"Every contact leaves a trace." So said the great French criminologist Dr. Edmond Locard in 1910, and these few deceptively simple-sounding words laid the cornerstone of modern forensic science. Put another way, every time a crime occurs involving physical contact, the perpetrator either leaves something at the scene or takes something away, often both. It might be hair, fibers, grit, powder, flakes of skin, a button, earth, or any of countless other items, all of which make the crime scene officer's job critically important, because evidence once missed is often irretrievable. By its very nature, trace evidence is often easy to overlook, and only the most diligent and painstaking examination will uncover all there is to be found, even if this means vacuuming the entire crime scene. Samples, when found, are logged and labeled, then passed to the laboratory for analysis.

Of course, there is little point in gathering this evidence—which may be barely visible or even invisible to the naked eye—unless it can afterward be seen clearly. For this reason, the handheld magnifying glass, although forever linked with images of Sherlock Holmes, remains the single most useful piece of scientific equipment available to an investigator, both at the crime scene and during initial laboratory examination. From there it is a short step to the compound microscope, invented between 1590 and 1609 by Dutch lens grinders.

Although a simple reflected-light microscope can enlarge samples by a factor of one thousand, it was found that still greater magnification was needed. First suggested by French physicist Louis de Broglie in 1924, the scanning electron microscope required a decade of research before becoming fully operational. It works by scanning a sample, not with light, but with an extremely fine electron beam, or microprobe, that generates electron emissions that feed back information about a sample's contours. After being amplified by a photomultiplier, this information can be displayed as three-dimensional enlargements of up to 150,000 times on a visual display unit, although most forensic work rarely requires magnification of more than ten thousand times.

The technique is particularly useful in comparing evidence such as paint fragments, fibers, paper, and wood and is capable of working with samples as small as one hundred-thousandth of an inch. Additionally, the scanning electron microscope can provide high-resolution photomicrographs for use as court evidence.

Another problem faced by laboratory technicians is identifying what exactly a sample is made of. Here the most significant breakthrough occurred in 1859, when two German scientists, Robert Wilhelm Bunsen and Gustav Kirchoff, discovered the principle of spectrography. They found that the spectrum of every element has its own individual signature, and passing light through a substance produces this spectrum, which the spectroscope reveals in a series of dark lines called absorption lines. By combining this with a related instrument called a spectrophotometer, which measures the intensities of light of different wavelengths, scientists can analyze and identify all manner of different substances.

Of course, the full array of techniques and instrumentation available to the modern forensic analyst is too vast to be covered here. Each decade brings inventions and refinements that narrow the gap between criminal and pursuer.

William Dorr

DATE: 1912

LOCATION: Lynn, Massachusetts

SIGNIFICANCE: Microscopy was unknown to most Americans until they read about this sensational case.

Millionaire George Marsh didn't appear to have an enemy in the world, yet someone pumped four bullets into the seventy-seven-year-old retired soap manufacturer, then dumped his body beneath an embankment abutting the salt flats near Lynn, Massachusetts. The crime seemed motiveless, because the victim's wallet and gold watch were untouched, and there was no likelihood of any family member benefiting by his death; Marsh had bequeathed his entire estate to charity, with the full knowledge and approval of his relatives, all of whom were independently wealthy.

He was last seen alive on the afternoon of April 11, 1912, and according to the medical examiner, he met his death sometime that evening. Clues were in short supply, apart from a scrap of woven cloth with a pearl-gray overcoat button attached, found a few yards from the body. It might have come from the killer; it might not. Only by finding the overcoat could investigators gauge its true significance.

Appeals to the public for information led to reports of a light-blue car seen near Marsh's home on the day of the murder. A boardinghouse keeper recalled letting a room to a young man who drove such a vehicle. He had given his name as Willis A. Dow and spent considerable time at his window with a pair of binoculars, studying the rear of George Marsh's house.

Another landlady was even more helpful. She, too, had let a room to Willis A. Dow at the time of the murder, and on his departure he had left behind an overcoat from which all the buttons had been removed. Owing to a lack of local forensic facilities, police forwarded the coat and button to the Lowell Textile School in northern Massachusetts for examination.

Professor Edward H. Baker and Louis A. Olney compared both items under the microscope. The fragment of multicolored cloth on the button matched the cloth of the overcoat in both weave and texture, and the area of the coat from which it had been torn—with its broken threads—was also clearly visible. They speculated that, as he fought for his life, George Marsh had yanked the button from the coat of his killer. Later, the murderer had removed all the remaining buttons and presumably destroyed them in a futile attempt to thwart any subsequent identification.

Murder Weapon

While these findings inexorably linked the button from the crime scene to the overcoat, they in no way helped identify the mysterious killer. For that, detectives had to thank a fisherman who trawled a .32 Colt pistol from the water less than fifty yards from where Marsh had been killed. The manufacturer's serial number records led to a store in Stockton, California, and in turn to a thirty-year-old motorcycle dealer named William A. Dorr.

At this point, the saga took an incestuous twist. Dorr's aunt, Orpha Marsh, who also lived in Stockton, happened to be the foster daughter of George Marsh's deceased brother, James. As such, she was the heiress to James's considerable fortune. Dorr, a grasping psychopath, was not the kind of man to let a few bloodlines get in the way of some hefty capital gains, and he set about seducing his matronly aunt. He met with spectacular success. Orpha, thirty-eight years old, unmarried and unloved, was so smitten with her nephew's amorous overtures that she drew up a will naming him as sole beneficiary. The only problem with this arrangement, to Dorr's way of thinking, was that Orpha's fortune was held in a trust administered by George Marsh, who allowed her only a monthly stipend of $87.55. Dorr seethed; as long as the elderly millionaire remained alive, he would never get his hands on the capital. Over many months he convinced the ever-more-compliant Orpha that her affairs were being grossly mishandled, until finally she agreed that he should travel across country to confront her skinflint uncle.

Whether Orpha Marsh was privy to Dorr's murderous scheme remains a matter for conjecture. What is certain is that she received a letter from him informing her that the deed was done and enjoining her not to breathe a word about it until the matter was public knowledge— advice she took to heart.

But already the police, aware of her liaison with Dorr, had tapped her telephone, and they were listening when Dorr called her from a nearby restaurant. Dorr still had the phone in his hand when he was placed under arrest. He admitted killing Marsh but claimed to have acted only in selfdefense because the near-octogenarian had attacked him! Afterward, he had propped the body up in the passenger seat of his car and driven around for thirty minutes before dumping it on the flats where it was found the next day.

Orpha, perhaps sensing her own precarious position, sealed Dorr's doom by releasing a diary in which he had detailed his daily stalking of George Marsh and hiring "a negro who will do the job for me for $1,000." This imaginary account seems to have been written purely for Orpha's benefit, perhaps an attempt by Dorr to convince her that his wasn't the murdering hand.

At his trial, Dorr's plea of mitigation received scant consideration from the jury, who decided his guilt after only two hours of deliberation. On March 24, 1914, he was executed in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

Conclusion

Millions of Americans read and marveled over the fact that a single overcoat button sent Dorr to the electric chair, as what had once been the preserve of the fictional detective now entered the realm of reality.

Colin Ross

DATE: 1921

LOCATION: Melbourne, Australia

SIGNIFICANCE: This was the first Australian murder case to obtain a conviction through forensic science.

Gun Alley, a shadowy cul-de-sac in the Eastern Arcade district of Melbourne, had long served as a favorite assignation point for prostitutes and their clients. For this reason it was regularly patrolled by the local constabulary. On the last day of 1921, an officer shone his light into the gloom, half expecting to find the usual furtive couples. Instead there was only a large bundle lying on the ground. He edged closer.

A young girl had been strangled and bludgeoned to death; her naked body, bruised but oddly free from blood, had been wrapped in a blanket and dumped like so much garbage. The savage nature of the rape confirmed that this was no ordinary killer. The victim was soon identified as Alma Tirtschke, a twelve-year-old schoolgirl who had been reported missing the previous day. Outraged by the crime's brutality, local prostitutes who had used Gun Alley on the night of the murder helped police compile a timetable that established that the body must have been dumped after 1 A.M.

As is often the case, the negative evidence spoke loudest of all. An absence of blood at the crime scene meant that the girl had been killed elsewhere and then transported to Gun Alley. Unless the killer had a car— rare in Australia at this time—the mission must have been undertaken on foot, implying that the killer lived close by. Rather more puzzling, the victim's body had been carefully washed and dried.

As the investigation gained momentum, one name kept cropping up— Colin Ross. Numerous witnesses placed this local wine-bar owner in Gun Alley at around the time the body was thought to have been dumped, including one person who claimed that he had been carrying a blanketwrapped bundle. When questioned, Ross almost fell over himself to be helpful. In so doing, he talked himself to the gallows. Not only did he admit that Alma had been in his bar on the fateful day—though his claim to have scarcely noticed her hardly squared with his precise description of what she had been wearing—he also revealed details about the murder that only the killer could have known. Gradually, Ross's unsavory predilection for young girls came to light, a craving he himself had once summed up thus: "I prefer them without feathers."

Destroyed Evidence

Police theorized that Ross had lured Alma to his bar, where he assaulted and strangled her, then washed the body, presumably to destroy all traces of evidence. After wrapping the corpse in a blanket, he had made his way to Gun Alley, intending to hide it under a drain grating, only to be disturbed by the approaching police officer. In a panic he had abandoned the body and run off into the darkness.

Two blankets found at Ross's home were sent to Dr. Charles Taylor, a government industrial chemist, for analysis. On one he found several strands of reddish-gold hair, the same color as the victim's. His first task was to establish that the hairs were human; this was easily achieved as only the hair of some apes in any way resembles that of humans. The high degree of pigmentation indicated an age range of twelve to thirty, when coloring is at its peak; the length—some strands were more than twelve inches long—at that time virtually guaranteed that the hairs had a female origin. Some were pulled out by the roots, a common feature of assaults; others were broken off.

At Ross's trial the defense produced a fair-haired female customer from Ross's bar and challenged Taylor to distinguish between samples of her hair and that of the murder victim. He did just that, demonstrating clear dissimilarities between the two and proving, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Alma Tirtschke had been in contact with the blanket found at Ross's home. Despite his protestations of a police frame-up, Ross was found guilty and was hanged on April 24, 1922.

Conclusion

Even though forensic science was still relatively new to Australia, Ross's postmurder precautions provided disturbing evidence that killers were becoming increasingly aware of the need to cover their tracks. Fortunately, he didn't realize that murder victims—even clean ones—leave clues wherever they go. But not everyone is happy with Ross's conviction. Following the original publication of this book, relatives of Ross contacted the author with news that a reexamination of a single strand of hair from Alma Tirtschke had taken place. Although it was not possible to obtain the hoped-for DNA profile, it is claimed that modern comparisons of this hair with another hair taken from the crime scene show a clear difference. The authorities remain unconvinced. Thus far, they have rejected every attempt to have Ross's conviction overturned. 

