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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
'Kate Winkler Dawson is an unbelievable crime historian and such a talented storyteller.' Karen Kilgariff, cohost of the My Favorite Murder podcast 'Heinrich changed criminal investigations forever, and anyone fascinated by the myriad detective series and TV shows about forensics will want to read [this].' The Washington Post 'An entertaining, absorbing combination of biography and true crime.' Kirkus 'Kate Winkler Dawson has researched both her subject and his cases so meticulously that her reconstructions and descriptions made me feel part of the action rather than just a reader and bystander. She has brought to life Edward Oscar Heinrich's character, determination, and skill so vividly that one is left bemused that this man is so little known to most of us.' Patricia Wiltshire, author of Traces and The Nature of Life and Death Berkeley, California, 1933. In a lab filled with curiosities – beakers, microscopes, Bunsen burners and hundreds of books – sat an investigator who would go on to crack at least 2,000 cases in his 40-year career. Known as the 'American Sherlock Holmes', Edward Oscar Heinrich was one of the greatest – and first – forensic scientists, with an uncanny knack for finding clues, establishing evidence and deducing answers with a skill that seemed almost supernatural. Based on years of research and thousands of never-before-published primary source materials, American Sherlock is a true-crime account capturing the life of the man who spearheaded the invention of a myriad of new forensic tools, including blood-spatter analysis, ballistics, lie-detector tests and the use of fingerprints as courtroom evidence.
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To Quinn and Ella, our family’s greatest storytellers
CONTENTS
AMERICAN SHERLOCK
PROLOGUE
Tales from the Archive: Pistols, Jawbones, and Love Poetry
His upper jawbone was massive—a long, curved bone with nine tiny holes meant to hold his teeth. The remainder of his skeleton was blackened by a fairly large fire ignited by an anonymous killer. Lifting up the jawbone, I examined the small blades of grass that adhered to its exterior—organic evidence from his hillside grave in El Cerrito in Northern California.
It was distressing to hold a bone that had belonged to a murder victim, particularly one who was never identified. I glanced over at the archivist, Lara Michels, who quietly stood across the wooden desk inside the massive warehouse. “What’s next?” I asked.
She led me down a long row of large cartons, more than one hundred boxes donated by the same owner. I had been given exclusive access to a trove of material collected over five decades by a brilliant man, a forensic scientist and criminalist from the first half of the twentieth century, a man who changed how crimes were solved before forensics became the foundation of most criminal cases—America’s Sherlock Holmes. I walked along the tight corridor, scanning the labels on the cardboard boxes for a common name: Edward Oscar Heinrich.
When Heinrich died in 1953, at the age of seventy-two, his youngest child, Mortimer, waited sixteen years to donate the contents of his 2father’s laboratory, a bastion of forensic history that once monopolized the ground floor of Mortimer’s childhood home in Berkeley, California. In 1968, he bequeathed his father’s many boxes, containing case files, evidence, personal diaries, letters, even romantic poetry, to the University of California at Berkeley, Oscar’s alma mater and the college where he spent years teaching forensic science. The archive was an incredible repository of information, but given the university’s limited budget for archival material and research, the collection remained uncatalogued and untouched for more than fifty years.
In 2016, I discovered Oscar Heinrich hidden in a short article that lauded one of his most famous cases, the Siskiyou train robbery of 1923. Astonished that no contemporary author had penned a book about him, I requested that UC Berkeley open his collection for research. Michels agreed, and after more than a year of waiting, I began to immerse myself in the bizarre world of Oscar Heinrich, the most famous criminalist you’ve likely never heard of.
The boxes contain more than one hundred thousand pieces of information, such as photographs, notes, letters, sketches, and trial transcripts. It was an overwhelming and disorganized collection that was housed in the school’s off-site processing center. Heinrich seemingly kept everything from his life (personal and professional), manically collecting notes written on napkins, thousands of newspapers, hundreds of bullets, and dozens of financial journals. I began jokingly describing him as a “productive hoarder”—until my colleague, a psychology professor, at the University of Texas suggested that he had in fact fit the diagnostic criteria for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, which occurs in just 1 percent of the population. People with OCPD have a preoccupation with perfectionism, control, and order—a neat life. They are frequently extremely productive and successful, but their personal relationships often suffer because their rigidity can manifest itself in righteousness, even anger when their control is threatened. Heinrich’s already-stressful life was certainly complicated by his OCPD, but as an author and researcher, I was thankful for his fastidious habit of adding constantly to 3his collection. I was particularly grateful for the numerous boxes of evidence he had preserved from criminal cases.
The evidence was plentiful, spanning investigations that unraveled over decades. The archivist allowed me to examine pieces from a detonated bomb, a locket owned by a dead woman who was run down by her own car, a lock of hair belonging to an actress who died during an infamous party, and several pistols that required having their firing pins removed by UC Berkeley police.
As I picked up the first photo, I was struck by something that seemed like an odd observation at the time—Heinrich was quite handsome for a tightly wound scientist. He was slight and not particularly tall, with thinning light brown hair. There was something about the sharp angles of his face that made him magnetic in photos, a confidence in his eyes as he cleaned a revolver.
I spent months staring at thousands of photographs, some taken by Heinrich’s assistants and others developed by the criminalist himself (he was an avid photographer who relished documenting crime scenes). I noted hundreds of details, like the way he squinted as he adjusted the focus knob on his favorite microscope. The way his teeth gripped the bit of a straight-stemmed pipe as a small stream of smoke billowed from its bowl. The way his forehead wrinkled as he hunched over evidence. The way his round rimless glasses fit extra-snuggly around his temples—a requirement for a chemist who spent much of his time leaning over a microscope.
As I flipped through those portraits, I gleaned more details about his private lab in Berkeley Hills, a lovely neighborhood overlooking San Francisco Bay. Heinrich was surrounded by odd devices. Every conceivable type of microscope was crammed onto a long wooden desk. Any extra space was surrendered to test tubes, crucibles, beakers, lenses, and scales. Behind Heinrich were shelves filled with hundreds of priceless books, at least priceless to a chemist turned forensic scientist. There were tomes on fingerprint identification, applied mechanics, analytic geometry, and powdered vegetable drugs.
