Bombs and fire have always held great appeal for the criminal, presumably in the belief that the secrets of their activities will be consumed in the conflagration. Nothing could be further from the truth. The killer, anxious to dispose of the victim, will find that a human corpse is extraordinarily fire resistant, requiring extreme temperatures to destroy teeth and bone. The bomber, too, is equally handicapped. If the crime scene has been processed correctly, modern laboratory techniques can isolate the most arcane substances. The accomplished technician knows exactly what items and substances will be needed for analysis. Highest on the list are any undetonated samples of explosive: These are most likely to be found close to the source of the blast. For this reason, all of the soft and porous material from this area, such as wood, soil, clothing, and furniture, is collected in case it has been penetrated by explosive residues.

Once in the laboratory, this debris is first microscopically examined to categorize the different types of evidence and to search for unconsumed traces of the explosive. Once the useful material has been removed, the debris is cleaned with acetone, which absorbs most explosives and can be used for chemical testing. The most common technique for analyzing and identifying explosives is chromatography.

In gas chromatography, which is used for analyzing fire residue, a sample is vaporized and sent down a tube by an inert gas, where all the compounds in the sample separate. Because accelerants and explosive chemicals move down the tube at different rates than do other residue substances—usually ash, charred wood, plastic, or fiber—each compound settles in the tube at a different rate, called the retention time. By consulting a reference table of retention times, the analyst can identify each compound.

For compounds that would break down completely if vaporized, liquid chromatography, in which the sample is carried down the tube by a liquid, is used. Thin-layer chromatography also uses a liquid to transport the sample. In this technique a glass slide is coated on one side with a thin layer of finely ground silica gel, and spots of the sample are placed along the bottom part of the slide. The slide is then partially immersed in a liquid, which by capillary action climbs up the slide and over the sample, separating its components. At this point, the separations are generally colorless and must be either viewed under ultraviolet light or sprayed with a suitable reagent, which will colorize the result. The resulting chromatographic plate is then compared with other samples or a control substance for similarities.

Despite the impressive array of analytical techniques that can identify not only the components but the origin of an explosive device, bombs remain inexpensive to construct, easy to conceal, and virtually impossible to guard against. They can slaughter thousands and profoundly affect the lives of millions more. Whether domestic or international, the dedicated terrorist has easy access to a frightening array of explosive devices. The fertilizerbased bomb that worked so dreadfully in Oklahoma in 1995 was similar in construction to the device used at the World Trade Center two years earlier. On that occasion the twin towers withstood the assault, but as the ghastly events of September 11, 2001, demonstrate, nowadays the suicide bomber doesn't even have to construct his own device; others do it for him. Twenty thousand gallons of high-octane jet fuel encased in pressured containers, traveling at several hundred miles per hour, need only the intervention of a deranged hand to become the deadliest criminal use of explosives yet seen.

Frederick Small

DATE: 1916

LOCATION: Mountainview, New Hampshire

SIGNIFICANCE: An almost foolproof plan to commit the perfect murder failed because of the desire to save a few dollars.

At fifty, the impression that Frederick Small liked to convey was that of a successful retired broker who had brought his considerable fortune to the shores of Lake Ossipee in Mountainview, New Hampshire, where he lived in connubial bliss with his devoted wife, Florence. Sadly, the truth fell short of this rosy scenario: All of Small's business ventures had failed ignominiously, he was perennially broke, and Florence was the third woman to bitterly regret walking down the aisle with this sadistic and greedy psychopath.

Small spent most of his time tinkering in a workshop at the rear of his cottage. Newfangled gadgetry fascinated him, and he was constantly trying to invent some product that would make his fortune. A conspicuous lack of success in this area meant that he had to keep a very watchful eye on the meager investments he did have, and every few weeks or so he would make the hundred-mile train journey to Boston to check on his fast-diminishing portfolio.

September 28, 1916, was such a day. In the morning he phoned the local coachman, George Kennett, and asked to be picked up that afternoon and taken to the railroad station. At 3:30 P.M., as arranged, Kennett collected Small's mail from the rural delivery box and then proceeded eagerly to the cottage. It was a stop he always looked forward to; invariably, before setting off, Small would invite him in for a tot of rye. Today, though, Small was waiting outside. Hardly glancing at the letters, he tossed them indoors, called out "Good-bye" to Florence, and slammed the door shut. Then the two men drove off.

At the station, Small was joined by Edwin Conner, a local school-teacher and insurance agent who had agreed at late notice to accompany him to Boston. Together they caught the four o'clock train. After checking into a Boston hotel, Small mailed his wife a postcard at 8:40 P.M.—he wrote the time on the card—and then the two men took in a movie. They returned to the hotel around midnight, at which time the desk clerk informed Small that he should phone Mountainview at once—a fire had been reported at his lakeside cottage. Over the phone,

Small learned that his house was still ablaze and that Florence was believed to be inside. He limply handed the phone to Conner, who heard the tragic message repeated.

