside the manila paper parcel they found a red-and-blue striped pillow. It had been slit open, and among the feathers was the headless trunk of a woman, severed at the waist. The remains were removed to Volk's Morgue in Hoboken, where county physician Dr. George W. King conducted a cursory examination. His first impression was that the dismemberment showed clear signs of a skilled hand. Judging from the softness of the cartilaginous joints, he put the age of the woman at not more than thirty. He estimated her height at approximately five feet four inches and her weight between 120 and 130 pounds, and he judged that she had been in the water a few days at most. (At a later, more thorough autopsy, King found that the woman had given birth prematurely not long before she died.)

The next day, about three miles downriver at Weehawken, New Jersey, two crab hunters came across another parcel, this one containing the lower part of the torso. Wrapped in a newspaper dated August 31, then placed in a pillowcase, it had been weighted down with a large rock. Oddly enough, the composition of this rock was to have a profound effect on the course of the investigation. Geologists determined that it was schist, a grayish-green rock rarely found in New Jersey but very common in Manhattan. It was irregular in shape and appeared to have been broken off by blasting, probably a result of the massive building program then under way in New York.

This revelation raised the question of sovereignty. Bodies found floating in the Hudson River are not entirely uncommon, and usually jurisdiction is decided geographically, that is, on the basis of which side of the river the body washes up on, the New Jersey side or the New York side. But because there was a strong indication that this particular murder had occurred across the river, responsibility for the inquiry passed into the hands of the New York Police Department (NYPD).

Legendary Detective

The investigation was led by one of the great innovators in American criminology, Inspector Joseph A. Faurot. Already he had made his mark. In 1906, following a visit to London, Faurot had returned to New York mightily impressed with Scotland Yard's use of fingerprinting as a forensic tool, and that same year he made history with his arrest of a man with a British accent who was acting suspiciously at a hotel. Despite the man's insistence that he was merely conducting a liaison with one of the hotel's female guests, Faurot sent a copy of his fingerprints to Scotland Yard. Back came confirmation that the man was a notorious hotel thief, thus earning him the distinction of being the first criminal in the United States to be apprehended through the use of fingerprints.

Faurot also understood the value of old-fashioned detective work. In this case, both the pillow and the pillowcase yielded promising clues. On the pillowcase, about an inch high and evidently the handiwork of a novice, the letter A had been embroidered in white silk. Such an item, Faurot felt, most likely had come from a lady's boudoir, hinting that the body had been dismembered at a private residence.

A tag on the pillow gave the manufacturer's name, the Robinson-Roders Company of Newark, New Jersey. When questioned, company officials revealed that the pillow had been a disappointing seller; only twelve had been made and all had been acquired by George Sachs, a secondhand furniture dealer. Sachs confirmed that the line had been slow-moving; he still had ten of the pillows in stock. Of the two sold, one was traced to a woman who clearly had no knowledge of the crime; the other had been delivered, together with various pieces of furniture, to an apartment at 68

Bradhurst Avenue. The landlord told Faurot that the flat had been rented two weeks earlier by someone called Hans Schmidt, apparently for a young female relative of his, and Schmidt had ordered the furniture.

All attempts to locate the new tenant foundered, and for five days a team of detectives kept the apartment under surveillance. Still no one showed up. Finally, on September 9, Faurot obtained a passkey and let himself in. One glance was enough to convince him that he had found the murder scene. A dark discoloration on the green wallpaper and another on the floor showed every indication of being blood. Someone had evidently gone to a great deal of trouble to remove them; next to the sink lay a new scrubbing brush and six cakes of soap.

Murder Kit

Inside a trunk, Faurot found a foot-long butcher knife and a large handsaw; both had recently been cleaned. Another trunk held several small handkerchiefs, all embroidered with the letter A in the same novice hand as the pillowcase. There was also a bundle of letters addressed to Anna Aumuller. Most were from Germany, but three had return addresses in New York. Faurot interviewed all of the correspondents, a task that ended at St. Boniface's Church on 42nd Street. The priest there remembered Anna Aumuller as a twenty-one-year-old German immigrant who had worked as a servant in the rectory until she was discharged for misconduct. When asked if Anna had known Hans Schmidt, the cleric nodded. He also knew Schmidt's present address—St. Joseph's Church, 405 West 105th Street.

Puzzled more than suspicious, Faurot reached St. Joseph's just before midnight. Father Hans Schmidt answered the door. When Faurot introduced himself, the bulky thirty-two-year-old German-born assistant priest almost fainted. Just minutes later, in a fit of remorse, he unburdened his soul with a bizarre tale of having gone through a form of marriage with Anna—a ceremony he had conducted himself for obvious reasons—only to then kill her, excusing himself on the grounds that "I loved her. Sacrifices should be consummated in blood."

He admitted purchasing the knife and handsaw on August 31, then vacillating until the night of September 2, when he had crept into Anna's bedroom while she lay sleeping and slashed her throat. When questioned about the obvious signs of experience in the dissection, Schmidt acknowledged that he had been a medical student before being ordained. He had discarded the remaining body parts in the Hudson River as well. No more were ever found.

In Schmidt's wardrobe, Faurot found business cards with the name of Dr. Emil Moliere. Schmidt admitted to occasionally posing as a physician under several names, a fact borne out by the discovery of several medicines used to induce abortions. Checking into Schmidt's history, Faurot uncovered a strange mix of religious fervor and con artistry. He had served at several churches across the United States, often arousing suspicion but never facing censure.

At his first trial in December 1913, the jury was deadlocked over Schmidt's sanity. Two months later, a second jury experienced no such misgivings and convicted the priest of murder on February 5, 1914. After a two-year appeal, on February 18, 1916, Schmidt died in the electric chair.

Conclusion

This case was typical of Joseph Faurot's innovative approach to crime solving, an approach that served him well. In time he would found the NYPD's fingerprint department and would later become New York's assistant police commissioner.

Edward Keller

DATE: 1914

LOCATION: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

SIGNIFICANCE: This crime classic emphasizes the importance of careful observation allied to medical knowledge.

Ten days before Christmas 1915, workers digging in the cellar of a vacant Philadelphia warehouse on Kensington Avenue uncovered a packing case. Inside was a trunk that contained a male skeleton, fully clothed, tall and heavy-boned. Its features, apart from a few scraps of brown and gray hair, had been obliterated with quicklime. Death had resulted from a massive blow to the rear of the head. When the corpse was moved, a dental bridge comprising four teeth fell from its mouth.

