The criminologist Edward Oscar Heinrich (1881–1953) was an expert witness enlisted by the prosecution for People vs. Arbuckle. He was pitted against Roscoe Arbuckle’s chief counsel, Gavin McNab, and rebuttal witnesses, all rival experts drawn, for the most part, from Los Angeles.

The following passage is from our working draft, a narrative that covers Heinrich’s first appearance on the stand in November 1921.

Repainting Room 1219

Heinrich also discussed in a previous blog entry about the way to properly “see” room 1219 of the St. Francis Hotel on September 5, 1921.

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Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” in which Sherlock Holmes solves a murder by using his magnifying glass to compare the wax impression of a thumb to a thumb stain on a wall, was inspired by a real crime. A decade earlier, in 1892, a young Argentinian woman murdered her two children so that her boyfriend would marry her. Instead, she became the first person convicted of a capital offense based on a finger print, a single bloody thumb mark left on a wall. But this revolutionary way of solving crimes had begun even earlier, when, ironically, two Indian civil servants needed a way to identify people of color in criminal cases for the British Raj because “they all look alike.” This became the Henry system of finger print classification that was adopted by Scotland Yard and subsequently by police departments in the United States during the first decade of the twentieth century.

In 1910, the first American criminal case to be decided solely on the basis of finger print evidence occurred when Thomas Jennings, an African American, was convicted for the murder of a white homeowner during a botched burglary attempt. For the next ten years, police departments in the United States further perfected their methods of finger print identification—dactyloscopy—and the routine taking of finger prints from criminal suspects and crime scenes.

By 1920, finger print evidence became as much a sensation as DNA evidence is today in solving seemingly unsolvable crimes, especially when there was no other witnesses than the alleged perpetrator, as in the case of Roscoe Arbuckle. Proving that he had fatally injured Virginia Rappe provided a challenging test of the scientific method and the District Attorney of San Francisco took advantage of what was then the epicenter of modern criminology and forensics just across the bay at the University of California in Berkeley.

The first Chief of Police of Berkeley, California, August Vollmer, was already known around the world for his progressive innovations in creating one of the first modern police forces in the country. He had also encouraged the University of California to establish the first program in criminology in the United States, where Brady’s expert witness, Edward O. Heinrich, was hired as the first lecturer in 1919.

Known as “Oscar” to his friends and students, Heinrich started out as a self-trained pharmacist in his native Tacoma, Washington. With nothing but a high school diploma, he earned a degree in chemistry at Berkeley as a special student in 1908.

Edward O. Heinrich, ca. 1919 (Carnegie Library, Denver)

Over the next decade, Heinrich worked as a chemist in Tacoma, a police chief in Alameda, California, and as the city manager of Boulder, Colorado. He returned to Berkeley in 1919 at the invitation of Chief Vollmer to take over the laboratory of the late Theodore Kitka, a handwriting expert and authority on inks and ink stains. Kitka, obsessed with freeing Tom Mooney from prison for the 1917 Preparedness Day bombing, had made important strides in the science of finger print analysis—and Heinrich continued this work.

For Kitka, Heinrich, and other handwriting experts, going from the loops of and downstrokes of a subject’s handwriting to the loops, whorls, and tent arches of finger print analysis was a logical progression. Both disciplines required a practiced eye, patience, an inquiring mind—and a good microscope. In his advertisements in San Francisco’s legal newspaper, The Record, he billed himself as a “Legal Chemist and Microscopist.”

Heinrich’s work had made news when William Hightower was arrested for the kidnapping and murder of a Catholic priest in August 1921. He had shown the court how the word “tuberculosis,” stenciled on Hightower’s tent to ward away the curious from his campsite, was obviously the work of a cake decorator—and matched the lettering of a ransom letter for the dead priest. Although Hightower was a drifter, he was also an itinerant baker. As further proof, Heinrich employed soil analysis, forensic geology, and the microscopic examination of rope and tent fibers as well as nicks on Hightower’s pocketknife.

