Bodies are leaky objects; once punctured they tend to ooze or spray blood indiscriminately. This is hardly surprising, because the average human being has about ten pints of blood gurgling through his or her system at any given time. Although it was recognized as early as 1875 that there were various types of blood, it was not until 1901 that Karl Landsteiner, an Austrian-born biologist, standardized the grouping system and gave it its modern form. By separating the serum from red blood cells in a centrifuge, then adding red blood cells from different people to the serum, he found that two distinctively different reactions occurred. In some cases, the serum seemed to attract the red blood cells, but in others it was repelled. One group of cells agglutinated—or clumped together—and the other didn't.

Landsteiner labeled these two blood types as A and B, but he soon realized that there was a third type that didn't react the same way as either A or B but showed characteristics of both. This he called C, although it soon became known as O. One year later, an assistant discovered yet another type of serum that did not agglutinate with either A or B. This one was called AB. Thus the four major blood groups were identified.

In the mid-1920s, Landsteiner discovered another grouping system as a result of injecting rabbits with human blood. These groups he identified as M, N, and MN (a combination of M and N). In 1930, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Landsteiner went on to discover the Rhesus factor in 1940 as a result of experiments with rhesus monkeys.

The next great advance in understanding blood types came in 1949, when two British scientists observed that the nuclei in cells of female tissue usually contain a distinctive structure that is rare in males. It was called the Barr body, after one of its discoverers, and it is most noticeable in white blood cells. The presence of this female-only structure is accounted for by the differences in chromosomes between males and females.

These advances have had a profound effect on criminology. When blood is found at a crime scene, investigators can now determine whether it is indeed blood by performing the Kastle-Meyer test, which uses a solution of phenolphthalein that turns pink when it comes into contact with even the minutest trace of blood. Then, by using the precipitin test (see the Ludwig Tessnow case on page 241), investigators establish whether it is animal or human blood. Finally, they determine the blood group and the sex of the person who spilled that blood. For all these reasons, blood is one of the most reliable and informative types of evidence, and, as we will see, its impact on crime solving has been immense. 

Pierre Voirbo

DATE: 1868

LOCATION: Paris, France

SIGNIFICANCE: This case established the reputation of one of France's greatest detectives.

Following complaints from customers about the quality of his water, the owner of Lampons, a Parisian restaurant in the rue Princesse, investigated the basement well. Floating on the surface was a malodorous parcel wrapped in cloth. Gingerly, the owner fished it out and was horrified to discover that it contained the lower portion of a human leg. On January 26, 1869, he reported his discovery to the Sûreté, and a new recruit named Gustave Macé was sent to investigate. Macé found yet another parcel floating just below the surface—a second leg, encased in part of a stocking.

Both limbs had been sewn into pieces of black calico, about a yard square, tied at each end. Macé thought he detected the hand of a seamstress or tailor in the bags' skilled construction. Also, someone had monogrammed the letter B in red cotton into the stocking. All the medical examiner could say was that the legs appeared to be female and that they appeared to have been in the water for a fairly long time—perhaps six weeks. Macé began checking through the file of missing women, 122 in all. He had painstakingly reduced the number to 84 when he received unwelcome news: A second doctor, more experienced in forensic medicine, had examined the legs and declared them to be male. All of Macé's efforts thus far had been in vain. Undeterred, he merely redirected his efforts toward finding a missing male.

He remembered that in mid-December a male human thigh wrapped in a blue sweater had been recovered from the River Seine. At around the same time, another thighbone had turned up in the rue Jacob. Two days later, a laundry proprietor reported seeing a stocky, mustachioed fellow scatter pieces of meat from a basket into the Seine. Then, just before Christmas, two gendarmes had stopped a similar-looking man in the early morning hours not far from Lampons. He was carrying a large hamper. Inside were several parcels. He opened one and showed them a ham. Satisfied, the gendarmes had let him go. Macé suspected that this confrontation had so unnerved the killer that he had dumped the legs in the first available place, the well at Lampons. It also suggested that he lived close by.

The concierge of the restaurant building knew of no tailor currently living there but directed Macé to a seamstress who once had. Mathilde Dard was now a nightclub singer; she was also the ex-mistress of a tailor and political firebrand named Pierre Voirbo, who happened to match the description of the nocturnal meat distributor. Mathilde had lost touch with Voirbo but suggested that Macé try a Madame Bodasse, the aunt of one of Voirbo's friends. Macé, alert to the possibility that the letter B might refer to Bodasse, took the elderly woman the monogrammed stocking. She instantly identified her own handiwork; also, she recognized the sweater as belonging to her nephew, Desiré Bodasse, who lived in the rue Mazarine.

Murder Site?

