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You are now listening to true Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them.
Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK.
Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Good Evening, Berkeley, California, nineteen thirty three. In a lab filled with curiosities, beakers, microscopes, Bunsen burners, and hundreds upon hundreds of books, he sat an investigator who would go on to crack at least two thousand cases in his
forty year career. Known as the American Sherlock Holmes, Edward Oscar Heinrich was one of America's greatest and first forensic scientists, with an uncanny knack for finding clues, establishing evidence, and deducing answers with a skill that seemed almost supernatural, Heinrich was one of the nation's first expert witnesses, working in a time when the turmoil of Prohibition led to sensationalized
crime reporting and only a small systematic study of evidence. However, with his brilliance and commanding presence in both the courtroom and at crime scenes, Heinrich spearheaded the invention of a myriad of new forensic tools that police still use today, including blood spatter analysis, ballistics, lide detector tests, and the use of fingerprints as courtroom evidence. His work, though not without its serious some would say fatal flaws, change the
course of American criminal investigation. Based on years of research and thousands of never before published primary source materials, American Sherlock captures the life of the man who pioneered the science our legal system now relies upon, as well as the limits of those techniques and the very human experts who wield them. The book they were featuring this evening is American Sherlock, Murder Forensics and the Birth of American CSI.
With my special guests, journalist and author and documentary producer filmmaker is Kate Winkler Dawson. Kate Winkler Dawson will join us in a fifteen minutes and in the interim. Now, this is an interview with Kate Winkler Donson that has decided to do a flurry of media today. So this is one of the one of the exclusive places where you can get and speak and listen to Kate Winkler Dawson talking about her latest book, American Sherlock, and so I will well as we wait for Kate Winkler Dawson
to join us. I'm going to have the great privilege of reading the prologue, which will introduce Oscar Heinrich Edward Oscar Heinrich and a fitting introduction to the stories that Kate Winkler Dawson will tell us about some of the fascinating stories of Oscar Heinrich's life. This is tales from the archive Pistols, job, bones and love poetry. His upper job the bone was massive, a long curved bone with
nine tiny holes meant to hold his teeth. The remainder of his skeleton was blackened by a fairly large fire ignited by anonymous killer. Lifting up the jawbone, she examined the small blades of grass that adhere to its exterior, organic evidence from his hillside grave in El Serrito in northern California. It was distressing to hold a bone that had belonged to a murder victim, particularly one who was
never identified. Kate glanced over at the archivist, Lara Michaels, who quietly stood across the wooden desk inside the massive warehouse. What's next, Kate asked. She led Kate down a long row of large cartons, one more than one hundred boxes
donated by the same owner. She had been given exclusive access to a trove of material collected over five decades by a brilliant man, a forensic scientist and criminalist from the first half of the twentieth century, a man who changed how crimes were solved before forensics became the foundation of most criminal cases, America's Sherlock Holmes. She walked along the tight corridor, scanning the labels on the cardboard boxes
for a common name, Edward Oscar Heinrich. When Heinrich died in nineteen fifty three at the age of seventy two, his youngest child, Mortimer, waited sixteen years to donate the contents of his father's laboratory, a bastion of forensic history that once monopolized the ground floor of Mortimer's childhood home
in Berkeley, California. In nineteen sixty eight, he bequeathed his father's many boxes containing case files, evidence, personal diaries, letters, even romantic poetry, to the University of California at Berkeley, Oscar's alma mater and the college where he spent years
teaching forensic science. The archive was an incredible repository of information, but given the university's limited budget for archival material in research, the collection remained uncataloged and untouched for more than fifty years. In twenty and sixteen, she discovered Oscar Heinrich hidden in a short article that lauded one of the most famous cases, the Siskiyou train robbery of nineteen twenty three. She was astonished that no contemporary author had penned a book about him.