The D'Autremont Brothers

DATE: 1923

LOCATION: Ashland, Oregon

SIGNIFICANCE: Over a lengthy career, Edward O. Heinrich was credited with solving more than two thousand crimes; many consider this his finest hour.

America's last Wild West-style train robbery occurred on October 11, 1923, when two armed desperadoes clambered across the tender of a Southern Pacific express train just as it was about to exit a tunnel in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon. They ordered engineer Sydney Bates and fireman Marvin Seng to halt the train so that its engine, tender, and mail car were clear of the tunnel, leaving the rest of the coaches, those filled with passengers, in the blackness. A third gang member, waiting outside the tunnel, attached dynamite to the side of the mail car and then ran toward a detonator. Seconds later, an enormous explosion engulfed the mail car and its contents. Everything, including the lone mail clerk, Edwin Daugherty, was incinerated. Bates was then ordered to shift the train out of the tunnel. He did his best, but the big locomotive would not budge. His reward for failing to comply was a bullet. Fireman Seng and brakeman Charles Johnson, who had come forward to investigate the explosion, were also shot down in cold blood before the panicky killers made good their escape, empty-handed.

The attempted train robbery, so reminiscent of the James Gang, attracted virtually every available investigative agency: railroad police, postal detectives, and sheriff's deputies, as well as officers from nearby Ashland. A huge posse set out in pursuit of the bandits, but all they found was the battery-operated detonator, a revolver, a pair of greasy blue denim overalls, and some shoe covers made of gunnysack soaked in creosote, apparently to foil any tracker dogs.

As days and weeks passed with no discernible leads, someone suggested contacting Edward Heinrich. It was not a universally popular decision.

Many doubted this quiet chemist from Wisconsin who had filled his crime research laboratory at Berkeley with the latest in scientific technology. Eventually, Heinrich was given the overalls, together with news that a garage mechanic had been arrested because his dungarees appeared to be stained with the same grease.

Heinrich examined every stitch of the overalls under a microscope, including samples of the grease and debris from the pockets. His first findings led to the immediate release of the luckless mechanic—the stain was not auto grease but pitch from fir trees. Then the scientist went on to amaze everyone by providing a full description of the man they should be seeking: a left-handed lumberjack from the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest, someone with light-brown hair who rolled his own cigarettes and was fussy about his appearance. He was five feet ten, weighed about 165 pounds, and was in his early twenties.

Incredible Deduction

How, listeners gasped, had he gleaned all of this from one pair of overalls? Heinrich was matter-of-fact. Because the pockets of the left side were more heavily worn than those on the right, and because the garment buttoned from the left, it was reasonable to assume that the wearer was lefthanded. Chips of Douglas fir, common to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, were found in the right pocket, such as might be collected by a left-handed lumberjack standing with that side nearestthe tree. Shreds of loose tobacco in both pockets were an obvious indicator of smoking preference.

Simple measurement of the overalls gave Heinrich a good idea of the owner's build and height, while a pocket seam yielded several neatly cut fingernail parings, somewhat incongruous for a lumberjack unless he was fastidious about his appearance. A single strand of hair clinging to one button was light brown; the level of pigmentation suggested someone in his early twenties.

In addition, Heinrich found one other clue that previous investigators had totally overlooked. Tucked into the bottom of a long, narrow pencil pocket was a tiny wad of paper. It had obviously undergone numerous washings with the overalls and was blurred beyond all legibility, but by treating it with iodine, Heinrich was able to identify it as a registered-mail receipt numbered 236-L.

The post office traced the receipt for fifty dollars to Roy D'Autremont of Eugene, Oregon, who together with his twin brother, Ray, and another brother, Hugh, had not been seen since October 11, the date of the train holdup. Inquiries about Roy revealed that he was left-handed, had often worked as a lumberjack, rolled his own cigarettes, and was very mindful of his appearance.

Heinrich, meanwhile, had been examining the Colt pistol found near the detonator. Although its exterior serial number had been filed off, he knew that in recent years Colt had taken to duplicating the number inside the gun. Sure enough, when Heinrich dismantled the weapon he found the second engraving. This steered police to a Seattle store where it had been bought by a man calling himself William Elliot. Heinrich opined that, under the microscope, "Elliot's" handwriting and a known example of Roy D'Autremont's were indistinguishable.

All at once, the D'Autremont Gang became the most wanted men in America. Yet despite a fifteen-thousand-dollar reward and circulars that were sent to almost every police department around the world, their whereabouts remained a mystery. And then, in March 1927, an army sergeant studying a wanted poster was struck by the resemblance between Hugh D'Autremont and a soldier he had known in the Philippines. He passed his suspicions on to the authorities. That month, Hugh was captured in Manila and returned to America. In April, his brothers were found working in a steel mill in Steubenville, Ohio, under the alias of Goodwin. All three confessed and were given life imprisonment.

Conclusion

Heinrich's extraordinary work in this case earned him national attention and the nickname "the Wizard of Berkeley." More than anyone else, he made Americans aware of the new face of crime fighting.

Bruno Hauptmann

DATE: 1932

LOCATION: Hopewell, New Jersey

SIGNIFICANCE: Only innovative scientific analysis prevented the "Crime of the Century" from languishing in the unsolved file.

Between seven-thirty and ten o'clock on the evening of March 1, 1932, someone scaled a ladder into a New Jersey bedroom and abducted the nineteen-month-old son of arguably the most famous man alive— transatlantic aviator Colonel Charles Lindbergh. It was a heartless crime that stunned not just America but the world. The only clues were an illwritten ransom demand for fifty thousand dollars signed with a curious logo, some indistinct muddy footprints found beneath the window, the homemade ladder, and a chisel discovered some distance away.

From the outset, the investigation was unorthodox, as Lindbergh chose to put his trust in private parties rather than in official channels. Eventually, an intermediary, Dr. John Condon, contacted the note writer through a Bronx newspaper and agreed to pay the fifty thousand dollars. In a dark cemetery, Condon handed over the ransom in traceable bills and gold certificates to a stranger who spoke with a pronounced German accent. The stranger passed Condon a note saying that the child was aboard a boat moored off the New England coastline, but this turned out to be false. For weeks the investigation foundered, until May 12, when the badly decomposed body of Charles Jr. was found in a wood barely two miles from the Lindbergh estate. The autopsy, conducted by Dr. Charles H. Mitchell, indicated that the child had died from a blow to the head, received in all probability on the night of his abduction.

Shortly after the kidnapping, Arthur Koehler, a scientist with the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory, offered his services to the investigation. By 1932, Koehler was recognized as the world's foremost wood expert, the author of fifty-two government booklets and pamphlets on the subject and one book, The Uses and Properties of Wood. He was shown a few slivers of wood from the ladder and asked to identify the type of wood used. This Koehler did, noting in his report the presence of golden brown, white, and black wool fibers, which he speculated might be from the kidnapper's clothing. Then, with police interdepartmental friction mounting to a level that threatened to jeopardize the entire investigation, Koehler found himself sidelined for almost a year.

Eventually, he was summoned to Trenton to examine the ladder in person. His first impression was that it had been poorly constructed; instead of rungs, the ladder had cleats, sloppily mortised with a dull chisel, while other tools, including a plane and a saw, had been used needlessly in places. After making test cuts with the crime scene chisel, Koehler wasn't prepared to state categorically that it had been used on the ladder.

Exhaustive Inspection

Back at the Forest Products Laboratory, Koehler dismantled the ladder into its component parts. Each segment was numbered: the cleats one through eleven, the rails twelve to seventeen. Every mark was noted and indexed. Four types of wood were used: North Carolina pine, birch, Douglas fir, and Ponderosa pine. Marks on rails twelve and thirteen were consistent with wood that had been dressed by a mill using a belt-driven planer set to operate at 230 feet per minute. Four nail holes in rail sixteen, unconnected with the construction of the ladder, suggested that the wood had previously served in another capacity. Because these holes were clean and rust-free, and the wood showed no weathering, Koehler felt sure it had been used indoors, most likely in a barn, garage, or attic.

Although North Carolina pine grew over a very wide region, Koehler thought that because the wood had surfaced in New Jersey, it had probably been milled in the eastern United States. A letter was sent to 1,598 planing mills from Alabama to New York. Of all the mills contacted, only twentythree reported owning planers configured to the specifications outlined in the letter. Samples of cut wood were requested from each. An example received from the Dorn Lumber Company of McCormick, South Carolina, showed exactly the marks Koehler was looking for.

Because the company had not set its planer to run at 230 feet per minute until 1929, obviously the wood had to have been dressed since then. Company records showed that in that period, forty-six carloads of one-byfour pine had been shipped north of the Potomac.

Arthur Koehler's testimony proved crucial during Hauptmann's trial. (National Archives)

On November 19, 1933—eighteen months after Koehler's initial involvement in the case—detectives finally tracked the wood to the National Lumber and Millwork Company in the Bronx, only to have their hopes dashed when the company admitted that it did not keep records of purchasers. 

Bruno Hauptmann was condemned to the electric chair. (National Archives) This wasn't the first time that the Bronx had figured in the inquiry; earlier, notes from the ransom money had begun to show up in this New York borough. Banks had been given a list of the serial numbers and were told to keep an eye out for them, but not until September 18, 1934—well over two years after the kidnapping—was any significant progress made. A garage attendant who received a ten-dollar gold certificate from a customer jotted down the customer's car license plate number—4U-13-41-NY—on the certificate. When it was deposited at the bank, they immediately contacted the police.

The next day, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a thirty-four-year-old illegal German alien who worked as a carpenter, was taken into custody. At his Bronx home, police found fourteen thousand dollars of the ransom money. Hauptmann insisted that he was merely minding the money for a friend, Isidor Fisch, who had gone back to Germany and since died from tuberculosis, which explained why Hauptmann was now spending the cash.

Apartment Ransacked

Police tore Hauptmann's home apart. In the garage was a hand plane that produced cuts identical to those found on the ladder. Later, an officer studying the attic, which had been dismantled and shipped to the investigation headquarters, noticed that part of a floor joist had been sawn off. When Koehler laid rail sixteen across this section, the nail holes in the joist and those in the rail aligned perfectly. He later showed, by analyzing both grain and wood, how rail sixteen and the section of board remaining in the attic were originally all one piece.