Both men raced back to Mountainview, driving through the night in a hired car. At dawn, distraught and inconsolable, Small viewed the smoldering ashes of his cottage, mumbling that it must have been the work of a passing itinerant. When it was safe enough to do so, a search party entered the blackened shell. In the cellar, they found what was left of Florence Small. The arms and legs were partially destroyed by flames, but the head and trunk were intact. When informed of the discovery, Small gasped, "You mean there's enough to be buried?"

Savage Murder

Indeed there was. And there was also enough to show that Florence had been murdered well before being engulfed in flames. The cord knotted tightly about her neck may have killed her, as might the .32 caliber bullet found in her skull, but the murderer had made triply sure by bludgeoning Florence Small's face to an almost unrecognizable pulp. Whoever burned the cottage obviously intended to destroy all traces of the crime and would have succeeded had not the exceptionally fierce blaze incinerated the floorboards, plunging Florence's body from the bedroom into the basement and several inches of water, where it was shielded from the searing heat.

An explanation for the fire's unusual intensity—it even melted the basement stove—came when George B. Malgrath, the medical examiner, noticed a strange resin on the body. It turned out to be the slag left by thermite, a welding compound of aluminum filings, metallic oxides, and magnesium, that when ignited produces temperatures in excess of five thousand degrees Fahrenheit. In seeking to annihilate the body, the killer had clearly overplayed his or her hand.

When officers searching among the rubble found a .32 Colt pistol that belonged to the bereaved husband, suspicion turned sharply in Small's direction. But, he protested, he had been one hundred miles away when the fire had started at ten o'clock.

Already, though, something else had turned up among the wreckage—the twisted remains of an alarm clock with wires and spark plugs attached. Also, police learned that just hours before Small's Boston trip, five gallons of kerosene had been delivered to him. Given these components and his technical knowledge, the construction of a device timed to explode when he was in Boston would not have been difficult. Considerable support for this theory came when Dr. E. W. Hodgson found the contents of Mrs. Small's midday meal still in her stomach, indicating that she had died hours before the fire started.

Violent Marriage

As always, the question of motive figured prominently in official considerations of whether to charge Small. His brutality toward Florence was well documented—on one occasion, he had to be restrained from beating her with a boat oar—and neighbors had become used to the sound of her screams echoing across the lake at night. But in the end, it was Small's old nemesis, money, that trapped him. Less than a year earlier, he had taken out a twenty-thousand-dollar joint insurance policy on their lives. He had originally attempted to do this without Florence's knowledge, until the agent, Edwin Conner, pointed out the impropriety of such an arrangement. Brought into the discussions, the hapless woman had willingly signed the policy. At the same time, Small insured the cottage for a further three thousand dollars.

Small continued to protest his innocence, playing what he considered to be his trump card: his insistence that Kennett, the coachman, had seen Florence on the veranda as they left for Boston. It was a shrewd psychological ploy, and it might have succeeded with someone more impressionable. But Kennett was adamant: No, he had not seen Florence, he had only heard Small's shouted good-bye. Small was finished.

During Small's trial at Carroll County Courthouse, prosecutors presented a mechanic who contrived an arson machine on the spot from apparatus identical to that salvaged from the fire. On January 8, 1917, Small was found guilty and sentenced to death. One year later, he paid the ultimate price on the gallows at the State Prison in Concord.

Conclusion

Ironically, Small's downfall was brought about by his own miserliness. Some time earlier, after a dispute with a contractor, he had rebuilt a section of the cellar ceiling himself, using cheap boards, and it was through this very section that the bed supporting his wife had tumbled. Had the floor held, then the body would have been entirely consumed by flames and Frederick Small would have been free to spend his insurance money, content in the knowledge that he had committed the perfect murder. 

Charles Schwartz

DATE: 1925

LOCATION: Walnut Creek, California

SIGNIFICANCE: This case presents a vivid example of Edward O.

Heinrich's ability to tackle every aspect of criminal investigation.

The small company founded by Charles Schwartz in Walnut Creek, California, was run with but one thought in mind—to invent an artificial silk that was indistinguishable from the genuine article. Such dreams did not come cheaply, and by the summer of 1925, Schwartz had sunk considerable sums of money, mostly his wife's, into the venture. Her belief in him didn't waver, and vindication came when one day he emerged from the laboratory, triumphant. The samples he held aloft were breathtaking. All who held the fabric compared it favorably to Chinese silk. During the celebrations, though, Schwartz injected a note of caution, hinting that certain unnamed businessmen would stop at nothing to get their hands on his invention. He intended to remain vigilant.

