In 1887, two of the most famous detective characters of all time, the figments of a writer’s imagination, Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion Dr Watson, were first introduced to a small readership in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. That Sherlock Holmes appeared at the same time as Alphonse Bertillon was laying the foundations of scientific criminology in Paris is, at first sight, a coincidence. Arthur Conan Doyle, the 27-year-old doctor who waited in vain for patients in Southsea, wrote stories to pass the time and did not know Bertillon, nor was he connected with Scotland Yard. His Holmes was simply a private detective who had no appreciation for the work of other crime officers.
However, Sherlock Holmes’ career had the same roots as scientific crime fiction. It was the belief of the time that all of life’s problems could be solved through rigorous thinking, scientific reasoning and natural science. Thus Holmes became the literary herald of a particular branch of criminology-forensics, which we might call the search for traces of crime.
It was a time when solving murders was almost all about one question – how to find the killer. Someone was accused of a crime, perhaps months after the event, and an examination of his clothes revealed brownish stains. What caused them? Dirt, rust, fruit or blood? Sherlock Holmes was a man who knew the right answers to these questions.
But that was only the first problem Holmes encountered. His scientific research world was much bigger. He was also an expert in chemistry, mineralogy and poisons, he knew the human body and firearms, he knew all about fabrics, he used a magnifying glass to discover clues that others had overlooked.
Sherlock Holmes stories have been read by policemen, police inspectors, detectives and ordinary people, imagining they had the same abilities as him. Sherlock Holmes books were printed and reprinted again and again.
The stories drag on, and so in 1893 – just as a writing-weary Conan Doyle was plunging his hero to his death in the abyss of Reichenbach – a book was published that was a far cry from the literary adventures, but which nevertheless followed the ideas of the early Holmes. It was called A Manual for Investigating Judges, written by Hans Gross, who was a judge in Graz, then an Austro-Hungarian city.
He was a man of practice who sought new ways to solve criminal cases. In his book, he talked a lot about anthropometry, forensic medicine, poisons and firearms, blood traces, and information on microscopy, mineralogy, zoology and botany – things that one might encounter in the investigation of serious crimes.
The book says, among other things, “Dirt on boots or other clues, such as where the perpetrator last wore boots, often tell us more than other investigations.”
The book was soon reissued and the time was ripe for the concrete realisation of Conan Doyle’s visions. In 1907, Gross’s book was reprinted for the fifth time and soon received its first concrete response to its usefulness from a remote part of south-western Germany, not far from the Kaiserslautern, where small villages are scattered among fields, hills and forests. The crime was important because a little earth on a pair of shoes betrayed the criminal, and this is exactly the way Hans Gross imagined solving cases a few years ago.
Earth on your shoes
On Thursday 29 May 1908, Margarethe Filbert took advantage of a free afternoon to take the train from Rockenhausen, where she was a housekeeper for a builder, to Winnweiler station, from where she intended to walk home. The route would take her through the valley, past the village and the ruins of Falkenstein Castle, and she would have to return to her workplace by the same route.
The next evening she was still not back in Rockenhausen, so the Gendarmerie went on a search operation and checked the surrounding area. The body was not found until the next day in the afternoon. It was lying on a gentle slope 50 metres from the footpath, with a skirt over its head and leaves covering the lower part of the body. When the skirt was lifted off the victim, the head was missing and the victim’s handbag was also missing.
In the evening, the scene and the body were examined by a public prosecutor, a judge and a doctor. The case was taken over by Prosecutor Sohn, who had read Gross’s book “Handbook for Investigating Judges” some time ago. The next morning, a local photographer took photographs of the corpse. The autopsy showed that Margarethe Filbert had been strangled first and then beheaded, but it could not be established whether she had been raped, so her organs were sent to the forensic institute in Würzburg.
A search for suspicious persons is launched in the village of Falkenstein. Very soon, Andreas Schlicher, a factory worker and mine foreman, was suspected of being a perjurer. He was also heavily in debt, ugly and violent, and had a quick temper. He was questioned but denied guilt. No blood was found on his clothes or on the knife. When the villagers were questioned about him, the investigators quickly realised that they were afraid of him. Only a villager from a neighbouring village who was picking mushrooms in the forest heard cries for help, but even she could not say more.
The tracking dog searched the ground in various places to find the missing head, but found nothing except a few pieces of flesh with hair that could have come from the missing head. Prosecutor Sohn was in a quandary. He looked in the Manual for Investigating Judges, but even there he could not find a sensible answer. As he was leafing through the handbook, a leaf fell out of it, actually an article from the Frankfurter Zeitung, which he himself had put in there some years ago.
He spoke about the chemist Dr George Popp, who solved several complex cases in rather unusual ways. In one case, he photographed fingerprints left by a criminal on a dress, and in another, he got a landlord to confess to murdering a maid on the basis of dirt on his handkerchief. The public prosecutor, Sohn, called him in immediately and the next day sent him pieces of flesh and hair and all the parts of the unfortunate victim’s dress to examine.
