Silent Witnesses (17 page)

Popp then became interested in the encrusted soil on Schlicher's shoes. It had been established that Schlicher's wife had cleaned his shoes the day before the murder and that he had not worn that particular pair since the day of the murder. Together with a geologist, Popp collected soil samples from
the area near the murder, from the area where Schlicher's possessions were found, and from near his house. Popp found that the samples taken from the murder scene contained decomposed red sandstone, angular quartz, ferruginous clay, and a little vegetation. In distinct contrast, the samples from Schlicher's home contained fragments of porphyry, milky quartz, and mica, as well as root fibers, weathered straw, and leaves. The area around the house was also littered with greenish goose droppings. Finally, the sample from the area where Schlicher's possessions had been found contained brick dust, coal, and pieces of cement that had fallen away from the crumbling castle walls.

Armed with this information, Popp examined Schlicher's shoes. He found the sole encrusted with a thick layer of soil. Given that the shoes had been cleaned and then not worn except on the day of the murder, Popp reasoned that the soil could only have accumulated on that day and that therefore each layer would contain a sequence of deposits from where Schlicher had been on the day of the murder.

He carefully removed the layers one by one. The earliest layer, attached directly to the shoe, consisted of goose droppings. On top of this was a layer of grains of red sandstone, and on top of that a mixture of coal, brick dust, and cement fragments. These were obviously comparable to the samples that Popp had taken from the various locations of significance to the case. Schlicher claimed to have been walking in his own fields that day but no fragments of porphyry with milky quartz were found in the soil on the shoes, which would have been the case if he were telling the truth. On the other hand, it seemed clear that the goose droppings came from near his home, the red sandstone
from the scene of the crime, and the coal, brick dust, and cement from the castle.

Faced with this compelling evidence against him, Schlicher finally confessed to the murder of Margarethe Filbert. From her appearance he had thought she was rich and decided to rob her. When he realized she had no money, he had attacked her in anger and cut her head off and hidden it. He was initially sentenced to death, though this was later commuted to life imprisonment.

The Margarethe Filbert case established Popp at the forefront of forensic geology and confirmed the vital role that soil samples play in criminal investigation (see
Plate 9
). The great Hans Gross had always maintained that the dirt on someone's shoes would eventually prove more compelling than a confession obtained by intensive interrogation. Popp had proved him right.

Microscopes continued to be promoted by other scientists as well. Professor Alexandre Lacassagne, a French physician and leading criminologist, impressed their usefulness upon his students at the Lyon Institute of Forensic Medicine. One of these students, Emile Villebrun, went on to become a leading forensic authority himself, specializing in fingernails—in the marks they leave and the value of material that might be discovered underneath them. He wrote a thesis on the subject and also solved a number of serious crimes. But perhaps the most famous of those who studied under Lacassagne is a man whose name we have already mentioned more than once: Edmond Locard.

Locard was born in Lyon in 1877. First educated at the Dominican College at Ouillins, he subsequently attended the University of Lyon and graduated with a doctorate in
medicine and a licentiate in law. He had developed a passion for all things forensic from an early age, spending his childhood reading Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. After earning his doctorate in medicine, he was fortunate enough to be taken under Lacassagne's wing as his assistant. While still studying under him, Locard became convinced that France, not to mention forensic science as a discipline, needed a real laboratory of crime, a laboratory completely dedicated to examining criminal evidence. This was extremely ambitious; the idea had been tried by others, including the famous Bertillon, before, and had always been met with indifference or even hostility. But Locard was determined not to let the shortsightedness of doubters and critics hamper him, so, after much persuasion on his part, in 1910 the police department of Lyon allowed him to create the first police laboratory in the attic rooms of the Lyon courthouse. However, the department did not officially recognize Locard's laboratory until 1912. He needed to prove himself, and his opportunity arrived in 1911.

It was discovered that there was a counterfeit gang in operation in the local area, forging coins and using them to buy things. The police already had their suspects but no proof of their guilt. They arrested them in any case, but despite being questioned at length, the suspects refused to confess. Frustrated by their lack of success, the police eventually turned to Locard, who saw this as the perfect opportunity to prove his worth.