She requested that U. C. Berkeley open his collection for research. Michaels agreed, and after more than a year of waiting, she began to immerse herself in the bizarre world of Oscar Heinrich, the most famous criminalist you've likely never heard of. The boxes contain more than one hundred thousand pieces of information, such as photographs, notes, letters, sketches, and trial transcripts. It was an overwhelming and disorganized collection that was housed in
the school's off site processing center. Heinrich seemingly kept everything from his life, personal and professional, manically collecting notes written on napkins, thousands of newspapers, hundreds of bullets and financial journals. Kate began jokingly describing him as a productive order until her colleague, a psychology professor at the University of Texas, suggested that he had in fact fit the diagnostic criteria for obsessive compulsive personality disorder, which occurs in just one
percent of the population. People with OCPD have a preoccupation with perfectionism, control, and order a neat life. They are frequently extremely productive and successful, but their personal relationships often suffer because their rigidity can manifest itself in righteousness even anger when their control is threatened. Heinrich's already stressful life was certainly complicated by his OCPD, but as an author and researcher, Kate was thankful for his fastidious habit of
adding constantly to his collection. She was particularly grateful for the numerous boxes of evidence he had preserved from criminal cases. The evidence was plentiful, spanning investigations and unraveled over decades. The archivist allowed her to examine pieces from a detonated bomb, a locket owned by a dead woman who was run down by her own car, a lock of hair belonging to an actress who died during an infamous party, and several pistols that required having their firing pins removed by u. C.
Berkeley police. As she picked up the first photo, she was struck by something that seemed like an odd observation at the time. Heinrich was quite handsome for a tightly wound scientist. He was slight and not particularly tall, with thinning, light brown hair. There was something about the sharp angles of his face that made him magnetic in photos, a confidence in his eyes as he cleaned a revolver. Kate spent months staring at thousands of photographs, some taken by
Heinrich's assistance and others developed by the criminalist himself. He was an avid photographer who relished documenting crime scenes. Kate noted hundreds of details, like the way he squinted as he adjusted the focus knob on his favorite microscope, the way his teeth gripped the bit of a straight stem pipe as a small stream of smoke billowed from its bowl, The way his forehead wrinkled as he hunched over evidence.
The way his round, rimless glasses fit extra snugly around his temples, a requirement for a chemist to much of his time leaning over a microscope. As Kate flipped through these portraits, she gleaned more details about his private lab in Berkeley Hills, a lovely neighborhood overlooking San Francisco Bay. Heinrich was surrounded by odd devices. Every conceivable type of
microscope was crammed onto a long wooden desk. Any extra space was surrendered to test tubes, crucibles, beakers, lenses, and scales. Behind Heinrich were shelves, though with hundreds of priceless books, at least priceless to a chemist turned forensic scientist. There were tomes on fingerprint identification, applied mechanics, analytical geometry, and powdered vegetable drugs. The titles, written in six different languages,
would intrigue any intellectual. Blood, urine, feces, and moisture. A book of tests read one cover Rusnik and papers and fabrics read another. He even owned a tattered dictionary's slang used by criminals. They seemed unrelated. A cache of mismatched textbooks in the library of a brilliant madman, But each was a tiny piece belonging to a bigger puzzle that only he could assemble. The Portrait of a genius and the tumultuous era which he lived began to emerge, and
it was a tumultuous era. The homicide rate in the nineteen twenties, when Heinrich Heinrich's most interesting work began, had increased by as much as almost eighty percent from the decade before thanks to prohibition. For thirteen years, the federal government banned alcohol and hopes of reducing crime, but extended spawned new and more creative criminal enterprises. Varying levels of corruption tainted local governments and police departments across the country.
Judges enjoyed immunity from arrests, and most major cities were ruled by crime bosses. Poverty and unemployment were also responsible for the increase in violent crimes, as many Americans became desperate for security and safety, and there was an ever growing backlog of unsolved crimes. BI was still the Bureau of Investigation, a group of insufficiently trained officers and mostly
investigated bank fraud. Local police forces were underfunded, poorly instructed, and mostly using investigative techniques that hadn't been updated since the Victorian era. There would be no public federal crime lab until nineteen thirty two. Violent bank robberies increased, while murderous terrorized Americans, especially women, whose new found independence inflamed both the passions and the anger of many in society.
The archaic methods of crime fighting in the nineteen twenties, procedures depending on hunches and weak circumstantial evidence were futile. Cops were combat a sneakier criminal, those thieves and murderers who understood chemicals, firearms, and the criminal court system. Police route manned and many times outsmarted. Footprints are the best clue, declared one top cop at the time. There's no need for any type of any other type of identification. Innocent
men were being hanged while criminals escaped justice. The complicated crimes of the twenties demanded a special type of sleuth, an expert with the instincts of a detective in the field, the analytical skills of a forensic scientist in the lab, and the ability to translate that knowledge to a general
audience in the courtroom. Edward Bosker Heinrich became the nation's unique crime scene investigator, one of America's greatest forensic scientists, a criminalist who cracked some of the country's most baffling cases.
