Department of Legal Medicine Uses Dandruff, Pieces of Skin and Old Bones to Catch Killers

One day last week, two state policemen in Lynn, Massachusetts, packed several pieces of bruised skin and damaged organs from the dead body of Mrs. Mary C. Bridges in a plain cardboard box and sent them to an address in Boston. The next day, Dr. Richard Ford and the Department of Legal Medicine began another in a long series of investigations in violent death. Had Mrs. Bridges been murdered, the police wanted to know, or was it suicide?

Reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes, who once nabbed a murderer with the victim's ear as his only clue, the department substitutes microscopes and test tubes for guns and tear gas to do its work. In over 500 cases a year, it proves that science is smarter than the most diabolical murderer.

"Murder is a pretty stupid affair," Dr. Ford claims. "The chances that a murderer won't drop as much as a flake of dandruff near his victim, nor be seen by any witnesses are nil."

"We depend on a more concrete thing than a witness' questionable identification, however," Dr. Ford says. "We count on invariable laws of chemistry and biology. Their verdicts are indisputable."

"Except for chance street killings, Dr. Ford believes it a rare murder that can't be traced. In an Eastern city recently, the body of a man, clad in trousers, shirt, socks and unionsuit was found lying on the floor of his room in a lodging house. His necktie had been tightened without disturbing its position beneath the collar and the ends wrapped twice around his neck and the tied in a small knot beneath one ear. Above the tie, his face and neck were discolored.

There were no signs of a struggle, but the landlady said the middle-aged man had been accustomed to bringing young men home for the evening now and then. During the night, she heard sounds which sounded to her as if the lodger was preparing for a trip.

Mystery Marks

After a routine check up of the room, the police sent the man to the morgue where a medico-legal examiner found two small holes in his neck, below the necktie. They didn't go deep, but in the throat muscles, the examiner found signs of hemorrhage. The findings seemed to indicate death by strangulation.

Eighteen months later, after all known homosexuals in the area had been questioned, the police heard of a teen-aged orphan who was boasting to his friends of a similar crime. This type of report reaches police headquarters every day, but on checking, they found that his story was consistent with what he medico-legal examiner had found.

The boy said that, provoked by "improper advances," he had seized the man by the throat and tightened the tie until the man was unconscious. He then tied the ends around his victim's neck and, before leaving, made a stab at the unconscious man's throat with a pair of scissors. He freely admitted his guilt.

Justice often, depends on such small points, Dr. Ford points out. The story was not just adolescent boasting, in this case. The scissor marks proved its truth.

Usually the investigative process is long, but rarely tedious. Dr. Ford and his colleagues, members of the only such department in the country, are pioneers. There is no established precedent to follow, and their methods must be their own.

Some years ago, when the department was still young, picnickers found scattered human bones in the bushes near a beach on the South Shore. Police accumulated all the evidence they could find and sent it to Dr. Moritz, then head of the department. The bones were that of a woman. Tied around her neck was a thick rope.

By examining the progress of leaf decay under the skeleton, botanists found how long the body had been there. Their estimate checked with that of entomologists (insect specialists). Maggotts leave eggs on their prey, and learning the age of these gave the bug men an accurate estimate of how long the young woman had been dead when found.

Then the department calculated how much that particular kind of rope shrank in that climate. Once the victim's neck size was ascertained, 20 young nurses with the same neck size were used to discover how the rope had been wrapped, tied, and so forth. Much about the murderer can be learned this way--whether he was left-handed, short or tall, heavy or slight.

Also found with the victim's bones were the bones of an unborn child. The police then checked on the missing person's file at the time the young woman was murdered, found out how many of the missing women that age were pregnant, who were the men each knew, and which of these men had seen or been seen with the woman at the time of the murder. The murderer was soon found, confessed, and sentenced.

Hollywood Enters

Hollywood got hold of the story and, with a few theatrical changes, filmed it under the title, "Mystery Street." Recognizing the appeal of this kind of picture, Bruce Bennet, who played a prototype of Dr. Moritz in the film, reportedly got screen and television rights to 325 other case histories from Dr. Moritz last month and plans to do a series based on these accounts.

Proving guilt is not the only function of the department. Just as important to Dr. Ford is proving innocence.

One morning in a nearby city, a man in his early 40's awoke and dressed to start another day at work. As he was eating breakfast, he suddenly pitched forward onto the floor, unconscious. Ten hours later, he died in a hospital without ever regaining consciousness.

The Legal Medicine Department was called in because once or twice before his death, neighbors said they heard him quarreling with someone in his room. He lived alone. Police examiners had found a brain hemmorhage and asked the department whether it could have been caused by violence. But there was no injury to the scalp or skull of the dead man, and the hemmorhage was deep within the brain. To the department, it was clearly a natural death, caused by the internal hemmorhage.

Some months later, a civil suit in the courts revealed that the dead man had been a passenger in a car that was sideswiped. This had happened nine days before his death. The car suffered only a bent fender, and the man had been healthy after the accident. He worked a pneumatic drill, and showed no signs of weakness, pain or suffering. It took Dr. Ford and members of his staff three days in court, however, to convince the jury that the driver was not guilty of manslaughter.

"It's an unhappy outcome when we discard the possibility of criminal action and can't convince people," commented Dr. Ford.