The clothing seemed to offer the best chance of identification. A jacket label bore the name of an exclusive Philadelphia tailor, while the pockets surrendered a door key, a prayer book, and a crucifix. When

William Belshaw, a Philadelphia detective who solved several notorious crimes.

asked how long the body had lain buried, the medical examiner hazarded a guess of three years, give or take a few months.

The investigation was headed by Philadelphia's top detective, William J. Belshaw. Right from the outset he had to hack his way through a forest of misleading clues. First, there was the packing case.

Stenciled on one side was a name and address, "John McNamee, Wensley Street," but the 1911 city directory failed to show any such entry. The jacket, too, posed problems. When shown the garment, the tailor whose label appeared inside sniffily dismissed it as mass-produced rubbish, hardly one of his custom-made masterpieces!

If, as seemed likely, the killer had deliberately switched the label to thwart a potential pursuer, then where did this leave the other clues, in particular the dental bridge? Could its integrity be guaranteed? Belshaw had doubts. Sure enough, when he checked the skull, he counted—including the bridge—thirty-five teeth, three more than normal for an adult male. Further discrepancies came to light when the scraps of hair were put under the microscope. The brown hair, fine and silky, was grossly dissimilar to the coarse gray hair. Belshaw reasoned that because the corpse had most of his teeth, this suggested a young man and therefore the brown hair had come from him; the gray hair, he felt, originated from and had been planted by the killer, probably someone middle-aged.

Through local manufacturers of packing cases, Belshaw discovered that on March 14, 1914, a John McNamee had ordered a case for delivery to the 600 block of Wensley Street. But this was only twenty-one months prior to the discovery in the basement, a much shorter length of time than the three years suggested by the police surgeon. Belshaw blamed the abundance of quicklime for the doctor's miscalculation as to how long the body had lain in the pit.

The address on Wensley Street turned out to be a rooming house whose landlady recalled one of her tenants receiving such a case. She thought his name was McNamee and described him as mid-twenties, tall, with blond hair and prominent teeth. Belshaw produced the key found on the corpse and began trying every door in the building. On the second floor he found a lock that it fitted.

Records for 1914 showed that the warehouse where the body had been found had previously been occupied by the Red Star Laundry, now defunct. The ex-proprietor, Edwin Klempner, confirmed to Belshaw that McNamee had worked for him as a night watchman until March 1914, when he had abruptly vanished. Proceeding on the basis that the likeliest motive for murder had been robbery, Belshaw surveyed every local pawnshop. One such establishment reported that in March 1914 they had loaned ten dollars on a watch to a Mr. John McNamee of Wensley Street. The ticket had never been redeemed and they still had the watch. Inscribed on its case was a name—Daniel McNichol.

Fearful Wife

A 1914 directory listed McNichol's address as 866 North 22nd Street. When Belshaw called, a timid-looking woman admitted that she was McNichol's wife and that he had vanished on March 30, 1914, but she refused to enlarge on why she had not reported his disappearance. Her description of him—tall, well-built, brown hair, good teeth—fitted the corpse perfectly, as did her statement that McNichol, a devout Catholic, never went anywhere without a prayer book and crucifix. As gently as he could, Belshaw informed Marie McNichol that her husband had been found.

Through a flood of tears, Mrs. McNichol explained her previous reluctance to report Daniel's disappearance. Apparently, one of his business partners, a man named Edward Keller, had called with news that Daniel had absconded with fifteen hundred dollars in company funds. Keller said that if Mrs. McNichol was prepared to make good the deficiency, he would not contact the police. Dutifully the poor woman repaid every cent that her husband had misappropriated. She had no idea where Keller lived—he had always called for his money— but described him as about forty-five, with deep-set eyes.

Belshaw soon found those eyes staring out from a police file photograph; they had an oddly familiar look. After a moment's thought, the mist cleared —Keller and Edwin Klempner, boss of the Red Star Laundry, were one and the same! Keller's criminal record went back almost a quarter of a century and included a fourteen-year jail term for embezzlement. Known accomplices included a twenty-six-year-old nephew, Albert Young, who in every detail fitted the description of John McNamee. Belshaw speculated that the two men had lured McNichol to the laundry and killed him. But that still left one loose end— the dental bridge. Where had it come from? The likeliest solution was provided by Young's mother in New York, who said that her son wore just such a bridge. Belshaw pondered the likelihood of Young's voluntarily relinquishing his bridge and could reach only one conclusion.

Edward Keller readily confessed his identity when Belshaw came to call; he also admitted that he and Young had killed McNichol because they owed him money. But on one point Keller would not budge: he emphatically refuted any suggestion that he had killed Young as well. His erstwhile partner, he said, had cut and run.

When it came time to stand trial, Keller repudiated this confession, claiming coercion and declaring himself the victim of a plot hatched by his missing nephew. Enough doubt was created for the jury to return a verdict of manslaughter. Keller received a twelve-year jail sentence. Albert Young was never seen again.

Conclusion

This tale has a curious conclusion. During the eight years Keller spent behind bars, he appeared to reform, and on his release, he married a social worker, who found him a job as night watchman at the Corn Exchange National Bank. About one year later, on the morning of December 20, 1925, an elderly man, panting hard and clutching a satchel, hailed a cab in midtown Philadelphia and asked to be driven to the railroad station. He kept urging the driver to go faster. At the station, the cab drew to a halt. The driver, puzzled by the silence behind him, turned around. Edward Keller was sprawled across the backseat, dead from a heart attack. Beside him lay the satchel, stuffed with more than six thousand dollars in bills stolen from the bank just hours before.

Abraham Becker and Reuben Norkin

DATE: 1922

LOCATION: New York, New York

SIGNIFICANCE: Not only are stomach contents useful for establishing time of death, but here they provided indisputable proof of identification as well.

For years, Abraham Becker and his wife Jennie had endured a bitter, loveless union, plagued with violent quarrels. Finally, in 1920, Becker left his wife and four children and eloped with his longtime mistress, twentyfour-year-old Anna Elias. But after three months in Cleveland, they returned to the Bronx, and Becker moved back in with his wife. This heralded such a dramatic improvement in the Beckers' domestic situation that on the night of April 6, 1922, no one was surprised to see the couple at a friend's party with Abe playing the attentive spouse, plying Jennie with canapés, grapes, figs, and almonds.