Samples of Hauptmann's handwriting and spelling were given to Arthur Sherman Osborn, who in 1910 had written a massive textbook titled Questioned Documents that became the standard in its field. Osborn and his son, Albert D., also proficient in handwriting analysis, both concluded that Hauptmann had authored the misspelled ransom demands. Oddly enough, right at the outset of the investigation, Scotland Yard, which had become involved in the case because one of Lindbergh's servants was British, had studied the logo and concluded that it was an amalgam of three letters, BRH, though not necessarily in that order.

In the overwrought atmosphere that plagued Hauptmann's trial, Koehler's evidence was some of the most lucid and most damaging, as he showed how the plane found in Hauptmann's garage had been used to plane a rung of the ladder. An avalanche of forensic evidence virtually consumed the defendant, resulting in a verdict of guilty on February 13, 1935.

Conclusion

On April 3, 1936, Hauptmann went to the electric chair, still protesting his innocence. Many believe him to be the hapless victim of a frame-up, but while this case has several troubling aspects—most notably the shoddy initial police work—no objective reading of the evidence could fault the jury's conclusion. 

John Fiorenza

DATE: 1936

LOCATION: New York, New York

SIGNIFICANCE: In this genuine classic of American forensic science, a hair less than an inch long led investigators to the killer.

Nancy Titterton, thirty-four, lived with her husband, Lewis, at 22 Beekman Place, a Manhattan brownstone popular with the literary set. Each day, Lewis left for his job as an NBC executive, while Nancy worked at home as a book reviewer and a promising novelist. On Good Friday, 1936, two furniture men, returning a couch that had been under repair, climbed the stairs to the Tittertons' fourth-floor apartment. Surprised to find the front door ajar, Theodore Kruger called out. There was no answer. He and his young assistant, John Fiorenza, entered cautiously. They peered into the bedroom. One of the beds showed signs of disorder—a disheveled bedspread—and clothing was strewn carelessly on the floor. Attracted by a light in the bathroom, Kruger slowly opened the door.

Nancy Titterton was lying facedown in an empty bath. Nude except for her rolled-down stockings, she had been strangled with her own pajama jacket. Kruger sent his assistant downstairs to the janitor's office, where he phoned the police.

Such a high-profile victim inevitably prompted a high-powered investigation, and the sixty-five-strong team under the leadership of Assistant Chief Inspector John Lyons got its first break early. When the body was lifted from the bath, a cleanly severed thirteen-inch length of cord came into view. Judging from bruises on Nancy Titterton's wrists, she had been bound before being raped; afterward, the killer had cut the bonds and apparently taken them away with him. But in his haste, he had missed this short piece of cord beneath the body. Lyons ordered his men to check every rope and cord manufacturer in the New York area, little realizing that the search would eventually cover three states and dozens of companies.

The discovery of a smear of fresh green paint on the bedspread— presumably left by the killer—led to vigorous questioning of some workers who had been hired to repaint 22 Beekman Place. Only one, though, had been at work on Good Friday, and his presence elsewhere in the building at the time of the murder—around 11 A.M. according to the medical examiner —was attested to by other tenants.

Lyons was puzzled. Everything pointed to this being a deliberately planned murder—the killer had brought the cord with him and taken it away again—and yet no one in the building had heard anything suspicious. Also, Nancy Titterton was a timid woman, most unlikely to admit a stranger to the apartment, so either the killer had broken in and taken her by surprise, or she knew him. Lyons was inclined to believe the latter.

Unusual Discovery

Dr. Alexander O. Gettler of the city's toxicological laboratory examined the bedclothes. A chemist by discipline, Gettler was well rounded in all aspects of criminalistics, and using a magnifying glass, he studied every stitch of the bedspread. After a while, he found a strand of stiff white hair, barely half an inch long. A more powerful microscope revealed it to be horsehair, of the type used for stuffing furniture. Curious, Lyons obtained a sample of horsehair from the couch that had been under repair. Gettler declared them identical. Because nothing else in the apartment was remotely similar, Lyons concluded that the hair had to be from the sofa; furthermore, because it was too heavy to have been blown into the bedroom by a gust of air, it could only have been transported on someone's clothing. While not entirely ruling out his own detectives as unwitting carriers, Lyons thought it more likely that the horsehair had come from one of the two furniture men. Yet neither had entered the bedroom. Or so they said. But what if one of them had visited the apartment earlier that day?

Lyons visited Kruger's upholstery shop. He found the proprietor there alone. When asked to account for his whereabouts on Good Friday morning, Kruger replied that he had been working in the shop. And Fiorenza? Kruger shook his head slowly. No, his assistant had not arrived for work until 11:50 A.M. He had been delayed for some reason.

Lyons pushed for more. Hesitantly, Kruger admitted that the diminutive twenty-four-year-old Fiorenza had a checkered past but was making every effort to reform. Kruger's next revelation made Lyons even more thoughtful. On April 9, the day before the murder, Fiorenza had accompanied Kruger when he had gone to collect the couch from the Titterton apartment, and this was the second time they had been there. So if Fiorenza had called at the apartment on Good Friday, Lyons speculated, Nancy Titterton would have admitted him as a familiar face.

Back at headquarters, he sent for Fiorenza's record. It showed four arrests for theft and a two-year jail sentence. Of greater significance, though, was a 1934 psychiatric report, in which Fiorenza was diagnosed as delusional and prone to wild fantasies. Such a person, Lyons decided, might well be his own worst enemy.

So began a relentless battle of nerves. Each day, detectives would drop by the furniture shop and chat with Fiorenza about baseball and other topics of the moment, only rarely mentioning the murder. Whenever they did, it was only to say how stymied they were. Fiorenza, encouraged to offer theories about how the murder had occurred, found the attention flattering and let his fertile imagination run wild. How about a lover? Or maybe a pots and pans salesman? The suggestions kept flowing. So, too, did the lapses, as he unconsciously let slip details of the crime that only the killer could have known. Certain in his own mind that Fiorenza was the murderer, Lyons cast around for the proof that would convince a jury.

Breakthrough

He found the evidence he was looking for on April 17: The piece of twine found beneath Nancy Titterton's body had been manufactured by the Hanover Cordage Company of York, Pennsylvania. Their records showed that the distinctive istle-based cord had been widely distributed in the New York area, but eventually detectives traced a wholesaler who had sold a roll to Theodore Kruger's upholstery shop.

On April 21, Lyons ordered Fiorenza to be brought in for questioning. For several hours he resolutely denied all knowledge of the crime; then Lyons produced the length of twine. Fiorenza buckled when he heard how it had been traced to Kruger's store. All of the bluster hissed from Fiorenza's frame. Now the confession came in a rush: how on Good Friday morning, infatuated with Nancy Titterton's beauty and believing her to be equally smitten by him, he had gone to her apartment and gained admittance on the pretext that he was returning the couch.

Once inside, he had inveigled her into the bedroom by suggesting it as an alternative place for the couch; then he had attempted to seduce her. But she had rebuffed his pathetic advances. In a fury, he had overpowered the slightly built woman, rammed a handkerchief into her mouth, tied her hands with cord, and raped her. Afterward, he had knotted the pajama jacket around her throat. He dragged her into the bathroom, cut the cord from her wrists, then dumped her in the bath. He claimed she was still breathing when he left.

Fiorenza's plea of temporary insanity hardly bore close examination. He had obviously considered the likelihood that Nancy Titterton would reject him, otherwise why take along the cord and knife? The prosecution said he had entered the apartment fully prepared to rape, and he had left there a cold-blooded killer. Found guilty, Fiorenza was executed on January 22, 1937.

Conclusion

Gettler's contribution to this case, and that of his assistant, Dr. Harry Schwartz, received extensive press coverage, demonstrating to readers how the miracles of twentieth-century technology were now being used in the business of catching killers.

Samuel Morgan

DATE: 1940

LOCATION: Seaforth, England

SIGNIFICANCE: A single scrap of fabric and the secrets it held provided a landmark case for the advancement of fiber analysis.

At half past six on the night of November 2, 1940, fifteen-year-old Mary Hagan left her home in Waterloo, just north of Liverpool, to buy an evening paper. She did not return. Five hours later, searchers combing nearby railroad tracks found her body in a cement blockhouse. She had been raped and strangled. Beside her lay that evening's edition of the Liverpool Echo. Dr. James Firth, head of the Home Office's Northwest Forensic Science Laboratory at Preston, Lancashire, was called out in the middle of the night to examine evidence found at the crime scene. He concentrated his attention on a scrap of muddy fabric found near the body. It looked like a bloodstained finger bandage.

Firth studied the victim's body. On the left side of the neck was what appeared to be an unidentifiable bloody thumbprint. Because none of the victim's injuries had bled, he reasoned that both the print and the bandage belonged to the killer. Most likely the injured assailant had lost the bandage during the struggle and then had pressed his bleeding thumb against Mary Hagan's throat.

Laboratory analysis revealed that the bandage was in two parts: a waterrepellent outer layer and an inner bandage impregnated with disinfectant and zinc ointment. The disinfectant—acriflavine—proved to be a valuable clue. Because wartime priorities had restricted its use almost exclusively to military field dressings, Firth suspected that the killer was a serviceman nursing a badly injured thumb. Inevitably, the investigation turned toward the nearby Royal Seaforth barracks, and in particular to a private named Samuel Morgan who had deserted in late September. He was already under suspicion for an earlier attack on another local woman, Anne McVitte.

On November 13, Morgan was detained in London, still showing obvious signs of a badly gashed right thumb, and was returned to Liverpool. At first he was charged only with the attack on Anne McVitte. A prison doctor who examined Morgan's thumb injury thought that it might have been caused by barbed wire and was between one and two weeks old.

When interviewed by the police, Morgan's sister-in-law admitted harboring him since his desertion from the army. She also recalled that on October 31 she had dressed a wound to his right thumb, caused, he said, by some barbed wire. The next day she had applied a fresh bandage, this time adding zinc ointment. On each occasion she had used dressings from Morgan's military kit. Fortunately, she still had some of the bandage and ointment left, both of which she handed over. She denied seeing Morgan since four o'clock on the afternoon of November 2, when he had left her house ostensibly to borrow money from a brother-in-law, James Shaw.

Breathless Meeting

Shaw agreed that he had met Morgan at the Royal Hotel in Seaforth on November 2 between seven and eight o'clock. Yet another brother, Francis Morgan, was also present. At about 7:35 P.M., Samuel Morgan had arrived, panting hard, as if he had been running, and with blood pouring from his thumb. He got Francis to bind the wound with a field dressing, then begged the two men for money as he needed to flee the area immediately. They handed over every penny they had, and he left.