Dr Popp co-owned a chemical laboratory, which dealt with chemical analyses of various kinds, including “criminal-technical investigations, handwriting analyses and microscopy”. He had successes and failures, but the failures did not discourage him, he always wanted to do and discover something new.
His passion was criminology. He started with blood and poison tests, and when news of the use of fingerprints for identification came from London at the turn of the century, he took up dactyloscopy.
He replied to the State Prosecutor Sohn as soon as he received the letter. The hair on the dress was female and may have been the victim’s hair, he reported, the hair on the flesh parts was animal, probably mole, and not related to the murder, no fingerprints were found, but a lot of horse hair was found.
Schlicher was arrested and his house was again searched in detail, from the cellar to the attic, and his clothes and shoes, which he was wearing on the day of the murder and which have now been cleaned and carefully put away in a closet, were also searched. But they found nothing incriminating.
At the hearing, Schlicher claimed that he had never left his house after 4 pm on the fateful day and that he did not know Margarethe Filbert. The police searched his house again and again found nothing suspicious. They noticed the suspect’s shoes with some soil on the heels, but since there was no blood, they put them back in the closet. The soil residue on the shoes seemed insignificant to them.
Dr Popp then joined the investigation from a distance and suggested that the defendant’s fingernails be clipped and sent to him. He examined the nails and noticed human blood under them. Meanwhile, the police were still searching for the severed head of the unfortunate Filbert, and their investigation led them to the ruins of Falkenstein Castle, which was often used by vagrants as an occasional shelter. In the castle’s underground rooms, they found a tin box with empty cartridges and a wrapper containing a black blouse and a pair of men’s trousers. All of these belonged to the accused and his wife and were intended to prove that Schlicher had been involved in blood libel.
Investigating Judge Sohn was slowly losing patience when Dr Popp informed him that he had found traces of human blood on Sclicher’s trousers. He then examined the defendant’s shoes, which had been sent to him in the hope that the soil residue on the shoes would be identical to the soil residue on Margarethe Filbert’s shoes, proving that they had met on the fateful day.
At first glance, Dr Popp’s method of investigating soil remains seemed flawed, but it contained all the elements of future criminal investigations. These took into account that soil is also a living organism, constantly changing due to mineral conditions, weathering and soil microbes.
It took several weeks to establish the composition of the soil on the shoes at the time of the murder, which proved his presence at the crime scene, by taking a number of soil samples from Schlicher’s surroundings and comparing them with the soil residue on the shoes. The soil residue on the shoes also proved that Schlicher had changed the trousers he was wearing at the time of the murder in the ruins of Falkenstein Castle.
Schlicher denied everything, but was sentenced to death at his trial and later commuted to life imprisonment. Only then did he confess to being Margarethe Filbert’s killer. “The chemists were right when they found out where I was walking.” He murdered her to rob her, but when he realised the senselessness of his action, he panicked and cut off the head of the murdered woman, burying her and hiding her blood-stained trousers in the castle ruins.
Dr Popp described the importance of the forensic investigation of traces of earth remains only ten years later in the journal Archives of Criminology, founded by the now deceased Gross. He then passed on his knowledge to future criminologists, becoming a full-time lecturer in criminology at the University of Frankfurt.
Traces of dust mean data
But as important as Gross and Popov’s contribution to the development of modern criminology was, the idea of a scientific study of crime traces appeared in different places and in different cases at the time. The first of these was in the field of hair investigation. In fact, the idea of tracking hair and assessing it forensically was already several hundred years old. However, it was not until 1863 that a German doctor described a case of forensic hair examination in connection with the six murders of a miller’s family. Three bloody axes were found in the vicinity of the murders, and the remains of the hair were found on the axes.
Microscopic examination of the hair revealed that it is human hair of different colours; black, light and brownish. All of them were the hair of the victims, which was determined on the basis of the thickness of the hair, its length and its colour. This was the first time that the police had demonstrated the method of forensic hair analysis to a curious audience at a court hearing, using six microscopes.
At that time, hair examination became a popular procedure in forensic medicine. When Hofmann, the founder of the Vienna School of Forensic Medicine, published his manual of forensic medicine at the turn of the century, he devoted a special chapter to hair analysis. It was now clear that each hair is made up of three parts; the root, the trunk and the tip. But the trunk is also made up of three parts; the outer surface, that is, the scales, which lie like roof tiles on top of each other. Underneath this is the cortex, where the cells with yellow, brownish, dark brown or black pigments that give the hair its colour are located. The midline is the central part of the hair, in fact its axis, and is often missing in men’s hair. It is made up of small cells with air spaces between them.
All this allows the forensic scientist to determine quickly enough whether the hair is human or animal. When the remains of human hair were found, the first thing the CSI had to do was to determine whether they belonged to a man or a woman. Is it hair from the head or chin or is it pubic hair. In an era when women generally had long hair, this was easy to determine, given the length of the hair. Men’s hair was short and they were known to cut it with scissors. It was more difficult to determine whether the hair had been pulled out, torn or fallen out, or whether it had been removed by some other violent act.