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Ladies and Gentlemen, author of American Sherlock, Kate Winkler Dawson. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for greening this interview. Kate Winkler, My Dan, how are you fine? Thank you, thank you very much for joining us. I just took the liberty of reading your prologue where you discuss everything about coming into your possession these incredible information
material from Edward Oscar Heinrich. Now I've done that introduction to let our audience know a little bit about how you came upon these materials and an introduction on who exactly Edward Oscar Heinrich was. Now with this, let's talk about two of the cases that you say in your book shaped his career, shaped his reputation. And are two
of the fascinating cases that Oscar Heinrich was inextricably. Let's talk about May thirtieth, nineteen thirty three, in a case you call a bloody mess and David Lampson in Palo Alto, California. Tell us a little bit about this incredible case and Oscar Heinrich's involvement.
Well, in this book, I start with this case and I end with this case. So the book ranges from you know, Oscar worked from nineteen ten until nineteen fifty three, so over forty years, and I picked a time period that I thought would be really fascinating, which is prohibition Roaring twenties, and then you know, through the Great Depression. And so I started with this Lambson case and I end with the Lambson case because I wanted a sort
of seth stakes early. So I wanted you to know who David Lambson was, and you know why he depended on Oscar heine Rich so much as his expert in his murder case. And then you'd go through the journey through five or six other cases of what OSCARS developments were personally and professionally, and then we end again with.
The Lambson case at the end of the book, so that.
We can see what the results were. And so the David Lambson case was fascinating, and I'll just kind of give you up a little brief bit. You know, Heinrich
was this professional forensic scientist. By the time nineteen thirty three came around, he had solidified his reputation as America Sherlock Holmes because he knew so many disciplines in forensics, so biology, botany, handwriting, bloodstain pattern analysis, ballistics, chemistry, it was really a pretty incredible toxicology, a very long list, so he could walk into a crime scene and he could determine any number of tests that he was able to run that very a few other people knew this
amount of tests and that you know, would not just solve the crime, but really rebuild the crime what happened. And so by this point he has a pretty incredible reputation, so the prosecutor who hired him was really.
Leaning on him to solve this case.
So the case is of a man named David Lambson who was kind of an account executive at Stanford University Press in pala Alta, California. He was good looking, young, and he was married to a beautiful woman named Aileen Lambson who.
Had a master's degree, which.
Was pretty unusual for anyone, let alone a woman in the nineteen twenties and thirties. And they had a little girl and Memorial Day Week in nineteen thirty three, which were referring to the Lambsons had decided they were going to go to a slew of parties and they had a great time, and they sent the little girl to go spend several nights with a grandmother and so David and Aileen could be alone, and they came home Sunday night, So the night before Memorial Day, and Eileen was not
feeling well. She came home late from one of their parties and she went to bed with a stomach ache, and David kind of helped her throughout the night. And the next morning he wanted to do some yard work and she wanted to take a bath, so he drew her a bath, and he went outside of their small cottage, which was in a very effluent area. It was not a big house, but it was in an affluent area called Faculty Row.
Where they bought this cottage.
So he went into the garden and started a bonfire and started clipping all of the fruit trees they had in the backyard, like BlackBerry bushes and apple trees, and his neighbors were all kind of around him, and everybody was gossiping and chatting. It was just a nice, you know, cool morning. The Lambsons were planning to rent out their cottage for the summer because their young daughter was having a lot of sinus infections and they wanted to take
her to the mountains. So the doctor thought it might help her, and so they were renting out the cottage, and a real estate agent that morning popped her head over and said, listen, I rang the doorbell. Your wife didn't answer. I'd like to bring in a client. I'm sorry, we don't have an appointment. And David was startled, but he said sure, and he put on his t shirt, said goodbye to the neighbors. Let the bonfire continue to burn.