Macé found Bodasse's apartment deserted, but a flickering candle and the fully wound clocks suggested that someone was still living there. Madame Bodasse also confirmed that a batch of negotiable securities was missing from a secret drawer. Macé ordered a watch put on the apartment. For more than a week nothing happened. Then, out of the blue, Voirbo breezed in to see Macé at the Sûreté. He oozed confidence, due in large part to his background as a police informer, and he listened to what Macé had to say with amused indifference. Some of his composure slipped, though, when Macé produced a rent receipt from Voirbo's former apartment—he had paid the bill with one of the missing bonds.

Macé placed Voirbo under arrest and then searched his current lodgings from top to bottom. There were stacks of newspapers, all containing accounts of the discovery of the legs in the restaurant, and in the cellar he found two barrels of wine. Inside one, concealed in a cylinder, were the missing securities.

A feature of Gallic criminal investigations is the predilection for recreating crime scenes. Macé already had a fair idea of where and how the crime had taken place; now he wanted confirmation. Collecting Voirbo and several officers from the station, the convoy journeyed to the house in the rue Mazarine, where Macé had noticed that the tiled floor in one room had a prodigious slope. With a theatrical flourish, Macé poured a carafe of water onto the tiles, then watched it gather in a pool beneath the bed. Voirbo remained tight-lipped as Macé ordered that the tiles be removed one by one. As each tile came up, dried bloodstains could clearly be seen on the sides and underneath.

Realizing that the game was up, Voirbo broke down and confessed. He had battered Bodasse with a flatiron and then had slit his throat. Afterward, dressed only in his underwear, he had dissected the body. He thought that he had cleaned up the mess thoroughly but had failed to notice that recess beneath the bed. His motive had been simple greed; he wanted the securities because he would soon be getting married.

Ever resourceful, Voirbo managed to make one brief dash for freedom but was soon recaptured. While he was in jail awaiting trial, friends brought him gifts. One, a loaf of bread, contained a razor. He used it to cut his own throat.

Conclusion

In highlighting Gustave Macé's contribution to this case, it should be remembered that if not for the intervention of the second doctor, Amboise Tardieu, this murder would probably have never been solved.

Ludwig Tessnow

DATE: 1901

LOCATION: Rugen, Germany

SIGNIFICANCE: The killer had previously escaped justice, but a landmark advance in forensic science prevented a repeat performance.

Off the northern coast of Germany, in the Baltic Sea, lies the island of Rugen. Here, on July 1, 1901, two young brothers from the village of Gohren, Hermann and Peter Stubbe, eight and six respectively, left their home to go out to play. When they did not return, the family feared the worst. The following morning, a search party found dismembered body parts scattered over a wide area of local woodland. Tracking the bloody trail led them to the disemboweled remains of the Stubbe brothers.

A suspect was soon in custody. Ludwig Tessnow, a jobbing carpenter from the neighboring village of Baabe, had been seen talking to the children on the day they disappeared, but he denied any involvement in their deaths. A routine search of his home turned up boots and clothes all bearing dark stains and all recently washed. Tessnow's explanation sounded reasonable enough, considering his job: The stains were wood dye, he said, used daily by countless craftsmen in his line of business.

Tessnow was taken before the examining magistrate at Greifswald, Johann Schmidt. For some reason, Schmidt doubted the carpenter's tale but didn't know why. Then the mist cleared. Three years earlier, German newspapers had reported a startlingly similar case in the town of Osnabruck, several hundred miles to the west. Two young girls, seven-yearold Hannelore Heidemann and her friend Else Langemeier, eight, had been found butchered in a wood near their home on September 9, 1898. A man seen loitering near the woods on the day of the murder had been detained because his clothing was heavily stained. He gave his name as Ludwig Tessnow. But when he told the police that the stains were simply wood dye from a recent job, he was eliminated from their inquiries.

Magistrate Schmidt, together with the local prosecutor, Ernst Hubschmann, continued digging. They discovered that just weeks before the brutal Stubbe slaying, on June 11, a farmer had seen a man fleeing from one of his meadows. Puzzled, he went to investigate. Seven of his sheep had been hacked to pieces, their parts strewn around the field. When Hubschmann arranged for the farmer to view a lineup of possible suspects, he had no hesitation in picking out Tessnow as the culprit.

Revolutionary Test

Tessnow maintained his innocence; the stains on his clothing, he insisted, were wood dye, nothing else—which left Hubschmann in a quandary. Apart from these stains, there was nothing to connect the carpenter with any crime. But just as he was on the verge of freeing Tessnow, he learned that a young German biologist, Professor Paul Uhlenhuth, had recently developed a revolutionary new technique that could differentiate not only between blood and other stains but also between human blood and the blood of other animals.

Uhlenhuth had found that after he injected protein from a chicken's egg into rabbits and then mixed the rabbit serum with egg white, the egg proteins separated from the clear liquid to form a cloudy substance or precipitate. An extension of this process led to the production of rabbitbased serums that would precipitate, and identify, the proteins of the blood of any animal, including humans.

