On November 22nd 1889, a note appeared on the second page of the Paris daily L’Intransigeant, stating that investigators had succeeded in identifying the body. Two illustrations were published alongside it. One showed the decaying, unrecognisable head of a four-month-old corpse, the other the face of the deceased man when he was still alive. Both illustrations showed the face of the insignificant bailiff Gouffé, who had an office near Montmartre and was known for warming the bed of many a Parisian lady.
When the daily broke the news, Gouffé had been a virtual celebrity for weeks, even as the success of the Paris World Exhibition was being overshadowed by the events surrounding it. The man disappeared on 22 June, and as he was known for his antics in the beds of famous Parisian ladies, Parisian crime police inspector Sureté Goron did everything in his power to solve the mystery of his disappearance.
Then, an unidentified body, believed to be Gouffé’s, was discovered near Lyon. All the Paris newspapers wrote about how Alexandre Lacassagne, a Frenchman barely known to the public, a pathologist and forensic medical expert from Lyon, had managed to find the face of the decomposed corpse, almost beyond recognition, and to restore its identity. Everyone agreed that this was a milestone in the history of French forensic medicine.
Even on the evening of 27 July 1889, when Gouffé’s brother-in-law reported his disappearance to the police, the police paid little attention. The brother-in-law said that the 49-year-old widower Gouffé had been living with his daughters and that he had had affairs with at least 20 Parisian ladies, but that no one was interested at the time. The case was taken over by the head of the Paris criminal police, Goron. He visited Gouffé’s office and noticed twenty used matches on the floor in front of the cash desk. The doorman told him that on the evening of the disappearance someone had come to the office and that he had first thought it was Gouffé and only later realised that it was a stranger. All efforts to trace the stranger were in vain. The police sent a description of Gouffé to all their stations and also to the newspapers, and the case stalled.
By mid-August, the police had not moved a step further in their investigations. Then Goron got a copy of the local newspaper Quotidien Provançal on his desk and saw a circled notice that a man’s body had been discovered in a sack near Lyon on the Rhone River and had been transported to a morgue in Lyon. The local police authorities saw the inquiry by their colleagues in Paris about the decomposing body as interference by the metropolis in their work and refused to explain further. But the journalists did not give up and published the story of how the body was discovered.
The villagers along the Rhone River smelled an unbearable stench coming from a bush and, when they started to investigate what was causing it, they found a jute sack in the bush. Inside, they found a half-decomposed human corpse. The police were called and took the bag to Lyon, where Dr Paul Bernard autopsied the corpse on 13 August.
The body in the bag was naked, wrapped in waxed canvas and tied with a 7-metre rope. The deceased had apparently been strangled. Subsequently, it was reported from near the place where the body was found that some more pieces of wood, believed to be part of a suitcase, had been found. “The wood smelled like a decomposing corpse,” said the finder. It turned out that the wood was indeed part of the lid of the suitcase, as evidenced by the Paris train station labels on the suitcase, which stated that the 105 kg suitcase had been shipped from Paris on the day Gouffé disappeared. Later, the key that opened the lid of the suitcase was also found.
Goron, the head of the Paris crime police, decides to send Gouffé’s brother-in-law and a policeman to Lyon to identify the body. On arrival in Lyon, the two men went to the city morgue, which was on an old barge moored in the suburbs on the Rhone. From the boat, the unbearable stench of corpses could be smelled from a distance. The morgue keeper pressed some handkerchiefs to their noses and led them into the hold, where naked corpses lay on planks. My brother-in-law walked over to the body he thought was Gouffé’s, looked at it, shook his head and turned back in horror. He did not think it was Gouffé.
The police investigated further and soon came across a coachman who testified that he had been waiting for some guests at the station on 6 July. A man got off the train, dragging a heavy suitcase behind him. He was joined by two other people, together they dragged the suitcase somewhere and returned some time later without it. The coachman took the police to the vicinity where the body was found, and then managed to identify all three persons in the police crime album, who turned out to have been in prison since 9 July for armed robbery. All those allegedly involved have denied any connection with the suitcase.
The police in Lyon have informed their counterparts in Paris that the case is closed and that they should not continue. The body was buried two days later in De la Guillotiere cemetery. Knowing that he could not interfere in the work of the police in Lyon, Goron concentrated on what was happening in Paris and learned that Gouffé had met Michel Eyraud and his mistress Gabrielle Bompard in a restaurant on 25 July. Strangely enough, on 25 July, the very day Gouffé disappeared, they both disappeared from Paris, erasing all traces of each other.
Goron, who has come under an avalanche of criticism, has still not given up the idea that the body buried in Lyon is Gouffé’s. He therefore went to Lyon himself and, despite the protests of the local police, demanded that the body be exhumed. Lacassagne, a professor and head of the newly created Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Lyon, was given the task of autopsying the body.
Forensic examination
What we call forensic medicine today does not have a long history. The first evidence that medical knowledge can help solve crimes can be traced back to 1st century AD China. In 1248, a book called Hsi Yuan Lu was published there, giving instructions on how to use medical knowledge to solve complex criminal cases. The European Middle Ages said nothing about this. It was only in 1507 that the Constitutio Bambergensis Criminalis appeared in the field of the Bishop of Bamberg, which described the requirement that, in the case of the death of a child or of physical injuries, a doctor should be asked for his opinion before passing judgment.