And he went into the back and said meet me at the front of the house and I'll let you in. And he finds his wife dead in the bathtom and there's blood everywhere, on the floor, over every wall, on the ceiling, and the corner would later say that Aileen
was a very spelt young woman. She was, you know, one hundred and twenty pounds at the most, and he said the corner would say that she lost about half of her blood, which is a lot, and she was laying in the bathtub, and he screamed, and the real estate agent comes in and within about fifteen to twenty minutes he is under arrest for murder. And this begins an incredibly high profile, controversial case because Oscar Heinrich comes in,
is hired by the prosecution. He walks into the house, and the prosecutor says, listen, this guy beat his wife to death. And Oscar looks the blood on the walls. He looks at the blood pattern. He looks to see if there's a void in the blood spray, was there somebody behind her that would have blocked the blood And he comes back out and resigns from the prosecutor's case and calls the defense, and that's where the story goes. Then it's a.
Big who done it?
What happens? Did she slip and fall or did he beat her to day? And it became a massive case in not just in California, but it was an international story.
What were the forensic innovations or the forensic evidence that he brought forward in that trial?
It was really bloodstained pattern analysis. And so what's interesting about that case and starting an ending with that case is that I wanted to be clear in the book that you know, Oscar did a lot of firsts in forensics that were very important. He was the first to introduce forensic geology into a criminal case in America. He was the first to introduce forensic entomology. How bugs arrived to a crime scene in America? You know, he was
an innovator with handwriting analysis. He was the first to introduce bloodstain pattern analysis in the United States eight years earlier in a different case, but not all of the science was good, and the science that he used, which was blood stain pattern analysis, is junk science. Now to consider junk science, there's an argument and certainly kick back from from the experts in that community that differ, but it is unreliable and it's really subjective and up to
the analyst. So Heinrich used these tools a bloodstain pattern. He had a little dial that was all based on trigonometry, so he used the measurements when of the tails and the heads of the blood. So if you in this case, we're just going to stick with Lambson's facts, which were the prosecutor claimed that David Lambson, in a fit of rage, took a metal pipe and beat his wife on the back of the head as she stood in the shower,
and blood went everywhere. And if you could then look at the drips of blood, so you know, you think of it as kind of an exclam point, like there's a head and then there's a little tail that experts say that you can look at those drops and you could tell how tall the perpetrator is, exactly where he was standing, where she was, was she sitting, was she standing? On all of that and that should inform us who
the killer is. And Heinrich did that and what he determined, which is going to totally ruin all of this, but what he determined was that she slipped and fell and hit her head on the sink. And there are other explanations, you know, I think there is a middle ground, and I think you know that there are other explanations you'll just have to read about in the book. But the techniques that he used are currently used today, but they are dubious at best, and they are challenged in court.
And what you'll find with young science that I'm sure your audience will be interested in is is that there is in many cases not very much science in the forensic science, and that experts overstate their importance in court and that can sway a jury, and that's problematic. There's also very sound science that is rooted in scientific research, like toxicology, DNA analysis, but things like blood stained pattern analysis,
there are aspects to it that are accurate. So void patterns if somebody is standing behind a victim and beats them to death and blood comes backwards. Well, the person who is the perpetrator is going to absorb the blood, right the blood's going to go all over their clothes. It's not going to go on the wall right behind
them because they're blocking the wall. So in a Lean Lambson's case, every wall, every part was covered with blood spatter, so nobody was standing right behind her beating her to death. But there's so many mysteries in this case and how it unfolds and does was he guilty? And you know, does Oscar have any doubts about his guilt? And is he you know, testifying on behalf of a guilty man And what happens to David Lambson is also incredible.
Yes, there are so many incredible stories and needs to say progressively, you show the controversy that Heinrich is involved with, and the luster goes off his reputation. Let's talk about the dual cases that created a lot of stress and anxiety for Heinrich in nineteen twenty one, two cases going on concurrently, and these cases again are testing of this forensic methodology and the forensic science that he is employing tell us a little bit about frital cases.
Yeah, and I really I spent time looking at cases that I thought would really illustrate as time moves on, the skills that he picks up, you know, the winds and the losses, so that you could see a development in his career and in his personal life kind of happening parallel, and then you know the overall arch of forensics in general and what's happening in that timeline. So the first case you're talking about was the Father Heslin case.
And in the case of Father Heslin, it was a parish priest, you know, Catholic priest who was met by a stranger at his home and the stranger asked the priest in Colma, California, in nineteen twenty one to please come give last rights to a man who had tuberculosis. The stranger's friend was dying and he needed Father Hesln to come and please give him last rites. And Father Hesln agreed and left in the middle of the night.
