Blood, Bullets, and Bones Read online

  A Brooklyn newspaper dated six days before the discovery was wrapped around the thigh. That gave police a likely time of death. Now Marten set about determining the identity of the victim. Because a woman’s body is evolutionarily adapted to bear children, her pelvis and thighs are different from a man’s. By measuring the angle of the thighbone in relation to the hip socket, Marten determined that the thigh belonged to a man. He then took X-rays to determine the calcification of the bones. From this, he could tell that the man was older than twenty-five. The length of the thighbone suggested that the man was shorter than average—five feet, four inches tall. Based on the size of the thigh, Marten believed the man to be extremely stocky, weighing about 200 pounds. The thigh had an odor of alcohol, and toxicology reports confirmed that the man had been drunk when he died. The hairs on the thigh were light brown, and it was likely the hair on the man’s head would be the same color. The man had fair skin.

  Marten had learned quite a bit about the victim just from his thigh. Three days after the thigh was found, investigators had a bit of luck. Part of a chest, with the same blood type, hair, skin, and build, turned up in a Brooklyn lumberyard. The following day, the right thigh, left lower leg, and parts of the right and left arms were found, and a couple days later, a hip. By now, the newspapers had gotten ahold of the case and the whole city was looking for body parts. Finally, the head, along with two feet, two forearms, and two hands, were found by a gardener digging up topsoil in a vacant lot. The head had a jagged hole, showing that the murder weapon was likely an ax or hatchet.

  Marten now had much of the corpse but still didn’t know the man’s name. He had had no dental work and bore no tattoos, both of which are helpful for determining identity. A dirty shirt was found with the body—and the bloodstains were of the same blood type as the body parts. Once washed, the shirt proved to be a valuable clue. A laundry mark was visible on the collar.

  In those days, men wore button-down shirts every day and had them cleaned at laundries. The laundries marked the shirts with permanent ink so that they could be returned to the correct owners. Different laundries had different systems of marking, so one might read W-K33 and another, H 8421-3-5. These marks were helpful in identifying bodies and solving crimes. The first of the above marks, for instance, was found on bloody towels connected to the murder of a jewelry salesman. The police located the laundry, and a worker there identified the customer. That customer turned out to be the killer. These laundry marks were so helpful in solving crimes that some police departments had files of laundry marks used by all the laundries in the city.

  Laundry mark on a shirt, similar to the one used to solve the Brooklyn Butcher case

  In this case, the police searched the laundries until they found the right one, which was located in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn. The laundryman supplied the name and address of the owner of the shirt. Police found that man, a bootlegger and owner of a speakeasy, at home. But he said the shirt didn’t belong to him. It belonged to his ex-partner, Andrew Zubresky. The man was so cheap that he would sneak his shirts into his friends’ laundry bags so that he didn’t have to pay for his own cleaning. Zubresky and the owner of the laundry bag had had a falling out, and Zubresky was now running a different speakeasy. At that location, the police found Zubresky’s wife (identified by Marten only as Mrs. Andrew Zubresky). She said that she and her husband had argued. He’d withdrawn $1,400 from his bank account and gone to Europe. Her description of her husband matched the one Marten had made based only on the thigh.

  Police didn’t believe Mrs. Zubresky’s story. If her husband had taken a European holiday, then why had he wound up all over Brooklyn? Heightening their suspicions, they learned that the Zubreskys had been tried for the murder of Mrs. Zubresky’s first husband in Cleveland. He, too, had owned a speakeasy where Zubresky was the bartender. Had Mrs. Zubresky offed her first and second husbands? Detectives interrogated her, but she never broke.

  When the police followed Mrs. Zubresky, they saw that she was living with Charles Obreitis, a butcher-turned-bartender in the Zubreskys’ Greenpoint speakeasy. He confessed to the murder. Obreitis said Mrs. Zubresky had asked him to kill her husband, promising money and romance. Obreitis had agreed. One night, he got Zubresky drunk and hit him over the head with a hatchet. Then he was faced with the problem of getting rid of the body. He decided to cut it up (using his butcher skills) and deposit the parts all over Brooklyn, apparently thinking police wouldn’t figure out that they belonged to the same person. Which poses the question: exactly how many people’s body parts did he think they would suppose were lying around the city?