Anyone dismissing this as entrepreneurial paranoia received the rudest of shocks on the night of July 30, 1925, when the laboratory was shaken by a tremendous explosion, then burst into flames. As fire-men dragged the charred body of a man from the debris, it was impossible to forget Schwartz's fearful warning. His wife, with only some jewelry and a watch to guide her, identified what was left of the corpse. The presence of several incendiary devices made it clear that this had been no accidental blaze, especially when a neighbor reported seeing a car similar to Schwartz's race away after the explosion. An unanticipated complication arose with the discovery that just before the fire, Schwartz had insured his own life for $185,000, a vast amount in the 1920s. Understandably, the insurance company wanted confirmation that the dead man was actually Schwartz.

Given his proximity to the crime and the assistance he had rendered in the 1923 Southern Pacific Railroad murders (see the D'Autremont Brothers case on page 299), it was only natural that University of California scientist Dr. Edward O. Heinrich would be called in to assist the inquiry. He asked for the charred body to be sent to his laboratory.

Even before Heinrich became involved, events had taken another peculiar twist. Mrs. Schwartz told police that one day after the explosion, someone had burgled her house and stolen every photograph of her husband. There had been no attempt to take anything else. Heinrich, who had requested just such a photograph to aid in identification,

Edward O. Heinrich, America's finest early forensic scientist, is credited with solving more than two thousand crimes.

asked if any other photographs of Charles Schwartz existed. After a moment's thought, Mrs. Schwartz recalled that her husband had recently had his portrait taken in Oakland. The photographer there found the negative and rushed an enlargement to Heinrich.

Heinrich already knew that he was dealing with a case of murder— the skull had been battered repeatedly. Now, one glance at the photograph convinced him that the corpse was not that of Charles Schwartz. In the photograph, Schwartz had an instantly recognizable mole on one earlobe. This corpse did not. There were other discrepancies. According to his widow, Schwartz had eaten a meal of cucumbers and beans just before the explosion. Yet when Heinrich examined the stomach contents, all he found was undigested meat. And microscopic examination of hair from

Schwartz's hairbrush revealed clear differences from that of the dead man.

Switched Body

The murderer had gone to considerable lengths to create the impression that the body was that of Charles Schwartz. A molar missing from the right upper jaw matched Schwartz's old dental chart, until Heinrich discovered that this socket was still raw, indicating a tooth pulled shortly before or after death. Significantly, other identifying features were obliterated: Someone had gouged out the eyes, and the fingerprints had been destroyed with acid.

Scraps of paper found in a closet at the burned-out laboratory were put under a microscope. Just visible was the name "G. W. Barbe" and a partial address, "Amarillo, Texas." Gilbert Warren Barbe was an itinerant preacher who had drifted into town and become friendly with Schwartz. Curiously, the two men were very similar in appearance, and now Barbe had disappeared. When Heinrich learned from Mrs. Schwartz that her husband's eyes had been brown, while those of Barbe were blue, he was convinced that the body in the fire belonged to Barbe and that Schwartz was the man seen fleeing in the car.

Heinrich suspected that Schwartz had been planning this crime for months, just waiting for the right victim to appear. He doubted that the socalled lab had ever been used for that purpose; it lacked water and gas, and the bills showed only enough electricity consumption to keep a single light burning. It had all been a sham.

Mrs. Schwartz would hear none of it, angrily brandishing the artificial silk as proof that her husband had been well intentioned. Sadly, the police had to inform the distraught woman that her husband's supposedlyartificial silk was, in fact, genuine and had been bought in a San Francisco store. They also showed her an advertisement that Schwartz had placed for a chemist's assistant. Among the qualifications requested were small hands and feet! Clearly, Schwartz had been advertising for a victim. And then he had met the traveling missionary, Warren Barbe, a man remarkably similar to himself and someone unlikely to be missed. Schwartz had gambled that their three-inch difference in height would pass unnoticed, because fire often shrinks its victims, but he was wrong. When Heinrich measured the corpse, it was still three inches longer than Schwartz had been in life.

Although the police were certain that Mrs. Schwartz had not been privy to her husband's wickedness, they also realized that Schwartz's only hope of getting the $185,000 would be to contact her when the excitement had died down. To this end, they encouraged local newspapers to report that the claim had been settled. The story received wide coverage and caught the eye of an Oakland rooming house landlord who thought that the deceased man bore a striking resemblance to one of his boarders, a Mr. Harold Warren, who had rented a room one day after the explosion.

A call to the police brought a swift response. But when one of them rapped on the stranger's door, the only answer was a single shot. They burst into the room to find Charles Schwartz dead on the floor, a smoking revolver in his hand. On a table was a note addressed to his wife; in it he confessed his guilt and begged her forgiveness.

Conclusion

Edward Heinrich's grasp of so many varied disciplines makes him a unique figure in the history of forensic science. He was a geologist, a physicist, a handwriting expert, an authority on inks and papers, and a biochemist. But perhaps his greatest strength lay in deductive reasoning—a gift so strong that he became known as the American Sherlock Holmes. 

Sidney Fox

DATE: 1929

LOCATION: Margate, England

SIGNIFICANCE: The arguments fostered by this cause célèbre prompted a courtroom conflict that is discussed to the present day.