He left behind a housekeeper who was very worried because the stranger was odd and had an odd accent and just was dressed strangely and he was wearing driving goggles, which you know, people who had open air touring cars in the nineteen twenties wore. But it was foggy and rainy and in the middle of the night, and no
reason for this man to be wearing goggles. So she was was concerned, and when the priest didn't show up the next day, she called the archbishop, who called the police, and thus began an incredibly complicated story about the kidnapping of a priest and sort of a nation waiting to see what was happening to this man who, you know, the father Heslin just had a stellar reputation as you know, a counselor and a spiritual guide. So this was heartbreaking for a lot of people. And Heinrich was brought in
really to play second or third fiddle. He was younger, this was the beginning, This was the first decade of his career in in you know, law enforcement and scientific investigation. And so he was saying, you know, he was second or third fiddle to two other criminologists, criminalists who had more experience than he did, and he thought were just charlatan's. He just thought they were both jokes. So there are ransom letters that are coming in partially typed and partially handwritten,
which was odd. The amount of the I can't remember the exact amount of amount of the ransom, but it was something like sixty five hundred dollars, where you would think that they would round up or down. So the whole thing was really odd. And so, you know, the archbishop and the cops brought in these two experts in handwriting analysis, who are also experts in what's called graphology, which is, you know, a junk science and really was
never taken that seriously even in the twenties. And they predicted, you know, that this man was you know, demented, but really, you know, they couldn't give any more details at all. And what Oscar said was if you look at his handwriting, he said, I have no idea who this man is. I don't know his identity, but I do know when you find him that if you ask him what he does for a living, that he'll say he was a professional baker. And the cops first of all said, well, how is that at all helpful?
I mean, how many bakers are there?
And he said, listen, I'm just telling you a little bit more information and let's continue to move forward and we'll get closer to identifying him. But the reason that Oscar talked about that was because he really believed in profiling, and very little profiling.
Was done in the United States.
It was done after the person was caught as a way to determine whether or not he should stand trial. Is this guy crazy or not is what a judge wanted to know. So then they were profile and try to sort that out. But very little was done before the person was caught, and Oscar was one of the.
First to do it.
So Oscar's belief, which was true, is that a baker is a baker. If he turns into a murderer, that doesn't mean he's not a baker any longer. So he was able to look at this man's writing and say, only someone who's professionally trained as a baker would make loops like this. This is how you you you know, do writing on a cake.
It's just the way you have to do it on a cake.
And so this was a profile.
This was actually real.
This was not just handwriting comparison. This was a habit that Oscar had picked up on. It's like a murderer who has a cat and you find that fiber you know that cat hair, So he's a little pet owner even though he's a murderer.
And they in these are habits. You can pick up all.
The spent shells you want, you can wipe down all the fingerprints you want, and you know, make sure that you you shave your head and make sure you're not leaving behind any hand. But you still have habits that none of us can break. And so as this this went on, finally just out of I don't know if it's luck, they had a suspect named William high Tower, and much of what happened with William high Tower was
determining whether he was sane or not sane. And I think it's pretty clear that he was not sane as you get closer into the story. And Oscar was also the one who encouraged the very first use of the lie detector of the polygraph in a criminal court case, in this particular court case, and we now know that the polygraph is inaccurate, that there are many reasons why people pass it or don't pass it. It can do with they have to do with your medication, with your
emotions that day, with your mental health. I mean, there's too many variables and in forensic science that is the key. That's the word to underline is variable because in handwriting, your handwriting is not identical all the time, there are variables.
Fingerprints the same thing.
Your fingerprint doesn't change, but the quality of the fingerprint that you leave behind does change. And so this was something that it was just occurring to people in this
time period. So Oscar was able to kind of really crack this case and ty William High Tower definitively to this case using grains of sand and forensic geology, using some handwriting analysis, you know, but particularly nailing down the profile of this person, and that I think is what he was great at shoring up the case for the prosecutor of the defense.
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love dot com slash true Murder for fifteen percent off today. Now, Kate, you were talking about this case in nineteen twenty one, but as I mentioned, there was a concurrent case going on at the same time, and as you write in the book, how interesting was the media at that time, What was their response at that time and their ethical boundaries at that time in terms of accuracy. Tell us a little bit about the media and the media's response to these two trials in nineteen twenty one.