This was followed in 1532 by the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, which only gave instructions on how to determine the depth and course of wounds. Over the years, only individual instructions on how to deal with criminal proceedings followed, and it was not until the French Revolution that the beginnings of forensic medicine were given a more significant impetus. Napoleon’s Code d’ instruction criminelle of 1808 prepared Europe for a new public trial in which medical experience was also taken into account. Thus, in 1857, a booklet entitled Handbook of Forensic Medicine by Johann Casper had already appeared. Pathologists now demanded not only the right to autopsy those who died in hospitals, but also those who died violent deaths in the streets, drowned people and unidentified persons. This meant entering the terrifying world of crime and criminality.
Thus, on 12 November 1889, in the late afternoon, a cheap wooden coffin was dug up in the cemetery of Lyon and placed on a stone table in the lecture room of Professor Lacassagne at the Faculty of Medicine. At that time, refrigerators were unknown, rubber gloves were not even known, and decomposing corpses were touched with bare hands, while in mortuaries, the deceased still had a cord connected to a bell so that the apparently dead, waking up, could call for help.
Lacassagne was reluctant to see the decomposing corpse. He always said, “A badly done autopsy cannot be repeated.” Dr Paul Bernard, who did the first autopsy, was only a preparator at a medical school. What unnecessary procedures did he carry out, how did he treat the skull and the chest? The decomposition process also did its work, so that there was almost nothing left that could be used to identify the corpse, except the bones and the hair.
The process, which Lacassagne started that afternoon, took 11 days. First, he separated the skeleton from the decaying tissue. Determining the size of the corpse was itself a major problem. The usual measurements did not correspond to the size quoted by his family. It was necessary to consult the military archives, as Gouffé’s measurements were sufficiently precise at the time, and his tailor was also asked for measurements. There were changes in the bones of his legs which indicated deformity and therefore disease. It turned out to be the result of a tuberculous inflammation in his youth, which had caused a slight limp. Gouffé’s daughters confirmed the injuries.
The injuries to the neck bones were indicative of asphyxiation and not, as the first autopsy concluded, of drowning. The biggest problem was to establish the age of the skeleton, but Lacassagne estimated the age of the skeleton to be 50 years, based on the wear of the teeth and the tartar at the roots of the teeth. Gouffé would have been 49 years old at the time.
For Lacassagne, hair colour was the decisive proof. He knew that it could change after death, and the first autopsy found that the decomposing corpse had black hair. Lacassagne asked for Gouffée’s hairbrush to be sent from Paris, and this is how he discovered that the man had chestnut-brown hair. A microscopic analysis of the hair confirmed that the hair on the corpse had also once been chestnut brown. On 21 November, Lacassagne exclaimed in front of the press, in a theatrical gesture to which he was no stranger: “Gentlemen, I give you Mr Gouffé!”. It was the first time that a forensic investigation had become the sensation of the month.
But that was not the end of the case, the killer had to be found. The carpenters made a replica of the suitcase from the disintegrated parts and put it on display in the Paris morgue. Who made the original and who was it sold to? In the following days, 25,000 people saw the suitcase. One carpenter told us that such a suitcase could not even have been made in France, only in England. Another man who rented out flats in Paris came forward and said that a man from London, Michel, had booked a room for himself and his daughter. They had brought with them a suitcase just like the one that was exhibited in Paris.
So Goron went to London with a copy of the suitcase, and a London case maker confirmed that he had indeed made one. Goron soon found out that the guests from London were the well-known swindler Michel Eyraud and the traveller Gabrielle Bompard. They were acquaintances of Gouffé and disappeared from Paris on the same day as Gouffé.
So the crossword with its many questions slowly filled up. Eyraud and Bompard must have seen that Gouffé had a lot of wealth and was crazy about attractive girls. Did Eyraud, hoping to find the key to the cash register, kill him and stuff the body in a suitcase? When he couldn’t find the key, he sent the suitcase and the body to Lyon to get rid of it. His picture was sent to all police stations in France and consulates in Europe.
On 16 January the following year, Goron received a letter sent from New York. When he saw who had sent it, he first thought someone was joking with him. But when graphologists compared the two, they realised that it was Eyraud. In a letter of twenty pages, he complained that everyone was looking for him as a murderer, and that he had only fled Paris because of his debts. “Gouffé is her victim. She murdered him with the help of one of her many lovers”, he accused Gabrielle Bompard.
The surprises were not over yet, because on 20 January Gabrielle Bompard herself appeared in the Goron reception room. She claimed that she had come from America and that she wanted to tell the police what had really happened. She was also a victim of Eyraud, who had hypnotised her into inviting Gouffé to a meeting in the flat she had rented. There, Eyraud strangled Gouffé, put the body in a suitcase and took the train to Lyon.
Of course, Goron did not fall for Gabrielle’s tricks, as he was convinced that she was an active participant in the murder. He arrested and interrogated her and left her to starve. She finally confessed to the murder, but still claimed that she was only a weapon in the hands of Eyraud. But there were more than enough witnesses to prove her involvement in the murder. Her arrest was the new sensation in Paris and people flocked to the apartment where the murder took place. Eyraud was arrested in Havana as he was leaving a brothel and then taken by boat to Saint-Nazaire. A large crowd of curious onlookers and journalists gathered at the port.
On 16 December 1890, the trial of Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard began. The verdict was “Death sentence for Eyraud and 20 years imprisonment for Gabrielle Bompard.”
Which blood is human?