He began by examining the suspects' clothing, carefully going over each garment with his magnifying glass and tweezers. During the course of this exercise, he came across an unusual-looking fine dust in one of the men's trouser pockets. He gently
removed samples of this and placed them onto a large sheet of clean, white paper. He also brushed out the man's shirtsleeves, collecting the resulting samples on a second sheet. He looked at these samples under a microscope and was delighted to find that under powerful magnification he could clearly observe that the dust contained minute traces of metal. Chemical tests then revealed these to be tin, antimony, and lead, which matched the composition of the counterfeit coins. Furthermore, he found that their quantities were in the same ratio. Similar evidence was subsequently recovered from the clothing of two more members of the gang. When the evidence was presented to the suspects, they confessed.

The case was an enormous boost for Locard's reputation, and that of his laboratory. He had proved to the police that methodical scientific techniques could be of real practical value in crime detection. From that day on, his crime lab was never underused again, and he went on to be instrumental in solving a great many crimes. Some years later, in 1922, he outlined some of the more infamous of these in his book
Policiers de roman et policiers de laboratoire (Detectives in Novels and Detectives in the Laboratory).

One of the cases mentioned in the book occurred in 1912, when Locard was involved in investigating the murder of a young woman named Marie Latelle who had been found strangled one morning in the parlor of her parents' house just outside Lyon. The police were immediately given the name of her boyfriend, Emile Gourbin, as a potential suspect. Latelle was very pretty and her habit of flirting with other men infuriated Gourbin. He had reportedly flown into a jealous rage over it on more than one occasion.

But while he seemed to have a possible motive, Gourbin also had an excellent alibi. A doctor who had examined Latelle's body had estimated her time of death at about midnight. On the night of the murder, Gourbin had spent the evening at the house of a friend who lived many miles from Marie's house. After passing the time eating, drinking wine, and playing cards with several friends, he finally retired to bed around 1
AM.
His friends confirmed his story; he was nowhere near her house on the night that Latelle was murdered.

The local police were at a loss and asked for assistance from their colleagues in Lyon, who suggested Locard might be able to help. He agreed to offer his expertise and conducted a full examination of the body using a magnifying glass. There were marks around Latelle's throat that the local police had assumed were the marks of the murderer's fingers. In fact, they turned out to be scratches caused by the murderer's nails. This gave Locard an idea and he asked to see Gourbin. He inspected his hands and was pleased to discover that he did not appear to have cleaned them properly in recent days. Locard scraped the matter from beneath the young man's nails and transferred the residue to a section of white paper.

Locard returned to the laboratory with this new evidence and began to scrutinize it. Under a microscope he was able to observe that the material recovered from underneath Gourbin's nails included epithelial tissue—skin and blood cells. While this was perhaps a little suspicious, it was by no means damning evidence in and of itself; the cells could have come from Gourbin scratching himself. However, Locard noticed something else mixed in with the epithelial cells: a granular dust composed of regular-shaped crystals. This turned
out to be powdered rice, a highly significant discovery since in 1911 this was the basic constituent of face powder. In addition Locard found iron oxide, zinc oxide, bismuth, and magnesium stearate, all of which were chemicals commonly used in the cosmetics industry. The skin under Gourbin's nails had been covered in pink face powder.

Under Locard's instructions, Latelle's room was searched. A box of face powder was discovered and proved to be composed of ingredients identical to the material found under Gourbin's nails.

Confronted with this evidence, Gourbin finally confessed to killing Marie, explaining that he had duped his friends by advancing their wall clock, enabling him to slip out of bed, kill Marie, and still have an alibi. Without Locard's methodical examination of the trace evidence, it is almost certain that Gourbin's alibi would have held and that the murder would have gone unsolved.