On the way home, their car developed engine trouble and chugged to a halt. Becker, a chauffeur and experienced mechanic, raised the hood to diagnose the problem, then called for Jennie to help him. As she climbed from the car, he felled her with a wrench, raining blow after blow on her head. Certain she was dead, Becker hauled her body to a nearby grave he had already prepared, an ash pit. For added insurance, he doused the body with lime. Then he drove home.

Questions from inquisitive neighbors were parried with the story that Jennie had run off to Philadelphia; another man, he said, had spirited her away. Few believed this, however; Jennie was a devoted mother and would never willingly abandon her brood. Becker, on the other hand, incited a torrent of local gossip by depositing the four children in local orphanages, thus clearing the way for Anna Elias and their two-year-old daughter to move in with him. If his actions were rash, then his tongue was positively suicidal. Often he could be overheard boasting to friends, "Congratulate me.

I have got rid of my wife!"

Such comments inevitably led to his downfall. In November, the garrulous chauffeur was arrested as a material witness in the disappearance of his wife. Even in jail, his tongue refused to stay still, as he bragged to a visiting acquaintance that he had killed his wife and "buried her so deep they [police] couldn't find the body in a hundred years." Had Becker realized that the person listening so avidly to these admissions was an undercover police agent, he might have been more circumspect.

Murder Plot

During these conversations, Becker made frequent mention of his business associate, Reuben Norkin, an auto shop owner. Norkin was quickly arrested and grilled. At first, he denied the allegations, but then he admitted helping Becker bury his wife, although he insisted that his complicity stopped at just that. Norkin led detectives to where Jennie Becker's body lay in the yard of his auto shop. After digging down four feet, the search party found a rotting corpse.

When confronted with the remains at the morgue, Becker was dismissive. "My wife's a bigger woman than that."

"What about the clothes?" asked the police.

"These aren't the clothes my wife was wearing." Becker's insistence that his wife had been wearing low-heeled shoes, unlike the fashionable high heels worn by this corpse, prompted retrieval of the original missing-person report he had filed. In it he had described exactly the clothes worn by this dead woman. Still, he refused to budge from his assertion that these were not the remains of his wife.

To settle the argument once and for all, the corpse was turned over to medical examiner Dr. Karl S. Kennard for autopsy. The crushed skull obviously indicated severe blows to the head, but from the condition of the bronchial tubes, it appeared as though Jennie Becker had actually been alive when buried and had died from suffocation. Also, the lime had not totally destroyed the stomach, which meant that when Dr. Alexander O. Gettler analyzed the contents, he was able to find traces of grapes, figs, almonds, and meat-spread sandwiches—the very items Becker had lovingly fed his wife at the party. Becker, obviously shaken by these discoveries, blustered that any woman could have eaten such food, until Gettler administered the coup de grâce: examination of the meat spread found it to be identical to the canapés served by the party hostess—prepared according to an old family recipe.

Becker thought fast. He now admitted that the corpse was that of his wife but claimed that Norkin had killed her to "get even with me, because we had a row over an automobile." When asked why he had not reported the murder, Becker replied, "because he [Norkin] has killed a lot of other people and would kill me, too." Becker then added the rather astonishing assertion that after killing Jennie, Norkin had considered his account settled, and the two men had become firm friends again!

Not surprisingly, Norkin's version of events was an exact mirror image of Becker's, even down to fearing that Becker would kill him, too. Norkin said that Becker had first broached the subject of killing his wife months earlier. "In April he asked me to lend him a shovel and I let him have one. . . . Later on he told me that he had buried his wife in a pit near my shop."

While Becker's guilt was beyond dispute, prosecutors opted to seek the maximum penalty for Norkin as well. In separate trials, both men were found guilty of first-degree murder, and each went to the electric chair in 1924.

Conclusion

Dr. Alexander O. Gettler was for many years head of New York's Chemical and Toxicological Laboratory in the medical examiner's office. His expertise and lucid delivery made him an excellent witness in dozens of trials, but rarely did he exceed the heights reached in this memorable case.

Patrick Mahon

DATE: 1924

LOCATION: Eastbourne, England

SIGNIFICANCE: Sir Bernard Spilsbury often cited this case as the most challenging he ever encountered.

For some time, Jessie Mahon had been suspicious of her husband's frequent absences from home. Knowing better than most the effect his salesman's smile and glib tongue had on the opposite sex, she feared he might be up to his old philandering ways again. Finally, propriety gave way to curiosity, and she began emptying the pockets of his many suits. Her attention was drawn to a baggage-check ticket from Waterloo train station in London. She asked a friend, an ex-railroad policeman, to investigate. On May 1, 1924, he presented the ticket at Waterloo and was given a Gladstone bag, the contents of which sent him running to Scotland Yard. They shared his concern but thought that justice could be best served by replacing the ticket in Mahon's pocket and allowing him to reclaim the bag.

The next day, when Mahon breezed into the baggage-check office, a waiting police officer stepped forward. Mahon cheerfully agreed that the bag's blood-soaked contents—a cook's knife and a monogrammed case, both of which had been sprinkled with disinfectant— did look ominous, but attributed the stains to some dog meat he had carried recently. Told to try again, because the blood was human, Mahon crumpled. In a whisper, he admitted that the initials on the case— EBK—were those of his mistress.

At thirty-seven, Emily Kaye was in love, engaged to be married, intending to emigrate, and pregnant. The only cloud on her horizon was that the father of her child, Patrick Mahon, already had a wife. There is no evidence to suggest that Emily was greatly perturbed by Mahon's matrimonial state; on the contrary, she seems to have been quite ruthless, making plans for their imminent departure to South Africa. Unfortunately, she accepted Mahon's invitation to spend the weekend of April 12 at a bungalow he had rented on a desolate stretch of Sussex coastline known as the Crumbles.

Mahon had prepared for Emily's visit by purchasing a large cook's knife and a tenon saw, which showed quite remarkable prescience, because during the course of an argument that weekend, Emily fell and accidentally struck her head on the coal scuttle with fatal results, leaving Mahon to marvel that he had just the right equipment to ensure that his embarrassment did not become public knowledge. Emily, he said, or what was left of her, was at the bungalow in Sussex.

House of Horror

When Scotland Yard detectives, accompanied by Sir Bernard Spilsbury, entered the deserted house, they saw nothing that was immediately recognizable as Emily Kaye. What they did find was detailed by Spilsbury in his later report: two large saucepans of boiled human flesh, saucers and other receptacles swimming with greasy human fat, thirty-seven portions of flesh in a hatbox, a fiber trunk holding large chunks of torso including a heavily bruised shoulder, and a biscuit tin full of various organs, all atop a blood-drenched carpet.