“What is particularly interesting is that I was able to use my serum to immediately identify which blood was human in a solution of table salt and human, horse and bovine blood over a period of four weeks. This is particularly important for forensic medicine.” This was a phrase that appeared in a German scientific journal in 1901 under the title ‘Method for distinguishing blood of different species, necessary for proving human blood’. The author of the article was Paul Uhlenhuth, an assistant at the Hygienic Institute of the University of Greifswald.
This was the most important innovation in forensic medicine at the turn of the 20th century. For a long time, forensic pioneers had been looking for a way to determine whether or not stains at a crime scene were human blood. Early on, they realised that blood loses its characteristic colour as soon as it dries and ages. The red colour changes to brown, and later greenish-yellowish tones appear, which no longer resemble blood at all. However, this colour may hide blood – blood that serves as evidence in a murder, attempted murder, rape, bodily harm or theft to link the perpetrator to the crime.
Until then, no one had ever been able to prove human blood in obscure stains. Thousands of times in the history of the Criminal Investigation Department, fresh blood has been found at crime scenes, but the suspects have always claimed it was animal blood and no one has been able to prove them wrong. Ludwig Teichmann-Stawiarski, an anatomist from Krakow, had already pointed out in 1853 that human blood forms characteristic crystals when mixed with vinegar. But there were so many exceptions to this procedure, where crystals did not form, that it was not suitable for practical use.
In 1861, Van Deen, a Dutchman from Groningen, discovered that haemoglobin not only gives blood its colour, but also binds oxygen to it in the lungs of humans and animals. Using a special process, he was then able to make a spot of blood turn blue, which was due to the oxygen in the blood. If this colour did not show up, then it was not blood.
But was it human or animal blood? From 1829 to 1901, there were many unsuccessful attempts to prove human blood. During these decades, attempts were also made to use the microscope to get to the desired target. All mammals have round red blood cells and so do humans. All other vertebrates show oval red blood cells with a cell nucleus under the microscope, but this is not the case in mammalian blood cells, nor in human blood cells. But all these experiments were of no practical use until Paul Uhlenhuth presented his methods of proving human blood in 1901. Many wondered at the time whether this was not yet another method that led nowhere, and another great disappointment.
Uhlenhuth was not an expert in forensic medicine, but was transferred as a military doctor to the Institute of Infectious Diseases in Berlin, whose director was the well-known Robert Koch. He was soon transferred to Greifswald, where he continued his experiments, injecting rabbits with large quantities of protein derived from hen’s eggs. He then used their blood to make a serum with which he experimented with different types of blood.
In the summer of 1900, he was finally convinced that he was on the right track. Finally, he was helped by Dr Otto Brenner, a forensic physician and lecturer in forensic medicine, who was often powerless when the murderers told him that the blood on their clothes was animal blood. Uhlenhuth’s serum showed that it could be used even with old traces of blood and with the smallest traces.
Within a few days, a number of national and international forensic experts had already made the pilgrimage to Greifswald to see for themselves the success of the method. Samples arrived by post from investigating judges and public prosecutors asking them to determine whether or not it was human blood. But the final breakthrough came, as it always does, when his method was used in a high-profile criminal case.
In July 1901, the North German newspapers reported the horrific murder of two children on the island of Rügen. The sons of a ferryman had been missing on the south-eastern part of the island since 1 July, when they had not come home for dinner. Hermann Stube was eight years old, his brother Peter six. The father informed the police and the gendarmerie, who launched a search. The town of Göhren bordered a long forest and the father assumed that the two children had got lost while playing in it.
The bodies of the children were found in the bushes only on 2 July. The children’s heads were smashed and severed from their bodies, their arms and legs were amputated, their livers were cut out and their internal organs were scattered in the forest. The heart of the older child was probably taken by the killer. In the bushes lay a large flint, smeared with blood, which had been used to kill the two children. There was no doubt that it was a sexual murder.
The police started asking residents and a fruit seller said she saw Ludwig Tessnow, a carpenter’s apprentice, talking to two children on 1 July. Tessnow was considered a special man who had wandered around Germany for a long time and had only recently returned to the island. On 1 July, a road worker spotted him and said that his clothes were stained with brownish stains.
On 2 July, he was arrested and his work clothes were inspected. It looked as if he had recently washed it. Brownish stains were found on some parts, but he claimed it was bovine blood. Some other stains were found, which were thought to be residues of carpentry liquor.
It was these stains of carpenters’ stain that reminded the investigating judge of another child murder that took place on 9 September 1898 in a village near Osnabrück. Two girls had not returned home from school at midday. The parents enquired at the school and learned that they had not been to school at all that day. They searched the nearby woods and found their bodies in different places. The killer had cut their bodies into smaller pieces and scattered them in the woods.
Suspicion also fell on the carpenter’s apprentice, whose clothes were full of stains. The Osnabrück police had no forensic knowledge and were satisfied with his excuse that the stains were the residue of carpentry liquor, so they released him from custody. It turned out that the apprentice’s name was Ludwig Tessnow.
Something else caught the attention of the investigators in Rügen. On the night of 12 July 1901, seven sheep were gruesomely slaughtered in a meadow, butchered and their body parts scattered across the field. A shepherd saw the perpetrator fleeing and, when confronted by Tessnow, immediately recognised him. But he denied everything.
The investigating judge was already familiar with the Uhlenhuth method of identifying bloodstains. He therefore sent him the clothes of the alleged killer and a bloodstained flint. The public awaited the results of the investigation with suspense, outraged that the police had still not been able to prove that Tessnow was the child killer.