  The final step in solving the murder was to prove without a doubt that the body belonged to Zubresky. As a veteran of the US Army, his fingerprints were on file in Washington, DC. But since the body had been left in the open air, most of the fingers had rotted away. The right thumb was intact, but mummified. Marten tried everything to get a thumbprint, to no avail. Finally, he went on vacation, preserving the thumb in a glycerin-formaldehyde solution. When he came back, the thumb had unexpectedly plumped up. He got a print from it and it matched perfectly the one from the War Department. Obreitis went to prison for twenty years. Mrs. Zubresky stuck to her story and walked free, but she was later jailed for forging Zubresky’s checks.

  In another case, the medical examiner had a hunch as to the identity of a body but needed to prove it without a doubt. Call it the Case of the Party Food. Jennie Becker was fed up with her husband’s cheating ways—he was married with three children, for goodness’ sake. It was time to stop fooling around. But Becker had no intention of being faithful to his wife. Frankly, he’d fallen out of love with her. This might have been just another unhappy marriage. But Abraham Becker was a bad man. And he came up with a bad plan.

  On April 6, 1922, Abraham and Jennie went to a party thrown by their friends the Linders. Abraham doted on Jennie at the party, but it was all a ruse. On the drive home, he claimed they were having car trouble. His friend Reuben Norkin was standing on a street corner nearby. Abraham picked his buddy up, explaining to Jennie that perhaps Reuben would know how to fix the car. If something seemed off to Jennie or if she protested in some way, she nevertheless ended up with the men in an empty lot. There, Abraham popped the trunk and said, “Come here, and I’ll show you what’s the matter.”12 Jennie leaned over the hood to see. Then Abraham hit her with an iron bar. Reuben had been part of the plan all along and stood lookout while Abraham buried his wife.

  Afterward, Abraham told his suspicious neighbors that Jennie had gone to Philadelphia and even showed them a telegram that said,

  EVERYTHING OK WITH ME

  LETTER WILL FOLLOW JENNIE.13

  As promised, a letter did follow, which read:

  Dear Husband Abe:

  This is to inform you that I have gone away with another man who I was married to before I married you. He said he would arrest me for bigamy if I didn’t go with him. I hope you will be a better father than I have been a mother. I remain your ungrateful wife, Jennie.14

  Abraham was laying it on a bit thick. But the letter was postmarked from Philadelphia, and so the neighbors believed that it was from Jennie—for a while.

  Several months later, a badly decomposed body was found, and the neighbors got to talking again. Could it be Jennie? Police heard the gossip and brought “Husband Abe” to the morgue.

  Ever the charming husband, he said, “It don’t look like my wife. Jennie was a bigger woman.”15

  It wasn’t so much his words as his nonchalant attitude that convinced police of Abraham’s guilt. They even found a man who said that Abraham had asked him to send the telegram and letter from Philadelphia. But how could they be sure the body was Jennie’s? The body’s clothing had no laundry marks, and dental records were unavailable. In the end it was a familiar name—Dr. Gettler—who cracked the case based on the contents of the stomach. Whoever this was had had a somewhat unusual dinner prior to dying. Gettler found t
races of oranges, raisins, cherries, and almonds. Police asked the Linders what they had served at their party. Sure enough, oranges, raisins, cherries, and almonds were all on the menu. Reuben confessed to everything, but not Abraham. Nonetheless, both men were convicted and sent to the electric chair.

  Not every case cracked by the New York Medical Examiner’s Office was based on the autopsy alone. “Tour men,” medical examiners deployed to the scenes of unexplained deaths, gathered clues from the crime scene, too. Medical examiners still “tour” crime scenes today, the purpose being to view the context of the death and determine whether a crime occurred. The importance of these visits is apparent in a 1920s case involving a missing key.