When sixty-three-year-old Rosaline Fox and her illegitimate son, Sidney, thirty, checked into the Metropole Hotel in Margate on October 16, 1929, they were penniless and without a scrap of luggage. This was not an uncommon state of affairs for this most uncommon of couples. Behind them lay a decade-long trail of bad checks, unpaid bills, angry hoteliers, and frequent brushes with the law. In between jail sentences, Sidney Fox fancied himself something of an English upper-class gentleman. He was plausible and cunning and proudly homosexual, though pragmatic enough to adopt more conventional forms of seduction should the flagging family coffers so demand. In these endeavors, he enjoyed his mother's unstinting support.

On October 22, he scrounged the rail fare to London and called at an insurance office to arrange for two accident policies on his mother's life— with an aggregate value of three thousand pounds (twelve thousand dollars) —to be extended until midnight the following day. Then he returned to the Metropole Hotel at Margate.

The next evening, at about 11:35 P.M., fire broke out in the adjoining rooms occupied by Fox and his mother. Fox, clad only in a shirt, ran along the corridor, yelling for help. He directed another guest toward his mother's room. Clutching a handkerchief to his face, Samuel Hopkins bravely entered the smoke-filled room, past a furiously burning armchair, to the bed where Mrs. Fox lay unconscious. He dragged her outside. Fox, who made no attempt to assist, watched from a safe distance. Two doctors examined Rosaline Fox and pronounced her dead from shock and suffocation. Sidney, it is reasonable to assume, must have glanced at the clock: His mother had died just twenty minutes before the insurance coverage was due to expire.

A few days later, Mrs. Fox was buried in her native East Anglia. Fox went directly from the graveyard to the insurance company, where he filed his claim with such an absence of funereal solemnity that a suspicious agent telegraphed his head office to suggest that they investigate this case more closely.

Subsequently, the matter was referred to Scotland Yard and an exhumation order obtained. The postmortem was performed by Sir Bernard Spilsbury, by then a national figure at the peak of his celebrity. The absence of carbon monoxide in the blood or sooty deposits in the air passages convinced him that Mrs. Fox had died before the fire started, and he believed that she had been manually strangled. His reason for thinking this was based solely on one factor—the alleged presence of a bruise at the back of the larynx. There were none of the usual physical signs associated with strangulation—no finger marks on the neck, no petechiae (pinprick bruising of the face), no fracture of the brittle bone in the throat known as the hyoid —yet Spilsbury was adamant that Mrs. Fox had been throttled.

Second Opinion

Fox was duly arrested and charged with murder. At the request of the defense, another eminent pathologist, Professor Sydney Smith, examined sections from the larynx that Spilsbury had preserved in formaldehyde. Apart from some putrefaction, Smith couldn't find anything at all, certainly not a bruise, and told Spilsbury so. Unaccustomed to having his opinion doubted, the older man snapped, "It must have faded . . . it was there when I made my examination."

Under cross-examination Spilsbury became even crustier, refusing to countenance the possibility of a mistake. "It was a bruise and nothing else. . . . There are no two opinions about it!"

Professor Smith, who believed that death was due not to strangulation but to heart failure precipitated by the smoke and fire, testified for the defense. Attorney General Sir William Jowitt wasted no time in raising the subject of the vanishing bruise: "Sir Bernard says there can be no two opinions about it."

"It is very obvious that there can," replied Smith silkily.

"But you are bound to accept the evidence of the man who saw the bruise?"

"I do not think so."

"How can you say that there was no bruise there?"

"Because if it was there, it should be there now. It should be there forever."

It was unanswerable logic, but Spilsbury's reputation by that time had reached near-mythic proportions. To the British population at large, from whom all juries were drawn, his word had an almost biblical authority. The dangers inherent in such a situation were admirably pointed out by defense counsel J. D. Cassells, QC, who said, "It will be a sorry day for the administration of justice in this land if we are to be thrust into such a position that because Sir Bernard Spilsbury expressed an opinion, it is of such weight that it is impossible to question it."

Source of Blaze

Far more damaging, from a defense point of view, was the mystery of just how the blaze had started. Dr. Robert Nichol, who had attended Mrs. Fox, noticed that "there seemed to be no connection between the obvious source of the fire and the site of the fire itself." He was referring to the fact that flames had seemingly leaped from the gas fire to the armchair without burning any of the carpet in between. Margate's chief fire officer expressed his opinion that "the fire unquestionably originated directly underneath the armchair." His attempts to replicate the blaze had necessitated the use of gasoline, because the carpet would not burn otherwise. Coincidentally, Fox had had a bottle of gasoline in his room, which had been used, he said, to clean his only suit.

If ever any defendant should have availed himself of the right to silence, it was Sidney Fox. But that was not his way. His testimony, shiftily given and teeming with the most transparent lies, proved deadly. Asked to explain why he had slammed shut the door of the burning room where his mother was fighting for her life, he replied feebly, "So that the smoke would not escape into the hotel." A wave of revulsion swept the court as they stared at someone prepared to jeopardize his own mother's life in such a manner.