The investigation showed that there were no bloodstains on Tessna’s work clothes, but there were bloodstains on other clothes. Six bloodstains were found on his jacket, seven on his trousers, one on his shirt and four on his hat. Six sheep’s blood stains were also found on the jacket and three on the trousers. Uhlenhuith’s expert report, which he produced at the end of 1902, was instrumental in Tessnow’s death sentence and took his method of identifying bloodstains beyond the borders of Germany. At the turn of the century, this was one of the greatest forensic advances.
Child murders
However, German forensic medicine was otherwise in a state of stagnation at that time, as neither the authorities, nor the police, nor the medical faculties had yet come to the realisation that forensic medicine was a special branch of science without which it would not be possible to carry out forensic and legal work successfully in the future.
In 1888, the German Professor Ungar lectured on the importance of forensic medicine, pointing out serious problems. He was not a professor of forensic medicine, but a professor of paediatrics in Bonn. The very fact that, as a paediatrician, he was often asked for his opinion in suspicious cases of infant deaths made him an enthusiastic advocate of the new branch of science. Although he had neither a laboratory nor his own institute of forensic medicine, he began to lecture throughout Germany.
As early as 1883, he had already attracted attention by arguing that water in the lungs of children, until then considered a sure sign of whether a child was born dead or alive, was by no means reliable evidence on which doctors could rely for their expert opinion. In particular, putrefactive gases from decomposition can lead to erroneous conclusions, as they can leak fluid into the lungs of a stillborn child.
When Ungar gave his famous speech in 1888, he was already well known in forensic medicine. He pointed out that only two of Germany’s twenty faculties had forensic medicine lectures. It was only at the end of the century that the position of forensic medicine began to improve. Young pathologists realised that there was still an unexplored scientific field ahead of them, which would allow them to develop as individuals.
Uhlenhuth’s discovery gave forensic medicine the impetus it desperately needed. In Paris in particular, there was a widespread belief in the limitless possibilities of forensic medicine, and it was no coincidence that forensic medicine experienced a spectacular crisis here a few years later. Lacassagne wrote on this occasion: “History reminds us of the limits of our knowledge when we are in danger of forgetting it.”
On the afternoon of 5 April 1905, a young worker appeared at the door of the Bretonneau Hospital. She was holding a heavily breathing child, whose face was already purple in colour. The porter immediately referred her to the children’s ward and called the doctor on duty, who found that the child was suffocating. The young worker, whose name was Weber, came from the suburbs, where many of her relatives, also called Weber, lived, and told the doctor a strange story. She lived in a suburb where the narrow and poorly lit streets were inhabited by labourers, carriage drivers, small craftsmen and casual workers. On that day, at midday, she was visiting her six-month-old son Maurice with another pregnant woman, also called Weber, Jeanne Weber. She entrusted her child to her.
When she returned from running errands, she found her baby on the bed, limp and foaming at the mouth, with Jeanne Weber pressing her hands to his chest. In a panic, she rushed to the Bretonneu hospital. The doctor on duty examined the baby and found a reddish, finger-long mark on his neck. He immediately thought that someone had strangled him. After a few hours, the baby’s condition improved and the mother was reassured. The doctor on duty began to question her further about the incident and learned that four babies had died in the Weber family circle in the last four weeks, all showing signs of suffocation, and Jeanne Weber had been present in one way or another everywhere.
The first to die was little Georgette, daughter of Pierre Weber, on 2 March. She was watched over by Jeanne Weber. On 11 March, her sister Suzanne died in a similar manner. She was also looked after by Jeanne Weber. Here, too, dark spots were found on the girl’s neck. The doctor nearby did not attach any significance to this and considered both deaths to be the result of convulsions.
On 25 March, Jeanne Weber was looking after seven-month-old Germaine, Leon Weber’s daughter. She too died the next day of asphyxiation. The little girl’s face was dark and her eyes had almost popped out of their sockets.
On 27 March, Jeanne Weber’s seven-year-old son Marcel fell ill. He too almost died of asphyxiation, but recovered a few days later, but died shortly afterwards. Suspicious imprints were also visible on his neck.
The doctor on duty knew the suburb where all this was happening. Children’s lives were not of much importance there, and the doctors just took their deaths as a natural occurrence among the poor population. Nevertheless, the question arises as to how it is possible that, in all these cases, no one thought that the children had died violent deaths.
The doctor on duty, Dr Saillant, was not an expert in forensic medicine but suspected attempted asphyxiation. Jeanne Weber was arrested after it came to light that her two daughters had died one after the other a few years earlier. Inspectors began questioning witnesses. A neighbour said that she had heard little Georgette, who died on 2 March, screaming a few days before her death. When she ran into her room, she saw her tongue hanging out of her mouth, which was full of foam, and Jeanne Weber was bent over her body with a strange expression on her face.
Inspector Bovet, who lived in the suburb in his youth, took over the investigation. He knew the squalor and poverty, how often death cuts children down, and how little emotion the residents can afford to feel about it. But what was happening now was too much even for him. On 9 April, he handed in his report to the investigating magistrate, Leydet, who was convinced that Jeanne Weber was the murderer. He could only guess what was going on in her head, but he could not know what exactly she was thinking.
The examining magistrate asked for an expert opinion from Dr Henri Thoinot, who was to examine the surviving Maurice Weber and exhume and autopsies the children Georgette, Suzanne, Germaine and Marcel. He was convinced that Dr Thoinot, who was a famous collaborator of the famous Paris school of forensic medicine, would find evidence of the children’s violent deaths by suffocation.