Even in 1909, it was sometimes very difficult to prove that a hair belonged to a particular person, despite all the necessary information, because hair had many other characteristics that varied from person to person. Forensic hair examination was only relevant at that time if it could rule out an identity due to significant differences in hair composition and alert investigators that they were on the wrong track.
As the criminal investigations into the hair slowly progressed, in Lyon, in the south of France, a young researcher’s long-held dream came true. Twenty-three-year-old Edmond Locard was a pupil of the well-known criminologist Alexandre Lacasasgne, who had spent his early career as a military doctor in North Africa, where he became well acquainted with the intersections between medicine, crime and criminology. When he later took over the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Lyon, he soon became well known throughout the south of France.
He wanted to develop forensic methods that were far more advanced than the perception of forensic research at the time. He was convinced that forensic investigation could tell a great deal about people, their occupation and the crime scene, including the dust that clung to clothes, the face, nose and nails, other parts of the body and footwear.
As a schoolboy, Edmond Locard read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Gross’s books on forensic medicine. The notion that every person, whether a thief, burglar, murderer or car crash perpetrator, would leave small traces of dust or dirt at the scene that Holmes could identify at a glance was forever etched in his mind.
He became so obsessed with finding criminals by following clues at crime scenes that he set out on a journey to see what others knew. In 1909, he visited criminologists in Paris, London, Rome, Brussels, New York and Chicago.
He returned home disappointed. Apart from occasional attempts to use footprints and shoeprints on broken doors or broken glass in laboratory analysis, there was no indication that these traces were being seriously dealt with and used as evidence elsewhere in the world. He dreamt of having his own laboratory within the police force for the forensic examination of these traces.
But Edmond Locard in Lyon was met with nothing but a shrug of the shoulders. Police investigations in the south of France were then in the hands of the prefects of the departments and the mayors of the towns. Le Sureté Nationale, now separate from the Paris police and directly subordinate to the interior ministry, increasingly took over the most difficult police investigations throughout France from 1907 onwards. With the increasing number of criminal gangs moving freely throughout France, it also set up its own mobile brigade, which was deployed wherever it was needed.
But Locard did not give in. Through personal acquaintances, he persuaded the Prefect of the Lyon department to give him two dark attic rooms and two assistants in the Palais de Justice in 1910. This was the beginning of what was later to become known as the Lyon Police Laboratory. The uninviting surroundings did not deter Locard from his idea, and in his first two years he worked on several criminal cases, trying to prove the link between the crime and the perpetrator by means of almost imperceptible traces at the scene of the crime.
The Sureté Nationale had been trying for years to track down counterfeiters of French coins in the Lyon area. Police spies suspected three people were involved, but there was never enough evidence to arrest them, and no one knew where the counterfeiting workshop was. All that was known was that they were made from a mixture of antimony, tin and lead.
Locard obtained the suspects’ clothes and, using a brush and a magnifying glass, managed to remove small, almost invisible pieces of metal. Laboratory tests subsequently revealed that these were residues of antimony, tin and lead. Successful trace trace investigations then followed.
“Dust is all the things that surround us,” Locard argued, and so he investigated dust sedimentation on clothes, shoes, hair, in ears and nasal cavities, on hats, tools, furniture and carpets, in gardens, in the streets. Dusty traces could be found everywhere, providing a mountain of information that he could then link to the crime.
“Road mud is liquid-soaked dust, and dirt is dust soaked in dried greasy particles.” For him, dust particles were the alpha and omega of all police research. In the early years of his work, he had only a microscope, a small spectral apparatus and containers for chemical analysis at his disposal in the laboratory. With this modest equipment, he developed a real system for classifying traces according to different criteria.
After 1920, however, Locard was no longer the only one working on the systematisation of dust traces. Following his example, it was also taken up in the Netherlands, in Berlin and even in California, the cradle of American criminology. The ingenious Americans used very practical household appliances such as hairdryers and vacuum cleaners to collect traces of dust.
The dust trace method has thus become a common tool for a large part of the criminal police force. Its success was largely due to an event that kept the whole of Paris in suspense in 1924 and which occupied an unforgettable place in the annals of criminology.
Package in the Bologna Forest
Like many other affairs, this one started with a package and an unidentified dead man. On 8 June 1924, in the early hours of the morning, a walker in the Bologna forest noticed a large curve a few metres from the road. As he approached it, he saw that two legs and one arm were sticking out of it. Terrified, he ran away and informed the forest guard.
Inspector Bethuel arrived, opened the wrapping, which was actually a blanket, and found the body of a 60-year-old man with severe head injuries. His shirt showed signs of coal, so the inspector assumed that the body had been lying in the coal cellar for some time and had only been brought to the Bologna Forest later.
The body was taken to the morgue, where forensic expert Dr Paul, who carried out a very routine autopsy, found head injuries allegedly caused by a wooden stick.