Well, the second trial, as you mentioned, was that of Fatty Arbuckle, who was a very very famous silent film star in the nineteen twenties, and in nineteen twenty one, he was capturing headlines because he had just wrapped up his latest movie. He had a movie currently playing in theaters that was doing really well. He was the highest paid actor in Hollywood at the time. He was on the top of the world. I mean really, it was an incredible year for him.
And so.
His friend decided to throw him a party at the Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco, which was a really swanky hotel, and there were men from Hollywood there, there were showgirls there, kind of his entertainment and companionship. And there was a minor actress there named Virginia Repey, and she and Fatty our Buckle gone along well. And a few days after the party she ends up dead. She had a chronic condition that was exasperated when you drink
kind of you know, bathtub gin. And then again we're in the middle of prohibition at the time, and she ends up dead. Fatty Arbuckle is arrested for a manslaughter and potentially for a sexual assault, and he goes on trial. And the reaction of the press of both of these cases, you asked about ethical boundaries, there.
Seemed to be very few at all boundaries.
And this is we see this with what we call yellow journalism. You know, this is the rise of William Hurst papers, the rise of the tabloid journalists. But really, I say that, and in some ways it's not true because if you read the Penny Dreadfuls from the eighteen hundreds, you know that are about Jack the Ripper, you know, and any of these stories in Victoria and England.
I mean, boy, they.
Sure did love a good murder, and particularly if it involved of celebrity, and the Fatty Arbookle trial was pretty incredible.
You know.
There were people who, of course.
Defended him, and then there were the religious right who who were incredibly critical of Hollywood. It was sort of a country divided in some ways, and Oscar Heinrich was one of those people. He really disliked Hollywood. He believed in some ways that women should continue to wear corsets and there should be chaperoning. He was sort of old fashion,
which was interesting. It was an interesting choice of career for him because he, of course, you know, had to deal with what he would consider to be the dregs of society. And so the Fatty Arbuckle case was the first case that I read where I really felt that he had, for me an uncomfortable biased because in his letters to his best friend and to his son and to his.
Wife, he just talked about how.
Disgusted he was in general with Hollywood, with Hollywood stars and the opulence, and with flapper women, and then particularly.
With Fatty Arbuckle.
He just felt like this was not he was not conducting himself in the way a man should, a right man should, And so it became very clear to me early on that Heinrich had to have felt very, very comfortable with his evidence. And it was fingerprinting evidence, which is the reason why if you look at the front cover of the book, it's a handprint and that's actually
Fatty our boocals handprint, and Oscar took it. Oscar went to the San Francisco jail and with the ink pad and rolled it and you know, to then took a photo of it. And I think that that handprint's really important because that was sort of the beginning of his reputation. It was solidified with the Siskiu train robbery two years later, but he made headlines for months because he dragged this out for months. His testimony and his expertise continued to
hang the jury. It continued to trigger miss trials because the jury believed at least one person in each trial believed his evidence and fingerprint evidence is just not accurate, and it wasn't accurate if you look some of the photos in the book, it wasn't. It wasn't even remotely accurate in this case. And on top of that, you know, you've got the coroner who sang, listen, don't really know what caused her death. But it wasn't just Fatty Arbuckle
on trial. It was Hollywood on trial. It just it was it was a country divided, and so you know, the headlines were just incredible. I mean, they certainly damned Fatty Arbuckle right out of the gate, and so it was quite a spectacle.
It was the trial of the century for sure.
It was definitely an OJ scenario, you know, with that that sort of salacious reporting.
You talk about that trial as well, and the interesting behavior of the district attorney when he has these conflict conflicting testimonies of these showgirls, he just gets them into the room and says, you're going to change, You're going to make new statements. But that's kinwashed at that trial and leads and helps Fatty Arbuckle to a certain degree. Of course, what you mentioned too, his career is absolutely
ruined as of that, so he has no career. Yeah, very interesting that you call this Sherlock Holmes and the parallel to this fictional character, but also very much like the fictional character. He has nemesis, and he also has well at least one Chauncey McGovern in particular. But John Boyton Kaiser tell us about this John Boyton Kaiser in his contribution and his role as a I guess a Watson.
