Evening Star Newspaper, November 10, 1929, Page 95

THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, NOVEMBER 10, 1929. e — - - S — Thwarted by Death: Master Mind in Crime Hssassin’s Bullet Snuffs Out Life of Famous French Scientific Sherlock Just on Verge of Startling Discoveries and Introduction of New Ildeas in Crime Detection. BY R. S. FENDRICK. MADMAN'S bullet has brusquely snuffed out the life of the greatest criminologist that France, and per- haps the world, has yet produced. Edmund Bayle, successor of Al- phonse Bertillon at the Paris police laboratory, was the prince of scientific detectives, the lead- er of the new school of savants—no fitting word has yet been coined to describe this new profession—who solve the most baffling crimes with test tubes, X-rays, ultra-violet rays, micro- scopes, electro-chemical baths, spectroscopes, special cameras and all the other aids of mod- ern science. He was the forerunner of the Sherlock Holmes of the future—the bespectacled and besmocked professor who will confound crim- fnals with mysterious reagents and reactives. “I foresee the day when a suspect will first be taken to the police laboratory for examina- tion,” M. Bayle told me a few weeks before he was assassinated. - “It will not be for a strong-arm third degree, but for a chemical fnquisition. The scientist in charge will place the accused man under a powerful microscope and study him as though he were an interest- ing insect. After that he may X-ray him and ultra-violet-ray him in an effort to find traces of the crime. He would probably wash him, too, in order to analyze the water, and these wouid only be the preliminaries of the physical inspec- tion. . “New scientific discoveries, particularly ultra- violet rays and electro-chemistry, have given the police a powerful arm against lawbreakers. “For example, we can determine if two drops of liquid are absolutely of the same essence by seeing if they have the same degree of electric conductibility. It is a wonderful process, precise to one ten thousandth of a milligram. In one case I had a check that had been washed, with acid and the amount raised. There was reason to believe that a suspect had done this check- washing on a sheet of blotting paper on his desk. The blotting paper showed no signs of acid to the naked eye, but I placed a small piece of the blotter, not much larger than the head of a pin, in an electro-chemical bath, and a similar-sized piece from the washed check in another bath, and measured their electric conductibility. They were absolutely identical. It was not only the same acid, but acid out of the same bottle.” Tfll world at large always thinks of the late . Alphonse Bertillon as the most famous French criminologist of modern times. It is true that he was one of the pioneers of eriminology, but he was a crude bungler com- pared with the eminent scientists who direct the Paris, Lyon and Marseille police laboratories today. Contrary to common belief, Bertillon did not invent the fingerprint system of identifica- tion, which is the outstanding police achieve- ment of the twentieth century. He created an- thropometric identification, which is & system * of taking certain measurements of the body, and he fought the adoption of the fingerprint system in France for many years. There is no com- parison between the two. The anthropometric method is complicated, requires much time and has many weak points, such as the growth of a young person’s body and the subsequent change in measurements. The fingerprint system. which is generally credited to Sir Willlam Herschel of England, is quick, simple and never errs. It not only serves to establish the real identity of criminals already caught, but aids to run them down, as lawbreakers often leave their prints behind. Besides the prints are easier to classify. France scrapped Bertillon’s system in 1921 and adopted the fingerprint method. The other European police laboratories have done the same. In Bertillon’s time the Paris police laboratory did little else than spend a vast amount of time taking the anthropometric measurements of prisoners. Since 1915 Edmond Bayle has built up a trained staff of chemists, photographers, elec- trical experts and other technicians who apply the very latest discoveries of science to the de- tection of crime. Bayle himself was the super- detective, the master mind who devoted himself only to the more difficult problems, When he rose to testify in a trial the guilty trembled. As a French court reporter wrote during one trial: “Bayle was the forty-fifth witness, but when he started to speak all the other 44 were forgotten. A typical example of his testimony was given in the Despres murder trial last Summer. Despres was an aged man who went about col- lecting money for a bank. He suddenly dis- appeared one day, as if the earth had swallowed him up, and a few weeks later his body was found in a sack in the Seine, with a red-and- white handkerchief tied over his mouth as a gag The last place Despres had been seen to enter was the house of Nourric, a bricklayer, in the Parisian suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne. Nourric, his wife and his brother-in-law, Duquesne, were arrested, but the state’s case was purely circum- stantial and the public prosecutor was despair- ing of conviction until Monsieur Bayle walked to the bar. “I do not hesitale to say that the handker- chief tied around the murdered man’s head is identical with the other five found in Nourric's home,” M. Bayle declared. “As you see, this material consists of two red threads followed by four white ones, but between the forty-seventh and what should have been the fifty-first red threads there are only three white ones. The same defect occurs in all six handkerchiefs. “I must explain to you that this material is woven in pieces 100 yards