Inspector Bethuel, meanwhile, was checking the lists of missing persons and was convinced that the body belonged to Louis Boulay, who had been missing since 30 May 1924. The case was then taken over by the 1st Police Brigade, known as the “Brigade criminelle”, which dealt only with important cases. Gaston Bayle, who was in charge of the police’s identification service and had already become familiar with the achievements and developments in spectral analysis, including ultraviolet rays, was also brought in.
These take on special properties as soon as they are isolated from light rays and used to illuminate different objects. For example, colours as seen in normal light take on very different shades when exposed to ultraviolet light. Thus, it is possible to re-read old ancient texts underneath them, which medieval monks, to save themselves expensive parchment, erased with water and sand and then re-wrote the blank pages.
Bayle used the process of spectral photometry, which was based on the recognition that the intensity of light directed through different goods varies, and that these variations are characteristic of each type of good. This is how Bayle found himself in the morgue in front of the corpse of Louis Boulay and began to use tweezers to remove small particles of coal, stones, grains of sand and sawdust from his hair. He also took the deceased’s clothes to the laboratory, examined them carefully and removed all traces of coal, sand and other dirt. He knew that the hardest work was yet to come.
Meanwhile, the police approached the deceased’s widow, but it turned out that she was only interested in the household. The company, which dealt mainly in cheques and barter, had nothing specific to say about the deceased, Louis Boulay, who worked there. He was an old, conscientious and, above all, honest man.
But on the murder victim’s desk, the inspector came across an old newspaper, open on the page where the horse-racing bets were placed. Two of the bets were circled in red pencil. Boulay had bet small sums of money only a few times, but had never hit anything and had been ridiculed by his colleagues for it. Only the inspector thought this trace was important. With Boulay’s photograph, he began visiting neglected pubs and bars in the suburbs where horse bets were collected and illegal profits paid out by people who did not have an official licence to do such things.
In a bar near the train station, the owner recognised Boulay as “Father Louis”, who was a regular guest and listener to discussions about horse racing. He accepted bets from others and cleared the profits from the horse bets after the races were over. He never cheated anyone, but where he took the money from the bets and who he was connected to, no one knew.
Gaston Bayle, Head of Identification, has already informed the police of the results of the tests on the traces on the murder victim’s clothes. The traces he removed from the deceased’s clothes contained quartz crystal, silica, dust particles from rock probably from grinding larger pieces, wood dust belonging to pine and oak, and small, rodent-like animals without claws, which suggested that they could only evolve and live in total darkness. The microbes on the clothes were the same as those found in wine cellars where wine is aged.
All this gave no clue as to where the body was before it was brought to the forest. But it was precisely this information that could be linked. Money for bets on horse races might have been accepted and paid in a cellar, the investigators concluded. Thus began the second phase of the investigation. Arrests of illegal horse-betting organisers began to be made and one of them recalled hearing Boulet whisper to a Tessier: “We’re going to get rid of a man in Mogador Street and I don’t like it.”
Tessier was soon arrested with a pocket full of betting slips. He remembered Louis Boulay, or as he was known, “Daddy Louis”, but he did not know what had happened to him. Tessier was known as a cheat and a swindler who did not pay out promised winnings on horse betting. Could it be that ‘Daddy Louis’ had demanded that he pay him the money he owed his customers and Tessier, who no longer had the money, simply killed him?
Gaston Bayle from the Identification Service went to Tessier’s cellar with the police. Bayle immediately noticed that the floor was made of a mixture of sawdust, coal, sand and other materials. There was also a large coal bin, on which he noticed the same pattern of colours as he had found on the millimetre-long remains on the murder victim’s clothes. He put all traces of the dust samples in special bags, took them to his laboratory and began his investigations.
A few days later, he reported to the police that the samples from the cellar matched exactly the samples he had taken from the murder victim’s clothes. Bayle went to Tessier’s cellar again and searched it. He illuminated the stairs to the cellar with an acetylene lamp and noticed a colour stain which concealed something. He scratched at the new paint and noticed something brownish underneath, which could have been blood. The petrol test confirmed this. But whose blood was it?
Finally, Tessier’s neighbour, who had returned from a trip, turned himself in to the police. He had heard about Tessier’s arrest, went to the police and told them that there was a small cellar under the stairs, in fact a room from which there had recently been a strong, sweet sound. This cellar was just big enough to squeeze a man’s corpse into. It was completely dark, so that the cellar walls could have lived in it, full of coal dust, sawdust, the smell of wine barrels and other residues.
There was ample evidence of guilt. On 13 December 1925, the court sentenced Tessier to ten years’ imprisonment. Who else was involved in the murder was never found out, nor was the real motive for the crime, as Tessier remained stubbornly silent.