Spilsbury spent eight hours in this hellhole, sifting through the fireplaces and dustpans until he had recovered a thousand fragments of calcined bone, much of it almost dust. Every item was cataloged and removed to his laboratory in London for reassembly. The task took him several days, usually after his colleagues had gone home, to spare them the harrowing spectacle of Emily Kaye being reassembled. He found everything except the skull and a portion of one leg. All had been part of a female body, pregnant at the time of death.

Although unable to state categorically how Emily Kaye died, Spilsbury had seen enough to demolish Mahon's claim of an accident. The idea of the flimsy coal scuttle inflicting such massive shoulder bruising and lethal injuries to the skull in a single fall, without either buckling or at least being dented, was preposterous. And neither had she been carved up with the blunt knife that Mahon claimed he had used, a frantic and futile attempt to deflect attention away from the deadly purchases that he originally claimed had been bought long afterward. Spilsbury always suspected that Mahon had bludgeoned Emily Kaye to death with a missing ax handle, which like the skull, was never found.

Allegedly, while on remand, Mahon told another inmate of burning the head on a stove in the middle of a thunderstorm; the intense heat had caused the eyes to open, which had so terrified Mahon that he had rushed from the house. Coincidentally, during his cross-examination on this very topic, a sudden clap of thunder rumbled overhead. Mahon cringed in terror, arm raised defensively, yellowish face staring skyward. Nothing else needed to be said. He was executed on September 9, 1924.

Conclusion

An interesting outcome of this case arose through Spilsbury's abhorrence at seeing police officers at the bungalow move scraps of rotten flesh with bare hands. Practically no specialized equipment— rubber gloves, tapes, or fingerprint powder—then existed for use at a crime scene. To address this deficiency, Scotland Yard, in consultation with Spilsbury and other forensic experts, assembled the famous Murder Bag that became an essential feature of every such investigation. 

Henry Colin Campbell

DATE: 1929

LOCATION: Cranford, New Jersey

SIGNIFICANCE: Inspired detection led first to the identity of a murder victim, and then to her heartless killer.

Studious, soft-spoken, and apparently a man of some substance, Richard Campbell seemed to be everything that Mildred Mowry, a middle-aged widow, was looking for in a husband. On his application to the matrimonial agency through which they met, the sixty-one-year-old New Yorker had listed his occupation as doctor; she believed him, and after a whirlwind courtship, the couple married on August 28, 1928. The next day, Campbell suggested that she deposit her life savings of one thousand dollars in his bank account so that she might receive the benefit of his deft investment skills. Mildred gladly agreed.

What should have been honeymoon bliss turned out to be less-thanromantic solitude because of Campbell's sudden announcement that his surgical work required his immediate presence in California. Leaving Mildred to languish in the small Pennsylvania town of Greenville, he traveled not to the West Coast, but to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and the bosom of his genuine wife and family, whose existence he had naturally kept from Mildred. He still kept in touch with her by letter, though, blaming his continual absences on too much work and not enough money.

Mildred, upset by Campbell's furtive behavior, eventually traced the elusive doctor to an accommodation address on West 42nd Street, New York. The proprietor, Louis Mirel, explained that Campbell had not used the facility for some time and suggested another address. After no luck there, either, Mildred returned home. On February 22, 1929, out of the blue, Campbell suddenly turned up in Greenville and informed Mildred that he was taking her to New Jersey with him. They set out in his dark-painted roadster. It was after midnight when Campbell halted just outside the town of Cranford. As Mildred lay dozing on the seat beside him, Campbell took careful aim with a .38 automatic and fired one bullet through the crown of her head. Afterward, he dragged the body from the car, doused it with gasoline, and set it alight, intending to destroy all evidence and possibility of identification.

At 5:30 the next morning, a truck driver spotted the still-blazing corpse and rushed to fetch the police. They rolled the charred body in the snow to extinguish the flames, but it was burned almost beyond recognition. To aid in identification, Public Prosecutor Abe J. David engaged Pinkerton's Detective Agency. William F. Wagner was assigned to the case, and he faced a thankless task. After tearing out the labels, the killer had bundled the victim's clothes around her head and set fire to them. What was left of them, poor in quality and old, suggested someone of modest circumstances. A few trinkets of jewelry still adorned the body, eliminating robbery as a motive. The shoes were manufactured by a St. Louis company, which reported that large quantities of the cheap brown oxfords had been shipped to the coal regions of Pennsylvania.

Death Mask

Determined that he would not be defeated, Wagner had the undertaker construct a death mask of the victim. The completed likeness, with its unusually high cheekbones, inclined Wagner to think that the victim had been of Polish extraction. Because there were numerous Polish settlements in western Pennsylvania, he had flyers circulated in that region, giving the victim's approximate age and describing her clothing. It wasn't long before the Greenville chief of police wired Wagner with a promising lead.

Just recently, two women, Mrs. S. D. Staub and Mrs. H. G. Dodds, had contacted him, worried about the disappearance of their friend Mildred Mowry. Six months earlier, she had told them of her marriage to a surgeon, Dr. Richard Campbell, but now the two ladies were agitated because they had not heard from her for two months. When they described Mildred as wearing special arch supports in her size 6C shoes, Wagner confirmed that these half-burned brown oxfords were similarly equipped.

In early April, copies of Mildred Mowry's medical records were given to the New Jersey authorities. Like the murder victim, Mowry had one finger stiffened at the joint, and this, together with charts from her dentist, convinced Wagner that he had identified the victim. In Greenville, a search of Mildred's apartment revealed letters from her absent husband, some giving the Mirel accommodation address. But the agency, although recalling the uncommunicative Dr. Campbell, knew nothing of his present whereabouts.

Wagner went to Elkton, Maryland, where the bigamous marriage had taken place. County records gave the doctor's address as 3707 Yosemite Street, Baltimore, which turned out to be an empty lot. However, the tenants of 3505 just down the street disclosed that their landlord's name was Henry Colin Campbell of Westfield, New Jersey, only a few miles from the murder scene. Police files showed Campbell, a convicted forger, with a history of marital irregularity, littered with wives and annulments. The Westfield house was deserted, but Wagner learned that Campbell's mail was being forwarded to 471 Madison Street, Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Drug Addict

On April 11, detectives called at the Elizabeth address and were met by Campbell's unsuspecting and legitimate wife. She told them that her husband was not due back until nine o'clock that evening. On the stroke of nine, a gray-haired man ambled under the nearby street-light and turned in to the house. Wagner and another detective moved forward to make the arrest. In Campbell's pocket, they found an automatic, later identified as the murder weapon. Campbell, who described himself to police as an advertising man, meekly allowed himself to be taken away. Within an hour, he had signed a confession to the murder of Mildred Mowry, although he later claimed that he could remember nothing of the killing, saying he had been in a drug-induced stupor at the time. What percentage of Campbell's actions were attributable to morphine addiction is unknown, but several physicians later testified that his health was in decline and that he required ever-increasing doses of medication.