Since that time, the method has been greatly simplified. A liquid sample of suspected human blood is placed on a glass slide treated with gelatin next to a similar sample of the biological reagent. When an electric current is passed through the glass by means of electrodes, the protein molecules in the two samples filter outward through the gelatin toward each other. If a precipitin line forms where the antigens and the antibodies meet, this indicates that the sample is human blood.

After almost a week spent examining a pair of overalls taken from Tessnow's house, together with other items of clothing, Uhlenhuth submitted his report on August 8, 1901. It turned out to be a momentous day in the annals of forensic science. The overalls were indeed stained with wood dye, but he also found seventeen traces of human blood. Tessnow's suit and shirt yielded similar results, although his jacket was found to be stained with sheep's blood. After his trial and a lengthy confinement, Tessnow was executed at Greifswald Prison in 1904.

Conclusion

The precipitin test is extremely sensitive, requiring only minute blood samples. Positive results have been obtained on human blood that has been dried for as long as fifteen years, and experiments on tissue samples of mummies several millennia old have proved successful. 

Jesse Watkins

DATE: 1927

LOCATION: San Francisco, California

SIGNIFICANCE: This historic case involved the use of ultraviolet light to detect bloodstains.

A thick fog enveloped San Francisco as Jesse Watkins headed toward that city's historic military post, the Presidio, on the night of August 21, 1927. Watkins, twenty-four, an ex-stable hand, had recently been fired for laziness by the Presidio stable master, Henry Chambers. Now he was going to get the $340 of pension money that was owed to him. Watkins broke in and shook the old man awake, only for Chambers to grab a revolver and begin firing. One bullet out of the three struck Watkins, lodging in his cheek. With blood streaming from the wound, he wrested the revolver away and then used it to club Chambers repeatedly. When the old man was still, Watkins bound and gagged him with his own underwear, only to realize that Chambers was dead. He then set about ransacking the apartment, searching for cash. After pocketing a few dollars, he burrowed his head down through the fog, grateful for its cover because his clothes were heavily bloodstained.

Upon reaching his Lombard Street apartment, he told his roommate, Sergeant Harry Edwards, that he had been mugged by a gun-toting

Here, ultraviolet light is used to detect bloodstains on a bayonet.

thief. Edwards was skeptical but removed the bullet with tweezers. Watkins, aware that news of the bloody killing would soon be all over San Francisco, scrubbed his shirt to get rid of the evidence and sent it to the laundry to make sure.

He was right; the murder dominated local headlines, and all the San Francisco police had to go on was a heel imprint left in the dust on Chambers's floor. Within the print were four letters—VERE. Routine questioning led them to another Presidio employee, who mentioned Jesse Watkins as a man with a grudge against Chambers. When detectives went looking for Watkins, they found Edwards. His story about the bullet was enough for them to place Watkins under arrest. A search of the suspect's belongings revealed a pair of old shoes, which were forwarded to Edward O. Heinrich at the University of California for examination.

Vital Clue

First, he noted that because of the wearer's manner of walking, both rubber heels were more worn on the inner side than the outer. Even so, the letters VERE—identical to those found in the heel imprint on the floor of Chambers's room—were clearly visible. Microscopic examination of those heavily worn parts revealed the faint outlines of two more letters—RE, which had preceded the others until being almost obliterated by the shoe owner's odd gait. This gave Heinrich the full word, REVERE, and the trade name of the heels. Although any reasonable person would have to conclude that Watkins had left the print in the dust, there was nothing to say when that print had been made, as any competent defense counsel would be quick to point out.

Heinrich wasn't finished yet. By chance, Edwards had kept the pellet extracted from his roommate's cheek. Using the recently invented comparison microscope, Heinrich was able to demonstrate conclusively that the slug had been fired from Chambers's gun. Finally, he turned his talents to the laundered shirt. In a darkened room, he spread the shirt out carefully on a table and then placed ultraviolet-light equipment in position. The sleeves showed nothing, which didn't surprise Heinrich, as many people roll them up. But all over the front, greenish-blue spots began to appear, unmistakable signs of blood.

The case came to trial in October 1927. Heinrich's evidence demolished defense alibi claims and their attacks on so-called circumstantial evidence. Found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, Watkins later confessed to the killing but declared that it had been accidental; he had intended only to beat Chambers up, not to kill him. His final comments on the matter included a bitter reference to the shirt and the damage it had done him: "If I'd known about those violet lights, or whatever you call them, you can be sure I'd have burned the blamed thing up."

Conclusion

Had this murder occurred just a few years earlier, Watkins would probably have walked free. Instead, he found, as thousands have since, that oldfashioned crime is no rival to the latest laboratory advances.

Jeannie Donald

DATE: 1934

LOCATION: Aberdeen, Scotland

SIGNIFICANCE: In this case, microbiology came to the assistance of serology and helped capture an unsuspected killer.