The police asked themselves a question: If Mary Hagan had been killed at around seven o'clock, as they thought, did Morgan have sufficient time to reach the Royal Hotel just half an hour later? A few simple calculations gave them an affirmative answer.

Suddenly, out of the blue, Morgan confessed. He had not intended to kill Mary Hagan, he claimed, just to rob her, but in trying to stifle her screams, he had inadvertently choked her. Singularly lacking in Morgan's statement was any mention of the vicious sexual attack. Given the ephemeral nature of confessions—easily made and just as easily recanted—Firth was asked to intensify his forensic examination.

He compared the bandage found in the blockhouse with the ones obtained from Morgan's sister-in-law. They matched exactly, as did the unopened packet of field dressings that Firth recovered from Morgan's pocket. All three were the same as the dozens of sample dressings supplied by Seaforth barracks, which highlighted a major drawback: In wartime Liverpool, such dressings numbered in the hundreds of thousands; it was hardly proof of murder. Of potentially greater importance was the discovery that soil stains on Morgan's clothing revealed the same trace elements— manganese, copper, and lead—found on the blockhouse floor.

Suddenly, Firth made a critical discovery. As noted, he had already matched the blockhouse bandage to those obtained from the sister-in-law. He now realized that they differed from the other sample bandages in one significant detail. Both had been double stitched, whereas all the barracks' bandages showed a single row of stitching. Firth turned to textile engineer Ronald Crabtree for clarification. Crabtree was in no doubt that the bandage Morgan had worn, the one applied by his sister-in-law, had been handsewn, and none too carefully; every other bandage from the Seaforth barracks was machine-sewn and flawless. Morgan had chosen the only bandage that could betray him.

At his trial for murder, which began on February 10, 1941, Morgan, as anticipated, recanted his confession, claiming that it had resulted from police coercion. But he had no answer for the forensic evidence, and after a weeklong trial, he was condemned to death. He was hanged on April 4, 1941.

Conclusion

Unquestionably, luck played a hand in securing the conviction of Samuel Morgan, but it was the kind of fortune that was becoming ever more common as advances in laboratory analysis continued to seal off the criminal's avenues of escape.

John Vollman

DATE: 1958

LOCATION: Edmundston, Canada

SIGNIFICANCE: This was the first murder case in which neutron activation analysis—so-called atomic evidence—played a decisive role.

Late one May afternoon in 1958, sixteen-year-old Gaetane Bouchard left home to go shopping in the small New Brunswick town of Edmundston. When she had not returned home by eight o'clock, her father, Wilfrid, began telephoning Gaetane's friends, asking where she might be. A few mentioned the name of John Vollman, a twenty-year-old part-time saxophonist who lived just across the border in Madawaska, Maine. Since meeting some months earlier at a local dance, he and Gaetane had enjoyed a casual relationship.

That evening, Mr. Bouchard drove across the border to confront Vollman at the newspaper printing plant where he worked the night shift. The young man seemed guileless enough; he admitted dating Gaetane at one time but denied having seen her recently, not since becoming engaged to another girl.

When Bouchard returned home, there was still no sign of Gaetane. At 11 P.M., he called the police and then resumed his search. On the advice of friends, he checked a disused gravel pit just outside town. Normally a popular spot with couples in cars, tonight it lay deserted. Bouchard parked and began exploring the dark ground, flashlight in hand. Within minutes, the probing beam picked out a suede shoe, instantly recognizable as Gaetane's. Moments later, it fell upon the lifeless body of his daughter. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and back, then dragged off to die in the darkness. Some distance away, a dark pool of blood and tire prints signposted where the murderous assault had begun. While making plaster casts of these prints, an observant police officer noticed two slivers of green paint, one barely larger than the head of a pin, the other somewhat bigger and heart shaped. They appeared to be from a car, probably chipped off by flying gravel as the wheels were accelerated fiercely.

The next day, attempts were made to retrace Gaetane's movements in the hours leading up to her disappearance. At 4 P.M. she had bought some chocolate from a local restaurant. Shortly after this, she was seen talking to the driver of a light-green Pontiac, possibly a 1952, with Maine plates. An hour later, two friends saw her inside a green Pontiac, in all likelihood the same green car that another witness saw parked by the gravel pit between five and six o'clock. The medical examiner attributed death to multiple stab wounds. There was no evidence of sexual assault, and from the partly digested chocolate remaining in the stomach, he gave the time of death at no later than 7 P.M.

Sexually Aggressive

Possibly through embarrassment at learning of his daughter's apparent promiscuity, Mr. Bouchard had not mentioned Vollman to the police when reporting Gaetane missing. This omission was rectified by friends of the dead girl. Detectives listened with interest as they elaborated on Vollman's reputation as an aggressive small-town gigolo, ill disposed to sexual rejection. Even more illuminating was the information that he had recently purchased a light-green 1952 Pontiac.

Like Mr. Bouchard, the detectives also caught up with Vollman at work. Before interviewing him, though, they checked the parking lot. Vollman's Pontiac was in good condition except for a heart-shaped blemish just beneath the passenger door where the paint was chipped off. When checked, the particle of paint from the crime scene fitted perfectly, a match later verified microscopically.

Vollman treated his inquisitors with shifty indifference, still insistent that he had not seen Gaetane for months. He sneered at eyewitness accounts that placed her in a green Pontiac, pointing out that perhaps the Edmundston police chief ought to be interrogated as well, because he drove an identical vehicle! Even mention of the heart-shaped splinter of paint failed to ruffle his equilibrium.

The Pontiac continued to reveal its secrets. Inside the glove compartment was a half-eaten bar of lipstick-stained chocolate, just like the type bought by Gaetane a few hours before her death. And if that were not enough to convict Vollman, the Edmundston morgue was now set to administer the knockout blow.

A second autopsy had revealed the most compelling clue yet. Entwined in the dead girl's fingers was a single hair, two and a half inches long, most probably pulled from the killer's head as she fought for her life. In order to establish whether this hair came from their chief suspect, investigators turned to a controversial by-product of the atomic age.

Neutron activation analysis (NAA) is a complicated technique in which the sample is first placed in a capsule, then inserted in a nuclear reactor and bombarded with neutrons in order to make it radioactive.

By measuring the rate at which radioactive atoms disintegrate, analysts can identify the sample's trace elements. Using this process, hairs from Vollman and Gaetane were compared to the single hair. In the proportion of sulfur to phosphorus radiation, Gaetane's hair registered 2.02, whereas the sample from Vollman and the single hair were 1.07 and 1.02 respectively. Clearly the single hair had not come from the murdered girl, and just as obviously it was very close to that of Vollman.

Cocksure Defendant

Over strident defense objections, the court decided to admit this revolutionary testimony when Vollman stood trial for murder in Edmundston on November 4, 1958. Having pleaded not guilty, Vollman seemed confident that the jury would disregard what the press had termed "atomic evidence." But as the witness stand filled with scientists eager to explain the new procedure and how it pointed toward the defendant's guilt, the mood in court began to turn palpably against Vollman, so much so that he abruptly announced that he wanted to change his plea to guilty of manslaughter. He now admitted to killing Gaetane, but not intentionally. At first, he said, she had encouraged his advances but then had changed her mind. His last memory was of a struggle breaking out. Everything afterward was a blur, lost in the murk of a blackout.

Vollman's last reckless gamble failed. Found guilty as originally charged and sentenced to hang, he was later reprieved.

Conclusion

NAA is so sensitive that it can identify fourteen different elements in a single inch of human hair. Scientists put the likelihood of two individuals having the same concentration of nine different elements at one in a million. But NAA is costly and of course requires access to a nuclear reactor. With the advent of other identification techniques, it has fallen from favor. 

Chester Weger

DATE: 1960

LOCATION: Starved Rock, Illinois

SIGNIFICANCE: Forensic science is only as good as its practitioners and the equipment they use. Here, ineptitude almost set a mass murderer free. Fortunately, other more capable scientists were at hand to avert this near miscarriage of justice.

The savage robbery and murder of three well-to-do Chicago socialites in Starved Rock State Park, Illinois, was a crime that shocked the nation. The women—Mrs. Lillian Oetting, Mrs. Mildred Lindquist, and Mrs. Frances Murphy, wives of prominent businessmen—were found bound with twine and hidden in a cave on March 16, 1960. All three were naked from the waist down. Nearby, on the hard-packed snow, lay a three-foot-long bloodied tree limb, thought to be the murder weapon. Autopsies confirmed that death had resulted from skull fractures and brain damage, but, significantly, there was no evidence of rape, suggesting that the clothing had been deliberately disarranged to throw investigators off the trail.

Because the victims had been staying at the park lodge, detectives concentrated on employees and other guests. For a time the most promising suspect was Chester Weger, a twenty-one-year-old dishwasher at the lodge. Other employees recalled seeing scratches on his face the day the women had been murdered, abrasions that Weger attributed to shaving.

Among his possessions, police found a bloodstained leather jacket, which they sent to their own laboratory for analysis. In the interim, Weger agreed to a polygraph examination, which was carried out by officials from the state police headquarters in Springfield. The results suggested that he was telling the truth when he denied any connection with the brutal crime, and shortly afterward the laboratory report came back—the stains on the jacket were animal blood, as Weger had claimed. Reluctant to give up on Weger as a suspect, the police gave him another polygraph test. Once more, he passed with flying colors.

At this point, Weger was dropped from the investigation, as were all the park employees. Now the police felt that the women had been the victims of a transient thief, especially when a belated inventory of Lillian Oetting's possessions revealed that two rings were missing, presumably stolen by the killer. Local pawnshops were asked to be on the lookout. None reported anything remotely like the missing jewelry. This was hardly surprising, because the elusive rings had not been stolen at all. They were found inside the dead woman's glove, which she had stuffed into her coat pocket before she was killed. Apparently she had feared the worst when approached by a stranger on the trail.

Bungled Investigation

By now it was clear that the investigation had been less than thorough. As disgusted police officers followed the furor over the ring incident, which culminated in the laboratory superintendent's resignation, they pondered the likelihood of other mistakes having been made. This brought about a renewed interest in the twine used to bind the women, originally thought to be of too common a type to be traced. Deputies found that it was a twentystrand variety and compared it with other twine used at the lodge, which also had twenty strands. The manufacturer, a Kentucky firm, confirmed that the only place in Illinois to buy that particular cord was Starved Rock State Park.

Officers again targeted the lodge. In a toolshed they not only found lengths of the twine but also knots in the twine that were identical to those used to bind the murder victims. A short list of people who used the shed was drawn up. High on that list was Chester Weger. Again his jacket was submitted for analysis, this time to the FBI Laboratory in Washington. Scientists there made no mistake—the stains were human blood, most likely from the same group as one of the victims.