Yeah, John Puton Kaiser, Yeah. John Puyten Kaiser was a reference librarian that someone who Oscar had become friends with decades earlier in Tacoma, and they became friends, and when Oscar moved to Berkeley, you know, they began writing each other, which was great because.
Now I have.
Heiser was a big deal in the library world, and so I have all of his letters because he had his own collection at UC Berkeley, and then Oscar kept all of his letters. So again I'm able to build these conversations between these two men, and it became clear to me really quickly that Kaiser was a confidant. He was a close, close friend, He was a sounding board,
and he was an advisor. So the majority of the books that Oscar used in his cases, I would guess ninety percent came from Kaiser, and Kaiser would send him unsolicited.
He would send them books.
He would just say, hey, I know you're doing the Fatty Airbuckle case. Here's another one on fingerprinting that I think you could use. Kaiser would ask his opinion, or Oscar would ask Kaiser's opinion about cases, and then Kaiser would give him unsolicited advice, which is all important.
But I think that.
John Boyden Kaiser's most important role was listening. Because Oscar had an incredible ego publicly, but privately he was very, very insecure. He was constantly a fear of losing cases. He was constantly in fear of being ridiculed on the stand by either a prosecutor a defense attorney or another witness. And that happened quite a lot you'll see in the book. And of course he was constantly in fear of debt collectors and lenders coming after him, which also happened throughout his life.
So all of.
This comes together in that there are very few people he can trust.
Including his wife.
He does not tell his wife about his financial problems.
He doesn't disclose that.
He says it's his honor to protect her from things like this, but he tells everything to Kaiser. And so I think that, you know, Kaiser served in a professional capacity, sort of like a Watson, but really it's the personal Kaiser knew him better than anybody. And so I think that that was so incredibly important to Oscar to have that best friend.
And that's where his key role really.
Is with this book. You talk about all of the court cases that he's involved with, again inextricably involved because they rely on him. Are the what are the things that affected him in terms of we talked about I mentioned the nemesis, this person that was this graphologist, and he vehemently disagreed with this guy, and he was he was the first fiddle, or at least he was that he was the second fiddle to this person that he vehemently disagreed with. What is the kind of criticism that
eventually categorized his career. What were some of the things and some of the contentious things that were he was alleged to have done in his career that marred that reputation and definitely contributed for him to be lost somewhat in history.
Well, I think that the reason he lost in history, I think was a couple of things. One is that forensic scientists generally work in the background. I mean, let's face it, you don't know much about forensic science.
You know famous forensic scientists. There aren't the people who are in Wikipedia.
I mean, the most famous people worked very quietly behind the scenes. They're not the police, they're not the das who were you know, in front of the cameras or in newspapers generally.
And he also didn't have a big case.
That was turned into a TV or a TV show or a movie like Paul Kirk who saw the Sam Shephard case, you know that was turned into the Fugitive with Harrison Ford, or you know Calvin Goddard who saw the Saint Valentine's Day massacre. So you know, these are cases that become well known only because of Hollywood, not because of the forensic scientists necessarily. What Heinrich really was accused of, I think the most what the most telling and the most entertaining, I think was.
When Chauncey McGovern, who was probably his.
Main competitor, decades after they became competitors, they were testifying in the same criminal case and Heinrich had just come up with this new technique in order to photograph two bullets side by side. So when you fire a bullet through a gun, the interior of the gun makes markings which are called bullet striations.
It's unique markings to the gun specifically.
So what Heinrich would do was he would take a bullet from a crime scene other from you know, it would be from a person or from a bullet fired through the wall. He would take that bullet and then he would take a clean bullet, fire it through the suspects gun, and then he would fire it into wax, dig it out, clean it off, and then he could put the bullet side by side and see if the markings matched up. It's a very valid scientific technique that's
still used today. And so what Heinrich did was to get a step further, and not only was he able to you know, match these markings up, but he was able to photographic.
Through a comparison microscope, which nobody.
Had ever done before, and he could blow up the photographs. And he took him in and to the courtroom and showed him to the jury. And this is, you know, definitive evidence that the suspect had used the gun to shoot and kill his boss. But Chauncey McGovern, who was the expert, on the other side of the table, and
they just hated each other beyond belief. Chauncey McGovern got on the stand and essentially accused him of nineteenth so, you know, twentieth century photoshopping essentially, you know, what would you in the nineteen hundreds, how would you you know, early nineteen he accused him of photoshopping kind of in the nineteen twenties.