In his final charge to the jury, the judge, although clearly repulsed by Fox's performance, expressed grave concerns about Spilsbury's testimony. "There were no marks on the throat. Sir Bernard Spilsbury had said it was quite possible there would be none, but you and I might find that hard to believe. As regards the hyoid, it is a very curious coincidence that it was not broken in this case. That is a very strong point in favor of the accused."

Listening to these words, Fox may have retained some hope. If so, it was sorely misplaced. After just an hour's deliberation, the jury pronounced him guilty and he was hanged at Maidstone on April 8, 1930.

Conclusion

So was Fox guilty of murder? All the available evidence seems to suggest that he had intended to arrange an accident for his mother, that is, to burn her to death. In light of this, Spilsbury's verdict of strangulation must have come as a bombshell to him. Ironically, Spilsbury's intransigence offered the defense their only hope of securing an acquittal, and had Fox not testified and exposed himself in so callous a fashion, then the bitter forensic wrangling might well have led to an acquittal.

John Graham

DATE: 1955

LOCATION: Denver, Colorado

SIGNIFICANCE: Painstaking reconstruction of the crime allowed scientists to solve the worst single incident of aeronautical mass murder on American soil.

Just eleven minutes after taking off from Denver on November 1, 1955, United Airlines flight 629 to Portland, Oregon, exploded, killing all fortyfour people on board and cascading debris over miles of countryside. A team of investigators from United Airlines, the Douglas Aircraft Company, and the Civil Aeronautics Board was charged with discovering whether the crash came about because of mechanical failure, human error, or sabotage.

They began by superimposing a vast grid of squares over the entire crash scene. Searchers combed this area for scraps of metal, luggage— anything that came from the stricken plane. Every item and its location was noted on the grid before it was shipped to a Denver warehouse, where it was wired to a wooden mock-up of the DC-6B. As the fuselage took shape, it became obvious that no pieces could be found to fit a jagged hole near the starboard number four cargo bay.

The metal at this point—bent outward by a force far more powerful than just a crash—showed ominous signs of scorching; similarly discolored shards had been driven upward through the soles and heels of the passengers' shoes. Clearly, a violent explosion had occurred. Because there were no fuel lines or tanks in this part of the plane, the blast had to have been caused by either an accidental cargo explosion or deliberate sabotage.

On November 7, the FBI was asked to initiate a criminal investigation. Within twenty-four hours, some one hundred agents were deployed, either digging into the backgrounds of the plane's crew and passengers or checking air freight manifests to determine whether there had been any illegal shipments of potentially explosive materials. This latter line of inquiry drew a complete blank, but a glimmer of light began to illuminate the path ahead.

Airline records showed that a passenger, Mrs. Daisie King, en route to visit her daughter in Alaska, had checked a suitcase, but apart from a few barely identifiable fragments of leather, this case had seemingly vaporized in the crash—unlike the bag Mrs. King had carried on board as hand luggage. Tucked into one of the pockets of that bag, agents found a fouryear-old newspaper clipping about someone called Jack Graham, whom authorities were seeking due to allegations of forgery. Investigators soon learned that Graham was Mrs. King's twenty-three-year-old son. As well as the charge of forgery, he had also been arrested for theft, but the charges were dropped after his wealthy mother had repaid the missing money. Since getting married, the wayward youth appeared to have mended his ways. Even so, investigators couldn't overlook the fact that Graham had chauffeured his mother to the airport on the fateful day of the plane crash.

Like all of the victims' relatives, Graham was interviewed. He spoke to agents first on November 10. Questioned about the contents of his mother's luggage, he said that she always insisted on packing everything herself and would never let anyone help her. As an afterthought, he did mention that she had packed some shotgun shells and rifle ammunition for a hunting trip in Alaska. When asked specifically if he had put anything into his mother's luggage, Graham replied that he had not.

Suspicious Gift

Graham's wife, Gloria, verified Mrs. King's single-mindedness about packing her own luggage but added something else. Just minutes before setting off for the airport, her husband had taken a bulky gift-wrapped package to the basement. The present, she thought, was a jewelry tool kit intended for his mother to use in her hobby of fashioning trinkets from seashells.

This was news to the agents; Graham had said nothing about any gift. But a neighbor had also heard Graham mention the tool kit—how he had searched all over for just the right kind, then gift-wrapped it and placed it in his mother's luggage as a surprise for her when she reached Alaska.

Inquiries made in the Denver area found only two stores that stocked kits suitable for cutting seashells, and neither reported selling such an item during October.

At a second interview, on November 13, Graham denied knowledge of any gift for his mother. That same afternoon, FBI scientists reported that burned metal retrieved from the crash scene showed traces of sodium carbonate, sodium nitrate, and sulfur-bearing compounds— the residue left by an explosion of dynamite.