In all probability, Mildred Mowry was not Campbell's first victim. Just one year earlier, middle-aged governess Margaret Brown suddenly left her job to marry a doctor she had met through a matrimonial agency, taking with her seven thousand dollars in savings. Her body, shot and burned in identical circumstances, was found just fifteen miles away from where Mowry met her death. While the similarities were marked, it proved impossible to fix the blame for that murder on Campbell. In the end, it was all academic. On June 13, 1929, Campbell was found guilty of first-degree murder. He was executed the following April.

Conclusion

In times of such limited communications, the sheer size of the United States was often the criminal's greatest ally. A crime committed in one state, unless of national significance, stood very little chance of being reported elsewhere. Without William Wagner's brilliance and determination, it is entirely conceivable that Campbell would have evaded justice, and given his track record, he very likely would have gone on to kill again. 

Patrick Brady

DATE: 1935

LOCATION: Sydney, Australia

SIGNIFICANCE: What became known as Australia's Shark Arm Murder has achieved legendary status in the annals of forensic science.

In mid-April 1935, two fishermen caught a fourteen-foot tiger shark off the coast of Sydney, Australia. Reluctant to kill such a magnificent creature, they gave it to the Coogee Beach aquarium, but the shark never settled into captivity, refusing to eat and lolling sluggishly in the pool. On April 25, the shark suddenly went berserk, thrashing about in a frenzy that culminated with it vomiting up a huge mass of waste, among which was a wellpreserved human arm! The arm was Caucasian in origin, muscular and brawny, and had an unusual tattoo depicting two boxers squaring up to each other. Knotted tightly around the wrist was a length of rope.

Aquarium experts were amazed that the shark's digestive juices had not dissolved the limb. Normally, such flesh would have been destroyed within thirty-six hours, but apparently the trauma of capture had so affected the fish that its digestive system had shut down. This suggested that it must have swallowed the arm very shortly before being captured a week earlier. After the shark was killed, an autopsy of the unfortunate creature failed to find any more human remains.

The skin on the fingers was still intact, but it was in very fragile condition. Scientists at the Sydney police laboratory managed to remove it carefully in small flakes and reassemble it, eventually obtaining a set of faint but definite prints. A check of police records had already revealed an alarming incidence of tattooed people reported missing, but the investigation soon homed in on James Smith, a forty-year-old ex-boxer with a criminal record. His wife identified the arm as that of her husband; the identification was later confirmed by fingerprints.

Smith had vanished two weeks before, on April 8, nine days before the shark was captured. He had told his wife of renting a seaside cottage for a fishing holiday with Patrick Brady, a denizen of the Sydney underworld with strong links to forgery and drug-trafficking circles. Taken into custody, Brady denied all knowledge of Smith's disappearance, but he did suggest that a wealthy boatbuilder named Reginald Holmes might be able to throw some light on the mystery.

Convinced that they were dealing with a case of gangland murder, detectives strove resolutely to locate the rest of the victim, as legal minds were already debating whether the discovery of just one arm constituted definitive proof of death. Even the armed forces joined in, as navy divers explored the sea bottom and air force planes made low sorties along the beaches. But they found nothing.

By chance, Professor Sydney Smith of Edinburgh University in Scotland, one of the world's foremost pathologists, was visiting Australia at this time and was asked to assist the local forensic medicine team in examining the arm. All agreed that it had been severed at the shoulder joint with a sharp knife, not bitten off by a shark. The amputation also seemed to have been carried out some considerable time after death, thus indicating that the arm's owner had not committed suicide.

Murder House

They next examined the seaside cottage. According to the owner's inventory, a small tin trunk, a mattress, three mats, and a length of rope were missing. This paved the way for a tentative reconstruction of the crime in which James Smith was killed, hacked apart on the mats, then squeezed into the tin trunk. The mutilated parts that the trunk would not accommodate, including the tattooed arm, were then roped to the outside, and the whole lot was dumped far out at sea. Somehow, the arm had worked loose, then to be swallowed by the unfortunateshark, which had suffered such gastric discomfort in the aquarium.

The rest of the story was equally bizarre. Three days after Brady's arrest, Reginald Holmes—who had denied even knowing Brady—was captured by a police launch in Sydney Harbor after a high-speed chase. His face was covered in blood from a slight bullet wound, the legacy, police thought, of a failed suicide attempt. Not so, said Holmes, insistent that someone had tried to kill him. He also now claimed that Brady had killed James Smith and had disposed of the body.

Holmes was right about someone wanting to kill him. On the very eve of the inquest into Smith's death at which he was to be a key witness, someone shot him twice in the head. His body was found in his car, late at night, under the Sydney Harbor Bridge. The roar of the traffic passing overhead had probably drowned out the sound of the gunshots.

Brady, of course, was in custody and therefore had a perfect alibi. Testimony at the inquest dragged on for twelve days until Brady's lawyers obtained a Supreme Court injunction to stop the proceedings on the grounds that one arm did not prove that James Smith was dead. Furious, the police responded by charging Brady with murder. It was a rash gesture. In court, Brady coolly accused yet another man, Albert Stannard, of involvement in Smith's death. The jury, no doubt influenced by the Supreme Court's earlier decision, decided that there was insufficient evidence to warrant a charge of murder, and Brady was set free. Later, Stannard and John Strong, both suspected hit men for the Sydney underworld, were tried for shooting Holmes, but after two trials they, too, were acquitted.

From what is known of the main characters, it appears likely that all this mayhem and mystery was the result of a struggle for control of drug trafficking in that part of Australia.

Conclusion

Discussing this case much later in his career, Sydney Smith wrote, "It is a trite saying but true that fact is stranger than fiction."

Buck Ruxton

DATE: 1935

LOCATION: Lancaster, England

SIGNIFICANCE: This forensic watershed was replete with radical new techniques that determined both corpse identification and time of death.

