Silent Witnesses (10 page)

Perhaps this explanation seemed detailed enough to be plausible, since no one challenged it. The jury found Stielow guilty of murder in the first degree and he was sentenced to death in the electric chair. Green, wishing to avoid the same fate, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment. In February 1916, an appeals court upheld the convictions, stating that “from an
examination of the record, it is inconceivable that the jury could have rendered any other verdict.”

While awaiting execution at the infamous Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Stielow managed to convince the deputy warden, Spencer Miller Jr., that he was innocent of the crime. Miller passed on his concerns to Louis Seibold, a reporter with the
New York World.
He in turn hired a Buffalo detective called Thomas O'Grady to reexamine the case.

O'Grady discovered that both the defendants were illiterate and would therefore have been incapable of writing out their own confessions. He also found it difficult to believe that they would have used some of the sophisticated phrases found in their statements. He then discovered that both Newton and Hamilton were working on a contingency basis—that is, they would not have been paid unless both Stielow and Green were found guilty.

O'Grady's investigation continued, but meanwhile the second and third appeals for a new trial were denied. Time was now running out for Stielow. Fortunately, by now the state governor had taken an interest in the case and on December 4, 1916, he commuted Stielow's sentence to life imprisonment. He also appointed a Syracuse attorney named George Bond to reexamine the case. Bond promptly employed yet another investigator, Charles Waite, to do the legwork.

Bond and Waite quickly established that the confessions made by the two men did not correspond convincingly with the facts of the case. The statements that Stielow and Green had signed said that Margaret Wolcott ran past them, but if that was so, then she must have recognized them, as she knew them both well. Why, then, would she have run to Stielow's house to find
help, knowing that he was one of the men who had attacked her? Both men had also said in their confession that Margaret Wolcott was alive when they emerged from Phelps's bedroom and ran back to Stielow's house, yet given that she had been shot in the heart, this seemed more than a little unlikely. And if these circumstances were not bizarre enough, it was also noticed that the angle at which the bullet had entered her body was geometrically impossible given the immediate geography, as anyone visiting the scene would have noticed at once.

Stielow's .22 revolver was then examined by ballistic experts from the New York Detective Bureau. It was their expert opinion that the gun had not been fired for at least three or four years. They wrapped a sheet of paper around the gun and fired a single round. The paper burst into flames, ignited by the hot gases discharged—an obvious contradiction of Hamilton's statement that there was no leakage of gas at the breech. Next the gun was discharged into a cotton-filled box. The bullets were recovered and taken to Dr. Max Poser, an expert in microscopic examination at the Bausch and Lomb headquarters in Rochester. Not only was Poser unable to find the microscopic scratches that Hamilton had sworn in court were there, he also discovered that the bullets had been fired from a gun with a manufacturing flaw. One of the five grooves that were supposed to line the inside of the barrel of that particular model was missing. Stielow's gun had no such defect, and therefore could not have fired the bullets that killed Phelps or Margaret Wolcott. When this evidence was presented, both Stielow and Green were pardoned. They were released on May 9, 1918.

While forensic ballistics had certainly helped to save the life of a man who had been falsely accused, the conclusion of this
case is perhaps not as satisfying as we would like. Another man did come to be suspected of the crime instead but was never prosecuted; neither were Hamilton and Newton, who had lied under oath and thereby almost caused the death of an innocent man. Stielow and Green were never compensated. Alas, true stories rarely have quite the ending that we would like them to.

Still, as a result of this case, the authorities began to see that the ability to accurately match the bullets taken from a crime scene with a particular gun had extremely useful practical applications. Charles Waite, whose involvement in the Stielow and Green case we have just mentioned, began to assemble data on all manufactured guns—their bore diameters, the pitch and direction of their rifling, and anything else that might help match a bullet with the gun that fired it. A survey of only American-made guns soon proved to be insufficient. At the end of the First World War, the United States was flooded with cheap, mass-produced foreign pistols, mostly from Europe. In order to broaden his database to accommodate the circulation of these weapons, Waite therefore traveled to Europe and spent the bulk of his time there for several years.

During the 1920s, while Waite was compiling his database, ballistic expert Calvin Goddard and chemist Philip Gravelle were busy perfecting the comparison microscope. This is a binocular device where each eyepiece views a different area through a separate microscope. A simple early model had already been used to compare such things as grains and ground pigments. Goddard and Gravelle modified it so that bullets or shells could be compared side by side. It was a revolution in the science of ballistics. In 1925, Goddard and Gravelle teamed
up with Waite to establish the now legendary Bureau of Forensic Ballistics in New York. From here they offered their services to police forces throughout the country, specializing not only in ballistics but also in fingerprinting, blood-typing, and trace evidence analysis—in just about any forensic technique, in fact.

Probably the bureau's most famous case took place on Valentine's Day 1929. On that day, at a garage situated at 2122 North Clark Street in Chicago, two men dressed as police officers lined six members of the George “Bugs” Moran gang up against a wall. Two other men joined them, both wearing trench coats and carrying Thompson submachine guns. They then proceeded to fire seventy rounds into the line of men, killing some instantly and seriously wounding others. (Of those wounded, none survived very long.)

