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Wedding Corsets Biography
The first trial produced a hung jury; the jurors were so far from agreement that they nearly came to blows in the deliberation room. The following year a retrial was held. Dorsey testified again. And this time Leutgert was found guilty of murdering his wife. Away from the courtroom, Dorsey faced criticism from other anatomists, who jeered at his "identifying a woman from four fragments of bone the size of peas" - that he abandoned forensics. But the press coverage had put forensic anthropology on the map.
Mary Ann Cotton
The 19th-century fear of arsenic poisoning first brought toxicology to the forefront of forensic investigation. The French had such trouble with arsenic that they dubbed it poudre de succession (inheritance powder). In England and Wales, there were 98 criminal poisoning trials between 1840 and 1850. Although a reliable test – the Marsh test – had been established in 1838, arsenic was still often used. It was odourless, virtually tasteless – some said it had a slightly sweetish taste – and cheaply available from all manner of shops. The body cannot excrete it, so the heavy, metallic element builds up in the victim's system, mimicking the slow deterioration of a natural disease. Those who digest it suffer a range of symptoms with varying degrees of severity: hypersalivation, abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhoea, dehydration and jaundice can all be a result of arsenical poisoning, often leading doctors to diagnose cholera, dysentery and gastric fever. Intelligent arsenic killers went down the chronic rather than the acute path of administration.
When she was 19, Mary Ann Cotton fell pregnant to a miner called William Mowbray and together they travelled the country looking for work. She gave birth to five children during this time, but four of them died, possibly from natural causes. In 1856, the couple moved back north, where she had three more children, all of whom died of diarrhoea. Her grief didn't prevent her from claiming on the life insurance policies she'd taken out on each of them. Then Mowbray injured his foot in a pit accident and had to convalesce at home. Soon he became ill and was diagnosed with "gastric fever"; he died in January 1865. Mary Ann went down to the office of the Prudential Insurance Company and collected the £30 policy which she had recently encouraged him to take out.
Over the next dozen years, Cotton became the most prolific female serial killer in British history. In 1872, she set her sights on Richard Quick-Mann, a wealthy customs and excise officer. Only her seven-year-old stepson, Charles Cotton, stood in the way. She tried fostering him with one of his uncles but failed. Then she took him to the local workhouse; the superintendent refused him entry unless Cotton accompanied him. All other options having failed, she poisoned Charles. The workhouse superintendent heard about his death and went to the police. The doctor who had attended Charles before he died carried out an autopsy and found no evidence of poison. So the coroner ruled death by natural causes. But the doctor had kept Charles's stomach and intestines and, when he tested them, he discovered the lethal poison.
The bodies of Mary Ann's most recent victims were exhumed and found to contain high levels of arsenic. Under the weight of this evidence and other witness statements, she was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. The story ran in the newspapers for months, and a rhyme was coined that began "Mary Ann Cotton – she's dead and she's rotten". The press knew that their Victorian readers were fascinated by the figure of the female poisoner, exuding loveliness and sweetness, offering her husband a second spoonful of sugar for his tea and then making it a lethal one. More than 90% of convicted spouse murderers in 19th-century Britain were men. But men were far more likely to stab or strangle their wives; twice as many wives as husbands stood trial for poisoning.
Brides in the Bath
By the mid-20th century, forensic scientists had a much higher profile, and some were almost celebrities in their own right. Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the eminent pathologist, was held in reverent esteem by the police and courts. Arthur Conan Doyle, who was somewhat suspicious of Spilsbury, remarked of "the more than papal infallibility with which Sir Bernard is readily being invested by juries".
Spilsbury's most famous case was that of Dr Crippen, the London pharmacist accused of poisoning his wife Cora and burying her torso in the cellar of his home. But his unconventional methods were also vital in another extraordinary case that neither DNA testing nor any other modern forensic technique could have helped him solve.
On 3 January 1915, Charles Burnham, a Buckinghamshire fruit grower, sat down with a mug of tea and opened his copy of the News of the World. On page three, he found a headline "Dead in Bath: Bride's Tragic Fate on Day after Wedding" and a short report explaining that one Margaret Lloyd had been found dead at her flat in north London. Charles Burnham's daughter Alice had also died in a bath, shortly after her wedding almost exactly a year before. Burnham contacted the police, and discovered that Margaret Lloyd's husband was George Joseph Smith, who had previously been married to Alice Burnham.
The police called in Spilsbury to perform an autopsy on the exhumed body of Margaret. He then travelled to Blackpool to autopsy Alice. Following this, the police uncovered details of a third woman, Bessie Williams, who had married George Smith and died in similar circumstances at home in Kent in 1912. When the police investigated anew, they discovered that Smith had benefited financially from all of his wives' deaths, the largest amount from Williams, who had left him £2,500 in trust money (worth around £190,000 today). A pattern was emerging, and the police arrested Smith.