A young woman out walking on the morning of September 29, 1935, was crossing a bridge near Moffat, Scotland, when she spotted numerous parcels, some wrapped in newspaper, littering the bank of the River Annan below. One, she realized to her horror, was a human arm. A more thorough search of the stream and its banks yielded seventy pieces of human body parts. Included in this total were two disfigured heads. The remains were taken to Edinburgh for analysis.

The pathologists charged with piecing together this grisly jigsaw puzzle —John Glaister, professor of forensic medicine at Glasgow University; Sydney Smith, New Zealand-born professor of forensic medicine at Edinburgh University; and J. C. Brash, professor of anatomy at Edinburgh University—were united in one opinion: Whoever carried out the mutilation did so with a high degree of anatomical skill and considerable patience (they estimated that the dissection had taken eight hours to complete). All of the customary identifying marks—sex organs, fingertips, and facial features—either had been obliterated or were missing. Despite the profusion of parts, the team believed that they were probably dealing with two bodies at most. One head was definitely female. The other skull appeared to be that of a male, but the extreme mutilation made identification almost impossible. This confusion led the first newspaper reports to list the victims as a woman of twenty-one, about five feet one inch tall, and a man of about sixty, five feet six inches in height.

Even without medical evidence to help them, Dumfriesshire police were able to establish roughly when the remains had been dumped in the gully. It could not have been before September 15, because that was the date of one newspaper used to wrap some of the remains. Conversely, the discovery of more body parts several hundred yards downstream suggested a date no later than September 19, when the stream had last been in full spate following two days of heavy rain.

Acting on this assumption, police narrowed their inquiries to anyone reported missing in the few days prior to September 19.

By chance, the chief constable of Dumfriesshire had been reading an account in a Glasgow newspaper of the disappearance from Lancaster, one hundred miles to the south, of a Mary Jane Rogerson, a maid at the home of Dr. Buck Ruxton. A telephone call by the chief constable to his Lancashire counterpart brought forth the information that Ruxton's wife had also disappeared at about the same time. Putting two and two together, the Scottish policeman asked the pathologists to reexamine the supposedly male bones to determine whether they were those of a strongly built female. He also asked Lancaster police for a description of Mrs. Ruxton.

Stormy Relationship

Ruxton, an Indian-born doctor, and Isabella Van Ess, although never legally married, lived together in Lancaster as man and wife and produced three children. Their union was forever teetering on the brink of collapse, blighted by Ruxton's insane, often violent jealousy that frequently led to interventions by the police. And now there was good reason to believe that that point of collapse had been reached. Ever since the disappearance of Isabella and Mary Jane Rogerson—who were last seen on September 14, 1935—Ruxton had been careering around Lancaster like a madman, seemingly determined to put a noose around his own neck. He had fabricated all manner of stories to explain the women's disappearance, none of them convincing, and had hounded the local police with demands that they search his home so that he might quash the vicious rumors circulating that he had done away with both wife and maid. At first the police had been inclined to dismiss Ruxton as a crank; after the request from Scotland they weren't so sure.

North of the border, other clues began to surface. Foremost were the newspapers used to wrap the remains. One was a torn copy of the Sunday Graphic, dated September 15. An officer, examining a fragment of the paper, found a mutilated headline that read "—ambe's Carnival Queenrowned." An accompanying photo showed a young girl wearing a crown. Contacting the paper, he learned that this was a special regional edition, sold only in the vicinity of Morecambe and Lancaster.

Once a local newspaper vendor confirmed that a regional edition of the Sunday Graphic had indeed been delivered to the Ruxton household on September 15, the circumstantial evidence began to steamroller.

Rompers used to wrap one of the body parts were identified by a woman who had given them to Mary Rogerson's mother for onward transmission to the Ruxton children.

Finally, the police took Ruxton up on his suggestion that they search his home at 2 Dalton Square. Despite evidence of a lengthy and exhaustive cleanup, they still found bloodstains everywhere, and the drains contained unmistakable traces of human fat. Ruxton's bluff had failed. Summoned to the police station on October 12, he was questioned through the night, and the next morning, at 7:20 A.M., he was formally charged with murdering Mary Rogerson.

Two Bodies

In Scotland, the pathologists continued their labors, as they assembled the skulls, torsos, seventeen parts of limbs, and forty-three portions of soft tissue into something resembling human form. In shape and size, the first body conformed exactly with Mary Rogerson. The bones and teeth indicated a woman approximately twenty years old, Mary's age exactly. The second body was that of a woman estimated to be between thirty-five and forty-five. Isabella was thirty-four years of age.

Curiously, it was more what the pathologists didn't find that convinced them that they were on the right track. Certain distinguishing features on both bodies had been eliminated. Mary was known to have a squint; the eyes of the first body had been removed from their sockets. Also, the skin on the upper arm had been scraped away, right in the area where Mary had a prominent birthmark. Similar disfigurement covered the spot where Mary's appendix scar would have shown. Likewise, the area at the base of her thumb, where an old injury had left a scar, had been shaved of tissue. Most convincing of all, fingerprints from the first body matched those found at Dalton Square on articles habitually handled by Mary Rogerson. It was evidence good enough to stand up in any court. Just about the only thing that the pathologists couldn't ascertain was the actual cause of death; the mutilation was too thorough.

The second body was equally illuminating. Several of the teeth had been wrenched out, and the nose was missing completely. Isabella Ruxton had very prominent teeth and a large nose. Also, her legs from the knees to the ankles were conspicuously of the same thickness; on this body the legs had been pared of all flesh. In this case, though, the condition of the lungs and tongue left no doubt that asphyxiation had been the cause of death. A fractured hyoid confirmed that she had been throttled. Interestingly, the eyes, nose, ears, lips, and tips of the fingers—all other areas in which evidence of asphyxia are found—had been removed, adding to suspicion that the murderer had specialized medical knowledge.

However, conclusive proof that this was Isabella Ruxton came as the result of a major forensic breakthrough. For the first time, the photograph of a victim was superimposed over the skull to see if it would match. It fitted perfectly. Between them, the trio of Glaister, Smith, and Brash had slotted the final piece into an astonishing forensic jigsaw.

In order to establish when the two women had been murdered, yet another forensic first was employed. Dr. Alexander Mearns of Glasgow University, in a pioneering feat of medical detection, by studying the life cycle of the maggots that infested the remains on the riverbank, was able to establish that the victims were killed at about the time that Isabella Ruxton and Mary Jane Rogerson were last seen alive.