4The titles, written in six different languages, would intrigue any intellectual. Blood, Urine, Feces and Moisture: A Book of Tests, read one cover. Arsenic in Papers and Fabrics, read another. He even owned a tattered dictionary of slang used by criminals. They seemed unrelated, a cache of mismatched textbooks in the library of a brilliant madman. But each was a tiny piece belonging to a bigger puzzle that only he could assemble. The portrait of a genius and the tumultuous era in which he lived began to emerge.
And it was a tumultuous era—the homicide rate in the 1920s, when Heinrich’s most interesting work began, had increased by as much as almost 80 percent from the decade before, thanks to Prohibition. For thirteen years the federal government in the US banned alcohol in hopes of reducing crime, but instead it spawned new and more creative criminal enterprises. Varying levels of corruption tainted local governments and police departments across the country. Judges enjoyed immunity from arrest, and most major cities were ruled by crime bosses. Poverty and unemployment were also responsible for the increase in violent crimes, as many Americans became desperate for security and safety. And there was an ever-growing backlog of unsolved crimes.
The FBI was still the Bureau of Investigation, a group of insufficiently trained officers who mostly investigated bank fraud. Local police forces were underfunded, poorly instructed, and mostly using investigative techniques that hadn’t been updated since the Victorian era. There would be no public federal crime lab until 1932; violent bank robberies increased while murderers terrorized Americans, especially women, whose newfound independence inflamed both the passions and the anger of many in society.
The archaic methods of crime fighting in the 1920s, procedures depending on hunches and weak circumstantial evidence, were futile. Cops were combatting a sneakier criminal, those thieves and murderers who understood chemicals, firearms, and the criminal court system. Police were outmanned and many times outsmarted.
5“Footprints are the best clue,” declared one top cop at the time. “There’s no need for any other type of identification.”
Innocent men were being hanged while criminals escaped justice. The complicated crimes of the 1920s demanded a special type of sleuth—an expert with the instincts of a detective in the field, the analytical skills of a forensic scientist in the lab, and the ability to translate that knowledge to a general audience in a courtroom. Edward Oscar Heinrich became the nation’s first unique crime scene investigator—one of America’s greatest forensic scientists, a criminalist who cracked some of the country’s most baffling cases.
But not everyone in law enforcement welcomed his peculiar approach. In 1910, when he opened the nation’s first private crime lab in Tacoma, Washington, he was scorned and quickly labeled a quack, an arrogant academic who claimed he could solve baffling crimes with some suspicious chemicals and a heavy microscope. His snappy tweed suits made him seem more like a square college professor than a seasoned detective. But he offered astounding results, solving at least two thousand cases in his more than forty-year career. He would regularly work between thirty and forty cases a month.
The press at the time dubbed Edward Oscar Heinrich “America’s Sherlock Holmes” thanks to his brilliance in the lab, his cool demeanor at crime scenes, and his expertise in the witness chair. Between 1921 and 1933, his reputation evolved from curiosity to legend. His cases are enshrined in books, but their hero is largely unknown—a pioneer in the world of crime solving whose fingerprint is everywhere.
He invented new forensic techniques, a CSI in the field and inside the lab before the acronym even existed. And he was a nascent innovator of criminal profiling fifty years before the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit invented its methodology, in 1972. Present-day scientists recite his methods as they sit on the stand in criminal cases. He pioneered countless methods that we take for granted as part of the crime-fighting arsenal—techniques like blood-spatter analysis, ballistics, and latent 6fingerprint retrieval and analysis. It’s safe to say Oscar Heinrich shaped modern criminal investigation techniques as much as any other scientist in the twentieth century.
He also pioneered some significant mistakes—problems that law enforcement are still grappling with today.
So much can be gleaned from Heinrich’s best-known cases, many of which were front-page news at the time (but most of which have fallen into obscurity, much like the man himself). It was through these cases that his reputation was made. It was also in a few key cases that his worst mistakes were codified for generations of investigators to come. But first, to understand where Heinrich went wrong, we need to understand where he went right, by peering into his work at the very height of his powers.
1.
A Bloody Mess: The Case of Allene Lamson’s Bath, Part I
He dipped into this bottle or that, drawing out a few drops of each with his glass pipette, and finally brought a test-tube containing a solution over to the table. … “You come at a crisis, Watson,” said he. “If this paper remains blue, all is well. If it turns red, it means a man’s life.”
— Arthur Conan Doyle,The Naval Treaty, 1893
The sharp crackles in the back garden signaled a weekend ritual—the sporadic popping from a small fire, one of many bonfires in her yard over the past three years. Her husband was fond of burning the rubbish he collected from their small bungalow-style home in Northern California.
It was Tuesday, May 30, 1933. The fire sizzled, consuming an incredible amount of debris: garden trimmings, dead artichoke plants, long-dead snails, useless paper, pieces of canvas, and even old steak bones—anything David Lamson thought might reduce to ash by late morning. The pungent smell grew stronger, like charred meat served by a distracted chef, but Allene Lamson rarely complained. The fires helped satisfy her husband’s compulsion to keep their home orderly.
It was an honor to live along Stanford University’s prestigious 8Faculty Row in Palo Alto, an affluent community about thirty miles south of San Francisco. Now a high-tech hub in the heart of Silicon Valley, the city has always attracted the wealthy, the educated, and the kingmakers, even in the 1930s. The Lamsons’ cottage was snuggled amid the palatial homes of professors and professionals, surrounded by the splendid coast live oaks and flowering eucalyptus trees on campus. The university had earned an international reputation by the 1930s—a sanctuary for future academics who could afford a pricey private education, even as most Americans struggled through the fourth year of the Great Depression, later called the toughest year.
The Lamsons’ cottage on Salvatierra Street, with its Spanish-style red-tiled roof and stucco walls adorned with ivy, was modest compared to the other lavish homes in the neighborhood. The house was just a ten-minute stroll from former president Herbert Hoover’s impressive three-tiered residence. His wife, First Lady Lou Henry, had an interest in architecture; in 1919, she’d helped to design the five-thousand-square-foot home in the newly popular International style of European estates. In the 1920s, she had overseen the construction of seven single-story cottages on the Row for younger faculty, with prices ranging from about $4,000 to $7,000, and the Lamsons had purchased one.