Eight-year-old Helen Priestly lived with her parents in a grim three-floor tenement building in Aberdeen. At half past one on the afternoon of April 20, 1934, her mother sent her to buy bread from a nearby store. When she had not reappeared after some time, Mrs. Priestly went out looking for her. Staff at the bread shop confirmed that Helen had bought a loaf just after half past one. She was last seen walking homeward at 1:45 P.M.

All of Mrs. Priestly's tenement neighbors volunteered to help in the search except Alexander and Jeannie Donald, a morose couple who kept themselves apart from other tenants. The search, which lasted all night, ended at five the next morning when Helen's body was found near the ground floor communal lavatory. And yet half an hour earlier, when another neighbor had used that same lavatory, the body had not been there.

Dr. Robert Richards, the police surgeon, found Helen lying in a sack, fully clothed except for her underwear. Rigor mortis had set in, and there was vomit on her dress, possibly a result of the cinders that had been thrown into the sack, some of which had lodged in her mouth. Although the body was on its right side, postmortem lividity showed that it had lain on its left for several hours after death.

Blood on her tights and dress and grievous injuries to her genitals indicated that she had been savagely raped. Because of this, and because the body had obviously been dumped by someone who had easy access to the lavatory, police questioned every male in the building. Meanwhile, Dr. Richards and Theodore Shennan, professor of pathology at Aberdeen University, began the autopsy.

Death had resulted from asphyxia. Vomit was found in the windpipe and the smaller air tubes, while bruises typical of manual strangulation mottled the voice box and windpipe. Digestive changes to Helen's last meal of meat and potatoes, eaten at half past twelve, indicated that death had occurred not later than two o'clock, a time confirmed by a roofer working nearby who had heard a girl scream at 2 P.M. What the pathologists found next—or rather didn't find—turned the investigation on its head. Despite the deep penetration and tearing of the sexual organs, no semen was present; they adjudged that all of the injuries had been inflicted before death by a sharp implement, by someone attempting to simulate rape.

Female Killer?

Proceeding on the assumption that the killer lived in the tenement, investigators were stymied by the fact that every male resident had a castiron alibi—unless the killer was a female who had attempted to mask her involvement by faking the sexual assault. Easily the strongest suspect was thirty-eight-year-old Jeannie Donald, who lived directly below the Priestlys. She admitted feuding with the dead girl's family but said that at 2 P.M. she was out shopping. However, when it was learned that a shop she claimed to have visited had been closed that day—and after the police found what appeared to be blood spots in her apartment—Jeannie Donald, along with her husband, was arrested. As it happened, the stain proved not to be blood, but the police still felt they had enough cause to hold Jeannie Donald, although her husband's alibi proved unshakable and he was released. At this point Professor Sydney Smith of Edinburgh University was asked to assist the inquiry.

He began with the sack. It was of Canadian make, used to ship cereals to Aberdeen, and had a hole in one corner. Five similar sacks were found in the Donalds' apartment, and all had holes in one corner where they had hung from a hook. Inside the murder sack Smith found the cinders and a small amount of household fluff containing human and animal hairs. The human hair had not come from Helen Priestly; it was a different color, much coarser, and artificially waved. When compared with hairs from the head of Jeannie Donald, Smith found them to be indistinguishable.

However, this was far from conclusive evidence, so Smith turned his attention to the rest of the detritus. It contained traces of cat and rabbit hair, along with fibers of wool, cotton, silk, linen, and jute dyed different colors —more than two hundred fibers in all. When compared with similar samples from the Donald household, using micro-chemical and spectroscopic analysis, twenty-five different fibers were matched, including the human and animal hair. Examples taken from other apartments in the building failed to produce a single match.

But the strongest evidence was yet to come. A closer scrutiny of the Donalds' apartment uncovered bloodstains on two washcloths, a scrubbing brush, a packet of soap flakes, a piece of linoleum, and two newspapers dated the day before the crime. All were group O, the same as the victim's. Smith circumvented defense objections to Jeannie Donald's giving blood by obtaining one of her used sanitary towels from prison. This showed a different blood group entirely, so obviously the stain had not come from her. Unfortunately, the victim's blood group was shared by almost half the population, gravely limiting its forensic usefulness.

Bacterial Contamination

Building on this serological bedrock, Smith reexamined the victim's wounds. Suddenly a thought occurred to him: Might not the rupturing of Helen Priestly's intestinal canal have led to her blood being contaminated by bacteria? Gathering up the victim's clothing, together with the bloodstained articles from Jeannie Donald's household, Smith consulted his colleague Thomas Mackie, professor of bacteriology at Edinburgh University. Mackie found considerable evidence of bacterial contamination, including one highly unusual strain that he had never encountered before— except on a washcloth from the Donald apartment.

The trial of Jeannie Donald began on July 16, 1934. Much of the testimony was given over to medical and scientific evidence. While none of the laboratory findings were conclusive in themselves, the sum total was devastating. Smith produced 253 separate and diverse items for the prosecution, a colossal performance that even the defense counsel had to grudgingly praise. The jury took only eighteen minutes to return a guilty verdict.