On November 5, 1935, a second count of murder was formally levied against Ruxton, that of killing his wife. He was convicted on both counts and sentenced to death. Following his execution on May 12, 1936, a newspaper released a full confession made by Ruxton in which he admitted killing Isabella in a jealous fury, only to be interrupted by the unfortunate Mary Jane. As a witness, she, too, had had to die.

Conclusion

The ramifications of this dual murder were so far-reaching that Brash and Glaister felt compelled to record their findings in a book, Medico-Legal Aspects of the Ruxton Case (1937). Lucid and scrupulously detailed, like the subject matter with which it deals, this book, too, has achieved the status of a classic. 

Arthur Eggers

DATE: 1946

LOCATION: San Bernardino, California

SIGNIFICANCE: This case is an example of how postwar California put the pursuit of criminals on a sounder scientific basis.

In January 1946, a visitor to the San Bernardino mountains was exploring one of that region's desolate box canyons when he spotted something lying beneath a broken tree branch. A closer look revealed it to be a middle-aged woman's corpse, half-naked, with the head and hands hacked off. She had been shot twice with a .32 caliber pistol. Preliminary inquiries by the local sheriff's department were hampered by the mutilation; without a face or fingerprints, identification was next to impossible, and neither the corpse's clothing nor a bloodstained tartan blanket found nearby offered any clues. Even so, fortune was with the investigators; only luck had led to the gruesome discovery, and the victim had been dead for less than ten hours. In different circumstances, the corpse might not have been found for months, by which time weathering and wild animals would have reduced it to a pile of unrecognizable bones.

Despite extensive newspaper coverage of the murder, no clues as to the woman's identity were forthcoming, which left only the missing-person files as a possible source of the corpse's identity. A three-week search produced the name of Dorothy Eggers. She had been reported missing by her husband, Arthur, at about the time the body was found, and at forty-one, she certainly sounded like a possibility, but the file described someone much slimmer and taller than the victim.

When filing the report, Arthur Eggers, a fifty-two-year-old clerk, had emphasized his wife's riotous lifestyle. He recounted how she would leave him and their two adopted children and hitch rides to nearby towns in search of other men, returning only when the money or the man had run out. There seemed to be genuine sadness in his eyes when he suggested that perhaps she had found someone willing to take her permanently.

Eggers's story certainly sounded tragic, but it did nothing to explain why Eggers had given such a blatantly inaccurate description of his missing wife, for already detectives knew that in height and stature, Dorothy Eggers and the body found in the mountains were identical. Eggers, summoned to the mortuary, removed all doubt by identifying the headless corpse as that of his wife, and corroboration came from the family doctor who had treated Dorothy for a large swelling on the foot. The bunion was still evident.

Bloodstained Car

Although there was considerable suspicion against Eggers, not a shred of evidence existed to connect him with the corpse. And then fate lent a hand. Recently, Eggers had sold his car. The buyer, a deputy sheriff, had noticed some brownish spots in the trunk that looked like dried blood. Aware of their possible significance, he reported his findings to his superiors, and Eggers was arrested. After days of questioning,he finally admitted that he had murdered his wife during an argument over her promiscuity. He had grabbed his pistol and fired, and then had disposed of the body while his children were out at the movies. About the head and hands he would say nothing other than that he vaguely remembered burning them.

As anticipated, Eggers soon recanted this confession, saying that it had been obtained under duress, and he fell back on his initial claim that Dorothy had probably been murdered by one of her casual lovers. This left the San Bernardino prosecutors in a quandary. They needed more than a retracted confession to win in court; hard physical evidence was necessary to link Eggers to the crime. To find that evidence, they turned to the Los Angeles Police Department, some sixty miles to the west. On the West Coast, they were unrivaled in the scientific approach to detection.

Criminalist Ray Pinker was assigned to the case, and the wealth of trace evidence he uncovered was astonishing. His first efforts, though, met with disappointment; fragments of bone found in the Eggers incinerator turned out to be of animal origin. More encouraging were the strands of hair Pinker found on the corpse, which matched samples from Dorothy's hairbrush. Next, he examined those items found with the body. Eggers's children had already identified the tartan blanket as coming from their home; now Pinker matched blood flecks on the blanket to the stains the deputy sheriff found in the trunk of Eggers's car. Both were of the same type as the victim. Examination of the blanket using ultraviolet light failed to reveal any semen stains, thus reducing the likelihood that Dorothy had first engaged in sex and had then been murdered by a casual lover.

Pinker was asked to analyze a .32 caliber pistol found at the Eggers family home. He test-fired the gun into a wooden container packed with cotton waste, then retrieved the bullets. Under a comparison microscope, they were indistinguishable from the murder slugs, demonstrating that this was the gun that had killed Dorothy Eggers. Even more deadly was a handsaw that Eggers had used around the house. Embedded in its teeth, Pinker found minute particles of human blood, flesh, and bone.

With such an overwhelming forensic case, Eggers's trial in the summer of 1948 became something of a formality. Convicted of murder, he died in the gas chamber at San Quentin on October 15, 1948.

Conclusion

Ray Pinker's outstanding contribution to the solution of this murder made headlines all across the state and provided many Californians with their first glimpse into a world that had previously been the stuff of fiction.

Richard Crafts

DATE: 1986

LOCATION: Newtown, Connecticut

SIGNIFICANCE: Trying to convince a jury that murder has taken place when no body has been found has never been easy. But the astonishing wealth of forensic evidence gathered in this case should have been enough to convince the most hardened skeptic.

Darkness had already fallen when Helle Crafts, a Pan Am flight attendant, and her co-worker, Rita Buonanno, left New York and drove north. They had just returned on a flight from Germany and were hurrying home, eager to beat the expected early winter snowstorm. At around 7 P.M., Rita dropped Helle off at her house in Newtown, Connecticut. Helle Crafts waved good-bye and hurried indoors. No one outside the house ever saw her alive again.

That night, November 18, 1986, five inches of snow fell, bringing down power lines and tree branches. All the next day, Rita tried to phone Helle but got no answer until the evening, when Richard Crafts picked up the phone. The forty-nine-year-old Eastern Airlines pilot, icily indifferent, disclaimed all knowledge of his wife's whereabouts. Rita was alarmed. She knew from talking to Helle that Richard Crafts was unpredictable— dangerously so—and she knew that Helle had recently initiated divorce proceedings on account of his adultery. But most of all, she remembered that Helle had once said, "If anything happens to me, don't think it was an accident."