One of the victims was a gangster named Frank Gusenberg. While he was still lying on the garage floor, a real police officer who had arrived at the scene told him he was dying and asked him to name the person who shot him. Gusenberg replied: “I'm not going to talk—nobody shot me.” He died with seventeen bullets inside him. The criminal code of silence had been maintained even under the most extreme circumstances.

Just over a year after these events—now infamous as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre—two Thompson submachine guns were recovered from the home of a known hit man called Fred Burke, who had been arrested on suspicion of murdering a police officer in Michigan. Goddard compared the bullets from the massacre with test bullets fired from the recovered Thompsons. They matched; the bureau had identified the murder weapons. Frustratingly, despite strong evidence against
Burke and his gang, for some unknown reason he was never charged with the crime. The case remains, officially anyway, unsolved. Unofficially it is almost certain that Burke and his gang were responsible, and it is only because of the work of the Bureau of Forensic Ballistics that we are able to make that statement. Burke was later convicted of the murder of the police officer and died in prison in 1940.

As firearms have been improved and refined, so ballistics experts have had to change their methods in order to keep up. There are certain characteristics that all similar weapons will have in common—things such as the caliber of the bullet, the number and size of the rifling grooves inside the barrel, and the position of the marks on the shell. These are known as class characteristics. All similar weapons will have the same class characteristics; for example, the barrels of all .45-caliber Colt automatic pistols have six rifling grooves with a left-handed twist. The groove depth in the Colt .45 is .0035 inch, and the rate of twist is one full turn in 16 inches. Caliber is the measure of the diameter of the bore (the interior of the barrel) in hundredths of an inch—a .30-caliber gun has a bore of 30 hundredths of an inch. Unfortunately, this simple system of categorization has slipped a little over time. Thus the .38-caliber Colt special has a bore of only .346, and the so-called .38—.40 has a bore of .401. To further complicate matters for the ballistics specialist, over the years many small-arms manufacturers have made speciality guns of unusual calibers. Still, despite these complications class characteristics can usually determine the model of gun from which a particular bullet was fired.

A modern-day forensic investigator mounts a cartridge case from a crime scene on a comparison microscope at the Santa Ana, CA, police department. Microscopes such as these were instrumental in allowing simultaneous comparison of cartridges.

The variety of firearms available means that determining the origin of a bullet requires an understanding of class characteristics as well as an extremely current knowledge of the range of weapons on the market.

Even more complicated details such as the rate of twist of the barrel can be determined using some reasonably straightforward calculations. First, you must measure the diameter of the bullet and the angle the groove makes relative to a straight line drawn from the point of the bullet to the back. The formula for determining the twist of the barrel from which a bullet was fired in inches is:

P = π × D ÷
tan a

P is pitch (meaning the twist), D is the diameter of the bullet, and
tan a
is the tangent of the angle of the groove. Suppose you're looking at a .45-caliber bullet with a diameter of .451 inch and you find the angle of the groove to be 5° 04′. Your
scientific calculator tells you that the tangent of 5° 04′ is .0885. You multiply π (3.14159) times the diameter and get 1.4168. You then divide that by .0885, which tells you that the twist is one turn in 16 inches.

But after an expert has managed to identify the type of gun that fired the shot, there is still one question remaining: which gun in particular was it? Fortunately, there are ways to establish this, related to the process of manufacturing a gun. To create the barrel, a bore is reamed out of a solid metal rod and the tool that does this job leaves behind myriad tiny scratches. A smoothing tool then reduces these scratches to microscopic proportions, but, crucially, they do not disappear altogether. Another tool then cuts the grooves in the barrel, and this process leaves behind its own pattern of tiny scratches. Additionally, each cut creates minute changes in the cutting tools themselves, meaning that the structure of each barrel is slightly different. What all this means is that every barrel is individual and leaves a different pattern of striations on the bullets that pass through it, even if these are only visible on a microscopic level. By test-firing bullets from a weapon they have reason to suspect has been involved in a crime, and then comparing these with bullets recovered from the scene, experts can establish whether the microscopic markings match, and therefore whether the gun is indeed the one they are looking for.

The importance of the unique marks that an individual weapon can leave upon the projectiles it fires is well illustrated by the case of Dr. Angelo Zemenides. Zemenides was a Cypriot who lived in London and worked as a teacher, as well as being an interpreter at the Old Bailey for the police. As a result of this latter occupation, he had received several death threats. Zemenides wanted to boost his income still further and so resolved to become
a marriage broker. He accepted a £10 fee from one Theodosios Petrou—a fellow Cypriot who worked as a waiter in an upmarket restaurant in Piccadilly Circus—on the condition that he find Petrou a bride with a £200 dowry. Since after some time no bride was forthcoming, Petrou asked for his money back. Unfortunately Zemenides only had £5 left. This he handed over, explaining rather feebly, “I spent the rest.” Petrou was unsurprisingly furious.