In the upwards of 200 cases the department is called to testify on, there has never yet been a decision rebuking the evidence it uncovers.

One of its biggest problems is to put technical proof into lay language. "Juries want to do the right thing," says Dr. Ford, "and generally they're sensible. All we have to do is to make them understand us without talking down to them."

Death With White Blotches

The department investigates not only homicide and mysterious death, but all cases of violent death where it can find information helpful to public and industrial health.

This fall, an infant who had been slightly ill, suddenly died with ugly white blotches all over its skin. An examination proved her to be the victim of meningitis, a deadly, infrequent, and contagious disease. Another child in the family, also sick, was rushed to a hospital and treated for the disease immediately, thus preventing a similar tragedy.

A man at work in a plant got his shin barked by a small hand truck. After the slight wound had healed, his leg became infected. A hospital gave him treatment, but after two weeks at home, he felt progressively worse. A few days later he died. An autopsy showed he had had a skin disease and was sensitive to any small wound. Thus his widow and children received lawful benefits from the company, which did not examine the man close enough to detect the disease when he began work there.

The department is not officially a part of the police force, although several members on it, including Dr. Ford, are official medical examiners. It volunteers its services and acts only when asked. The information it learns is used in the classroom and given to any official agencies that want it.

Last spring, several dog track owners around Boston suspected that the dogs were being doped. They paid the department to examine the urine of the winners for stimulants or sedatives and to do research into dope. The information found was revealed only to the owners and used, technically, in the department's classrooms. "Our prime aim," says Dr. Ford, "is still to educate."

Members of his staff are presently studying poisons. At one time it was difficult to detect poison in the system of a dead body, and once detected, to prove it did not come from the embalming fluid.

"When arsenical embalming fluids were legal in this state," Dr. Ford says, "there was no way to prove poisoning. Even today, there are traces of impurities in embalming fluids. The only way to be sure is to find the embalmer, discover what type of fluid he used, where he bought it, when, who made it, and then check the company's laboratory reports for that batch to see what impurities it contained."

No Vacation

Work such as this is a year round job. Unlike other departments in the University, the Legal Medicine Department does not relax during the summer months.

In any season, the handful of high ceilinged rooms in the Medical School which serve as laboratories are filled with strange and varied odors. "You can never tell what you'll smell in here," explains Dr. Ford. "Sometimes people send us bones that still have a little meat clinging to them. And in the summertime that gets really fragrant. During the rest of the year, it could be anything."

On the shelves around the rooms are tall bottles housing any part of the human body from brains to kidneys, floating in formaldehyde. None of the equipment, outside of a few machines for typing blood, is very complicated. There is a photo room where speciments can be recorded for future demonstration, and a refrigerator room with a marble dissecting block where new- er specimens are prepared and stored. But the work-houses of the department that has done more for criminal investigation in its five and one half years than police departments in their many, barely occupies two floors of the Medical School's vast main granite building.

In the library are found books ranging from a modern Legomedical Annual, to an 1838 volume on Oddities in London Life. Besides scientific treatises on every thing from strangulation to decapitation, there are Love Stories of Famous Criminals, The Riddles of Sex, and a book called investigation of the Devil, which provides clues to the behavior of criminals and what they can be expected to do in certain situations.

Included in the library are slides illustrating such things as bullet wounds, and stomachs distorted by poison. Pictures in the files show bodies, or parts of the body, under autopsy, as well as instruments of violence.

Dr. Ford's office is a nest of papers, topped by the model of a foot--all that was found after a European madman had dissolved an unknown number of people in a vat of sulphuric acid. In addition to being chief of the Legal Medicine Department; he is on the National Committee that drew up plans for a model lego-medical investigation system for states and large cities.

A Department in Every State

It is his belief that such services as his department performs for Massachusetts should be available to law enforcement agencies all over the country. "Most coroners, who must find causes for death, are not even doctors," he points out, "but elected or appointed minor politicians. The number of states which demand that medical examiners must be physicians can be counted on one hand."

Even big cities rarely have competent medical examiners, he goes on. "We'd like to see departments like this in all large universities and in every state and sizeable city. Police files on unsolved crimes across the nation are proof enough that such facilities are needed."

There is such a department here, mainly because of a very unusual woman named Mrs. Frances Glessner Lee. Eleven years ago, Mrs. Lee established the Lee Chair for Legal Medicine in the Medical School. At that time, there were less than a half dozen men trained in this field, and most people had never heard of it.

Knew Effectiveness

But Mrs. Lee knew how effective it could be. George McGrath, former medical examiner in Boston and friend of Mrs. Lee, had experimented with medico-legal investigations that cleared several men convicted on circumstantial evidence. When McGrath died, Mrs. Lee established the McGrath Memorial Library on Legal Medicine for the new-born department.

Her work didn't stop there. She made 15 doll-models of actual crimes, and helped the department along by passing on many tricks she had learned from McGrath.

The field is still young. There is a vast amount of knowledge still necessary for complete investigations. Dr. Ford's under-staffed department wants to teach the country how to make crime a non-profit enterprise, but he needs more men to do it.

"It's tough, but interesting work," says Ford. "It's a chance to do something different, new, useful, and rewarding."

And it seems to work