Once again, Weger became the chief suspect. And yet twice he had passed a polygraph. Even so, it was decided to test him again. Top polygraph expert John Reid of Chicago conducted the examination. This time, the machine clearly indicated deception when Weger denied committing the murders.

Other evidence slowly came to light. In the fall of 1959, not long before the triple murders, a girl had been raped and bound with twine exactly like the cord used in the murders. From a photo layout, she identified Weger as her assailant. The girl told police that during the attack Weger had kept a bullet clenched between his teeth, a grim reminder, he warned, of what would happen to her if she ever told anyone.

Confronted with this new evidence, plus the revised blood analysis and the incriminating polygraph findings, Weger confessed. On March 3, 1961, Weger was convicted of murdering Lillian Oetting and sentenced to life imprisonment. It was considered unnecessary to prosecute Weger for the other two crimes because he was already under lock and key.

So how did Weger fool the polygraph? Reid, asked to account for his success where others had failed, expressed it as follows: "Simple enough, it's a matter of technique, in knowing how to conduct such an experiment effectively."

Asked the same question, Weger had an entirely different rationale. "Before the first two tests," he said, "I just swallowed a lot of aspirin and washed it down with a bottle of Coke. That calms a guy down, you know. Why I didn't do that before this other guy tested me I'll never know."

At the time of this writing, Chester Weger is still behind bars at the Menard Correctional Center. In September 2005, the Illinois Prisoner Review Board unanimously rejected his latest request for parole. They are not scheduled to reexamine his application until 2008.

Conclusion

Some good actually came of the Starved Rock Murders. The amateurish Illinois state crime laboratory, then no better equipped than a high school chemistry lab, was abolished by the state legislature. In its place, Illinois today has what ranks among the finest state crime laboratory systems in America.

Stephen Bradley

DATE: 1960

LOCATION: Sydney, Australia

SIGNIFICANCE: To solve a crime that stunned the nation, Australian police put together a forensic team made up of geologists, doctors, scientists, and, most important, the general public.

Until June 1, 1960, Bazil and Freda Thorne were an obscure middle-class couple living in suburban Sydney, Australia. On that day their anonymity was forever shattered by the news that they had won one hundred thousand Australian pounds ($210,000) in the state lottery. Any exhilaration they felt lasted all of six weeks: On July 7, someone snatched their eight-year-old son, Graeme, from the street as he made his way to school.

Later that morning, a man with a heavy foreign accent phoned the Thorne household and demanded twenty-five thousand pounds for the boy's safe return. He called again at 9:40 P.M., repeated his demand, and hung up quickly, thereby foiling police attempts to trace the call. That would be his last communication.

The next day, Graeme's empty school case was found in a garbage dump in a distant part of town. On July 11, his cap, raincoat, arithmetic book, and lunch bag turned up another mile away. But there was no sign of the boy. An eyewitness report of a 1955 blue Ford Customline parked outside the Thorne residence on the morning of the kidnapping offered hopes for a lead, but tempering official optimism was the fact that five thousand such vehicles were registered in the state of New South Wales.

Each passing day diminished hopes of finding Graeme alive. And so it proved. Five weeks later, on August 16, his body was found wrapped in a rug about ten miles from his home. He had been suffocated and clubbed to death. The Scientific Investigation Bureau was responsible for extracting the trace evidence. Certain items of Graeme's clothing had been encrusted with a pink soil-like substance; its significance would become apparent only later. The rug, which had one tassel missing, was covered with both animal and human hairs, as were the victim's jacket and trousers. Around the shoes and socks, a mold culture had begun to form. Further traces of botanical matter were found in the clothing.

All these items were subjected to a barrage of tests. Dr. Cameron Cramp of the Government Medical Office identified four different kinds of hair: three human and one, he said, almost certainly from a Pekingese dog. The shoe mold, said Professor Neville White, comprised four types of fungi. By replicating as closely as possible the circumstances of Graeme's death, he dated the mold as six weeks old, suggesting that the boy had been killed immediately after abduction. The pink substance was identified by Horace Whiteworth, curator of the Geological and Mining Museum in Sydney, as a kind of mortar frequently used in Australian house construction.

All of this left only the botanical material. Because of the variety and amount, the entire scientific staff at the National Herbarium was called upon to lend assistance. By mid-September, all of the various leaves, seeds, and particles of twigs found on the body had been identified. One, an extremely rare cypress seed, offered the most hope of providing a lead, because it definitely did not grow in the vicinity where the body was found.

Public Appeal

Investigators now reevaluated the pink mortar; if they could locate a housing development in which it coexisted with the rare cypress, a valuable link might be established. An appeal broadcast to the general public, urging anyone who knew of such a property to contact the police, brought immediate results. A mailman suggested that they try a particular house on his route. The pink house at 28 Moore Street, Clontarf, certainly fit the bill: on either side of the garage door grew not only the rare cypress but also other plants whose traces had been found on Graeme's body. The current residents, having moved into the house just recently, were soon eliminated as suspects, but not so the previous tenant.

Stephen Bradley (whose real name was Istvan Baranyay), a Hungarian immigrant, had moved out of the house on the very day of the kidnapping. Neighbors confirmed that he spoke heavily accented English, owned a blue Ford Customline, and was devoted to his Pekingese dog. Inside the house, detectives found an old photograph. It showed Bradley and his family enjoying a picnic, sitting on the very rug in which Graeme's body had been wrapped. They even found the rug's missing tassel, torn off and left unnoticed on the floor.

News that on September 20 Bradley had sold the Ford to a used-car dealer sent officers rushing to the dealer in question. There on the lot stood the car they had been seeking for two months. Scientists examined every inch. In the trunk were pink particles identical to those found on Graeme's body.

Through travel agents, police learned that Bradley; his wife, Magda; and their three children had booked passage for England aboard the liner Himalaya. The ship had sailed on September 26 and was currently en route to Colombo, Ceylon. Before leaving, he had left his dog at a veterinary hospital for onward transmission to England. When Dr. Cramp examined hair from the Pekingese, he declared it to be indistinguishable from the hair found on the dead boy's clothes.

Detectives flew to Colombo, and were waiting at the quayside when Bradley's ship docked. After a monthlong legal wrangle— Ceylon had no formal extradition treaty with Australia—Bradley was returned to stand trial. During the flight, he claimed that Graeme had suffocated accidentally in the trunk of his car, but he failed to account for how the boy's skull had been crushed. Later, Bradley recanted this confession, to no avail. On March 29, 1961, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Four years later, his wife divorced him and went to live in Europe. Bradley's life sentence ended on October 6, 1968, when he dropped dead from a heart attack at forty-three.

Conclusion

Because Australia was unused to kidnapping—the only other instance had occurred thirty years previously—Graeme Thorne's plight started a media feeding frenzy. Within an hour of his abduction, every news station in the country had run the story. Whether this prompted Bradley to panic and kill the boy is unknowable; more certain is the likelihood that such hysteria in no way aided the missing lad or those charged with finding him.

Roger Payne

DATE: 1968

LOCATION: Bromley, England

SIGNIFICANCE: As a fiber-gathering exercise, the forensic work carried out in the aftermath of this horrific murder is virtually unparalleled.

At a few minutes past eight o'clock on the night of February 7, 1968, newly married Bernard Josephs arrived home at his flat in Bromley, Kent, to find the place in darkness. He let himself in, switched on the lights, and put his raincoat and briefcase on the settee, all the while calling out for his wife, Claire. Puzzled by the strange silence, he entered the bedroom. He didn't see his wife at first. Then he saw legs protruding from under the bed. Claire was lying facedown on the floor, her throat slashed wide open. She was wearing, among other clothing, a cerise woolen dress. Although no one realized it at the time, this dress—a present from her husband—would play a critical role in trapping Claire's killer.

The autopsy, performed by Professor James Cameron, confirmed the frenzy of the knife attack. Her throat had been severed to the spine. Defensive wounds on the right hand showed how hard Claire had fought for her life. It appeared as though the killer had half-strangled her first, then grabbed a knife with a serrated blade. Cameron put the time of death at approximately 7:15 P.M. There was no evidence of a sexual assault. No weapon was found at the flat, but the next morning a bread knife with an eight-inch serrated blade was noted to be missing.

The inquiry, headed by Detective Superintendent John Cummings, began piecing together the last few hours of Claire's life. At 5:45 P.M., her mother-in-law had phoned with a recipe for lemon soufflé. The two women had talked for about fifteen minutes, and sometime between 6 and 7 P.M. Claire had begun preparing the dish. Because the ingredients were still in a mixing bowl in the kitchen, Cummings reasoned that Claire had been interrupted by her killer. He further thought that given the absence of any evidence to indicate forcible entry, this interruption had taken the form of a visitor whom she knew.

This was borne out by the half-empty coffee cup in the kitchen and a plate of cookies. Cummings, noting that the cookies had been taken from a freshly opened packet that lay on the sideboard, took this to mean that the caller was unlikely to be a close friend. Such formality was not Claire Josephs's way with people she knew well.

Violent Background

By concentrating on friends and relatives, Cummings soon came up with the name of Roger Payne, a twenty-six-year-old bank clerk who had previous convictions for attacking women. Payne and his wife were acquaintances of the dead woman and had visited her apartment once in January 1968. What Claire wore during this visit—a brown skirt and a green sweater—would later assume great significance. One week later, January 15, she began work as a telephone operator, and only then did she start wearing the cerise woolen dress in which she was found the day she died. Prior to this, it had been stored in a suitcase and had been there since mid-1967.

When interviewed, Payne had numerous scratches on his hands, the result, he said, of a quarrel with his wife a few days earlier. He was asked to account for his movements on February 7. That morning, wearing a freshly pressed suit from the cleaners, he had gone to London for a job interview. On his way home, he decided to visit his mother, only for his car to break down on the way. While he was tinkering with the engine, the hood slipped and fell, which explained the bruise on his forehead that Cummings had noticed. After some time, he got the car running and carried on toward his mother's. According to her first statement, Payne arrived sometime after six o'clock and stayed only a few minutes; Payne's version had him showing up at 6:30 P.M. and leaving an hour later. The final leg of his journey was again marred by car trouble. This time it proved more difficult to fix, and he did not arrive home until 9:15 P.M. The next day, he returned his suit to the cleaners.

Cummings didn't believe a word of it and asked Margaret Pereira, senior principal scientific officer at the Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory, to analyze Payne's clothing. His overcoat and hat both showed traces of blood. Pereira typed the blood as group A, the same as Payne's (Claire Josephs belonged to the much rarer blood group AB). The coffee cup found at the crime scene was more enlightening. Saliva samples taken from around the rim showed traces of blood group A. While this meant that Payne could have drunk from the cup, so might have 42 percent of the general population.