Donald's death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, partly, it is believed, because of Smith's belief that she had not deliberately intended to kill the child. It was known that Helen Priestly was in the habit of baiting Mrs. Donald with the name "Coconut," a reference to her frizzy hair. Smith theorized that Helen had insulted Jeannie Donald as she passed her door and that the woman had caught hold of Helen and shook her. Abruptly the girl had lapsed into unconsciousness. (At the postmortem, it was discovered that Helen suffered from an enlarged thymus gland—a condition likely to cause rapid and unexpected collapse.) Thinking that the girl had died, Jeannie Donald panicked and pulled her indoors, where she decided to simulate rape with the sharp instrument. The excruciating pain awoke Helen, who screamed and vomited, some of which she swallowed. This may have been the cause of death, though the bruises suggested that Donald had strangled her to be sure. Then she had stuffed the body into a sack, and awaited her opportunity to dispose of the body in the dead of night.

Conclusion

Between the wars, Professor (later Sir) Sydney Smith was an untiring pioneer of the multifaceted approach to crime scene analysis. Unlike other, more renowned pathologists of the time, he avoided the traps of intransigence or dogma, preferring to allow the facts to speak for themselves, always willing to try the latest techniques. With his death in 1969, forensic science lost one of its finest and fairest practitioners.

Joseph Williams

DATE: 1939

LOCATION: Bournemouth, England

SIGNIFICANCE: Confronted by skilled advocacy, a jury repudiated the scientific evidence and set a man free. But was it the correct decision?

It was approaching midnight on the night of May 21, 1939, when the body of Walter Dinivan, a sixty-four-year-old widower, was found in the living room of his apartment in Bournemouth on England's south coast. His skull had been crushed. Later that night he died in the local hospital without regaining consciousness. The autopsy, performed by Sir Bernard Spilsbury, indicated that the killer had first attempted to strangle Dinivan and, when that had failed, had finished him off with a torrent of hammer blows to the head.

Chief Inspector Leonard Burt of Scotland Yard studied the crime scene thoroughly. Everything smacked of robbery as the apparent motive: A small living room safe had been emptied, as had Dinivan's pockets; also, his rings, watch, and gold chain were gone. On the floor lay a brown paper bag, crumpled and twisted, which Burt suspected had been wrapped around the murder weapon. The room yielded a rich crop of varying fingerprints. Comparison with relatives eliminated all of the prints except one—a thumbprint lifted from a toppled beer glass.

One of the odder discoveries was a hair curler found on the floor. Flushed with embarrassment, Dinivan's grandchildren suggested it might be related to the old man's fondness for entertaining prostitutes. But they had no explanation for the cigarette butts strewn across the sofa and carpet. Burt, aware of recent advances in saliva examination, ordered all of the butts gathered up for analysis. In the meantime, he interviewed local prostitutes. Several knew Dinivan as a regular client, but all dismissed the idea of using such an old-fashioned hair curler. During these conversations the name of Joseph Williams, a septuagenarian crony of the dead man, cropped up. Normally strapped for cash, around May 21 he had suddenly come into some money.

This was confirmed by a background check: Since the murder, Williams had paid off considerable arrears on his mortgage. When Burt called on the old man, he was met by a vile-tempered brute, toothless and unkempt, with thick glasses. After attributing his recent affluence to a win on the horses, Williams launched into a fearful diatribe against Dinivan, who had recently refused his request for a small loan. Included in the bilious onslaught were several tactless references to the dead man's safe. When asked if he minded providing an example of his fingerprints, Williams angrily ordered Burt from his house.

Blood Secretor

The inspector's return to the station was greeted by good news—the smoker of the cigarette butts was a secretor. In 1925, it had been discovered that some 80 percent of the population secrete their specific blood group information in other bodily fluids, such as saliva. This enabled Home Office analyst Roche Lynch to identify the cigarette smoker's blood group as AB, the rarest type, found in only 3 percent of the population. What was needed now was a specimen from Williams; given his attitude, this would be no easy task.

Burt's solution was both simple and ingenious. Officers kept Williams under permanent surveillance, with orders to contact Burt immediately should the subject ever enter a pub. A few days later the call came through. Burt rushed around to the pub, ostensibly on a social visit. Williams greedily accepted Burt's offer of a drink and a cigarette, and over the next hour or so, his attention diverted by alcohol and talk of horse racing, contrived to fill an entire ashtray with cigarette butts. When he finally weaved his uncertain way to the door, Burt watched him go, then gathered up the ashtray's contents. The next morning they were dispatched to Lynch.

His report confirmed that Williams was indeed a secretor, blood group AB. Burt decided it was time to turn the screws and confront the old man. Williams angrily insisted that Burt search his house, declaring he had nothing to hide. It was a monumental blunder. In a coal shed was a bundle of brown paper bags, the kind that had been found in Dinivan's living room.