President Hoover had recently retreated to his sprawling California estate after being soundly defeated in the last election by Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. Many Americans blamed Hoover for the Great Depression, the catastrophic economic collapse triggered by the stock market crash just seven months after the Republican took office in 1929. By 1933, shantytowns called “Hoovervilles” increasingly dotted America. Bread lines and soup kitchens served millions of impoverished people as Hoover returned to Palo Alto with a tainted legacy. While the former president’s two-acre property might have seemed ostentatious, the Lamsons’ cottage was cozy, the perfect size for a small family. David proudly, meticulously groomed his garden almost every weekend.
In 1933, many people in Palo Alto were certainly more fortunate than the rest of the country. The United States had been struggling to 9survive a world economic crisis since 1929. The Great Depression had devastated so many families—fifteen million Americans were unemployed at the time, about 25 percent of the country. But most people in Palo Alto seemed to be thriving, or at least maintaining.
Professors and scholars at Stanford University continued to teach classes and conduct research. Endowments suffered, but athletics and academics had expanded. The city relied on the university’s faculty and staff to spend money—and they did.
The black smoke billowed from the bonfire. It was a glorious summer morning in Northern California—bright, blue skies with just a hint of warmth. Unlike San Francisco, its Bay Area neighbor to the north, Palo Alto was shielded from the cool summer fog by the Santa Cruz Mountains.
The yard trash slowly cooked. But buried inside the pile was an innocuous piece of metal that refused to melt as it seared beneath the embers. In just a few hours it would become a vital clue, but for now it remained one more piece of junk in David Lamson’s bonfire.
Around nine that morning Allene Thorpe Lamson untangled her brown hair with her fingers, gently dividing it into sections and then weaving two long braids. Wrapped in her cotton nightgown, she gazed into the mirror hanging on the vanity in the couple’s small master bedroom. Allene was a natural beauty, with a slender figure, pale skin, dark hair, and chocolate-colored eyes, but her most attractive feature was her mind. She had received both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Stanford University, an impressive achievement for anyone in the 1930s, particularly a woman. Allene had belonged to a myriad of campus organizations—a leader in the Delta Delta Delta sorority as well as the women’s national journalism fraternity, Theta Sigma Phi. She was president of the Peninsula Women’s Stanford Club.
She was a fledgling writer and editor for the university’s yearbook, the 1926 Quad, as well as the Stanford Daily, a campus newspaper. As a graduate student she wrote lengthy and deeply researched features, including stories about the school’s hefty endowments and the publication 10of the university’s yearbook. Her writing was fluid and engaging—she clearly delighted in journalism.
“In a few short miles one passes from sea level to mountain top, each region abounding in the wild creatures and plants peculiar to it,” Allene wrote about Stanford’s role as a game refuge.
She was particularly enamored of the gorgeous Northern California countryside. She had moved from her native Missouri several years before, and her surroundings were often featured in her writing.
Inside the yearbook’s offices she met David Lamson, the charismatic editor in chief for a popular humor magazine, the Stanford Chaparral. They shared so many interests, both brainy students who were engaged in the Stanford community. By graduation Allene had been charmed by the handsome writer, and they were married just a few years later.
Her thirty-one-year-old husband of five years was slim and fit with dark brown eyes and a full head of thick, wavy dark brown hair just beginning to recede at the forehead. Much of the time David Lamson seemed pensive—curious women might have labeled him “intriguing.” The outer corners of his eyes drooped just a bit, but his young daughter almost always drew out a sly smile that turned big and bright. He was perpetually charming with friends, which made them a popular couple, much to Allene’s delight.
In 1933, David was the sales manager of the Stanford University Press, the school’s prestigious publishing house. He had spent a year teaching advertising at the university—a writer with ambition. Allene was an assistant executive secretary with the YWCA, which was more of a job than a calling. The position didn’t tap the skills she had earned from her two degrees. It stifled her, but unemployment wouldn’t do.
“She needed something to occupy her mind,” David explained to a friend. “She was not satisfied to be home.”
The Lamsons were a modish couple, both hailing from well-respected families. David was from Cupertino, California—his mother and two sisters lived nearby, one of whom was a well-known physician with her own medical practice. Their friends were some of the most 11moneyed figures in Palo Alto—there was a chemist with the National Research Council, a metallurgical engineer, a journalism professor, and an attorney. One of their closest confidants was socialite Louise Dunbar, President Hoover’s glamorous niece, who cavorted with the city’s bluebloods.
Allene gazed in the mirror as she examined the tiny lines on her face, as most women do. She was twenty-eight years old and the mother of a toddler, a little girl with black curly hair she named Allene Genevieve, whom she called Bebe. Allene smoothed her braids, coiled them, and fastened each to either side of her head neatly with hairpins, part of her morning routine. It had been such a taxing night, the last evening of a holiday weekend. She and David had zipped between social events for the last three of four evenings. There was a visit with the Ormsby family on Friday, several bridge games at the Swains’ home on Sunday, and dessert with their friends Dr. and Mrs. Ralph Wesley Wright the night before. The Lamsons enjoyed being hosted by friends, intellectuals who challenged their ideas and tickled them with quick wit.
“I would say they were quite happy,” remembered Dr. Wright.
But the couple’s enthusiastic socializing might have finally taken its toll. After chatting for several hours with the Wrights over dessert the night before, the Lamsons arrived home by eleven with Allene’s stomach in knots. Perhaps it was the lemon pie and orange juice that Mrs. Wright served, she wasn’t sure. David tried to be considerate; he insisted on lying down in their daughter’s nursery at the back of the house so he wouldn’t disturb her, which had been their routine for years when she needed rest. Luckily two-year-old Bebe was at a sleepover with David’s mother—a blessing, the families would later say.
David reminded Allene that he planned to do yard work the following day; he removed his work clothes, bathrobe, pajamas, and house shoes from the hall closet so he could slip out quietly in the morning. Allene snuggled under the sheets and closed her eyes, but not for very long.
The stomach pain had returned around three that morning when 12she called his name; there was no need to shout because their house was so tiny. David appeared at their bedroom door in his pajamas. He ran his hand gently across her back to comfort her and then suggested she have a bite to eat.
Soon Allene could hear him collecting things in the kitchen. He handed her a glass of lemon juice mixed with water; then he quickly left and returned with some warmed‑up leftover tomato soup and a toasted cheese sandwich. Eating something hot usually lulled her back to sleep, but she had little appetite that night. She nibbled on the crust and took just a few sips of soup.