From the bodies of Margaret and Alice, Spilsbury could find no signs of violence, poison or heart attack, though the GP who had first seen Bessie's body noted that she had been clutching a bar of soap. He had all three bath tubs brought to Kentish Town police station, where he lined them up together and examined them minutely. He was particularly puzzled by the case of Bessie Williams. Shortly before her death Smith had taken her to see the doctor about epilepsy symptoms. Smith had told her that she was suffering from fits, even though she couldn't remember having them and had no epilepsy in her family. But Bessie was 5ft 7in tall and obese. The bath tub she had died in measured just five feet at its longest, and sloped at the head end. Spilsbury knew that the first phase of an epileptic fit causes complete rigidity of the body and that, given her size and the shape of the bath, such a fit would have raised Bessie's head above the water rather than brought it below.
Spilsbury researched further and learned that an extremely sudden rush of water into the nose and throat can inhibit a vital cranial nerve, the vagus nerve, and cause sudden loss of consciousness, swiftly followed by death. A common subsidiary result is instant rigor mortis – which Spilsbury thought explained the bar of soap clenched in Bessie's fist. Armed with this knowledge, the investigating officer, Detective Inspector Neil, decided to carry out a series of experiments before the trial. The first volunteer stepped into a full bath, clad in a bathing costume, and managed to grip the side of the bath and struggle. But when Neil grasped her ankles and abruptly pulled her legs up, she slid under the water and lost consciousness. It took a doctor several minutes to restore her to consciousness; she was lucky to live. But the police had their answer.
Smith, a predatory conman with a penchant for gold rings and brightly coloured bow ties, was tried for the murder of Williams. At the trial, Spilsbury spoke with great authority. The jury deliberated for 20 minutes before finding Smith guilty. Public interest in the "Brides in the Bath Murders" was intense. Scores of journalists, hungry for a "scientist foils serial killer" headline, doorstepped Spilsbury throughout the investigation.
The Phantom of Heilbronn
Although Smith was almost certainly guilty, Spilsbury's intense self-belief – and the implicit faith invested in him by the legal system – also led to several miscarriages of justice. Although juries these days might be less swayed by the word of a charismatic expert witness, they can still place much faith in disciplines that are subject to interpretation – such as fingerprinting. Similarly, recent developments have shaken the foundations of DNA profiling.
The strange case of the "Phantom of Heilbronn" involved a seemingly superhuman female serial killer whose DNA was found at the scene of robberies and murders across Austria, France and Germany in the 1990s and 2000s. Mitochondrial analysis of the DNA suggested it came from a woman of Russian or eastern European extraction, but she seemed to be involved in a bewildering variety of criminal activity, and to leave no other trace. In 2009, when the DNA appeared on the burned body of a male asylum seeker in Germany, the authorities concluded that the "phantom" was simply the result of laboratory contamination: the cotton swabs used for DNA collection were not certified for the purpose, and were eventually traced to the same factory, which employed several Eastern European women who fitted the DNA profile of the "phantom".
One expert I interviewed said: "DNA doesn't lie. It's an exceptionally good lead and exceptionally strong evidence, but there is human interaction in the process [of profiling]. So the error rate is exceptionally low but it's not zero … DNA shouldn't be a lazy way to not do an investigation."
Suzanne Pilley
The largest strides in forensics in recent years have been digital. One case that hinged on such evidence was the murder of Suzanne Pilley, who was last seen as she set off on her way to her job as a bookkeeper for a financial services company in central Edinburgh. Suspicion quickly fell on David Gilroy, a colleague of Suzanne's with whom she had recently ended an affair. The police interviewed Gilroy and noticed a cut on his forehead, subtle bruising on his chest and curved scratches on his hands, wrists and forearms. Gilroy said he had scratched himself while gardening. Forensic pathologist Nathaniel Cary would later examine photographs of these injuries and testify that they could have been made by another person's fingernails, possibly in a struggle
The police seized Gilroy's mobile phone and car, and specially trained cadaver dogs detected human remains or blood in the boot and in the footwell, though there had clearly been an attempt to clean the car. Police also found vegetation underneath the car and a damaged suspension. It was suspicious, but they needed more to make the case. A forensic digital analyst went to work on Gilroy's phone. When you turn your phone off, it keeps a record of the last phone mast it was connected to, so it can find it again quickly when you start using your phone again. On the day that they thought he had disposed of Suzanne's body, Gilroy had switched off his phone as he travelled between Stirling and Inveraray. Police suspected he had done this to avoid being tracked as he searched for a good place to dispose of Suzanne's body in the dense woodland. On his way back, Gilroy again switched off his mobile phone between Stirling and Inveraray. This, the police believed, was when he dumped the body.
Suzanne's body was never found. Nevertheless in March 2012, Gilroy was found guilty of murder and conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice. It's rare for murderers to be convicted in the absence of their victim's body. In the Gilroy case there was no DNA. The scratches on his arm would not have been enough. He was convicted because of unusual mobile phone activity, CCTV video and images from road-side cameras.
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