So he's fabricating this.
Photo and it came very close to breaking oscar. He was humiliated and embarrassed, but then he picked himself up very quickly and he whispered to the prosecutor, and the prosecutor said, let's let him bring in his setup, and so he did and he took it through the jury, and the jury came and they looked through the microscope and they said, okay, these do look similar. But the jury was convinced the bullets were the same, but they weren't one hundred percent convinced that Oscar knew how to
photograph these bullets. And so it's almost like it was case closed. But well, are you really lying about the photography thing? And so they made him take a photo then and there, and they sent a bailiff with him to watch him develop the photo so he wasn't double exposing anything and then bringing it back in. And so really Oscar was accused of falsifying information. It was really in that particular case be.
Where that came up, you know. But I think that.
Overall he was very very well respected. It's later on, not the man, but the science that is doubted.
Absolutely. Now you talk about what's interesting is that he was totally convinced, whether this turns out to be later junk science, discredited methodologies and sciences, he was totally convinced there was no evidence that he helped anybody, any prosecution out when he was not convinced, was.
There no, No, absolutely not. I mean he was as much as he could. He was honest in his techniques. The problem is now we know that his techniques weren't all valid, and that is not a reflection necessarily on Oscar. It's a reflection on the times. There wasn't time to test these techniques the way they should have been through peer reviews, you know, through more research, through rigorous testing that's supposed to be done.
There wasn't it. This was the beginning of it. So, yes, they're.
Going to be mistakes. So you know, that really was sort of growing pains of forensics.
In the end. What are the most credible on now we would consider credible innovations in forensic investigation that he can be credited for.
Well, certainly he was an innovator in ballistics with the photography. He was the first to use forensic geology and move that forward, the first to use forensic entomology, so how bugs arrived to a crime scene? He moved that forward. Criminal profiling and toxicology. He used an awful of toxicology in his cases. So there were there are a lot
of very valid techniques that he used. The questionable ones are you know, fingerprinting, which who didn't use finger printing and still many people do and bloodstained pattern analysis were kind of the two big ones I think for him as.
Well, would you say that that he would be responsible for He had a great interest in policing, so along with his buddy of Volmer, he did make some significant changes along with his partner Volmer. What are the kinds of things that he made sure that we're instituted.
Hey, Dan, this is going to need to be my last question because I've had a take a little break before i have another big interview, So I'm.
Sorry I repeat that again.
The along with Volmer, Well, with Volmer, he was very interested in policing. So what are the things that he instituted within the cooperation with police Chief Volmer?
Well, you know, Volmer was nicknamed the grandfather of modern policing, and Volmer learned a lot from Oscar about organizing evidence, and he and Volmer created the first criminology classes in the country, which you know was at UC Berkeley, And first it was only police officers who were allowed to attend the classes, and then it became more of the general public. So they worked together on those classes that became incredibly important, and Oscar spent decade at UC Berkeley.
After that, Volmer and Oscar worked on the Father Heslin case where Oscar encouraged Volmer to use a light detector test. Now Oscar didn't wasn't the creator of it, he was at the innovator. He thought it was a good idea. Again, this is the beginning of just an understand how to catch criminals. And we now know that the polygraph is not accurate and it shouldn't be used in court. There's
a reason why it's an admissible in court. But Oscar at the time thought it was a good way to catch William high Tower in a lie.
Absolutely. I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about American Sherlock murder forensics and the birth of American CSI, Kate, For those that might want to take a look at this, is there a website Facebook page? Tell us a little bit more about how they might take a look at this.
Sure, there's my website, which is Katewinkler Dawson dot com. So my name dot com. I have a newsletter. You can just put your email address. It's really easy and you can kind of keep up with other projects that I'm doing and on this book, and on that page, if you scroll down, you'll be able to see all the places that you can buy the book. And then I'm on Facebook under my name Kate Winkler Dawson, and I'm on Twitter and Instagram.
It's been a fascinating interview. Thank you very much much for talking about Edward, Oscar Heinrich and the American Sherlock. Thank you very much. You have a great evening. Thank you.
Good night, Thank you, Dan, good night.