David returned to the nursery as Allene fell asleep again. The house was quiet now without Bebe; it was almost disconcerting. A silent home meant a respite from the incessant crying of a toddler who had suffered from horrible sinus infections all winter. It had been an exhausting few months for Allene—night after night of coaxing a sick child back to bed with the help of a nursemaid in the little girl’s room. David was the one to suggest that Bebe stay with his mother; he also told the nursemaid to take the holiday off so he and his wife could have some privacy. With Bebe sleeping at her mother‑in‑law’s, Allene was in a peaceful home, despite the indigestion.
By nine that morning, David appeared in the bedroom’s doorway once again. His shirt was off, his chest was sweaty, and his face was wet after hours of early-morning yard work near the bonfire.
Allene was still feeling poorly, but David had anticipated that. The water from the tub in the next room rumbled through the pipes—a hot bath was waiting for her. David had also prepared a breakfast tray in the kitchen with a bowl filled with Shredded Wheat cereal, a container of cream, and hot water for her morning cup of Postum, a popular coffee substitute made of whole grains and molasses for those who didn’t care for caffeine.
David guided Allene down the short hallway to the left of their bedroom. Much of the tiny bathroom was bright white, including the walls, the fixtures, and the tile around the tub. The room was far too 13cramped for two people, so David gently maneuvered her around the basin; she suffered from notoriously weak ankles.
Allene kicked off her sheep fleece–lined slippers, untied her nightgown, and hung it on the door nearby. David helped her step into the tub, which was now quickly filling with warm water. Weighing about 115 pounds, Allene was a delicate woman even at her healthiest, and her stomach was still bothering her that morning. She hoped that a long soak might move along her recovery—she didn’t intend to wash her hair, just relax. She didn’t even bother with a bar of soap.
Allene was steady as she lowered herself into the water, while David turned and left the door slightly ajar, stuck on a thick doormat. The tub was about halfway full when she turned the handle and slowly stood up—it was time to begin the day. The doorbell rang, but it might have gone unnoticed.
Suddenly the light that illuminated her bathroom vanished—deep blackness was everywhere. Perhaps she had closed her eyes, just for a bit, but the sensation was startling, as if she was blinded by thick ink. She was breathless, and now there was an aching at the back of her head, stretching from ear to ear. She collapsed.
The outside of the porcelain tub was cold as her body slumped over the side. Her torso dangled halfway out. Her arms hung down. Allene’s head tilted toward the tiles of the bathroom floor as one of her beautiful dark braids, which she had so gently fixed earlier, became unpinned and drooped along her left arm to the floor. The ends of her hair were frayed. One of her hands rested on a slipper, which had been lying on the tiles just outside the tub.
There was blood everywhere—even on the ceiling—but she didn’t notice. She was limp, dying. Red liquid from the back of her head quickly spilled into the clear water in the bathtub as crimson tentacles reached away from her body. The water slowly turned pink. Dark red streaks slid along the side of the tub. Within minutes, the blood glistened in her hair, soaking the brown strands along with almost every surface of her bathroom.
14Allene Lamson’s gruesome death would soon attract more attention than her quiet, ordinary life. Her friendships and her marriage would offer morbid fodder for a scandal-hungry press and a politically savvy prosecutor. Most of Allene’s friends didn’t realize that her gracious smile had hidden some troubling secrets, but soon everyone would know. She was married to a killer—even he had admitted it. And soon newspapers across America would accuse David Lamson of murdering Allene, too. But that narrative would unfurl later. For another few minutes Allene Thorpe Lamson would lie alone, dying in warm bathwater.
For the past three years David Lamson had been a reliably cordial neighbor. His scheduled weekend tasks in the small backyard were part sweat equity, part social hour. Friends peered over their fences and gossiped with one another about colleagues and classes as they trimmed their lush fruit trees—quince, apple, pear, loquat, and fig, among others.
“I hoed,” he remembered, “cleaned away the weeds by the blackberry vines, which I wanted to irrigate.”
That morning David’s task was to trim his artichoke plants in the back garden, not an unusual edict for many husbands who chose to use the holiday as a day to check off their chore lists. He strolled into the garden around seven after having a small breakfast with coffee. The Lamsons would soon be off to the mountains. They planned to spend the summer away from Palo Alto and would be renting out their bungalow for a few months. There was so much to do beforehand. Neighbors watched David navigate the piles of trimmings and weeds. Right before ten, he stopped for a chat with Helen Vincent about simonizing her car.
“I remarked that he was doing more than one thing at a time,” recalled Vincent, “getting a sunbath and doing his garden work.”
During their conversation a woman appeared in his garden, Julia Place, the Lamsons’ real estate agent. She explained that she had two 15clients with her from San Francisco who might want to rent the Lamsons’ home for the summer. David seemed a bit surprised, because they hadn’t arranged an appointment. Allene must not have heard the doorbell’s ring from the bathtub.
“He said it would be perfectly all right if I would go to the front,” said Place. “He would go through the back door and let me in with my clients.”
Place and Vincent watched David slip on his shirt and walk into his house through the back porch, while the agent and her clients returned to the front. Less than four minutes passed before an alarming sound came from inside—perhaps a scream.
“I really cannot describe it,” Place would later explain to police. “I would say it was hysteria.”
“My God, my wife has been murdered!” he cried as he flung open the door.
Julia Place and her clients, standing on his porch, stared at him. He was screaming, his shirt covered with pinkish-red blotches. His hands and face were dripping with water. Much of what happened next became a series of dim memories. He remembered carrying his nighttime clothes down the hall toward the bathroom.
“The first thing I saw was blood on the floor and the next thing was Allene lying over the tub,” David said, “her skull fractured.”
He cried out and cradled her, smearing blood across his shirt. She wasn’t responding to his voice. He laid her down again and dashed down the hallway, leaving his footprints in her blood along the way. Allene sank back into the tub and hung over the side.
“Of the rest of that morning I remember mercifully little,” David said. “It is as if the shutter of my mind opened now and again to photograph a scene, leaving a series of isolated impressions with blank gaps in between.”
16He begged the real estate agent to come inside.
“Get the police to find the murderer!” David screamed.
He ran to the bathroom again, crying wildly and staring at his wife as he held her again. One neighbor said she could hear his screams from one hundred yards away.