long, which makes 180 handkerchiefs. You may say that this error in the weaving will also be found in the other 174, which is true, but there is another damning coincidence. These are cheap goods with raw edges, sold in lots of six. The purchaser herself hems them, and I have discovered by micro- scopic examination and measurements that the ‘cne ~tied around Despres’ head and the other five found at Nourric’s home were hemmed on the same sewing machine and with the same make and weight of thread. Sewing machines space differently and tie differently. There are many makes of thread, and many sizes in all makes, but the thread used on these six hand- kerchiefs was absolutely identical. I even studied the fibers to make sure of that,” and the superdetective continued along this line of damning comparisons for several hours. As the jurymen gasped with astonishment at this scientific expose, the judge asked the three accused if they had anything to say about it. “Nothing,” they whispered hoarsely, and a few minutes later Nourric was condemned to life imprisonment and the other two to 20 yeais each. The list of the cases in which M. Bayle played a decisive role is too long to mention. Some of his finest work was done during the war, when he prepared secret inks for the French intelligence service and also read more than 2,000 letters in sympathetic ink written by German spies. He invented a developer for secret ink, called “iglycal,” that was marvelously successful. THE Paris laboratory chief was also the princi- pal witness in the case of the bluebeard Landru, who killed 12 of his fiancees and burned them in a kitchen stove in the lonely villa at Gambais. He identified some scraps of calcined bones as human, and also recognized some cor- set stays. In addition to criminal cases, investigating magistrates often called on M. Bayle to decide whether paintings and other disputed objects were really ancient or simply modern fakes. One noted 'affair concerned an alleged painting by Renoir, the French impressionist who died in 1919. A collector had paid a big price for this work—*“Woman With a Yellow Hat”—and then, becoming skeptical, filed a suit against the dealer for return of his money. The magistratas asked Bayle to determine if the essential char- acteristics of Renoir’'s style were embodied in the work in dispute. Bayle interviewed the son of Renoir and the dealer who sold him pig- ments; he analyzed the yellow on Renoir's palette and the yellow on some authentic works and learned that the master had used only Naples yellow during his career. The yellows on the disputed paintings were cadmium, chrome and strontium, but without a trace of Naples. Bayle also discovered other suspicious elements and reported that the painting was not by Renoir. It developed later that the dealer had picked up the painting for a few cents. He also Ssettled the great scientific dispute over Glozel, near Vichy, where several thousand allegedly antique pieces of pottery and bricks inscribed with an unknown language were A scene from the trial of the notorious blucbeard, Landru, at which M. Ba The defendant is indicated by an arrow. The late Edmond Bayle, famous French criminologist, whose remarkable career of scientific deduction was cut,short by a maniac’s bullet. found, by reporting that he had found cotton fibers dyed with modern aniline colors in the inside of the bricks. 4 6 AN evildoer always signs his crime,” M. Bayle contended, “and it is up to the laboratory detective to read this signature.” To carry out his objective, Bayle had de- veloped his laboratory to an almcst inconceiv- able perfection. He personally had invented scores of delicate apparatus, such as the special cameras used for bringing out fingerprints in- visible to the naked eye, and the ultra-violet-ray processes for analyzing metals, poisons and other substances by light. Did the police wish to know the exact nature of a bullet that had killed or wounded a man and then passed through him? Bayle would cut away a few threads from around the hole made in a suit, shirt or under- wear by the projectile, for even the fastest and hardest ball will leave a little of itself on its passage. acidulated bath, and the bath then submitted to electrolysis, leaving the residue attached to the electrodes. These electrodes would be placed in a special machine called the “spectrophoto- meter,” of which they became the poles. - An electric current was then turned on and the- spark was photographed. Every metal submit- ted to this test shows definitely characteristic The threads would be boiled in an- !:nys. and an expert has only to look at ome of these photographs to learn the exact metallic - composition of the bullet. WAs it important to know, and eye-witnesses were out of the question, whether a per- son would enter a certain room? M. Bayle solved one such problem with extra- ordinary success by placing an invisible infra- . rouge ray across the room, with a register that even indicated the exact time a person crossed. this ray, thereby interrupting the current. At the time of his death he was working on a spe- cial camera, conected with the infra-rouge system, that would photograph an intruder on a phosphorescent plate without revealing its presence. Had a murderer signed his crime by leaving a single wisp of his hair? The laboratry chief, or one of his dozen assistants, would inform the police within a few minutes whether the hair was from a wig, a living person or an animal; if from a human, the sex and approximate age of the person, and literally build up a persom~ ality under that one strand. Were some burned and charred documents found near the scene of a crime? Bayle would simply blow them intp the air with a bellows, catch them on a glass plate coated with gale Continued on Seventh Page yle was the chief witness for the prosecutiom,