  Boardinghouses were common during the 1920s and ’30s. People would rent bedrooms upstairs and share the eating and living space downstairs. Typically room and “board”—meals—were provided, as well as cleaning services. Boardinghouses could be rather genteel—Sherlock Holmes and Watson stayed in such a home. They could also be cheap, providing affordable housing for the poor. In one such lower-rent boardinghouse, a chambermaid knocked on the door of an elderly woman and, getting no response, unlocked it. She found the woman dead in her bed. Though the old woman lived in a communal home, she was a lonely person. She had just one friend, the middle-aged man across the hall. The boarders were impressed at how kind he was to her.

  The police arrived and, seeing no injuries, assumed the woman had died of natural causes. Still, they followed the protocol of calling the medical examiner, and it was a good thing they did. The medical examiner found something amiss. If the chambermaid had to unlock the door to let herself in, then the door must have been locked. But if the old woman herself had locked it, then where was the key? The chambermaid didn’t know, and the police couldn’t find it. They thought to check with her one friend—and found it in his pocket. That discovery led to an autopsy of the woman, during which the medical examiner found signs of strangulation. The neighbor confessed. He had been sneaking around the woman’s apartment looking for money. When she caught him, he killed her. As it turned out, her one friend in the world was also her worst enemy. As to why he locked the door from the outside, he told the police it seemed like a good idea at the time. Well, it wasn’t his worst idea that day.

  Cases like these made the New York Medical Examiner’s Office an example to other cities, counties, and states. Throughout the 1900s, coroners gave way to medical examiners. Meanwhile, detectives took the place of coroners when it came to investigating crime scenes and interviewing witnesses.

  DEADLY DOLLHOUSES

  Frances Glessner Lee influenced crime scene investigations in a big way—through miniatures. A fan of Sherlock Holmes, Lee one day asked her brother’s friend George Burgess Magrath about his work in the Massachusetts Medical Examiner’s Office. The conversation blossomed into a lifelong friendship, and Lee loved hearing about her friend’s investigations.

  Magrath would often say that there weren’t enough people being trained in crime detection. A wealthy woman, Lee had the means to fix that. In 1931, she donated money to establish the Harvard Department of Legal Medicine, where crime-solving seminars were held for medical examiners, lawyers, detectives, state troopers, coroners, insurance men, and newspaper reporters.

  Next, Lee embarked on an unusual project that would help investigators find clues at crime scenes. She created a series of twenty dollhouse scenes, which she called the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. For research, she read the newspaper, visited active crime scenes, talked to investigators, and attended autopsies. Then she created the fictional but “ripped from the headlines” scenes. One that may have been inspired by the Brides in the Bath case featured a woman in the bathtub. Unlike in the Brides in the Bath, however, this woman appeared to have gone out partying with her friends. Was the death an accident or murder?

  Each dollhouse cost about as much as building an actual house. A carpenter constructed the home on a one-inch-to-one-foot scale, complete with working doors and keys. Meanwhile, Lee made each doll by hand, painting their faces, sewing matching outfits, and knitting sweaters. Sometimes she created toys for the doll children, including a miniature dollhouse inside one dollhouse. After all that loving handiwork, she would kill the doll, stabbing her, tying a noose around his neck, etc. Finally, she would place clues at the scene—miniature bullet shells, rolled-up cigarettes, and more. Now it no longer looked like a child’s toy—more like a nightmare.

  Dollhouse crime scenes from Frances Glessner Lee’s Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death

  Students at the Harvard seminars would study the scenes for a day. Lee encouraged them to examine the scene in clockwise fashion, leaving no stone unturned. In one scene, a woman appeared to have committed suicide, but at the house, there was a fresh-baked cake, newly washed clothing, and a freshly filled ice cube tray—hardly the marks of a suicidal woman (as any TV mystery fan knows). After taking notes, the students would try to reconstruct the crime. Students said that this exercise really did help them handle challenging cases in the field. The nutshells now belong to the Baltimore Office of the Medical Examiner and are still used for teaching seminars. And for any retro TV mystery fans, Lee was the inspiration for Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote.