Any ambiguities raised by the serological findings were more than outweighed by the sheer volume of fiber evidence that was uncovered. Claire's distinctive cerise dress was made from a fluffy woolen fabric, the kind that sheds easily. These fibers—fluorescent and easily detected under ultraviolet light—made a mockery of Payne's precautionary trip to the dry cleaners. The surfaces were clean, but not the seams and hems. Sixty-one cerise fibers were recovered from his clothing, and he could not claim to have picked up the fibers from his visit to the Josephs' apartment in January. As noted, Claire did not start wearing this particular dress until a week after the Paynes called.

More Damning Evidence

Such success in one direction prompted Pereira to explore the possible transference of fibers from Payne's clothing to that of the victim. The cerise dress proved disappointing; its woolly texture made it less than ideal for the examination of contact fibers. But on Claire's raincoat, hung up just inside the front door, were a number of fibers that might have come from Payne's overcoat and others that matched his suit. Because all of the fibers were of a fairly common type, it was impossible to be more specific. At Payne's house, detectives found a frayed red scarf. Twenty rayon fibers matching this scarf were found on Claire's raincoat. Another fiber of the same type was recovered from her left thumbnail.

With such a wealth of fiber evidence, it was time to extend the search to Payne's car. Cummings reasoned that when Payne drove his Morris 1100 away from the apartment, he took the knife with him for later disposal. If that was the case, then the likeliest hiding place for the knife would be inside the pocket on the driver's door. Sure enough, tests at the bottom of the pocket found traces of group AB blood. This was further isolated by testing for the presence of PGM (phosphoglucomutase) groups. The resulting combination of AB, PGM 2-1—the same as Claire Josephs— occurs in just one person in eighty. Clearly Payne had tried to wash the inner surface of the driver's door, but very faint human bloodstains were detected in various places in the washed area. Debris on the car floor revealed several fibers matching the nylon carpet in the victim's apartment, together with yet more fibers from her dress.

Few defendants have faced such a formidable forensic barrage as Payne did when he stood charged with the murder of Claire Josephs. It was an unanswerable case, one his attorneys found impossible to overcome. Convicted on May 24, 1968, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Conclusion

The investigation of this murder has become a textbook classic of forensic science. This was to be Detective Superintendent Cummings's last major case. He always considered it his most successful.

Jeffrey MacDonald

DATE: 1970

LOCATION: Fayetteville, North Carolina

SIGNIFICANCE: Often overlooked in the notorious Fatal Vision murders is how an FBI analyst overcame crime scene deficiencies to provide the prosecution with its deadliest line of attack.

An emergency phone call received at 3:40 A.M. on February 17, 1970, sent military police racing to the Fort Bragg home of army doctor Captain Jeffrey MacDonald. The scene that greeted them was horrific. MacDonald and his wife Colette lay sprawled on the master bedroom floor. Colette was obviously dead, a torn blue pajama jacket full of holes draped across her chest. Beside her, clad only in blue pajama bottoms, MacDonald lay motionless but conscious. Above them, daubed in blood on the bed headboard, was the word PIG. Down the hallway, their two young daughters had been hacked to shreds.

In the midst of this carnage, with military police (MPs) rushing headlong about the house and inadvertently trampling evidence underfoot, MacDonald was an icon of lucidity. He told of falling asleep on the living room couch, only to be awakened by Colette's frantic cry. In the darkness he vaguely made out four hippies standing over him, three men and a woman who kept chanting, "Acid is groovy . . . kill the pigs." MacDonald hurled himself at the intruders. They responded by slashing him with an ice pick. To ward off the blows, MacDonald wrapped his blue pajama jacket around his hands; even so, he sustained multiple stab wounds and was quickly knocked unconscious.

Sometime later, he came to. Stumbling from room to room, he attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on each of his daughters, but to no avail. Then he found Colette. He pulled a small knife from her chest and tossed it onto the floor. Next he draped his pajama jacket over her. Then he phoned for help.

It had been a frenzied attack. Colette had been stabbed more than twenty times in the chest, her head pulverized by half a dozen blows, both arms broken in a vain attempt to fend off the blitz. Two-year-old Kristen received thirty-three stab wounds, while Kimberly, five, succumbed to a rainstorm of blows and knife wounds. By contrast, MacDonald's injuries were relatively minor, and before being removed for medical treatment, he was able to furnish detailed descriptions of his attackers.

Afterward, Detectives William Ivory and Franz Grebner studied the room where a life-and-death struggle had allegedly taken place. Something wasn't right. Next to the couch where MacDonald said he had been attacked, a lamp remained upright, and apart from a coffee table that was turned over on top of some magazines and an empty flowerpot in the middle of the floor, the disorder was minimal. To the experienced investigative eye, it had a distinctly staged appearance. Also, why had the gang allowed MacDonald—the only eyewitness— to live?

Manson Copyists

Perhaps, mused Ivory, because there was no drug-crazed gang? Had it all been an invention of MacDonald's? There was ample reason to think this. Among the magazines on the floor was the latest edition of Esquire, which featured extensive coverage of the recent Manson massacres in southern California. The similarities between that slaughter and this—homicidal dropouts high on hallucinogenic drugs—were starkly obvious. If MacDonald had been seeking to mask his own murderous activities, then such an article might well have provided the inspiration.

Another troubling aspect was MacDonald's poor eyesight; he needed glasses to read and drive a car. Supposedly he had been fast asleep in the pitch-black living room when he heard his wife cry out. How, in those few tumultuous seconds before being knocked unconscious, was he able to glean such good descriptions of his attackers? Moreover, the house was still in darkness when the MPs arrived. Wouldn't someone dialing for help on the telephone at least want the light on?

There were other, more tangible reasons for doubting MacDonald's story. Among the bloodstained bedding was the finger section of a latex glove, the kind that surgeons wear. It had been torn, as though removed in a hurry, possibly by the person who wrote PIG on the headboard. Also, the knife MacDonald claimed to have pulled from his wife's chest and then tossed onto the carpet was free of fingerprints. But the most damaging evidence came to light when Colette was lifted from the bedroom floor.

Beneath her body were several blue threads. Yet MacDonald claimed that he had laid his blue pajama jacket on top of Colette after finding her. Eighty-one blue fibers were recovered from the master bedroom. Still more were peeled off a sizable chunk of bloodstained wood found outside the back door. Beneath a nearby bush, detectives found a knife and an ice pick, both wiped clean.

Those ubiquitous blue threads kept turning up—nineteen more in Kimberly's bedroom, including one beneath her fingernail, and two in Kristen's bedroom. Microscopic analysis matched all of them to MacDonald's pajama jacket. Curiously, the only room where investigators failed to find any such threads was the living room, where MacDonald claimed to have fought for his life.

What they did find was blood, pints of it, splashed around all three bedrooms. Against all the laws of probability, each family member had a different blood group, making it possible to track the movement of the victims around the house, especially Jeffrey MacDonald. The only two places where his blood occurred in any significant amounts were the kitchen—by a cabinet containing a supply of surgical rubber gloves—and the bathroom sink, where, investigators speculated, MacDonald had stabbed himself after butchering his family.

Just as enlightening were the bloodstains the investigators didn't find. According to MacDonald, he had used two telephones to call for help; neither showed any sign of blood or even fingerprints. And the place where he fell in the hallway after being stabbed was also free from blood. In the living room, the only traces of MacDonald's blood were on a pair of spectacles and the copy of Esquire magazine. Not much for a man who claimed to have been attacked with an ice pick.

On May 1, the army felt it had enough to charge MacDonald with triple murder, but subsequent inquiries revealed such a catalog of official incompetence—many samples of vital trace evidence had been misplaced or lost completely—that in October 1970, all charges were abruptly dropped.

After leaving the army, MacDonald appeared on a TV talk show; joking almost, he berated the military for their attitude toward him. At the same time, he relegated the fate of his family to a few disinterested sentences. It was an oddly callous performance, and more than anything else, this was responsible for the renewal of official interest in Jeffrey MacDonald.

FBI Brought In

His pajama jacket was sent to the FBI Laboratory in Washington, D.C., where analyst Paul Stombaugh made an interesting discovery: all fortyeight holes made by the ice pick were smooth and cylindrical. In order for this to have happened, the jacket would have had to remain stationary. How, he reasoned, if MacDonald had this jacket wrapped around his hands to defend himself and was dodging a torrent of blows, could such a thing have occurred? Equally incongruous was a large stain made by Colette's blood that covered two parts of the torn jacket. When the parts were held together, the stain matched up exactly, suggesting that the stain had been made before the jacket was torn, a fact inconsistent with MacDonald's statement that he had placed the jacket over his wife only after finding her dead.

Also, by folding the jacket in one particular way, Stombaugh showed how all forty-eight tears could have been made by twenty-one thrusts of the ice pick, coincidentally the same number of wounds that Colette had suffered. This evidence, presented to a grand jury in July 1974, resulted in three murder indictments against Captain Jeffrey MacDonald.

Delays, motions, and countermotions kept the case in limbo for years, but on July 16, 1979, nine and a half years after the murders, MacDonald finally faced his accusers in a North Carolina courtroom.

Unquestionably, the dramatic highlight came when prosecutors Brian Murtagh and James Blackburn abruptly staged an impromptu reenactment of the alleged attack on MacDonald. Murtagh wrapped a pajama top around his hands and tried to fend off a series of ice-pick blows from Blackburn. For his troubles, Murtagh received a small wound to the arm, but two telling points had been made. First, all of the holes in the pajama top were rough and jagged, not smoothly cylindrical as the holes in MacDonald's pajama jacket had been. Second, Murtagh was stabbed, albeit not seriously. When MacDonald had arrived at Womack Hospital, he did not have a single wound on his arms.

In his own defense, MacDonald offered little except petulant arrogance; today he is serving three consecutive life terms.

Conclusion

MacDonald has no shortage of supporters who believe him to be innocent. Other observers highlight the forensic evidence—inexpertly gathered, maybe, but in its totality convincing proof that justice, although delayed, was served. 

Lionel Williams

DATE: 1976

LOCATION: Hollywood, California

SIGNIFICANCE: In this widely publicized murder, the preservation of physical evidence helped overcome a profusion of mistaken eyewitness testimony.

In his teens Sal Mineo had been one of Hollywood's hottest actors, but like many precocious stars before him, he found graduation to adult roles difficult, and his once-flourishing career went into a steady decline. As screen parts grew scarcer, he turned to the theater. On the night of February 12, 1976, Mineo was on his way home from directing a stage play. He had just parked his blue Chevelle behind the Hollywood apartment block where he lived when neighbors heard a cry of "Oh God, no! Help! Someone help!" followed by sounds of a struggle, more screams, then silence.