Williams was scornful. "I used to be a green-grocer," he sneered. "All greengrocers have bags."

At this point Williams, his confidence inflated to reckless levels, boldly proffered his hands, daring Burt to take his fingerprints. Burt gladly accommodated him and was later rewarded with the news that Williams's right thumbprint matched the print found on the glass. It was enough to arrest the vitriolic old man.

Despite a compelling circumstantial case against Williams—his sudden affluence, an admitted animosity toward Dinivan, the thumbprint, and the saliva test—there was still no direct evidence to link him with Dinivan on the night of the murder. Even so, men had been hanged on considerably less, and Williams's attorney, Norman King, decided that his client's only chance of avoiding the noose lay in an all-out assault on the credibility of the saliva test. (Just months earlier another jury had rejected saliva evidence and acquitted a defendant.) Dismissing all of the other evidence as irrelevant, King held aloft one of the cigarette butts and asked the jury, how was it possible to determine a blood group from invisible saliva traces? Could they, in all conscience, send a man to the gallows on such skimpy evidence? As a piece of advocacy, it was superb, reducing a well-rounded prosecution case to a single scrap of disputed evidence. Once again, a jury rejected the saliva test and returned a not-guilty verdict.

Conclusion

That night at a hotel, Williams celebrated his freedom with Norman Rae, a newspaper reporter who had championed his innocence. In the middle of the night, Rae was awakened by Williams's pounding on his hotel door. Overcome with drunken remorse, the old man sobbed, "I've got to tell somebody. You see the jury was wrong . . . it was me."

Rae was appalled. But there was nothing he could do. Under the stringent British libel laws, publication of the confession could result in massive damages. And there was no point. Having once been found innocent, Williams could never again be tried for the same offense. For more than a decade, Rae kept news of the confession to himself. Only after Williams's death in 1951 did he reveal how he and the jury had been duped.

W. Thomas Zeigler Jr.

DATE: 1975

LOCATION: Winter Garden, Florida

SIGNIFICANCE: Bloodstain analysis originated with the great French criminologist Alexandre Lacassagne, but even he would have marveled at the expertise demonstrated in this case.

At 9:15 P.M. on Christmas Eve, 1975, the police in Winter Garden, a sleepy town in central Florida, received an emergency call from prominent local businessman Tommy Zeigler: He had been shot in an attempted robbery at his family's furniture store and needed help desperately. Patrol cars converged on the Tri-City Shopping Center. They found a bloodbath—four people shot and beaten to death. Only Tommy Zeigler was still alive, bleeding from a stomach wound. The dead included Zeigler's wife, Eunice, and her parents, Perry and Virginia Edwards. The other victim was a black citrus worker named Charlie Mays who, according to Zeigler, had been part of the gang that raided the store.

Zeigler responded well to treatment—his injuries were less serious than first thought—and he was able to give an account of the nightmarish events. Apparently he and Ed Williams, a black part-time employee, had returned to the store at just after 7:00 P.M. to meet Charlie Mays, who had a TV set on layaway that he wanted to collect for Christmas. Zeigler said that once inside the store, he was jumped by several attackers. In the melee he lost his spectacles, so he was unable to provide a good description of his assailants, other than that one was large and black. The brawl spilled over into Zeigler's office, where he had grabbed a .357 Magnum and had begun firing until he was hit by a bullet and collapsed.

Police Chief Don Ficke listened to this story thoughtfully. In recent weeks, two black desperadoes known as the Ski-Mask Bandits had terrorized local businesses. Besides robbing their victims, the two thugs often sexually assaulted them as well. Ficke, aware that Mays's pants had been undone, wondered if perhaps the dead man comprised one half of the notorious duo and Ed Williams the other. But something else troubled the police chief: By chance a stray bullet had hit the store clock and stopped it at 7:24 P.M. Why, Ficke mused, if the shootings had taken place before half-past seven, had Zeigler taken almost two hours to call for help?

Conflicting Story

The next day, Ed Williams went to the police of his own accord. He had heard the rumors and wanted to set the record straight. In his version of events, he and Zeigler met outside the store at around 7:30 P.M. as arranged. Zeigler had gone inside alone, then called out for Williams to follow. When he did so, Zeigler attempted to shoot him with a pistol, but the weapon jammed, allowing the terrified Williams to run for his life.

With such a welter of contradiction, obviously someone was lying, but much of the haze cleared when FBI ballistics experts reported that the bullets that killed Eunice Zeigler and her parents came from a pair of .38s known to have been purchased by Tommy Zeigler. Twenty-eight bullets were fired in the store that night, from eight different guns, all of them owned by Zeigler. Then came news that the Zeiglers had been having serious matrimonial trouble: Eunice had even talked of leaving Tommy after Christmas. His response was to insure Eunice's life for $520,000. It was a clear motive, enough to arrest him for murder.