Agents quickly obtained a warrant to search Graham's house, where they found not only the shotgun shells and ammunition that Mrs. King had supposedly packed in her luggage, but Gloria Graham, confused and very frightened. Jack, she sobbed, had ordered her to say that she had been mistaken about the present.

Faced with these revelations, Graham suddenly recalled purchasing the tool set for his mother. He had paid a stranger ten dollars for it in a transaction witnessed by two employees at the garage where he worked. After slipping the gift-wrapped package, bound with transparent tape, into his mother's suitcase, he had stashed the remainder of the tape in his car.

While Graham blustered, FBI agents ransacked his house. In one of his shirt pockets they found a small roll of copper wire of a type used for detonating explosives. Even more damning, hidden in a cedar trunk was a $37,500 life insurance policy purchased by Daisie King at the airport just minutes before takeoff and made payable to Jack. Nobody had suspected this. Earlier, insurance companies had been asked for details of all the life coverage bought by passengers on flight 629; somehow Mrs. King's policy had been overlooked.

The incongruities kept surfacing: Investigators found some stockings and a cosmetics bag belonging to Mrs. King and gifts that she had intended for her daughter in Alaska. Surely she would have taken these things with her. When asked why his mother had left them behind, Graham mumbled weakly, "I told her not to take them because her baggage was overweight."

Cool Confession

At midnight, news came that Graham's two co-workers had no recollection of any tool kit purchase. Shortly afterward, for the first time, Graham was told of the FBI report stating that the crash was caused by a dynamite explosion. Graham digested this information for a moment while sipping from a glass of water. Finally, he shrugged: "Okay, where do you want me to start?"

Without a flicker of emotion, he told of constructing the bomb with twenty-five sticks of dynamite, two electric primer caps, a timer, and a sixvolt battery. In order to acquire the necessary bomb-making expertise, he had worked at an electronics shop for ten days at $1.50 an hour. As suspected, he had taken several items from his hapless mother's suitcase and replaced them with the lethal device.

From the moment of his arrest, Graham's only concern was to impress upon everyone just how much he loathed the mother who had abandoned him in his childhood and then reclaimed him only when she had remarried much later. But the financial angle could not be disregarded: Besides the insurance policy, Graham also stood to benefit from his mother's $150,000 estate.

At his trial, which was broadcast on TV, Graham recanted his confession and pleaded not guilty. Throughout, he remained impassive and unremorseful. Verdict and sentence were foregone conclusions, and on January 11, 1957, without saying a word, Graham walked to the gas chamber and died.

Conclusion

Had Graham been a student of criminology, he might well have forsaken aero-explosions as a means of killing his mother. Just six years earlier, a Canadian named Albert Guay had employed identical tactics to rid himself of an unwanted, overinsured spouse, with equally calamitous results for everyone concerned. Twenty-three lives were sacrificed so that Guay and two accomplices might pocket a few thousand dollars. They didn't get to spend one cent; all three were hanged.

Steven Benson

DATE: 1985

LOCATION: Naples, Florida

SIGNIFICANCE: Even an electronics genius found that he was no match for modern forensic techniques in this sensational saga of familial feuding that ended in tragedy.

At quarter to eight on the morning of July 9, 1985, Steven Benson, a thirtythree-year-old electronics whiz and heir to the family tobacco fortune, arrived at his grandmother's palatial home in the Quail Creek district of Naples, Florida. Together with his relatives, he intended to stake out a lot for a new house. After loading stakes and blueprints into the family's 1978 Chevrolet Suburban, he drove to a local convenience store, where he bought coffee and sweet rolls for the other fam-ily

Charred wreck of the Chevrolet Suburban after the Benson family murders. members. Just before nine o'clock, Steven accompanied his mother, Margaret Benson; his sister, Carol Lynn Kendall; and his adoptive brother, Scott, out to the Suburban. As they were about to drive off, Steven suddenly remembered that he had left a tape measure in the house. Tossing the keys to Scott, he headed indoors. Seconds later, Scott turned the key in the ignition and a massive orange flash enveloped the vehicle.

The Suburban blew apart. Only Carol Lynn survived the blast. As she crawled away from the twisted shell, helped by golfers from the adjacent golf course, a second blast erupted, turning the Suburban into an inferno.

The murder of such socially prominent citizens—the Bensons were very rich—sent shock waves throughout Naples, and by 11:30 A.M., agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) were on the scene. Amid the twisted wreckage, scorched wire, and splinters from the wooden stakes, they found obvious signs of a crude bomb: fragments of galvanized pipe and two end caps. An interested observer of all this activity, Steven Benson seemed remarkably nonchalant for someone who had just had a close brush with almost certain death.

When ATF explosives expert Albert Gleason began his examination of the shattered vehicle, he soon noted the sources of the two explosions: one in the console area, the second to the rear. This supported the conclusions of Collier County Medical Examiner Heinrich Schmid, who found that Margaret Benson's injuries were mostly on the left side of her body and Scott's were on the right, indicating that at least one bomb had exploded between them.