Rita's apprehension proved contagious. Other friends pestered Crafts nonstop on the phone, until he eventually snarled that Helle had flown to Denmark to visit her sick mother. However, when contacted, Helle's mother said that she was in fine health and had not seen her daughter for some time.

On November 25, Marie Thomas, nanny to the three Crafts children, spoke of a dark, grapefruit-sized stain she had seen three days earlier on the master bedroom rug. Kerosene, Crafts had said, but now that rug was missing, along with two others. (It was later learned that on November 22, Crafts had ordered carpeting worth fifteen hundred dollars from a local store.)

News of Helle Crafts's disappearance was greeted coolly by the local police. Their circumspection was understandable; domestic dislocations are an everyday occurrence, and most missing persons turn up alive and well. Even so, on this occasion many wondered whether official slowness to investigate had anything to do with Richard Crafts's work as an auxiliary police constable. Certainly Helle's friends thought so, and they kept up their campaign.

Finally, on December 2, Detective Harry Noroian contacted Crafts, who explained that Helle had left the house early on November 19. An hour later, he had gone to his sister's house in Westport. Around lunchtime he returned, but Helle was still not back, and he had not seen her since. He presumed that she had run off with an "Oriental boyfriend" from Westchester County, New York. When Noroian suggested that a polygraph might stave off the rising tide of rumor, Crafts jumped at the chance and passed with flying colors.

The first indication that all might not be right with Richard Crafts's version of events came from a credit card receipt. It showed that on the afternoon of November 19, he had purchased bedding. Yet when talking to Noroian, he had emphatically denied leaving the house after returning from Westport. This prompted a closer examination of Crafts's credit card records, and a particularly odd sequence of purchases, which had begun almost a week before Helle's disappearance.

On November 13, he had put one hundred dollars down on a

Westinghouse chest freezer, telling the store clerk that he would collect it later. He returned for the freezer on November 17. The following day at 1 P.M., just hours before Helle's return from Europe, Crafts rented another item, one he had reserved four days earlier—a wood chipper.

Gruesome Theory

Nothing had prepared the investigators for this. The implications of the purchase of a wood chipper were almost too horrible to countenance. A wood chipper's blades are designed to shred large branches; their effect on a human body was unthinkable. Grim confirmation of this nightmarish scenario came when a witness told of seeing a truck and wood chipper parked on a bridge over the Housatonic River just after dark on November 20. Detectives now had to face the ghoulish but very real prospect that Richard Crafts had first killed his wife and then disgorged her remains into the river.

On December 26, detectives carrying a search warrant entered Crafts's house. Because Crafts was not present, and to refute possible later claims of improper search or evidence planting, the entire exercise was videotaped. The first thing that struck detectives was the size of Crafts's gun collection: fifty weapons in all, a small armory. But the rest of their cursory inspection proved disappointing, and it was not until the arrival of Dr. Henry Lee, head of Connecticut's forensic laboratory, that significant progress was made.

In the master bedroom, Lee applied his considerable skills to a brown smear on the mattress. When sprayed with ortholotolidine solution (tolidine, ethanol, glacial acidic acid, and distilled water), the stain turned blue, indicating that it was blood. Next came the problem of deciding how it had come to be there. Dr. Lee, an internationally regarded authority on blood spatter analysis, determined that the blood had landed directly on the mattress, with medium velocity, at an angle of about ten degrees, suggesting that if Helle Crafts had been murdered in this room, then she had not been lying on the bed. Beyond this, Lee would not yet commit himself. Later laboratory tests confirmed that the blood was human, that the stain was relatively recent, and that the blood was of the same type as Helle Crafts's —O positive.

When yet another witness came forward to tell of seeing a wood chipper on the banks of the Housatonic in the early-morning hours of November 19, detectives concentrated their attentions on a section of the river known as Lake Zoar. There, in a culvert, they found an envelope addressed to Helle L. Crafts. It was the first clear evidence linking her to the area.

The Search

Slowly the net began to close in around Richard Crafts. While Lee supervised the laboratory analysis, a team of divers scoured the Housatonic. From deep within its icy waters they recovered a Stihl chain saw; nearby was the serrated cutting bar. These were sent to Elaine Pagliaro, an assistant of Lee's. Embedded in the bar's teeth she found human tissue, hair, and blue fibers that matched fibers at Crafts's house. Although the chain saw's serial number had been filed off, scientists were able to restore it and match the saw to one that Crafts had bought.

The evidence gathering was not confined just to the river. In a car that Crafts had driven, Lee found among loose wood chips in the trunk traces of human flesh, hair, and bone fragments.

On January 10, 1987, a weeklong search of the snow-covered riverbank began. It was an enormous undertaking. Searchers had to thaw the snow inch by inch and then sift through the soil on hands and knees. In all, the search yielded fifty-nine slivers of human bone, part of a finger, five droplets of blood, two tooth caps, 2,660 strands of hair, three ounces of human tissue, and two fingernails. It wasn't much—Lee estimated it at roughly one thousandth of a human body— but it provided enough material for more than fifty thousand forensic tests. Every single hair was examined microscopically and found to be human and blond, like Helle Crafts's. The presence of the roots indicated that they had been chopped from a skull.

Albert Harper, University of Connecticut anthropologist, deduced from the fat content of the bones that they were just months old. When he ground some fragments to powder to allow the production of antibodies and antigens, they revealed the blood type O positive—the same as Helle Crafts's.

But the most conclusive evidence came from one of the tooth caps. Comparison with dental records positively identified it as belonging to Helle Crafts.

In the midst of all this technical wizardry, Crafts was arrested and charged with his wife's murder. Prosecutors theorized that he had killed Helle to prevent a financially ruinous divorce. After clubbing her to death in the bedroom, they speculated, he stored her body in the freezer to facilitate easier carving with the chain saw. Then came disposal of the human parcels using the wood chipper. It was a grisly scenario but quite consistent with the facts.

On July 15, 1988, Crafts's first trial ended in a deadlock when one juror held out for acquittal and a mistrial was declared. The following year, on November 21, 1989, Crafts was finally convicted of murder and sentenced to fifty years of imprisonment.

Conclusion

Working with barely a handful of human matter, scientists were able to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that these were the mortal remains of Helle Crafts. As her husband stood spraying those remains into the Housatonic River, it could never have crossed his mind just how heavily those few scraps would ultimately weigh on the scales of justice.