Dust and small residue analysis has thus seen an upsurge, pushing the old methods of investigation into decline. For Bayle, neither dirt nor cleanliness existed. For him, everything was merely forensic material to prove or disprove guilt. Bayle enjoyed his success for only half a decade, appearing in court and using his evidence to confirm or deny the guilt of the accused. Sometimes he made mistakes, but he rarely admitted it. And he ended up miserable and undeserved.
On 16 September 1929, three shots rang out inside the Palais de Justice in Paris. Staff and judges came running from nearby offices to see a small figure lying on the stairs leading to the Institute of Identification. Blood was pouring from her chest and eyes. It was Bayle and he was dead. A passer-by in the street pointed to the murderer, who was trying to escape.
He was caught and immediately confessed: “Yes, I shot Mr Bayle. I am not crazy. I came here to kill him because he caused me a lot of damage with his expert opinion. My name is Emile Philipponet …”
Whether or not Bayle showed weaknesses in the last years of his life, when he was basking in the glory that had gone to his head, he did not deserve such an end.
Plane in wreckage
Forensic techniques developed particularly rapidly after the end of the Second World War and helped to establish the field of forensic chemistry in 1949, but it was only in this case that it came into its full expression. On 9 September 1949, Patrick Simard, an eel hunter from the Canadian hamlet of Cochon on the north shore of the St Lawrence River, was heading home when he heard the roar of an aircraft engine. It was a Quebec Airways DC-3, flying north, as it does three times a week, always at the same time, 11.45 sharp.
Then there was another explosion and Simard noticed that something had flown out of the fuselage. The aircraft then made a sharp left turn and crashed on the slope of Cap Tourmente. Simard started to run towards the crash site and spent an hour fighting his way through thick bushes. When he arrived, all he found was wreckage and motionless human bodies. Soon, a few more forest workers arrived.
The plane fell to the ground almost vertically, its wings broke off and the smell of leaking jet fuel spread around. Twenty-three people died, including three crew members, a flight attendant and a child. Simard rushed to the railway line and met some of the workers there and told them what had happened. They rushed to a nearby station and informed the authorities in Queebec.
Queebec Airways was a subsidiary of the umbrella organisation Canadian Pacific Airlines, which has not had an accident since 1942. The DC-3 was considered to be extremely safe and the pilot, Laurin, one of the most experienced pilots. A Board of Inquiry was immediately set up and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were informed.
The Commission did not reach the wreck until late in the evening and began its work by torchlight. The plane was not engulfed in fire when it crashed and the bodies were quickly identified. A hole was seen in the left front part of the fuselage, and it was assumed that this was the place where the explosion had occurred. Three engines were still running when the aircraft went down.
Initially, it was thought that the explosion was caused by material that should not have been on board. Could someone have deliberately left some explosive material in the baggage compartment? Was it out of murderous desire, revenge, jealousy, hatred or a desire to collect an insurance payout? The Criminal Investigation Police have taken the case into their own hands.
Canada has had a centrally organised national police force since 1949, which has evolved into an elite organisation called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It was the specific features of Canada’s development that necessitated such an organisation. In 1873, the law of might prevailed in the vast prairie areas of Canada, which were inhabited mainly by Indians and mixed-race people of French descent.
The following year, 300 selected police officers on horseback set out on a historic journey from Ontario to the Rocky Mountains on behalf of the Canadian government to establish police stations. They were dressed in the red uniforms of the British Army, which later became their trademark. In the following decades, when gold deposits were discovered along the Yukon River, the Mounties were the only force that kept order, albeit with great difficulty.
By the turn of the century, their reputation had become so well established that individual Canadian states disbanded their criminal police forces, and Mounties took over their duties across Canada. Only major cities such as Ontario and Quebec still retained their own police forces. Thus, in 1949, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which was divided into 12 divisions, was considered the most highly trained police force in the world. Red uniforms were still worn only at ceremonies and horses had long since been replaced by cars. Their divisions already had pathologists, firearms experts, chemists and forensic laboratories.
The crash of the DC-3 was a violation of federal law and the Mounties were assigned to the case, but because of the sometimes tense relations between the English-speaking and French-speaking areas of Quebec, they had to work with the Quebec City police. The first and most important task was to collect all the remains of the plane, which were scattered far and wide, and to look for signs of the explosives and bomb fragments that had caused the crash.
The first thing they noticed was that the passengers included three New Yorkers, all businessmen. The accident insurance checks were within normal limits and did not stand out in any way. There was also no indication that anyone wanted to get rid of their life partner in the accident, and all the relatives who were informed of the accident and the death of their relatives behaved as other people would behave in such cases.
But Inspector Bélec knew that in such cases, people are capable of incredible feigning. So it was necessary to check everyone who had sent or received parcels delivered by DC-3.
A town 90 miles from Quebec City was notified that someone had dropped off a parcel that was heavier than the parcels they normally send by air. It was significant that the sender of the parcel was to be one Delphis Bouchard and the recipient was to be Alfred Piouffe in Bai Comeau. However, both the sender and the recipient of the parcel were unknown at their addresses.