“Some of the things I remember most vividly are matters of no possible importance,” David remembered. “A friend’s voice urging me to come away, to let my wife go from my arms.”
He would later learn that his neighbor Mrs. Brown found him kneeling by Allene’s body, crying. She led David toward the nursery before he fainted and collapsed. A horrible scene would later haunt him.
“The glimpse of a neighbor’s face, twisted with pity and horror, emerging distinct from the blur of faces that filled the house,” David said.
He ordered Mrs. Brown to call his sister the physician … and the police. It was 10.10am when Palo Alto’s chief of police and several officers rushed into the cottage. There were now more than a dozen people inside the tiny home. The chief spotted Mrs. Brown holding a bloody towel and scolded her for inadvertently ruining forensic evidence.
“She was down, cleaning up something off the floor,” said Chief Howard Zink. “I told her to stop wiping up the blood, that everything must be left as it was, for evidence.”
Eight officers had responded, and soon each was interrogating David. A photographer snapped pictures while Allene Lamson lay on display—her naked body was partially draped over the tub for almost two hours. Strangers stared and whispered. The coroner noted several lacerations and contusions to the back of her head. One investigator shoved his hand in the tub just inches from her body and declared that the water was still warm. The doctors tested for rigor mortis, the stiffening of the limbs and joints that happens about two hours after death. They could still rotate her head, and the autopsy later concluded that Allene had died about an hour earlier, sometime after she climbed into the tub.
17“Who could have done it?” David cried. “No one had anything against her.”
The house was a nightmare for investigators. Allene’s blood had been transferred to almost every corner of her small home. The pathologist, the undertaker, officers, and countless neighbors had all shuffled through the scene, along with David Lamson and the real estate agent. There were large pools of blood in the bathroom, splashes in the hallway, red footprints leading to both bedrooms, sprays containing hundreds of droplets on each bathroom wall, and smears wiped on doorknobs. Reconstructing the scene would be arduous, even for more experienced detectives.
Officers peered down at the bathroom floor. It seemed improbable that a petite woman could be responsible for so much blood. Doctors guessed that about half of her blood had drained from her body, about two-and-a-half litres. Some of it was diluted by water from the bath. Some of it was arterial—blood that had sprayed directly from the body and had not mixed with any other fluid.
After two hours Allene was hoisted onto a stretcher—she spilled more blood along the route to the front porch. Her neighbors were awestruck. It was a ghastly, abrupt ending for an accomplished woman who had commanded respect from the time she strolled onto Stanford’s campus. Allene’s death would soon become even more troubling, particularly for her husband. The police chief eyed David as he answered questions.
“Ten minutes after the deputies arrived they were accusing me of murdering my wife,” David said. “Two hours later I was in the jail in San Jose.”
Less than twelve hours after Allene’s death the press happily latched on to the story. Subscribers to the local newspaper, the Santa Cruz News, found a piece with the titillating (and long) headline “Prominent Young Palo Alto Woman Is Found Dead in Bath Tub with Gaping Hole in 18Back of Her Head.” Hundreds of newspapers across America had picked up the report by the end of the day.
“Sheriff William Emig expressed belief she had been slain,” the copy read. “David Lamson … could offer no motive for his wife’s death.”
David seemed to agree with the sheriff that someone had broken into his cottage, perhaps a robber, and killed his wife while she bathed—there was no other explanation. The story was read by a remarkably large number of American readers who begged to be teased by the media. A year earlier, the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh’s twenty-month-old son was kidnapped for ransom from the family’s mansion in Hopewell, New Jersey. For two months federal agents led a massive manhunt for the baby before his body was found in the nearby woods.
Federal agents tracked thousands of leads in the Lindbergh mystery. Each new detail prompted a media frenzy and sold millions of newspapers, but by the spring of 1933, there were few updates, so readers were eager for another scandal. Now newspaper editors offered up the mystery of a prominent university academic turned wife killer as the next big headline. With each twist readers demanded more details, preferably lewd bits of gossip disguised as facts.
“Mystery Man Adds New Theory Puzzle,” declared a headline printed two days after Allene’s death. A university student had spotted a “shabbily dressed stranger loitering near the vine-covered campus cottage.” The witness said the man was lurking by the home early Tuesday morning when Allene died. Not credible, according to police, because David Lamson was the murderer. The couple’s friends weren’t convinced; the disquieting rumor snaking its way around the upscale neighborhoods on campus was that there was a killer stalking the upper-class houses along Stanford University’s Faculty Row.
“Guest.” That’s how Santa Clara County sheriff William Emig described David Lamson’s status in the jail in San Jose, California. He 19was not arrested or charged, but he was being held while investigators scrambled to sort through evidence. The police knew they were running out of time, because Lamson’s attorney was complaining loudly to the media about false arrest allegations.
In his three-piece brown tweed suit, David Lamson sat at an old wooden desk with a pen and paper inside his jail cell, less than twenty miles from his home. Scribbling near an oil lamp, he seemed more like an academic than a prisoner. Photos of Allene and Bebe were taped to the walls. David’s cell was on the third floor—the only room on that floor. He looked at his gold wedding ring. He had just fifteen square feet in which to pace, to fret about his trial. He often looked at the iron door with its large bolt. The walls were stone and steel, making the echoes inside the tall building almost unbearable. Lying alone on his cot, David thought about his daughter, Bebe, who was now living with his sister Margaret. His two sisters and their mother all steadfastly believed in his innocence.
At his desk, David Lamson considered his moderately circumscribed life. He had graduated from Stanford University in 1925 and was immediately hired by the academic press—a promising job that would become a successful career. He had married Allene Thorpe three years later, and they bought the bungalow on campus the following year; their daughter, Bebe, arrived the year after that. David had crafted for himself a predictable but pleasant life of socializing, family activities, and rewarding work. But as in most marriages, Allene and David had struggled with problems. And he kept secrets.
A San Jose jail cell would be his home for now as he awaited trial. He peered toward the street from his window and gripped the vertical bars. He could glance at Allene’s picture, wistful for days when she was alive. He had few emotions left, and grieving might not have been one of them, because he was scared for his own life. His defense team, some of the most talented attorneys in the state, watched him. They would hire only the best experts, they assured him, men who could expose weaknesses in the evidence gathered by the state’s investigators; those experts would set him free.