Aware that Zeigler was someone of substantial means and therefore able to afford the very best in legal representation, state prosecutors knew they would have to present a watertight case in order to secure a conviction. As a consequence they asked Herbert MacDonell, an ex-industrial scientist who had turned the study and interpretation of bloodstains into a life's work, to examine the blood-drenched store. MacDonell's first view of the store came on January 7, 1976, and lasted all day. He spent hours on his hands and knees, measuring precisely, peering through a magnifying glass, comparing stains with detailed crime scene photographs. Underpinning the observation was cold, hard logic. The sum total enabled MacDonell to compile this chilling scenario:

Zeigler and his wife had entered the store through the rear door. Eunice went into the kitchen, where she was shot in the back of her head. Her casual attitude—no sign of disarray and her left hand still in her pocket— suggested to MacDonell that she had not seen any other bodies and was therefore the first person to be killed. A second bullet fired at Eunice had pierced the kitchen wall, stopping the clock on the other side of the wall, and timing the exact moment of her death at 7:24 P.M. MacDonell felt confident in saying this because the bullets, fired from the same weapon, had parallel trajectories.

Perry and Virginia Edwards were unintended victims. On their way to church, they had probably noticed lights in the store and gone to investigate. Instead, they blundered into a diabolical murder plot. Ten feet inside the rear door, Perry Edwards was struck by a bullet. Dripping blood, he lurched toward the kitchen. Zeigler went after him with a linoleum crank. Edwards had reached Eunice—evidenced by his blood dripping onto her dead body—when Zeigler shot him again. Virginia Edwards, cowering behind a sofa to escape her homicidal son-in-law, raised a protective hand as Zeigler loomed over her. A bullet grazed her finger before smashing into her skull.

Unwitting Accomplices

Now Zeigler waited for Charlie Mays and Ed Williams, unwittingly cast in the role of the Ski-Mask Bandits, to arrive. But the fates conspiredonce more against Zeigler—first the Edwardses, now Mays. The intended fall guy had company. Felton Thomas told investigators that he had gone with Mays to the store at about 7:30 P.M. Zeigler had met them outside with a strange request: there was a bag full of guns on his car seat; would they mind test-firing the weapons for him at a nearby orange grove? Although bemused, both men agreed and climbed into Ziegler's car. (Corroboration of this unlikely-sounding tale came when Thomas led officers to the orange grove and they found fragments of .38 caliber shells.) Afterward, Zeigler drove at breakneck pace back to the store. Once there, he announced that he had forgotten his keys. If Charlie wanted his TV set for Christmas, he said, they would have to break in. Thomas, not about to break into any whiteowned store, refused and advised Mays to do likewise. After ostensibly driving home to get the keys, Zeigler entered the store with Mays. Still apprehensive, Thomas waited outside for a while. When Mays did not reappear, he left.

Inside the store, Mays was shot twice and then beaten to death with the linoleum crank. Although droplets of his blood fell onto that of Perry Edwards, the two had not mixed, an indication that Edwards had already been dead for some time. A shoulder holster, found near Mays's body and meant to incriminate him, was an obvious plant. The kind of beating that killed Charlie Mays would have sprayed medium-velocity bloodstains over the holster's upper surface. There were none. The back, too, was clean, even though the floor where it lay was drenched in blood. Clearly, the blood had dried—a process that MacDonell estimated would have taken at least fifteen minutes—before the holster was dropped onto it.

But Zeigler's own blood branded him a liar. He had been shot, he said, at the rear of the store, and from there he had struggled to the phone to summon help. Afterward he had waited at the front of the store. MacDonell tracked the drops of blood from the telephone to the store front, but could find none elsewhere. This meant that Zeigler had actually been standing by the phone when he was shot, and the only person who could have fired that shot was Zeigler himself.

On July 2, 1976, after a trial in which MacDonell's vivid reconstruction held the court spellbound, Zeigler was convicted of quadruple murder, and he was later sentenced to death.

Conclusion

In 1988 an appellate court decision overturned Zeigler's death sentence and he was awarded a new sentencing hearing. The following year, the original sentence was reimposed and Zeigler returned to death row. Always a notorious case, the Christmas Eve murders were featured on several TV programs, most of which portrayed Zeigler in a sympathetic light. These programs have been instrumental in the formation of a well-organized campaign to prove Zeigler's innocence. Among his more prominent supporters is the human rights activist Bianca Jagger. In April 2005 a motion for a new trial, based on DNA evidence that was unavailable in

1976, was rejected. At the time of this writing, Zeigler has been on Florida's death row for more than thirty years. Even so, this doesn't make him the Sunshine State's longest-serving condemned prisoner. Five other convicted killers stand between Zeigler and that dubious crown. 

Arthur Hutchinson

DATE: 1983

LOCATION: Sheffield, England

SIGNIFICANCE: Several forensic specialties were employed to trap this sadistic killer.