At this time Bertillon was still presiding over the forensic science department in Paris. However, in 1929 he was succeeded by the distinguished chemist Gaston-Edmond Bayle. Bayle had made his name in scientific circles with his work on spectroscopic analysis, where a spectrum is studied in order to determine characteristics of its source (for example, looking at the optical spectrum of an incandescent body to determine its composition). He had joined the Parisian police department as a forensic chemist and physicist in January 1915, though it was another nine years before he became involved in a case that really gave him the chance to shine.

On June 8, 1924, the body of a seventy-year-old man named Louis Boulay—who had disappeared on May 30—was
discovered in the Bois de Boulogne wrapped in a sheet. Both his wallet and a gold watch he was known to possess were missing from his person, suggesting robbery as a probable motive.

Bayle was asked to assist with the case. He quickly established that Boulay had been killed from several blows to the head with some kind of blunt instrument. He then began a careful search for trace evidence. He was not disappointed. Brushing through the hair of the corpse produced a mixture of river sand and sawdust, subsequent analysis finding the latter to be composed of oak and pine. There were also traces of coal dust, not only in Boulay's hair but also on his shirt. By determining its precise density, Bayle was able to identify it as anthracite. He also found traces of stone dust that he determined came from a grinding wheel.

Bayle also discovered two pieces of yellow cardboard on Boulay's clothes, the fibers of which were made of straw. From the victim's hat he recovered yeast cultures of a sort that you would expect to find in a wine cellar. Finally and most remarkably he discovered two beetles, both of which lacked eyes, indicating that they were a species that lived in total darkness. The man had evidently been battered to the ground somewhere where he had picked up these materials, before being removed from the place of his murder and dumped.

At first the police struggled to find any leads. Boulay appeared to be a respectable family man and it was difficult to see how he could have found himself embroiled in trouble. However, a newspaper was then discovered in his office with the names of two horses circled in pencil: Libre Pirate and Star Sapphire. It seemed that Boulay was fond of gambling. In fact, the bets
involved were small and would have caused him no financial problems if he had lost, but since this was all they had to go on, the police decided to follow up on it.

They visited all the known gambling haunts in the city, showing Boulay's photograph at each to see if anyone recognized him. At first they had no luck, but eventually the manager of a bar not far from the Gare St. Lazare recognized him as one of his customers known as Père Louis. It seemed that he was well known as a racing aficionado and was well liked by other customers, to the extent that he often acted as a bookie's runner, ferrying money and bets for people.

This was the breakthrough the police had been looking for. Runners might easily end up carrying large amounts of money, and it seemed that both the horses that Boulay had circled in his paper had won at long odds. An elderly man carrying considerable winnings would be a tempting target for an unscrupulous person. Now the police needed to track down the bookmaker's at which Boulay had placed the bets, and from which he would have had to claim the winnings. This proved enormously difficult. For the next five months the police interviewed dozens of bookmakers, both legal and illegal. Every one of them denied knowing Boulay, and the investigation stalled.

Then the police got their second break. A clerk working in Boulay's office remembered him getting a letter from one of the bookies he used, a man by the name of Tessier, offering him a “dead cert.” When prompted with this information, the chief clerk in the office also remembered Boulay mentioning Tessier, saying that he was no longer going to deal with him on account of being unhappy with his office, which was
situated in an old cellar. Much to the delight of the police, he was even able to remember Boulay telling him that these premises were situated on Rue Mogador.

Furnished with this information, the police were quickly able to build a more complete picture. The man in question was Lazare Tessier, a concierge serving 30 Rue Mogador. He was known to be an illegal bookie and had, in fact, already been interviewed about the murder; he had claimed that he had not taken any bets since his arrest a year ago. Now that they knew of its existence, it did not take the police long to locate the cellar from which Tessier did business. Bayle was called in to examine it and during a careful search removed several samples. Analyzing these back at his lab, he found that he was able to match various materials exactly to those discovered on the body—the coal dust, river sand, and sawdust. Bayle was delighted, his only slight disappointment being that nowhere in his search had he discovered any of the sightless beetles. However, given the strength of the evidence he had succeeded in compiling, this was hardly something to worry about.