At this time, forensic medicine had long been dealing with cases of hanging, forced suffocation and strangulation. It was particularly interested in the pathological consequences of these violent deaths. Already thirty years earlier, it had been found that rapid violent asphyxiation produced punctate effusions of blood under the ribs and on the heart. At that time, they also investigated asphyxiation caused by pillow suffocation.
Langreuther, a doctor of forensic medicine, had observed since 1888 that instant death could occur if pressure was applied to certain nerve nodes in the neck. At that time, it was believed that when a rope is hung around the neck, it leaves marks which vary depending on the area of the neck where the knot of the noose is located. This produces bluish impressions which later disappear. However, it was already known at the time that the natural skin wrinkles that occur on the neck, which are also bluish in colour, should not be confused with the marks left by the rope when it is hung.
So forensic medicine knew something about the formation of post-mortem marks on the neck. On 10 April 1905, Dr Thoinot first questioned Mrs Weber and her son Maurice, who survived almost miraculously, and the marks on his neck soon faded.
On 14 April, the bodies of Georgette, Suzanne, Germaine and Marcel Weber were exhumed. There were no signs of bruising on their necks, the jugular veins were intact, the root of the tongue was unharmed and there was no evidence of blood spilling into the tissue. All other organs were intact.
Thoinot sent his report to the investigating judge, Leydet, the same day. “In order to make a forensic diagnosis of diphtheria, there must be at least some indications of it. In all these cases, it was natural asphyxiation.”
Leydet was terribly disappointed. The gap between the findings of his criminal investigation and Dr Thoinot’s report could not have been wider. He therefore repeated the criminal investigation once more, handed the results to Dr Thoinot and asked him to provide a second expert opinion, which would not only include the autopsy but also an expert examination of all the witness statements, especially those who repeated that Jeanne Weber always had her hands under the children’s clothes and was pressing on their breasts. Could it be that the children’s breasts were pressed against each other as a result of suffocation?
Thoinot’s new report was a few pages long, but even this time he did not deviate a foot from his original opinion. The witness statements, the purple faces of the children, the bulging eyes, all of this he branded as unscientific evidence. The examining magistrate, convinced of Jeanne Weber’s guilt, handed everything over to the public prosecutor, who decided to charge Jeanne Weber only with multiple murder and attempted murder.
Did the court make a mistake?
The trial began on 29 January 1906. A huge crowd gathered outside the courthouse and demanded revenge. Henri Robert, the most famous lawyer in Paris, took up the defence of the accused and refused to miss the opportunity for such a brilliant self-promotion. He intimidated witnesses and ridiculed their statements. In the end, Jeanne Weber was acquitted. But no one imagined that the acquittal was only the beginning of the Weber affair.
On the evening of 16 April 1907, a child rang Dr Papazoglou in Villedieu: “I come from Chambon, my name is Louise Bavouzet. My brother August is very ill. Please come immediately.”
Bavouzet had a small farm, three children and a mistress who lived with him. Papazoglou asked about signs of illness and, when he found out that the child was probably overeating, he gave the girl some medicine and sent her home. The next morning, Augusto’s health deteriorated and when Dr Papazoglou arrived, the nine-year-old was already dead. The child was lying on a straw bed, washed and dressed in a fresh shirt tightly fastened around his neck.
Bavouzet’s housekeeper and lover Moulinet immediately explained, “He was vomiting and all dirty, so I washed him and changed him.” Dr Papazoglou insisted that the woman take off the boy’s shirt and as soon as she did so, he noticed a reddish change on his neck. He refused to give out the death certificate and informed the police. A forensic expert also arrived and performed an autopsy on a wooden table in the cemetery chapel. He too noticed suspicious marks on the neck. However, this is what made him indecisive. He knew from the literature that a tightly buttoned shirt collar can leave traces on the neck of a dead person that resemble a stench. In the end, he concluded that the child had died a natural death.
Hardly anyone noticed that Auguste’s older sister Germaine, who had a harelip, was not at the funeral. She did not like her father’s mistress, so she searched the sack in which she had put her things and found a pile of clippings from the Petit Parisien newspaper with articles about the Weber affair. Among them was a picture of Jeanne Weber and Germaine gasped. Her father’s mistress, Moulinet, was Jeanne Weber.
She went to the police station, put the newspaper clippings in front of the inspector and said, “She was the one. She strangled my brother Augusto.” The police ordered the pathologist and anatomist, Dr Bruneau, to carry out a second autopsy on the deceased boy. The autopsy was carried out for the second time in the cemetery chapel and revealed a clear two-and-a-half centimetre furrow on the body as a result of the strangulation, as well as some scratches that could have been made by fingernails. Bruising was also found on the throat. The boy had been strangled with a large handkerchief wrapped around his neck.
Jeanne Weber-Moulinet was arrested by the police and the next day the Parisian newspapers broke the news of the new-old affair. What did the events in Chambon mean? Was Jeanne Weber’s murderer acquitted by the court on 30 January 1906? Jeanne Weber left her husband shortly after the acquittal, because no one wanted to entrust her with the care of their child anymore and everyone avoided her. How could the forensic experts and the judges have made such a terrible mistake?