One of the most sickening mass murders ever recorded in Britain erupted in the unlikeliest of settings. Basil and Avril Laitner were a wealthy professional couple with a large house in the fashionable Sheffield suburb of Dore. On October 23, 1983, their eldest daughter got married. As the Laitners entertained wedding guests in a large tent erected on the garden lawn, they were unaware that a stranger hidden in some nearby shrubbery was watching their every move. In particular, the voyeur was infatuated by Nicole Laitner, the eighteen-year-old sister of the bride.

Sometime in the early hours of the next morning, the stranger let himself into the house through a faulty patio door. Armed with an eight-inch bowie knife, he mounted the stairs. Nicole was awakened by the sounds of a violent commotion. The next moment her bedroom door flew open. A flashlight beam blinded her in bed. A man's voice warned her not to scream or he would kill her. He had already killed her parents, he said. At knifepoint, he led Nicole out onto the landing.

Dumb with terror, she picked her way through the blood that puddled around the lifeless body of her father. He had been sliced to ribbons. Her mother, too, had been butchered by twenty-six knife blows. In another bedroom, a third family member, Nicole's brother Richard,

Serology unit examiners microscopically examine a liquid blood sample to determine ABO blood type. (FBI)

also lay dead. The killer—ill-kempt, stinking, and clad in a bloodstained Tshirt—steered Nicole through the carnage and out to the tent, where he made her strip naked. Sticking the knife into the ground by the side of her head, he growled, "You have got to enjoy it or I will kill you. That's where your mom went wrong. She created a fuss, so I had to kill her."

He later led the weeping girl back up to her bedroom, raped her twice more, tied her up, and made off. Nicole managed to free herself from the bonds the next morning at about the time some local workmen arrived to dismantle the tent.

Forensic scientists had rarely encountered so much blood at a crime scene; the landing, stairs, and two bedrooms were drenched. Two places where they unexpectedly found it, however, were on Nicole's bed, at around knee level, and on her nightdress. As she had not been cut during the attack, it was reasonable to assume that these bloodstains had come from the assailant. Alfred Faragher of the Home Office Forensic Science Service at Wetherby studied this sample carefully, identifying a rare combination of factors that occurred in only one fifty-thousandth of the population. And there was something else.

Escaped Rapist

Faragher had seen this same type of blood only a month previously. A woman had been raped in Selby, another Yorkshire town. The suspect, a forty-two-year-old petty thief and keep-fit fanatic named Arthur Hutchinson, had escaped from custody on September 28 by hurling himself through a second-floor window and scaling a twelve-foot-high wall topped with barbed wire. Hutchinson had a long record, including two convictions for sex offenses. His taste for violence surfaced early; at seven, he had stabbed his sister. Although most of his prison sentences were for minor offenses, he had recently been released after serving five years for carrying firearms and threatening his brother with a shotgun. (It was later learned that while in prison, Hutchinson filled two exercise books with notes about women who were likely candidates for rape and robbery, culling information from newspaper reports.)

With every police officer in northern England on his trail, Hutchinson checked into a hotel, signing the register "A. Fox." But Hutchinson, with his bloated impression of his own cleverness, was in for a shock. While scaling the barbed-wire fence, he had gashed his leg badly; now police let it be known that the barbed wire had been specially dipped and that any injury left untreated was likely to turn gangrenous. Hutchinson, who was known to frequent hospital emergency rooms for even the most minor ailment, took the bait. After being treated at Doncaster Royal Infirmary for a gashed knee, he was captured. Fittingly, the "Fox" was run to earth in a turnip field.

At his resulting trial, which began at Sheffield Crown Court on September 4, 1984, Hutchinson faced charges of triple murder. The evidence against him was overwhelming. Not only did Nicole Laitner identify him as her attacker, but he had left an impression of his shoe in blood on the stairs and a palm print on a bottle of champagne in the tent. Dr. Geoffrey Craig testified that two bite marks on a piece of cheese in the kitchen refrigerator matched Hutchinson's dental characteristics exactly. History was made when for the first time in a British murder trial, the jury was shown a police video of the murder scene, complete with bodies. The tape, lasting seven minutes, spoke more eloquently of the horrors at the Laitner household than could any advocate.

With so much evidence to the contrary, Hutchinson could hardly deny his presence at the house, but with vile cynicism he claimed he was there as Nicole Laitner's consensual sexual partner. All of the murders, he said, had occurred after his departure. Hutchinson's desperation reached its nadir when he suddenly gesticulated toward Daily Mirror crime reporter Michael Barron in the press box and yelled, "There's your killer!" It was a psychopathic act from a psychopathic defendant. He received three life terms.

Conclusion

Advances in serology now make it possible to identify some three hundred group systems, but the rush to develop a so-called blood fingerprint has been largely undermined by recent successes with DNA typing. Whether that particular scientific goal will ever be achieved remains to be seen.