A little-known feature of explosions is just how much of the actual bomb is left intact after a blast. On this occasion, Gleason established that the two bombs were each about a foot long, with four-inch end caps screwed onto pipes to seal the explosive. Two of the end caps were stamped with the manufacturer's mark, one with a letter U for Union Brand, another with G for Grinnell, raising the possibility that both seller and buyer might be traced.

Forensic Dig

Gleason returned to the bomb site and asked that an area twenty-five feet in diameter be excavated around it. In the manner of an archaeological dig, officers first sifted dirt through a wire strainer and then pawed at it with magnetized gloves. Pipe bombs are simple devices; their primary components are a canister (in this case a galvanized pipe threaded at both ends), an explosive device, and some kind of detonator. Gleason had already identified the bomb type; now he wanted to know how it had been triggered.

Close to the explosion, the remains of four 1.5-volt D-cell batteries were found. Gleason estimated that an electronically controlled switching device powered by six volts would detonate the bomb. Eventually, among the debris, he found a small piece of a circuit board that did not appear to belong in the vehicle, and there was also a manual switch that couldn't be accounted for.

Meanwhile, other investigators visited all the local hardware stores, construction sites, plumbing supply shops, and junkyards, asking about end caps and sections of galvanized pipe. One Naples store checked its records and found that it had sold two Union Brand end caps on July 5, and two footlong sections of threaded pipe on July 8. The sales assistant described the customer as about six feet tall and two hundred pounds, very similar to Steven Benson.

Fingerprint analysis of the pipe bomb components came up blank. Laser light tests, too, failed to produce anything of value. But then someone suggested checking the two sales tickets at the supply store. These were treated with chemicals. On the face of each was a latent palm print, what experts term a "writer's palm," made by someone who was left-handed, someone like Steven Benson. After considerable legal wrangling, agents managed to obtain inked impressions of Benson's fingerprints, which matched those on the tickets.

Career Fraudster

A background check revealed that Benson had been defrauding his mother for years. Recently his dishonesty had come to light, leading to threats of disinheritance. Before he would let that happen, agents speculated, Steven had decided to eliminate his family so that he might inherit the entire fortune, estimated at ten million dollars. With his electronics expertise, the construction of a pipe bomb would be simplicity itself, as would the construction of a detonator that he could trigger when he was a safe distance from the car. On August 21, after much legal consideration, Benson was arrested.

Eleven months later, he stood trial for murder. Although Carol Lynn remembered that the blast had followed almost immediately after Scott turned the key, Gleason expressed doubts that the ignition switch had triggered the explosions. Although he admitted that he was never able to locate the detonator, those scraps of scorched circuit board and batteries made it virtually certain that the blast had been detonated from outside the car. To give some idea of just how powerful the bomb had been, Gleason presented what he believed to be a similar device. Empty, the length of pipe weighed twenty pounds, and could have held anywhere between three to six pounds of high explosive.

With the fingerprint evidence as well, it all made for a damning case. On August 7, 1986, Steven Benson was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Conclusion

Bombs are notoriously resilient to the effects of their own destructiveness. Invariably they leave clues, and as Steven Benson discovered, where there are clues, there is usually a path to the bomb maker.

Pan Am Flight 103

DATE: 1988

LOCATION: Lockerbie, Scotland

SIGNIFICANCE: Spanning three continents, the forensic inquiry spawned by this terrorist massacre was, at the time, the most exhaustive ever mounted.

On December 21, 1988, Pan Am flight 103 departed London's Heathrow Airport en route to New York. The passengers, mainly American students and servicemen on their way home to celebrate Christmas, were in good spirits. As the jet winged northward, it climbed steadily. At thirty-one thousand feet, catastrophe struck: An explosion blew the Boeing 747 apart. Six miles below, the tiny Scottish hamlet of Lockerbie lay helpless. When flight 103 slammed into the ground, a huge fireball erupted, killing all on board and numerous townspeople, a total of 270 lives.

There had been no radio contact from the plane; one second it was on the radar screens, and then it had disappeared. Within hours, investigators from the FBI, Britain's Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), and local police were scouring the scene for clues and survivors. Only in the full light of day was the extent of the tragedy made apparent; debris from the plane had littered 845 square miles of the Scottish Borders and northern England. It was soon evident that no structural defect could have caused such widespread devastation; it had to have been a bomb.

Early the next morning two children found a box with a metal handle. It measured two feet by six inches, and on its side was printed "DATA REPRODUCER 1972." This was the plane's "black box," or flight information recorder; from it, experts hoped to unravel the mystery of what had brought down flight 103.

To aid them in the gruesome task of identifying victims, investigators enlisted the aid of the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System (HOLMES), a sophisticated computer program designed for the British police, capable of handling vast amounts of data. Every scrap of information was fed into the program: location of a body, type and nature of injury, clothing color and style. All were logged, sorted, and crossreferenced. For the FBI team it meant an opportunity to test the effectiveness of their latest forensic weapon: a phototelesis machine that could transmit and receive crystal-clear images of fingerprints and other identifying body marks over commercial phone lines, much like a fax machine but much sharper.