Seconds later, bystanders saw a man flee down the driveway and speed off in a car—a white man with long brown hair, they later told police. By the time they reached the thirty-seven-year-old Mineo, he was near death, a long stream of blood flowing from a stab wound in his chest. All efforts at resuscitation failed, and within minutes Mineo expired.

At first it was thought that Mineo's recent charitable work with prison reform had backfired badly and that an ex-con had killed him. That hypothesis crumbled the moment officers entered Mineo's apartment. The walls were covered with photos of nude men, and stacks of homosexual literature filled the bedroom. The investigation turned around completely. Now a lover's quarrel seemed the likeliest motive. Police scrutinized the photos, searching for someone whose description matched that of the brown-haired white man seen running from the apartment block shortly after Mineo's cries for help were heard. They found nothing.

The autopsy was conducted by Dr. Manuel R. Breton, deputy medical examiner of Los Angeles County. After establishing the cause of death, he X-rayed the lower chest and upper abdomen to see if any metallic fragments from the knife could be found. There were none. As a precautionary measure, he ordered that the chest section pierced by the knife be stored for possible later use at the Los Angeles County Forensic Science Center. As it happened, Dr. Breton's circumspection helped trap a killer.

For two years detectives chased every lead, only to see them all disintegrate. And then word reached them of a man imprisoned in Michigan on a bad-check charge, twenty-one-year-old Lionel Williams, who had boasted to a prison guard of killing Mineo. Earlier in Los Angeles, his wife, Theresa, had told police that on the night of the killing her husband had come home drenched in blood and admitted stabbing Mineo with a hunting knife.

Brutal Muggings

To no one's surprise, Williams soon retracted his story, but police in Los Angeles had already unearthed evidence linking him to a chain of vicious muggings in the city. Now they wondered if Mineo's death had resulted from a random mugging. Despite a witness's description of the getaway car as a yellow subcompact (police had discovered a loan agreement showing that Williams was driving a yellow Dodge Colt on the night of the killing), one giant roadblock was holding up the investigation: Every eyewitness had described a brown-haired white male fleeing from the crime scene—Lionel Williams was black, with an Afro hairstyle!

Then the police remembered the stored chest section. At the L.A. County Forensic Science Center it is customary, when a stab wound causes a fatal injury, to examine the wound for various characteristics such as length, width, thickness, and whether the knife used was a single- or double-edged blade, sharp or dull. The wound is also dissected surgically, layer by layer. Through this procedure it is possible to create a cast of the wound itself, which provides a precise means of identifying the murder weapon, should it ever be recovered, by matching the wound with the knife. At the time of the Mineo murder, the center had acquired a number of knives to assist their research. With a description from Mrs. Williams of the hunting knife owned by her husband—she even knew its price, $5.28—they were able to find an identical knife in their collection.

Normally, the act of inserting an allegedly matching knife into a wound during an autopsy is frowned upon, because it might distort the incision. But because this particular chest section had been fixed in formalin for storage, it was possible to do so without compromising the specimen. When inserted into the wound, the blade of this knife matched perfectly.

Although the scientific case seemed compelling enough, there was still the hurdle of eyewitness identification to overcome. Now Williams's past came back to haunt him. Tucked away in police files was a mug shot taken some years earlier, when he had been suspected of another crime. This photograph showed Williams, not sporting an Afro, but instead with long processed hair, dyed light brown and worn in a Caucasian style. Instantly the reason for the eyewitness confusion was crystal clear. At his subsequent trial, Williams was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Conclusion

Eyewitness testimony can be notoriously inaccurate, a constant problem for the courts. Here it presented a seemingly insoluble obstacle to the prosecution, and had it not been for some excellent scientific work, detectives might still be seeking Sal Mineo's killer.

Wayne Williams

DATE: 1979

LOCATION: Atlanta, Georgia

SIGNIFICANCE: Fiber evidence allied to probability analysis underpinned the prosecution's claim that Wayne Williams was the worst child killer in U.S. history.

By 1981, the city of Atlanta was in the grip of a two-year killing spree that had left more than twenty young black males strangled or otherwise asphyxiated. Just about the only clues were fibers found on the bodies and clothing of the victims; these were forwarded to the Georgia state crime laboratory. Two types were isolated: yellow-green nylon and violet acetate. The yellow-green fibers were very unusual, coarse with a trilobed crosssectional appearance, of a kind associated with carpets or rugs. Despite intensive efforts, it was not possible to determine the manufacturer.

In February 1981, following newspaper accounts of this fiber analysis, the killer began dumping his victims in rivers. They were also now either nude or nearly so. Not for the first time, a serial killer seemed to be monitoring media accounts of his activities and modifying his modus operandi accordingly.

In the early hours of May 22, 1981, police staking out the Chattahoochee River, one of the killer's favorite dumping grounds for his victims, heard a loud splash. They spotted a station wagon on the James Jackson Parkway Bridge. The driver, Wayne Williams, a chubby twenty-three-year-old black music promoter, was questioned but allowed to leave. Two days later the body of Nathaniel Cater, twenty-seven, was dragged from the river a mile downstream; in his hair was a single yellow-green carpet fiber. Suddenly the police wanted to know a good deal more about the plump entrepreneur. On June 3, they obtained a search warrant for Williams's house and car. Throughout his home, the floor was covered with yellow-green carpeting.

With little actual evidence to connect Williams with the Atlanta slayings

—apart from his reputation as an aggressive homosexual—it became apparent that this case would be decided in the laboratory. Working with chemists at DuPont, America's largest producer of fibers, FBI analysts passed the yellow-green fibers recovered from the victims through a spinneret, a device that stretches the sample, giving it distinguishable optical characteristics. The unique trilobed cross-section enabled them to determine that it had been manufactured by Wellman Inc., a Boston textile company.

Company records showed that this particular fiber—called Wellman 181B—had been made and sold to various carpet makers during the years 1967 through 1974. Because each carpet manufacturer has its own dyes and weaving techniques, it was possible to track these fibers to the West Point Pepperell Corporation of Dalton, Georgia. They had manufactured a line of carpeting known as Luxaire, and one of the colors offered was English Olive, which both visually and chemically matched the carpeting found at Williams's home.

Statistical Probabilities

Although this undoubtedly cast even greater suspicion on Williams, it was far from conclusive proof of guilt. After all, what were the odds of the fibers having come from his carpet and his alone? Only the prevalence of Luxaire English Olive could answer that. For instance, if every house in the Atlanta metropolitan area were fitted with Luxaire English Olive, then its evidential value would be nil. On the other hand, if that particular carpet were found in Williams's house and nowhere else, then any reasonable jury would have to regard that as highly significant. Somewhere between these polar extremes lay the statistical probability.

Although Luxaire was manufactured from 1970 through 1975, it used Wellman 181B fiber for only one twelve-month period between 1970 and 1971. During that time, 16,397 square yards of Luxaire English Olive were sold by West Point Pepperell to retail outlets across ten southeastern states, including Georgia. Compared with the 1979 total US residential carpeted floor space, estimated by DuPont at 6.7 billion square yards, this was a minuscule amount of carpet.

These were the indisputable facts. In order to establish the statistical probability of Luxaire English Olive being found in any one residence, certain conservative assumptions had to be made: first, that sales of Luxaire English Olive were evenly distributed throughout all ten states, and that it was installed in only one room, average size twenty square yards. Erring on the side of caution, investigators next assumed that all of the ten-year-old carpet was still in use, unlikely because the average life span of commercial dwelling carpet is approximately five years. This allowed them to calculate that in Georgia one could expect to find eighty-two homes containing the carpet. Because at the time of Williams's arrest there were 638,995 occupied housing units in metropolitan Atlanta alone, the odds of randomly selecting a home in that city with one room carpeted in Luxaire English Olive were 1 in 7,792—a very low chance indeed. Put another way, in order to randomly pick up the fiber found in his hair, Nathaniel Cater would have had to visit almost eight thousand houses in Atlanta or just one— the home of Wayne Williams.

The Killing Car

Although Williams was suspected of as many as twenty-eight murders, prosecutors felt their best chances of conviction rested with just two cases: Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne, whose seminude body had been recovered from the Chattahoochee River on April 27, 1981. Again, they were pinning their hopes on fiber analysis: A single fragment of rayon, found on Payne's shorts, had been matched to the carpeting in Wayne Williams's 1970 Chevrolet station wagon. Once Chevrolet provided details of all the pre-1973 cars that had been fitted with this kind of carpet, the Georgia licensing authorities clarified how many of these vehicles were registered in the Atlanta metropolitan area in 1981. The answer was 680. Of the more than two million cars registered, this represented a ratio of 1 in 3,828, which was also the statistical likelihood of Payne having acquired the fiber by random contact with any other car except that belonging to Williams.

At this point, the odds against Cater having picked up the fiber randomly, 1 in 7,792, were multiplied with the possibility that the rayon fragment found on Payne's shorts had an equally random origin, 1 in 3,828. The laws of probability say that this will occur no more than once in every 29,827,776 times! Wayne Williams was trying to buck some awfully big numbers.

But still the prosecution wasn't satisfied. During the trial they introduced into evidence a chart showing twelve other victims of the Atlanta child killer. On each body were found between three and six fibers that could be traced to either Williams's home or automobile. The odds against such a likelihood—virtually incalculable—ran into the trillions. To help the jury make sense of these mind-boggling figures, the prosecution prepared more than 40 charts and 350 photographs.

It was a job well done. The anticipated lengthy jury deliberation actually took less than twelve hours. On February 27, 1982, Williams was convicted and sentenced to two life terms.

Almost inevitably in such an extraordinary case, the jury's verdict by no means marked the end of the case. Campaigners insisted that Williams had been railroaded by a racist police force determined to pin the crimes on a black man, rather than investigate allegations of a reported Ku Klux Klan involvement. An absence of publicly available evidence to support these claims was also blamed on the state, with Williams's supporters contending that the state had deliberately suppressed evidence that could have led to an acquittal. This argument finally received a judicial airing in 2005. After listening carefully to arguments from both sides, U.S. district judge Beverly Martin delivered her decision on February 8, 2006. She wrote that none of the allegedly withheld evidence "would have had more than a minimal impact upon the outcome of Mr. Williams's trial had it been presented to the jury." Given the inflammatory nature of the Atlanta killings, it is unlikely that this will be the final word.