20“It never occurred to any of us that anything but an acquittal might result,” David said.
Back at the Lamson house, a brunette was prone, stretched across the tiny bathroom with her face pressed against the floor. The tops of her knees rested on the edge of the white tub. Her head rested just beneath the basin. Her arms, bracing against the floor, held up her body.
It was June 20—weeks after Allene Lamson had been found dead—when Edward Oscar Heinrich (Oscar, to his friends) waited in the doorway, peering at his “model,” his assistant’s wife, who had reluctantly agreed to play the distressing role of “corpse” for photos. She slowly stood up, readying herself for a new position while Oscar adjusted his small, round wire-rimmed glasses. It was his second trip to the Lamson house in a week. He jotted down notes and glanced at the reddish-brown spots on the wall.
“The door is liberally spattered below the glass,” he scribbled in his journal. “On the door jamb the drops show a projection southerly and upward which carry back to this same point.”
Hovering near Oscar was a fellow in a smart, dark three-piece suit sans jacket—Palo Alto criminalist George A. Weber. Oscar could feel Weber’s gaze. Oscar snapped another picture of Jean Weber with her arms flung over the side of the bathtub and her head tilted downward, a replica of Allene Lamson’s pose in death.
Oscar Heinrich had read books by European investigators about how a body might release its blood when impacted. And he had honed his technique on earlier cases, introducing perhaps the first blood-pattern analysis (BPA) testimony in America during a California murder trial in 1925. He was a professionally trained expert in a multitude of forensic sciences, including chemistry and biology, unlike many of the charlatans he disputed in court. By 1933, he was more experienced in bloodstain-pattern analysis than virtually anyone in the United States.
21David Lamson’s case was stymied by a mismanaged crime scene. Palo Alto police couldn’t untangle the rumors—there were unfounded whispers of an affair with a writer, a tryst with his daughter’s nursemaid, and violent arguments over sex that resulted in Allene ejecting David from their bedroom most nights. The local cops didn’t have the skills to focus on the facts, so they chased phantoms for two weeks. Much of the forensic evidence was lost in a chaotic scene on the day of her death.
A forensic expert’s first assignment is to preserve the evidence by securing the crime scene. David Lamson’s home had been contaminated by loads of people poking around the house. Oscar considered the case—his good friend August Vollmer, the former Berkeley police chief and now a college professor, would be helpful here, along with the librarian John Boynton Kaiser. Oscar had called on Vollmer’s advice for many cases because he was a cop with incredible investigative instincts who believed that educated police officers could outthink even the sneakiest criminals. Oscar was always pleased when they were able to work a case together.
“A precise little man,” observed one reporter—Oscar enjoyed an international reputation as a criminalist who could reconstruct a crime by collecting hidden forensic clues, processing them in his lab, and testifying as an expert witness. Most times Oscar was a prosecutor’s savior during tough trials. He was the scientist who had erected the nation’s first private science laboratory in 1910—America’s earliest general forensics lab. By 1919 there was another facility, one specifically for New York City’s toxicology cases, but Oscar’s laboratory was equipped to test all aspects of forensics—the lair of a real-life Sherlock Holmes.
Oscar Heinrich’s most high-profile cases had been splashed across American newspapers for two decades. Suspected killers confessed when they spotted his name on their case files. Journalists around the world had gleefully compared him to the most famous investigator in history—the greatest detective who never lived.
“So here is the inner sanctum of Sherlock Holmes,” a newspaper 22reporter once quipped as he wandered around Oscar’s Berkeley lab in Northern California.
“Not Sherlock Holmes,” Oscar snapped, shaking his head. “Holmes acted on hunches. And hunches play no part in my crime laboratory.”
After hours of work, Oscar finally summoned the journalists milling outside the Lamson home. He rarely disclosed many details to reporters because he didn’t trust most of them, but the public demanded an update.
“I have discovered enough evidence to warrant my staying on the case,” Oscar explained. “All action in this case took place in the bathroom, and I can reconstruct it in detail. I was delighted to discover a number of important clues overlooked until now by both the prosecutor and defense.”
At the end of the day Oscar had gathered all he needed. His hypothesis was sound and his suspect was near, he believed, and he could prove it using pieces of string and hundreds of dried blood drops that freckled the bathroom wall. The height and angle of the blood, along with its trajectory, would reveal the angle of impact. Allene’s every movement, Oscar theorized, would result in a very specific pattern. The strings, the protractor, the calculations, and the drips of Allene’s blood would solve her death.
“X marks the spot,” he said as he turned to assistant George Weber.
By 1933, Oscar Heinrich had unraveled countless violent crimes that seemed too puzzling to crack. His notoriety was impressive, but his record was not unblemished. His work over the past decade and his growing reputation for solving so‑called impossible cases gave many police officers and jurors confidence in his formidable abilities. But he had also made serious miscalculations in cases along the way, and his occasional aloofness on the stand sometimes stood in the way of getting the convictions he had so fervently pursued. The idea of solving crimes 23with forensic science was still such a new concept, and he was constantly fighting the perception that his techniques were “unproven,” “untrustworthy,” or “unreliable.”
Oscar was convinced that Allene’s death could be solved with the cutting-edge forensic tools that he was pioneering in his lab. A person’s life was in his hands, a weight he had carried many times before. Looking back on his own volatile career—his missteps at trials and his vicious fights with other experts—it pained Oscar to realize that there might, in fact, be room for doubt.
But before we can understand the conclusion of Allene’s case, we must first go back to the beginning—not of her story but of Oscar’s. And for Oscar, the beginning was a series of formative, and tragic, events in his childhood that would influence and inform all the work that would follow over the next seventy-plus years of his storied career. 24
2.
Genius: The Case of Oscar Heinrich’s Demons
“They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains,” he remarked with a smile. “It’s a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.”
— Arthur Conan Doyle,A Study in Scarlet, 1887
Edward Oscar Heinrich watched his mother mill around their small kitchen in Tacoma, Washington, as she collected breakfast dishes. It was October 7, 1897. The cups clinked in the sink. The sixteen-year-old slowly ate his meal. Reflected in the drinking glasses was a slight woman with an attractive face, wide-set eyes, and dark hair—the strongest, most steadfast person he would ever know. She was his moral guide, and by the end of that morning, he would become her savior for the remainder of her life.