Top Laboratory

Christmas Day saw the discovery of an oddly misshapen piece of metal.

It was sent to the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment at Fort Halstead in Kent, in all probability the most sophisticated forensic crime laboratory in the world. Equipped to the same standards as NASA, Fort Halstead's workbenches have zero static electricity, which allows for virtually perfect test conditions. Scientists there identified the twisted piece of metal as part of a baggage container, and they were unanimous in their conclusion—only a bomb could have caused such warping. While the faint possibility of a lone assassin operating from personal or financial motives could never be entirely ruled out, in all probability Pan Am 103 had been a terrorist target.

Intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic had suspected as much from the outset, but trying to fix responsibility among the ranks of the desperate and the disaffected was no easy matter. More data was needed, and for that the scientists and crash investigators would have to establish the bomb's type and likely point of origin.

In a vast hangar, technicians began reassembling the 747 piece by piece, a forensic jigsaw puzzle of unparalleled complexity. Ultimately, 85 percent of the plane was rebuilt. As in all such reconstructions, the negative evidence, or the pieces that were missing, offered the strongest lead. A fifty-foot section of fuselage, housing the forward luggage hold, could not be found: Any explosion in this vicinity would have devastated the plane's main electrical generator, destroying all hope of radio contact. After hours of painstaking work, investigators were able to pinpoint the blast to cargo bay 14L.

From among the thousands of fragments, scientists recovered three minuscule pieces of a gray radio-cassette player, similar to that used by terrorists in West Germany as a means of bomb concealment. They also found traces of the plastic explosive Semtex on what was left of a Samsonite copper-colored suitcase. All the indications were that the lethal radio-cassette player had been packed inside the suitcase, then detonated using an electrical circuit activated by a fall in atmospheric pressure.

Maltese Connection

Slowly the suitcase's origins came into focus. A scrap of blue fabric from a baby's jumpsuit had survived the crash, and on it was a label marked "Babygro." This was traced to a boutique in Malta, where the owner, Tony Gauci, recalled that several months earlier an Arab customer had purchased numerous items without regard to size or type. Because of the incident's peculiar nature, the owner had remembered it distinctly and was able to furnish a list of purchases to Fort Halstead. They included a tweed jacket, fragments of which were identified among the remains of the Samsonite suitcase, and an umbrella with fibers from the Babygro jumpsuit blasted into its fabric. Clearly, all these items had been in very close proximity to the bomb.

How the bomb actually got onto flight 103 remains a mystery. Computer records from a German company that operates the sophisticated international luggage transfer system suggest that a suitcase was loaded onto a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, Germany, and there placed on board flight 103. Who ordered the outrage is also an international guessing game. The name most often mentioned is Ahmed Jibril, head of the terrorist group Popular Front. One theory claims that the bomb was placed in retaliation for the downing of an Iranian passenger jet by the USS Vincennes a year earlier. Others feel that the targets were four American CIA operatives on board, men with considerable experience in Middle East hostage negotiations. Even more uncertain is how the deadly suitcase managed to evade security checks at both Frankfurt and London.

After a three-year joint investigation by Scottish police and the FBI, in which more than 15,000 witness statements were taken, indictments for murder were returned on November 13, 1991, against two Libyan intelligence officers, Lamen Khalisa Fhimah and Abdul Basset Ali alMegrahai. The latter was identified by the Maltese store-keeper as the man who made those strange purchases just weeks before the Lockerbie disaster.

Initially, Libyan president Mohamar Ghadaffi resisted all requests for their extradition; only after several years of UN sanctions did he bend to international will. On April 5, 1999, the two former intelligence officers were handed over to Scottish police in the Netherlands, which had been chosen as a neutral venue. Their trial began on May 3, 2000, before a panel of three Scottish judges, acting without a jury. Libyan fears about the court's impartiality were allayed on January 31, 2002, when the three judges acquitted Fhimah. At the same time,

Megrahi was convicted of murder and sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison. After his appeal was refused, Megrahi applied to the European Court of Human Rights. They, too, decided not to intervene, and he continues to serve his sentence in a Scottish prison.

Conclusion

Prior to the events of September 11, 2001, bombs detonated by atmospheric pressure were a favorite terrorist device. In the wake of that tragedy, airport security systems worldwide tightened up their screening procedures, and baggage is now routinely subjected to low-pressure screening, in hopes of exploding any such concealed devices. This has been a significant factor in the longer check-in times that now affect airports everywhere. Passengers made impatient by this delay would do well to reflect on the sobering fact that some terrorist cells, in their zeal to circumvent these screening procedures, have been known to design circuits that delay the detonation of their deadly handiwork until it has been exposed to at least thirty minutes of low atmospheric pressure.