Conclusion

Although there was eyewitness evidence linking Williams to one of the victims, the use of probability theory—something never before employed with fiber evidence in a trial—was nevertheless crucial in securing a conviction. Those who have complained that Williams was tried more by the law of probabilities than the law of the land would do well to bear in mind that for the most part, juries are composed of sensible citizens, and that there are only so many coincidences they are prepared to swallow. 

John Joubert

DATE: 1983

LOCATION: Bellevue, Nebraska

SIGNIFICANCE: A length of rope that originally defied identification ultimately provided irrefutable evidence linking a serial killer to one of his victims.

After making just three stops on his Sunday morning newspaper route, Danny Joe Eberle, a thirteen-year-old Nebraska schoolboy, vanished. Police in his hometown of Bellevue, just south of Omaha, organized a massive search, and on the following Wednesday, September 21, 1983, his badly mutilated body was found in some high grass alongside a gravel road, three miles from where he had been last seen.

He had been stripped and bound with rope. Knife wounds all over the body suggested that he had been tortured before death.

Details of the crime were passed to the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, which compiled a provisional profile of the likely killer: a white single male, about twenty years old, a loner, a latent homosexual, small and neat in appearance, with a fairly slender build. This last characteristic was suggested by the body's proximity to the road; profilers reasoned that the killer was physically incapable of carrying the body far, and had been forced to dump it in a well-trafficked area.

The rope used to bind Danny Joe seemed to offer the best chance of a lead. Generally, the more unusual the rope, the more useful it is in evidence, because a product available widely is difficult to link to an individual. But here the rope was so unusual that nobody could recognize it. Even the FBI declared themselves baffled as to its origin.

On December 2, another young boy, Christopher Walden, thirteen, the son of an officer at nearby Offutt Air Force base, was abducted. Three days later, two hunters found his body in a heavily wooded area. The hideous nature of his stab wounds made it abundantly clear that the killer had struck again.

There were two sets of footprints in

FBI agents tracked these few strands of rope around the world to serial killer John Joubert.

the fresh snow leading to the body and only one set leading away. Such familiarity with the terrain made it likely that the killer was someone local, possibly an airman on the base, and the ease with which both victims had been abducted led profilers to believe that he was someone involved with young boys in some way—perhaps the Boy Scouts, Little League, or maybe a coach.

This time investigators had a major clue—a witness had seen Christopher and a young male walking toward a tan or cream sedan just prior to the abduction. Under hypnosis the woman described the stranger as being of similar build to the victim and wearing a woolen hat pulled down; she even managed to recall the first seven digits of the car license plate. Unfortunately, the Nebraska Department of Motor Vehicles had registered more than a thousand cars beginning with those seven numbers. Tracing them all would be an arduous task.

Worldwide Search

Meanwhile, analysis of the rope continued. Every manufacturer in the United States was checked, as well as government and military outlets. Abroad, FBI field offices conducted inquiries—particularly in the Far East, where much of the world's rope is made—but every lead fizzled out.

On January 11, 1984, Barbara Weaver, who ran a Bellevue day care center, noticed a young man in a car slowly cruising the street outside. Three times he drove past. Alerted by the recent publicity, she made a note of the car's license plate. The driver saw her do this and stopped. In a fury he demanded that she give him the piece of paper. When Weaver refused, he first threatened to kill her, then roared off. Within seconds she was phoning the police.

Through this license number, detectives traced the vehicle to a local Chevrolet dealership, where they learned that the car was on loan to an enlisted airman at Offutt while his vehicle was being repaired. His own car, a cream-colored sedan, matched the first description exactly, even down to the license plate, which had the same digits recalled by the woman who had undergone hypnosis.

Agents went to Offutt and the quarters of John Joubert, a twenty-one-yearold, boyish-looking, and slightly built radar technician. In appearance and, it was later learned, in history, too, Joubert fit the psychological profile with lethal precision, even down to the fact that he was an assistant scoutmaster of a local troop. In a duffel bag belonging to Joubert, officers found a hunting knife and a length of rope. At first

Joubert denied all knowledge of the crimes, but when confronted with the rope—a very rare kind brought back from Korea by his head scoutmaster— he confessed, saying he was glad to be arrested, otherwise he would have kept on killing.

FBI Laboratory technicians compared the rope found in Joubert's quarters with that used to bind Danny Joe Eberle and declared them microscopically identical. Moreover, a hair found in Joubert's car was found to have come from Danny.

A background check revealed that Joubert, a former altar boy, originated from Portland, Maine, where on August 22, 1982, eleven-year-old Ricky Stetson had been abducted and stabbed to death. Because photographs of the victim's body showed bite marks, impressions of Joubert's teeth were shown to odontologist Dr. Lowell Levine, director of the Forensic Science Unit of the New York State police. He concluded that Joubert's bite marks and those found on the victim were identical. Although he had no known police record, Joubert had a history of attacking young children, each assault worse than the one before.

In July 1984 Joubert pleaded guilty to the double murder in Nebraska and was later sentenced to death. He was later convicted of the murder in Maine. Twelve years of death row appeals ran out at 12:14 A.M. on July 17, 1996. In his final statement, Joubert said, "I just want to say that again I am sorry for what I have done. I do not know if my death will change anything or if it will bring anyone any peace, and I just ask the families of Danny Eberle and Christopher Walden and Richard Stetson to please try to find some peace and ask the people of Nebraska to forgive me. That's all." An hour later, Joubert was strapped into the electric chair and executed.

Conclusion

Ironically, on the very day that Joubert was arrested, the Bellevue authorities received notification from an FBI office in Alabama that yellow fibers in the rope indicated that it had probably been made for the military in the Far East.

Malcolm Fairley

DATE: 1984

LOCATION: Buckinghamshire, England

SIGNIFICANCE: A single flake of yellow paint ended the career of a vicious serial rapist known as the Fox.

Throughout the hot summer of 1984, a hooded burglar subjected residents of a tri-county area north of London to a reign of terror as he broke into houses seemingly at will. Victims who heard his voice described a northern accent; others noticed that he was left-handed. The Criminal Records Office in London provided local police forces with information about all burglars who had migrated from the north of England. This sounded promising, until the computer produced 3,011 names, a daunting number.

On May 12 came a sinister escalation: A man returning home late at night in Cheddington, Buckinghamshire, found himself confronted by a hooded burglar pointing his own shotgun at him. After being tied up, the homeowner was sexually abused; then the robber fled with the shotgun.

As the thefts and attacks increased in both severity and number— the burglar was now using the shotgun to terrify his victims—police saturated the areas where he operated. Nevertheless, the crimes continued unabated. On July 10, the man dubbed the Fox graduated from burglar to brutal rapist. At another Buckinghamshire house, he first tied up a husband, then forced him to watch as he assaulted his wife.

Seventy-two hours later, in Edlesborough, Bedfordshire, three teenagers —a brother and sister and the sister's boyfriend—were watching TV at 2 A.M. when a man wearing a hood and leather gauntlets and brandishing a shotgun burst into the room. He ordered the girl to bind the two boys with electric cord, then dragged her into the bedroom and tied her to the bed with a pillowcase over her head. After helping himself to a drink from the kitchen, the intruder returned to the bedroom and raped her. Afterward, he brought the family dog into the bedroom and attempted to induce an act of bestiality. When the animal failed to respond, he ordered the two boys at gun-point to have sex with the girl; both simulated the act. The burglar raped the girl again and then sexually assaulted the boys. Afterward, he went downstairs and sat watching videos before leaving.

One month later, he made the mistake that brought about his downfall. On August 17, while driving north to Yorkshire to visit his mother, he was overcome with sexual craving. Outside the village of Brampton, he parked in a quiet field. Without his usual hood, he was forced to improvise one from a pair of green overalls. Then he broke into the home of an accountant —through a bedroom where children were asleep—and tied up the man and his wife. After ransacking the house, he returned to the bedroom and tied the legs of the thirty-seven-year-old housewife apart, one ankle shackled to the bedpost, the other to her husband's leg. When she resisted, he rammed the shotgun into her face and raped her. Afterward, he displayed his security awareness by washing the woman to remove bodily fluids and hair samples; he then cut out a square of bedsheet on which there were semen traces and took it with him.

Blunder

The next day, a police officer searching nearby fields for clues noticed footprints, then tire tracks where a car had been parked. A closer examination revealed a tiny flake of yellow paint on a tree, evidence that someone—possibly the Fox—had backed a car up carelessly, scraping the bodywork. Also found was the square of sheet, the makeshift mask, and a leather glove, all apparently dropped by accident. Of far greater significance, though, was the discovery of the shotgun, carefully concealed beneath a mound of leaves.

Convinced that they were dealing with the Fox, investigators speculated that he might return to pick up the shotgun and so ordered a media blackout of the night's events. To explain their unaccustomed presence in the area, officers staged a fake road accident, while their colleagues installed special infrared cameras and sensitive microphones around where the gun had been hidden in the undergrowth. After dark, a cordon of officers armed with night-sight binoculars encircled the copse. But the Fox did not return.

Nevertheless, he had left several valuable clues. The flake of car paint was identified as Harvest Gold. Only one manufacturer— Austin—used such a color. Further refinement of the search parameters narrowed the field to one model—an Allegro manufactured between May 1973 and August 1975. Because the collision with the branch had occurred at a height of forty-five inches, it was thought that the rapist's car would also be damaged at that height. Now the problem was to identify a northern burglar who drove a scratched yellow Allegro.

Still the main bulk of police efforts were directed toward eliminating those 3,011 burglars known to have migrated south from northern England. On September 11, two policemen sent to check yet another name on the computer printout turned into a north London street and stopped dead in their tracks. Outside the very address they were seeking stood a thin-faced young man washing a bright yellow Austin Allegro. The man, whose name was Malcolm Fairley, invited them into the flat he occupied with his wife and two children. When asked to account for his recent movements, he sounded evasive, so the officers asked if they could examine his car. On the rear bodywork, at a height of approximately forty-five inches, they noticed a chip of paint missing.

Inside, on a seat, lay a man's watch. When one of the officers asked Fairley to put it on, he strapped it to his right wrist—he was left-handed. A search of his flat revealed two sets of green overalls made from material identical to that used for the hood in the Brampton break-in. Fairley was placed under arrest and, faced with the overwhelming body of evidence against him, he quickly confessed.

At the Old Bailey on February 26, 1985, he was sentenced to six terms of life imprisonment.

Conclusion

Had the British police had access to a database of car paint samples, such as that maintained by the FBI, identification of the yellow flake might have been expedited. Even so, that alone would not have led them to Fairley's doorstep. For that, they had to thank the latest computer wizardry, and what is likely to remain the policeman's greatest ally—shoe leather.