Oscar had watched his mother suffer through much of his childhood. Albertine had been just twenty years old when she and twenty-eight-year-old August Heinrich, both natives of Germany, married in the Trinity Lutheran Church in Wisconsin. A year after having a little girl, Adalina Clara, Albertine gave birth to a boy they named Gustav Theodor Heinrich. The baby lived only a month, a tragedy for the young 26family. Another girl, Anna Matilde, came shortly after Gustav’s death, and soon Oscar arrived on April 20, 1881.
He would be the Heinrichs’ last child; and to honor the brother he never met, Oscar later named his eldest son, Theodore, after him. Oscar later remembered his mother warmly— she was a solid, secure presence in the young man’s life, and he admired her moxie and her deep sense of duty to their family. She leaned hard on both attributes, because from the time she was married, the family struggled with money.
“We kids earned our pennies by gathering old whisky bottles outside the factories and selling them,” Oscar remembered. “We were paid a penny for small ones, two cents for larger ones. That was our only source of spending-money.” There was never enough money to go around, but even for a young immigrant family there were always ways to scrounge up a little cash. And Oscar was nothing if not resourceful.
When Oscar was nine, August moved the whole family out west to Tacoma, Washington, for better opportunities promised by the newly finished railroad. But life there wasn’t much easier, and Oscar grew frustrated as he found himself surrounded by privileged and entitled children in the then-booming lumber town. His father wasn’t able to provide him with an allowance, so Oscar became determined to earn his own money. He was soon hired for a newspaper route, a lucrative job, but one that took him to the city’s red-light district.
Oscar had never strayed much beyond his family circle, and his forays into Tacoma’s underbelly to sell news to the area’s less reputable denizens were enlightening. He kept his eyes open— and his sense of decorum intact.
“Our family’s solidarity and my mother’s teachings served me well,” he said. “When I approached women in saloons and offered them my papers, I always had my cap in hand. They seemed to respect me.”
That entrepreneurial flair, linked with his own love of the written word, led young Oscar to embrace journalism of all kinds. Not content to merely hawk the news, the teenager reported and penned a newspaper story about the new game of handball for the Tacoma Morning Union27in 1895, when he was thirteen, moving from delivering the news to actually writing it. But his moneymaking endeavors weren’t just an adventure: they were increasingly a necessity. That same year, patriarch August Heinrich lost the family’s savings during a recession, and fourteen-year-old Oscar was forced to leave high school for a few months to take a cleaning job in a pharmacy, an entry-level post that would eventually serve as the foundation of his career.
Oscar read constantly in his off-hours: English literature, scientific tomes, and language primers. He also began tinkering with fiction writing— rudimentary, silly detective stories. He liked making money in his cleaning job, but he knew he wanted more of an intellectual challenge out of his work. Luckily, his family’s finances improved somewhat, and he returned to school less than a year after withdrawing with dreams of moving overseas. But when Oscar confided his plan to his father, August Heinrich stared back and issued a stern warning that portended difficult times ahead.
“You have no brothers,” he cautioned. “If anything happens to me, it’s up to you to support your mother and sisters.”
With broad shoulders and callused hands, Oscar’s father worked as a skilled carpenter in his woodshed behind their Tacoma home, pushing saws and driving nails into boards for hours. But the forty-nine-year-old struggled to find steady work. August was handsome, even with scruffy brown hair and a ragged beard that framed his face—the antithesis of the cultivated public image Oscar would later strive to achieve (and would always demand of his own sons). He and his mother thought that things were improving with his father and their fortunes. But the reprieve was short-lived.
Just after six on the morning of October 6, 1897, August pushed his chair back from the breakfast table and picked up his kit of tools, informing his son and wife that he would be leaving for a carpeting job on C Street. He glanced toward his woodworking shed at the back of the house and wished them a good day. As he walked through the back door, Albertine had no inkling that she would never see her husband 28alive again, no idea that at forty-two years old she would be abandoned with a teenaged son and two unmarried daughters.
After August disappeared in the backyard, Albertine noticed that her husband had left behind his dinner bucket. She walked swiftly toward the shed and swung open the building’s door. She screamed so loudly that most of their neighbors heard.
In less than a decade, Oscar would become one of the greatest forensic scientists in history. But at that moment, standing in his parents’ kitchen, he was just minutes away from seeing the first of many, many corpses in his career. The scene would plague Oscar until his own death, a ghastly reminder of what might happen if he surrendered to his own flaws.
The teenager sprang up from the table when he heard his mother’s wailing; he raced through the backyard and stood in the doorway of his father’s woodshed. Oscar looked upward as his mother collapsed. His father was hanging from a wooden beam near the ceiling with a window cord tied around his neck, dead from suicide.
As his mother sobbed, Oscar did something extraordinary for a sixteen-year-old boy. He gently led his mother to the kitchen and settled her in a chair so she wouldn’t faint. He phoned the police, retrieved a knife from the kitchen, and returned to the woodshed; Oscar climbed the stepstool that his father had used to slip on the noose. August’s body shook and swayed from the violent hacking of the knife. It finally dropped to the ground. Exhausted, Oscar dragged him to the house. Soon the police arrived, followed by local newspaper reporters, who collected details on the family tragedy.
“Suicide at Glendale,” read the Tacoma Daily News. “August Heinrich Hangs Himself in His Workshop.”
“No reason for the deed can be discovered,” read the copy, “and his wife and family, as well as many of his acquaintances, are at a loss to explain the cause of the suicide.”
But Oscar’s family knew the truth: his father had been distressed 29over finances for years, yes, but he had also been plagued with an ongoing darkness that clouded his life, one he had always struggled to overcome. The coroner determined that August had died from strangulation, not a broken neck—a more prolonged, painful death. It was an agonizing end for the flawed father Oscar loved so much.
Over the next six decades Oscar secretly fretted that he might also suffer from his father’s same anguish, his same craven weaknesses. But that fear also shaped his future—it spurred on his determination and helped craft his acumen for controlling every aspect of his life. Oscar transformed frustration into resilience. His deficiencies, such as his obsessive compulsions, became attributes … until they threatened his career, his family—even his life.