The defence of Jeanne Weber-Moulinet is once again taken over by the famous Paris lawyer Henri Robert. He rejected the findings of Auguste Moulinet’s autopsy, claiming that it had been negligently carried out by inexperienced country doctors, and demanded a new autopsy, to be carried out by the same forensic experts who had carried out the autopsy on the four dead boys in the first trial against Jeanne Weber.
So on 27 July, three and a half months after Auguste Bavouzet’s death, Dr Thoinot performed a third autopsy on his decomposing corpse. He had to admit that the decomposition had progressed to such an extent that the tissue around the neck had changed considerably and did not allow a true conclusion to be drawn as to the cause of death. Nevertheless, he viciously branded the work of his predecessors, the rural forensic experts, as dilettantish. Finally, he remarked that even here it was not possible to speak of a violent death. The investigating judge, although convinced of Jeanne Weber-Moulunet’s guilt, could do nothing more than release the murderer in the light of the expert opinions.
And then it came like a bolt from the blue. On 9 May 1908, the Paris newspapers announced: ‘Murder of a child in Commercy! Marcel Poirot, son of an innkeeper, strangled. Jeanne Weber caught at work.” Some details were also known.
Sixteen hours before the murder, a man and a woman rented a room at Poirot’s inn. He had got a job in a quarry, and she was extremely friendly with the innkeeper’s son, Marcel, and asked if he could spend the night with her because she was scared. The mother didn’t mind, but at night there were screams from the room. When the innkeeper came in, he saw a terrible scene. Marcel was lying motionless on the bed, his face purple, blood streaming from his mouth. Next to him in bed was a woman with blood on her hands and a bloody shirt, claiming not to know what had happened. However, she confessed to being Jeanne Weber, as a dismissal letter from the remand prison was found in her luggage.
The very next day, the child’s corpse was autopsied and every cut in the corpse was documented photographically. The child was strangled with a large handkerchief.
A wave of indignation has risen in France. How is it possible that the expert opinion of the most famous pathologists in Paris has been so wrong in previous cases? Thoinot’s only response to the criticism was to say that in the case of the four children, it was still a natural death, and only in the latest case of Marcel Poirot did he admit that it was an act of violence. He also called in psychologists to defend himself and succeeded in having Jeanne Weber declared unfit and sent to a psychiatric hospital, where she strangled herself two years later.
In the following years, a new generation of pathologists realised that the necks of young children are very elastic, and that as a result, a strangulation leaves few traces.
The affair of the century
American journalists liked to call the decades after the end of World War I the “lawless decades”, because they were marked by crimes that newspapers, in their hunt for sensations, always referred to as the “crimes of the century”. One of them took place in the early hours of 16 September 1922, near New Brunswick, a small town in New Jersey.
Two young walkers found two bodies on a side path and called the police. The dead man was lying on his back, dressed in a black priest’s robe, with a young girl lying next to him. Scattered over the bodies were numerous letters written in a woman’s hand. On the floor was a small post-it note: Reverend Edward W. Hall, St. John the Evangelist Church, New Brunswick. He was the 41-year-old pastor of the Episcopal Church, she was Eleanor Mills, wife of the churchwarden and singer in the church choir.
The police arrived and chased away a bunch of curious people. Dr Long came too, because they couldn’t find the coroner and he did his job. The Institute of the Medical Examiner, which had been elected for a few years, had come to America from England, and its job was to look at suspicious deaths, question witnesses and determine the cause of death. No one required a medical or legal knowledge of the medical examiner, and the medical examiner rarely invited a doctor to participate.
Hall had a small wound on his temple where the bullet entered, and Eleanor Mills had a slit throat and a bullet hole between her eyes. Everyone knew the Reverend Hall because in 1911 he married a seven-year-old spinster from one of New Brunswick’s most influential families, the Stevens. The initial investigation was quick and perfunctory, and the burial permit was granted almost immediately, as requested by the Stevens family, who did not want any autopsy. Only Eleanor Mills had her abdomen opened and her uterus examined for possible pregnancy, and then the opening was sewn back up.
Hall was given a solemn burial on 18 September, Eleanor a less solemn one the following day. But the double murder attracted a lot of attention in New Jersey and New York. The pallbearer’s body, the love between the pastor and the pastor’s wife, and the love letters with their racy content promised to be a big affair. Even before the police began their inquiries, journalists discovered that the relatives had been missing since the evening of 14 September, but had not informed the police.
The murder victim’s husband, James Mills, said that his wife sometimes stayed overnight at her sisters’ house, so he was not worried about her absence. The murder victim’s wife, Frances Hall, said that she had looked for her husband in the church at night but had not found him and had returned home. Residents near the crime scene heard voices, gunshots and saw cars driving off at night without their lights on.
Frances Hall’s brother was suspected of the crime. One was a special man with mulatto roots, the other a true American gentleman. The case was handled by whoever had five minutes to spare, so there was duplication of investigation. Nevertheless, the case remained deadlocked, and the judge ordered Eleanor Mills’ body to be exhumed, in the hope that the autopsy would turn up something important.
The autopsy was performed by a doctor and a surgeon, neither of whom had the skills of a forensic pathologist. They only found that the victim’s throat had been cut with a long sharp knife, that the line of the cut was smooth, and that the victim had received not just one shot to the head, but three. Hall’s body was then exhumed and autopsied. They told the press that nothing unusual was found. Of course, this autopsy was also carried out superficially. The case then passed from one hand to the other, but no progress was made.