Then the receptionist remembered that the parcel had been delivered by a larger woman with black hair, but she didn’t stand out in any way. A taxi driver from Yellow Cabs in Quebec then came forward and said that he had taken the unidentified French-speaking woman to the airport with the package and then returned with her back to the city to the Chateau Frontenac hotel.
An investigation into the life paths of the dead passengers alerted Inspector Bélec to a certain Albert Guay, husband of Rita Guay, who was among the deceased. He was still young, the father of a family and the owner of a small jewellery shop.
On 24 June 1949, he was imprisoned by the police for illegal possession of a revolver. But his arrest was not without a spicy aftertaste. He had threatened a plump waitress in a café with a revolver. She called the police and Guay was detained in jail for one night. Inspector Bélec wondered whether the waitress might be the person who had dropped off the package at the airport.
She was questioned and confessed that she had been seeing the intruder Alberto Guay for two years and now just wanted to live in peace and never see him again. It is possible, she added, that Guay was also seeing her friend Marguerite Pitre.
Meanwhile, Canadian newspapers have been full of speculation about who was responsible for the crash. And of course, journalists have also picked up the story of the unusual package on board. All of this could have tipped off the perpetrator and made the investigation more difficult.
A search through Alberto Guay’s life revealed that his wife Rita knew about his fence jumping and was convinced that the matter would eventually resolve itself. On the morning of 9 September, before she left for the airport, Guay said a very fond farewell to her. But all this was not enough to raise anything more than vague suspicions.
The Montreal Forensic Science Laboratory is still working on the wreckage of the DC-3. At that time, the use of chemistry in the investigation of explosive crimes was still in its infancy. Europe had known black gunpowder for centuries, then, before World War I, the highly explosive nitroglycerine, dynamite and, later, nitropent, hexogen and TNT were added to the mix. But it was not until 1910, after a series of bombings, that the criminal police began to distinguish between the different types of explosives.
The Criminal Investigation Division was convinced that the DC-3 explosion was timed to occur when the aircraft should have been flying over the wide St. Lawrence River. If this were the case, the wreckage of the aircraft would have disappeared into the deep and tarry wide river and there would have been nothing left to investigate. However, due to a five-minute delay in departure, the plane fell into a wooded area rather than into the river.
Examination of the duraluminium parts of the boot revealed that the otherwise smooth sheet metal was corrugated and yellowish in colour after the explosion. Every explosion produces gases. In the case of gunpowder, these develop slowly and traces of fire are visible. In the case of an explosion caused by nitroglycerine, however, an enormous pressure develops immediately and spreads outwards, followed by very intense heat.
The DC-3 was found to have been caused by an explosive made from a nitro compound. The type of nitro explosive was still unclear. The addition of various admixtures to nitro compounds had produced very different effects. The biggest problem was that these admixtures simply dissolved when the explosion occurred and it was almost impossible to determine the true composition of the explosive.
But some traces on the wreckage only proved that the designers had used 10 lb. of D-1 dynamite gelatine. This type of explosive cannot be made at home, but can be bought illegally or stolen. Small blue metal fragments belonging to the battery of a special detonator were also found in a tree near the downed aircraft.
Inspector Bélec has now turned his investigation to another friend of Guy’s, Marguerite Pitre, who had not received much attention until then. He discovered that she had worked at the Arsenal with Guay during the war and had borrowed money from him. Her brother was a watchmaker and did small repairs for Guay. Perhaps he was the one who made the mechanism to trigger the explosives?
They found the taxi driver who was taking the woman with the parcel to the airport and identified her as Marguerite Pitre. When the police arrested her, she immediately knew why she had been arrested and confessed in tears under pressure. She said that she had borrowed money from Guy and then he blackmailed her and forced her to become his mistress. At the same time, Guay was having an affair with an underage girl aged 16.
He forced her to take in a minor who had run away from her parents as a lodger and told her that he needed dynamite to remove tree stumps for a client. Marguerite was the one who procured, drove and delivered the dynamite package to the plane, not knowing that her lover’s wife, Rita Guay, was also on board.
After the crash of the DC-3, Guay came to her and urged her to commit suicide, saying that the police would soon find out who had dropped off the package at the airport. He forced her to take a large quantity of sleeping pills, which she ate, but she survived because her brother rescued her in time.
When arrested, Albert Guay denied everything and described Marguerite Pitre’s testimony as a fabrication. But this did little to help him when Marguerite’s brother confessed that Albert Guay had asked him to make him a small detonator. The dynamite was triggered by a finite electric current after the hand of the watch had touched the trigger at a specific time.
The jury in the Canadian court quickly reached a verdict of guilty. While in prison awaiting the death sentence, Albert Guay wrote a 14-page letter explaining the details of his intent. He died in February 1951, not knowing that his brother Marguerite Pitre, who had made the detonator, would follow him to his death in 1952, and Marguerite Pitre in 1953.