  3

  Elementary, My Dear Watson: The First Detectives

  For hundreds of years, coroners led the charge in solving murders—as best they could, anyway. During this time, police officers patrolled the streets and chased down any criminals caught in the act. But if a crime occurred out of sight, police had little recourse. Then, around 1800, the modern world’s first detective came on the scene. His name was François Eugène Vidocq, and he came from an unlikely place: prison. Vidocq was a wild young man, by his own accounts. He stole, fought, and had numerous girlfriends. When he found one amour, Francine, dining at a tavern with another man, he “heartily thumped the astonished pair,”1 according to his memoirs. Francine fled the scene, but the soldier stayed and pressed charges. Vidocq was jailed for three months for the attack, a sentence that would be parlayed into years in prison and on the run.

  By some accounts, Vidocq’s troubles worsened when he forged a pardon for a fellow inmate who had stolen grain to feed his starving family. However, according to Vidocq’s memoirs, his crime was less heroic and actually a complete misunderstanding. The fellow inmate had stolen not grain, but garden tools to work his small farm. And he was apparently not starving, for he had promised any prisoner 100 crowns if they got him released. Vidocq’s friends began forging a note of pardon, working in Vidocq’s cell because it was quiet there. The prisoner was released, but afterward the forgery was discovered. The thief was captured and blamed Vidocq’s friends and Vidocq himself. Vidocq always maintained that he was innocent of this. Whether that’s true is unknown. It was the crime that initiated his outlaw status, so to admit to it in his memoirs could have meant a return to prison. At any rate, he was judged guilty. To avoid being transferred to a harsher prison, Vidocq escaped—for the first of many times—by dressing as a guard.

  François Eugène Vidocq, the world’s first detective

  He was ultimately caught and sentenced to eight years in the Bagne, the very type of prison he feared. Here, prisoners wore arm and leg chains while doing heavy labor—and even while sleeping. Many died before they could complete their prison sentences. Vidocq became a slave laborer on the chain gang. Eventually, Vidocq escaped the lockup, but he remained on the run for the rest of his life. He would float from town to town, doing honest work, only to be discovered again as an escaped convict. (If you are a literature or musical theater fan and this is all starting to sound familiar, it’s because Vidocq later became friends with Victor Hugo, and Hugo based the character of Jean Valjean in his novel Les Misérables on Vidocq.)

  Because of his repeated prison escapes, Vidocq became an outlaw hero. But Vidocq wasn’t that kind of criminal—not really. Rather, he was a man still paying for what was supposed to be a
short jail sentence. So when a band of robbers asked him to join them in their escapades, he said no, and for that, they turned him in to the Lyons police. Vidocq turned the tables on the thieves, however, contacting the head of police and offering to help him arrest the crooks in exchange for his own freedom. And that’s how Vidocq wound up on the other side of the law.

  By 1809, Vidocq had made his way to Paris. With Napoleon conquering most of Europe, the nation’s capital had become an international hub. The population was fast approaching the one million mark, and crime was rampant. With an estimated 5,000 pickpockets and a murder every hour, the police were outnumbered by criminals. Wealthy people went out with armed guards, and even the middle class hired security guards to protect their homes from burglars.

  In this milieu, Vidocq’s profile as a police informer rose. As the story goes, Empress Josephine (the wife of Napoleon) had an emerald necklace that was stolen. Vidocq offered to find it for the police. By asking around in his criminal network, Vidocq located the necklace within three days. Soon, he was investigating major crimes as Paris’s first undercover detective. After many successes, he convinced the police to let him create his own bureau—with ex-convicts as his detectives. After all, they knew the criminals, and the criminals knew who committed the crimes. In 1817, Vidocq and his twelve agents made 772 arrests—fifteen of those for murder. The bureau, called Le Brigade de Sûreté (the security brigade), acted in all twenty-four districts of Paris. Over time, it became the Sûreté Nationale, a national detective bureau that predated the FBI.