Finally, investigators have taken a witness statement they had been ignoring. A 50-year-old widow who kept pigs and was therefore called “pig woman” lived near the crime scene. On the night of 14 September, she heard a noise and saw two men and two women arguing in the dark. One of them fell on the ground and a woman’s voice shouted, “Don’t do that!” Then shots rang out and another figure fell to the ground. Two more people were left, and one of them, a woman, put her hand on the other’s shoulder and said, “Henry.”
Henry was the name of one of Frances Hall’s brothers. But the “pig woman” also noticed a man with mulatto features in the background. This could have been Frances Hall’s other brother.
On 20 November 1922, a grand jury deliberated on the indictment and decided whether the material was sufficiently solid to proceed to trial. It deliberated for a week, while more than a hundred reporters and even more curious onlookers gathered outside the building. All the employees of Frances Hall House testified in her favour and provided her with an alibi. Henry Stevens also provided an alibi, claiming to have been 20 kilometres away from the scene at the time of the murder. The Grand Jury eventually concluded that there was insufficient evidence to proceed to trial.
But the newspapers made sure that the affair did not fade into obscurity. In New Brunswick, what had happened was all but forgotten when the Daily Mirror informed its readers of the sensational discovery. A piano tuner had married a maid who worked in Frances Hall’s house. In July 1926, he asked for a divorce, saying in passing that his wife had been bribed by the Stevenses in 1922. The newspaper’s editorial staff claimed to have information about some other bribes.
Newspapers seized on this news and demanded that the case be clarified. But how to proceed? Much of the evidence has disappeared to parts unknown. There were no more post-mortems, no more fingerprints, no more original transcripts of interrogations and expert opinions. They decided to have both Hall and Eleanor Mills autopsied again, but it only showed how carelessly the first one had been carried out.
More importantly, after the autopsy, Eleanor Mills’ pathologist stated, “The upper trachea, larynx and tongue are missing.” All these organs were cut out with great precision. All this showed how poor the cooperation between the police and forensic medicine was. On 3 December, the jury declared the two brothers and the sister innocent. The Hall/Mills affair had thus disappeared into the void where many other unsolved murders had found themselves in those years.
The mother killer
One of the most pressing issues in forensic medicine has been who and how to carry out the first forensic procedure when a body is found. In 1926, as the Hall/Mills affair was drawing to a close, a comprehensive report was being written on the operation of the mortuary inspector, a system imported from England, which had already been criticised in England, but which in America had become the scene of adventurous and grotesque events. Of the more than 100 unsolved crimes that took place in New York between 1868 and 1890, only eight were cases in which a corpse was immediately autopsied.
As there were hardly any forensically trained pathologists, the reports of the post-mortem examiners were often very confusing. Morticians, who were often also coroners, avoided autopsies because they wanted to hand over ‘intact’ bodies to relatives. Thus, between 1898 and 1915, among the coroners in New York, one could find eight undertakers, seven professional politicians, six real estate dealers, two barbers, two cobblers, one butcher, one miller, two bar owners, and so on. If a doctor was elected, it was a drunkard or a failure in his profession. That is also why such an inquiry rarely lasted more than five minutes.
Such confusion forced the authorities in Boston to abolish the system of elected medical examiners in 1877 and replace them with “medical examiners”, who had to be pathologists and were appointed by the Governor himself for seven years. Their task was to investigate every suspicious death, which led to the discovery of many unexplained murders. In New York, these changes did not take place until 1915. By 1918, there were already “medical examiners” in New York, who dealt with between 15,000 and 20,000 suspicious deaths each year and performed more than 6,000 autopsies a year.
On 17 March 1926, an affair began in Edinburgh that shook another cornerstone of forensic medicine and whose impact would be felt for decades to come. 31 Buchingham Terrace was the home of a pensioner, Bertha Merrett, and her son Donald. At half past ten in the morning that day, Henrietta Sutherland, a maid, was tidying up in the kitchen when she heard a shot. Then the door opened, Donald came in and said to the maid, without much excitement, “My mother has shot herself. I spent her money and she was worried about it.”
They entered the living room to find Bertha Merrett lying on the floor, covered in blood, shot in the head behind her right ear. The chair she was sitting on had been overturned. Two police officers ran over and, seeing that Bertha was still alive, called paramedics who took her to hospital. But Officers Middlemiss and Izatt were among the many British police officers who lacked experience in securing evidence, and were later unable to say under what circumstances they found the badly injured pensioner.
They gave contradictory statements and could neither say where the gun was at the time nor secure their fingerprints. There was a half-finished farewell letter on the coffee table, but someone had burned it. As suicide was a criminal offence in Scotland, a police inspector turned up at the house and did not secure the evidence. On the shelf were letters from two banking houses warning the pensioner that her bank accounts were overdrawn.
Meanwhile, at the hospital, they were fighting for Berthe Merrett’s life. X-rays showed a bullet in the base of her skull. The next day, the pensioner woke up unconscious and began to wonder what had happened. “You’ve been in an accident,” she was told. But she told the doctor that she had been writing a letter and her son Donald was standing next to her, so she told him to go away because he was disturbing her. Then she heard a bang and did not remember anything more.
The doctor informed a police inspector and told him that he doubted the suicide. As the old woman’s condition was critical, the inspector should have questioned her, but did not. Bertha Merrett then told a friend that she had heard a gun bang behind her, but she did not have a gun in her hand. Early on 1 April, Bertha Merrett was found dead. Her son Donald took no interest in her condition at this time and immediately brought a dancer from the bar to the house, bought a motorcycle and rode it to London.