Two years later, in 1955, the Chicago-based professional journal Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science published an extensive report detailing the scientific side of the case, analysing the procedures that led to the identification of the explosives used in the DC-3 crash. This accident has demonstrated the importance of laboratory investigations of explosive residue traces.
A few years later, another case – thousands of kilometres away – confirmed the importance of laboratory testing for traces.
Hit the lottery
Bondi was considered a holiday paradise on the Pacific coast of Australia. It wasn’t as glitzy as Florida, but it did have a number of fish and chips restaurants along its sandy shores. In the summer of 1960, 20,000 Australians, immigrants, clerks, taxi drivers, labourers and other honest residents lived here.
Among them was the inconspicuous Thorne couple. Basil Thorne worked in a travel agency and his wife Freda Thorne was a housewife. They had two sons, eight-year-old Graeme attended the local Scots College. The family’s life would have continued uneventfully for years had it not been for Basil’s discovery on 1 June 1960 that a lottery ticket he had bought for three pounds had hit the jackpot of 100,000 Australian pounds.
On 7 July at 9am, a neighbour, Phyllis Smith, turned up at the Thorns’ house in her car to take Graeme and her son to school as usual. However, Graeme was due to leave home at 8am and his mother was convinced that he had arranged another mode of transport to school. But because he had not arrived at school, the mother – the father was on a business trip – called the police in Bondi.
When she arrived, the phone was ringing and a foreign-accented voice said it was demanding £25,000 to release Graeme that day. “If the money is not forthcoming, your son and I will feed the sharks,” the voice finished menacingly.
The case was immediately handed over to the New South Wales Criminal Investigation Branch and Lieutenant Freeman took over, unaware that the kidnapping would keep the entire Australian police force busy for months.
Unlike Canada, Australia did not have a police force similar to Canada’s. A Commonwealth Police Force was set up in 1957, but it operated in the Northern Territory, a vast territory with a population of only 30,000 and few police stations linked only by aircraft and radio links and camel patrols. Otherwise, the police and the Special Criminal Police were a matter for each Australian state.
The first police units were initially partly made up of convicts sent by England to its colony of Australia from 1788 to 1868. For decades, the police history of New South Wales was filled with night patrols involving “well-behaved” prisoners as police officers. This, of course, degenerated into widespread disorder, so much so that in 1828, 75 policemen had to be dismissed for various misdemeanours and felonies. It was not until 1862 that order, occasionally disturbed by criminals such as Frank Gardiner, who robbed a shipment of gold that year, was restored in the province with the formation of the ‘bush rangers’.
But when Inspector Freeman entered the Thorne house on 7 July 1960, he had no experience of kidnapping. Dozens of police cars immediately gathered around the house and officers began searching the surrounding area. This violated the basic principle of criminology that police intervention should be as discreet as possible. The Americans knew very well that kidnappers only let their victims go if they feel safe. Otherwise, the abductee is almost certainly dead, as this saves the perpetrators from a dangerous witness.
Basil Thorne, who was on a business trip, learned of his son’s abduction from the newspapers, which immediately ran a story. In fact, all Sidney talked about was the kidnapping and theories were bandied about. The police had almost complete control of hotels, bridges, buses, railway stations, ports and airports.
A policeman was also on duty at the Thornes’ phone when the kidnapper called again the next evening, asked Freda Thorne if she had any money ready and, after a positive answer, demanded that she put it in two bags. He then disconnected the call. At that point, disagreements began between the police and the Thornes, who wanted as little interference as possible in the dealings with the kidnappers.
Then, a homeless man looking for empty bottles in a container found a school bag, which the parents identified as their child’s. 200 agents immediately arrived in the area, brought tracking dogs, cordoned off the area and started to fly over it with helicopters. Two days later, the boy’s cap, raincoat and school notebooks were discovered a short distance away. The newspapers were now reporting nothing but this kidnapping.
The information that the kidnapper spoke with a foreign accent made people suspicious of all strangers, and they were afraid to say unbelievable things to divert suspicion away from themselves. To Inspector Freeman, there was only one piece of information that seemed important. At 8.32 on 7 July, a pedestrian walking along the road leading to the school thought that a 1955 Ford car parked strangely was suspicious. Police checked the details of 5000 cars of this type on Australian roads.
Ten days after the kidnapping, the police were still at the beginning. The CSIs were convinced that the kidnappers, who had stopped coming forward, had given up hope of a ransom and that the child was already dead. The kidnapping had caused a national uproar and the police action was so extensive that it already posed a danger to the kidnappers.
On 16 August, two schoolchildren in a thicket 15 kilometres away from Bondi spotted a curve with a head sticking out of it. Police rushed to the scene and found the body of young Graeme wrapped in a blanket. He had apparently been murdered, strangled in fact, shortly after his abduction.
The police did not know how to proceed. They found the body in one place, but the school bag and other belongings in another. In this helpless state, they could only cling to the traces that the perpetrators might have left on the child’s corpse. By then, the Australian police already had some knowledge of modern forensic science. In 1936, a forensic laboratory was opened in Brisbane, and two years later another in Sydney.