“Among my earliest recollections, the most prominent are those of the brutal ways in which I have been robbed of all my illusions,” Oscar wrote his best friend, John Boynton Kaiser. “It stirs resentment, suggests revenge and breeds caution.”
After his father committed suicide in 1897, sixteen-year-old Oscar was immediately assigned immeasurable responsibility, almost more than he could bear. Reporters knocked on his door, demanding answers about his father’s death, the first of many secrets Oscar Heinrich would protect until he himself died. His father’s grim fate would haunt Oscar for decades, testing his relationships with his children and challenging his own mental health.
When he became the patriarch of the Heinrich family, there was no hope of returning to high school for his final two years. He studied at night to become a pharmacist, a steady career for a young man who needed to support his family. By the turn of the century, pharmacists were still sometimes called apothecaries. They dispensed medications, prescribed remedies, and even gave some treatments that were difficult 30to self-administer, like enemas. Going to a pharmacy school wasn’t needed to take the state board exams, but apprenticing under a licensed pharmacist was required, usually for at least a year.
The pharmacy curriculum of the early 1900s leaned heavily on chemistry. It trained a pharmacist not only to prepare medications but also to practice clinical chemistry, which was the analysis of bodily fluids, like conducting a urinalysis. The training was Oscar’s first step toward becoming a forensic scientist—a career he never initially intended to follow.
The teenager couldn’t afford formal pharmacy classes, so he depended on his innate ability to understand the context of the texts and the math behind dispensing the correct amounts of medication. He relied on his memory and his compulsion to stockpile useful information. When the eighteen-year-old passed his pharmacy state exams, he seemed to be the only one who wasn’t surprised as he slipped on a white coat. Inside the Stewart and Holmes Drug Company he studied drugs, poisons, chemicals … and human nature.
“A drugstore is a veritable laboratory in behavioristic psychology,” he said.
He watched male customers slyly leer at women in the store. Some tried to bluff Oscar to secure more medicine without a prescription. Others were desperate, clearly addicted to the medicinal alcohol he could access for them. And a few customers turned mean, even threatening, if they didn’t get their way—when they thought no one was listening.
“I learned what people do in secret,” he said with a smile.
Pharmacy work also offered him another reward—eight years of excellent training in the valuable skill of handwriting analysis.
“I had doctors’ prescriptions to decipher,” Oscar explained. “And doctors are the worst writers in the world. Right then I started in to qualify as a handwriting expert.”
For almost a decade, he watched the other pharmacists quickly calculate the formulas for medicine—and he envied them.
31“I was impressed with the difference between the caliber of my work and that of college-trained men,” he said. “Those men were far away from me as technicians.”
He desperately wanted to be a skilled chemist. He needed to secure a well-paying, stable job in Tacoma to help his family. He hoped to spend his life bending over beakers in a lab, but to do that, he had to go to college, and it wouldn’t be easy. Even though he had his pharmacy license, Oscar lacked a high school degree—and despite his years of work, he’d managed to save very little money. Still, he was determined, and he’d heard about a special program for nontraditional students like himself at the University of California at Berkeley that sounded like just the ticket for a driven (but uncredentialed) student like Oscar. With just $15 in his wallet, the twenty-three-year-old planned to embark upon the next phase of his education.
But just three hours before he was scheduled to board the train to Berkeley, a disaster: he received a letter from the university that said he had missed the entrance exams to become a special student by two weeks. The details of the mix‑up are lost to history, but true to his enterprising nature, Oscar was determined to achieve his goals. He hopped the train anyway and turned up at the registrar’s office in Berkeley, demanding to be admitted.
“When I presented myself the Recorder of the Faculties listened to my story, looked me over, then told me to go up to the Chemistry College and go to work,” Oscar would later tell his son.
It didn’t happen right away, but finally Oscar’s perseverance and intelligence convinced admissions officers to allow him to join the freshman class of the College of Chemistry as a special student in chemical engineering. It was a good gamble. He quickly became invaluable to his professors as a laboratory assistant in quantitative analysis, and then as an assistant instructor in physics and mechanics. He studied medicine and attended law courses, then took classes in sanitary engineering—a discipline that used science and math to improve sanitation along with the supply of safe potable water.
32His Bachelor of Science degree taught him how to uncover nearly invisible clues and become a specialist in chemical jurisprudence who could detect poisons and identify mysterious stains. Amid furious bouts of studying and teaching, he managed to make time to woo a pretty co‑ed, a calming companion during his transition from student to independent man.
Marion Allen and Oscar Heinrich met on campus at the University of California at Berkeley as students. They were both involved in Greek life; Marion was prominent with Delta Delta Delta, while Oscar had been elected to the Mim Kaph Mim chemistry honor society and the Acacia club, a social fraternity founded by undergraduate Freemasons. They took chemistry classes together, though Marion never seemed to use her degree for a profession—being married to E. O. Heinrich was likely challenging enough.
Their friends playfully nicknamed Oscar “Heinie,” just to gig the fastidious student, who could be a know‑it‑all. He seemed stoic much of the time, aloof even in his youth, but those who were close to Oscar, like his wife, knew that he was also witty and loving.
“It may seem delightful,” he wrote to Marion about the fancy Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., “but without you it is all sheer near-beer.”
Oscar and Marion were married at her parents’ home in San Francisco shortly after he graduated in 1908. They immediately moved to Tacoma, where his mother lived, and Marion gave birth to Theodore two years later. She was a homemaker, bright and social—a good writer who kept up with national news, but she didn’t seem to talk much with her husband about his job. Much of the letters involved neighborhood gossip, the boys (a second son came a few years later), and household finances.
Opportunities came in quick succession after Oscar’s wedding to Marion. In Tacoma, he took a job as a chemical and sanitation engineer for the city, where he dealt with paving, bridges, and the development of water and power plant construction. He inspected reservoirs, tunnels, 33dams, and bridges. He studied the city’s sewer and irrigation systems and then designed two chemical plants. And soon Oscar took the job of city chemist, a position that required him to do quite a lot of investigative work with the coroner and the police in cases involving complex chemicals.
But he was frustrated both with the pay and the lack of equipment, so in 1910 he resigned and opened his own private industrial chemical lab called Heinrich Technical Laboratories, a company that helped develop and manufacture products and create processes for clients. But Oscar’s work with the police and the coroner continued to stoke his interest in forensics, so he received more criminal cases from the city and the public.