Subsequent enquiries showed that he had withdrawn his mother’s money at the bank by forging her cheque signature. On 29 November, he was arrested and charged with forging cheques and murdering his own mother. This was the beginning of the Merrett affair, where forensic medicine was at the centre of the story.
The problem of gunshot wounds has been one of the main problems in forensic medicine. Research has sought to establish under what circumstances gunshot wounds are fatal. They were able to distinguish between entry and exit gunshot wounds, as this could be used to infer the course of a homicide or suicide. They also examined the course of the gunshot channels in the body and the distance from which the shot was fired, as this also told them whether it was suicide or murder.
It is never suicide if the shot is fired from a distance. Every time a shot is fired, a small flame appears at the muzzle of the weapon. If the shot is fired from a distance of up to 30 centimetres, a small burn will appear on the clothes, hair or skin. Very good forensic experts can tell from its smell at what distance the shot was fired. With each shot, unburnt particles of gunpowder also leave the barrel and deposit on the victim’s skin. They can be clearly seen even when shots are fired from a distance of 50 centimetres.
By the First World War, forensic medicine was very well trained to distinguish between close-range and distant shots. But with the invention of so-called smokeless powder and the production of nitro ammunition, new problems arose, as the flame from the barrel was virtually non-existent when the shot was fired, and there were fewer particles of gunpowder to deposit on the victim’s skin.
At the time of the Donald Merrett trial, forensic medicine was looking for new and more reliable evidence to establish the shooting distance. When investigating judge Horn began to look into the death of Bertha Merrett, he found no firm evidence of murder. The only witness to the incident was the accused. He could only rely on the statements of doctors and some witnesses, which were not considered credible witnesses in court. There were strong suspicions, but they had not yet been proven. There was material evidence, but the negligence of the police officers and the inspector was retaliated against.
Horn was thus able to rely solely on his knowledge of forensic medicine. He was convinced that the course of the gunshot canal in the head could prove whether it was a murder or a suicide. The autopsy report showed that the gunshot channel did not go all the way through the head, but first strongly forwards and then slightly upwards.
“It is not possible to determine from what distance the weapon was used, whether from a distance of a few centimetres or from a greater distance. The position of the wound suggests suicide,” the autopsy report concludes. What Horn did not know was that, regardless of the autopsy report, the doctors who tried to save Bertha Merrett’s life were convinced that it was murder. There were no signs of burns or blackening caused by gunpowder particles on her wound. These signs have been observed in other cases of suicide and would have been observed in her case if they had existed.
At that time, almost none of the forensic experts dealt with the actual firearms used in the crime. Only Sidney Smith, working in Cairo in 1917, was convinced that in cases where the distance of the shot from the victim was being determined, the shot should be repeated in the laboratory with the same weapon and the same ammunition as used in the crime. He knew from experience that it was imperative to use the same weapon and ammunition, and not just similar weapons and arbitrary ammunition of the same calibre.
It was on the basis of the burns and gunpowder residue left by gunshot that he found that each weapon leaves different traces on the victim. When Smith arrived in England, he suggested to the examining magistrate, Horne, that he should make test shots from Donald Merritt’s pistol. Comparison of the gunshot marks showed that Bertha Merritt had been murdered. This was also confirmed by the line of the gunshot channel.
In early February 1927, the trial of Donald Merritt begins. He was assisted in his defence by Dr Spilsbury, the most famous forensic expert. He also presented evidence similar to that of the prosecution. He made comparison shots with the original gun, but not with the same ammunition, so of course there were differences in the traces. But who knew at the time that the same ammunition that Donald Merritt used should have been used? So he was found guilty of cheque forgery and acquitted of murder because there was not enough evidence to prove it.
In February 1954, the body of a man who came to Germany with British troops after the end of World War II was found in a forest near Cologne, West Germany. Here he was involved in the black market and other illicit businesses. His name was Roland Chesney, but his real name was Donald Merritt. After serving a prison sentence for forging cheques, he inherited £50,000 from his grandfather. He married a 17-year-old girl who quickly moved away from him, although they were never officially separated.
He quickly spent his inheritance, then made a living by stealing, cheating and extortion. When the black market in Germany ended in 1950, he remembered that his wife, whom he had not seen for many years, also had some assets that would go to him after her death. With a forged passport, he went to England and drowned his wife in the bathtub. But his mother-in-law surprised him, so he killed her in a savage fight. But he left enough clues that Scotland Yard was soon on his trail. He saw the noose around his neck tightening and there was no way out, so he shot himself. Before that, he confessed to friends that he had shot his mother more than 25 years earlier.
All this has led researchers to study the consequences of firearms crime more seriously. While it was once thought that fatal injuries were caused by shots to the heart, certain parts of the head, the abdomen and the lungs, research into the nervous system has led to the realisation that even seemingly innocuous gunshot wounds can cause fatal shock due to irritation of the autonomic nervous system. On the question of how the severely wounded can continue to be able to function for some time, the realisation has become established that the body’s gunshot canals do not normally run in a straight line, but in an uneven line. Thus, the study of gunshot wounds slowly moved away from crude microscopic observations towards detailed chemical and physical analysis.
Forensic medicine has become a major science in a single century. Importantly, it has had to adapt constantly to the ever-accelerating development of criminal and social problems on the one hand, and to the development of medicine on the other. Since its earliest beginnings, forensic medicine has learned two things: to fight and to adapt constantly.