A first forensic examination of the deceased boy’s clothes and other belongings showed that there were many clues. The blanket in which the body was wrapped contained numerous remnants of human hair and animal hair. On the shoes, traces of reddish-coloured soil and mould were visible under a microscope. The scarf and trousers were clinging to the remains of small plants of indeterminate origin, and the woollen socks had a microscopic layer of some kind of fat.
The University of Sydney, the Faculty of Medicine, the Museum of Geology and Mining and the Textiles Department of the University of New South Wales were all asked to analyse these remains in more detail, as they had experts in each field.
In the seven decades since the literature encountered Sherlock Holmes’ crime scene plant particle research, this branch of forensic science has made great strides. The results of the forensic investigation have been astonishing. The human hair on the boy’s corpse belonged to three people, while the animal hair, due to its reddish colour, most probably belonged to a Pekingese dog. The mould culture on the shoes came from four types of mould. One species was yellowish in colour and was found to be the mould Aspergillus repens, which thrives only on moist soil and in complete dormancy, and only for a certain period of time, as its spores take three weeks to develop.
All of this pointed to Graeme being murdered immediately after his abduction. But that did not help to find his killers. The first tangible clues came from the Geology and Mining Museum, where reddish soil residues were analysed. This soil contained clay, brownish paint residues and plant fibres, but mostly reddish calcareous sand grains. This material was used in Australia during the construction of simple single-family houses to treat the basement walls on the ground floor of the buildings. More importantly, the discovery of which plant species the particles found on the clothes of the murdered man belonged to. Most of the remains were from two different species of cypress trees that grow along roadsides.
The police searched the road leading to the school where the missing child had disappeared, looking for a house in front of which similar cypress trees were growing and the walls of the cellar had been treated with reddish limestone granules. The search was fruitless until a postman alerted them to the existence of a similar house in a nearby village, only two kilometres from where the body was found.
Two plain-clothes police officers walked along the road past the house, saw that the information matched and informed their superiors. The list of occupants of the house showed that the current tenants had only moved in in September and were therefore of no interest to the police.
More interesting were the tenants of the house who lived here before. At that time, the house was occupied for six months by the immigrant family of Stephan Leslie Bradley, his wife Magda, their three children and their Pekingese dog. They moved to Australia in 1950 from Hungary. On the day Graeme Thorne disappeared, a removal company lorry turned up outside the house and emptied the house. The sudden eviction seemed suspicious to the owner of the house, who took down the registration number of Bradley’s car.
Police quickly discovered that Bradley had moved to Manly, but was living alone as his wife and children had gone on holiday to Queensland. He was also no longer the owner of the suspicious car, having sold it to an agency that dealt in old cars.
The police found the agency and checked the car. In the boot they found small plant remains of two different species of cypress. The child was either transported in the boot or killed there. In addition, laboratory analysis found that most of the soil and soil types found on the murdered child’s clothes were also found in the boot of the car.
But when the police arrived at his address in Manly, where he had moved, the flat was empty and the building manager said that Bradley had sent him a letter from Melbourne, explaining only that he had had to leave suddenly and would not be back. Bradley was therefore already on the run.
The public blunder by the police, which was revealed in October, that the killer of a child had been leading the police around by the nose for two months and was now likely to escape, has upset the public. Enquiries at travel agencies, car rental companies, shipping companies and housing companies revealed how meticulously Bradley had been planning his escape since 25 August. His wife had booked a boat trip to England with their elder son, and a few days later Bradley booked tickets for himself and their two children on the same boat.
He sold all his furniture and his car, and withdrew his children from school, saying he was moving to another town. He even took care of a Pekingese dog, which was to be brought to London by boat in a few days.
On 26 September, he and his family boarded the Himalaya, which was already off Sri Lanka on 8 October. Australian police issued an arrest warrant for him and asked for the cooperation of the Sri Lankan authorities. Bradley was therefore arrested on landing in Colombo, but the rest of the family was allowed to continue their journey to London.
When the plane with Bradley, accompanied by two Australian detectives, landed in Sydney, he said to them, “I did this thing with young Thorne. What’s going to happen to me now?” He later confirmed this in writing, saying that he wanted to get his hands on the money that Basil Thorne had won in the lottery. He lured the boy into his car and demanded a ransom from a public telephone.
His wife and children had already gone on holiday to Queensland, so he was alone in the house. He tied the child up, taped his mouth shut and put him in the boot of the car. When he opened the boot some time later, he saw that the child had suffocated. In a panic, he wrapped the child in a blanket and drove to the place where he was later found. In March 1961, Bradley, whose real name was Istvan Barayay, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
This case, where modern forensic tracking methods were used to find the culprit, was echoed five years later when Australian Detective Lieutenant Clark wrote one of the most important works in forensic science, Taxonomy and Plant Ecology in the field of forensic science. The more police forces around the world had to deal with scientific problems, the more they turned to forensic science for help.