While Heinrich was still involved in the Hightower case, he was already at work in the Arbuckle suite and had two doors from 1219—the one that connected to the hotel corridor and the one innermost door of the two that connected to room 1220—removed and taken to his Berkeley lab. In a matter of days, between September 17 and 21, he had a general idea that a crime had been committed in the room based on enlargements of finger prints of Arbuckle and Rappe taken by the San Francisco Police.

That the Arbuckle case was Heinrich’s first as a finger print expert wasn’t lost on the defense team but he had to be taken seriously in another way, given that high-profile cases involving finger print evidence were being lost by criminal defense lawyers. Juries that had an ear for the Cross of Gold oratory of the 1890s were now being swayed by science in the courtroom. Nevertheless, a William Jennings Bryan could still beat evolution at the Scopes Monkey Trial—and McNab could be said to have had it easier than his fellow Democrat did in 1925. Milton U’Ren, relying on finger prints alone, was no Clarence Darrow in 1921—and Heinrich was no Darwin. The scientist from Berkeley resembled a solemn-looking young man with a high-forehead and lock of hair falling over it. He spoke in a quiet and reasoned voice, as though to a room full of students rather than jurors already growing bored with the trial, already making up their minds.

Shortly after the Tuesday afternoon session convened, the bailiffs moved two oblong objects, covered with sheets, from behind Judge Louderback’s desk. Spectators gaped at them, including the jury as they filed in and took their seats in the jury box. An easel was set up to display enlarged photographs and placards. Matthew Brady himself, for the first and only time, conducted the examination after Heinrich was sworn in. But reporters barely noticed the rare appearance as the chief prosecutor ceded the floor to the man who had made it possible to visualize what happened in room 1219 on the afternoon of September 5.

Heinrich described himself as a “consulting criminologist,” according to Oscar Fernbach, “declaiming to the jury his many accomplishments like some Pied Piper of Hamelin.” But what Heinrich had learned from room 1219 was extensive and as yet unknown to everyone save the prosecutors. They wouldn’t see the hundreds of notes and equations for probability distribution that Heinrich had made. He had also identified many of the hairs found in room 1219. Under the microscope, he could tell which ones came from men and women, which had been “barbered” or pulled out by the root.

He had pored over her clothes in the evidence room and his lab in Oakland. The “sport suit,” as he called her green outfit, had been torn in various ways. The left arm of her green coat had been torn at the seam for a distance of five inches. The cuff links had been torn out of their cuffs, one of which hung by a few threads. The right sleeve of her shirtwaist had been ripped to the elbow from the back. The white silk underpants of Rappe’s “teddy bear” had been torn down the left side. In his final notes, Heinrich had no opinion about the clothes that Rappe wore into room 1219.

Heinrich had found some stains on the double bed’s quilted pad. Most of these he described these as “seminal in character” but had passed through the hotel’s laundry. When he turned the quilt over, however, he found a fresh blood stain one-quarter of an inch in diameter and near it a semen stain about three-fourths of an inch long and almost as wide. But he decided that these couldn’t be attached to the case even though he suspected a maid had just turned the mattress pad over.

One of the doors that Heinrich had brought from the hotel to his laboratory and to the courtroom was the outer door from room 1220 to 1219. He had found the impressions left by Maude Delmont’s shoes. He found scuffs from their toes but, more importantly, the impressions left by the nails and center screws of her French heels. After he conducted his own test with the shoes, strapping them to wooden handles so that they could be pounded like hammers in doors that were, like those of Arbuckle’s suite, either oak or birch. These tests revealed that Maude Delmont had kicked the door as she had said.

By Thursday, September 22, as the preliminary investigation got underway, Heinrich met with Brady, U’Ren, and Golden at the Hall of Justice. He had provisionally identified Rappe’s and Arbuckle’s finger prints on 1219’s bathroom door as well as the door leading into the corridor. Heinrich photographed Delmont’s heel marks on the door between 1220 and 1219 and collected hair samples and bobby pins. Semen stains were found on the comedian’s mattress. But Heinrich deemed them too old. U’Ren agreed to leave them out of the case. Lastly, Heinrich found nothing to suggest Delmont’s claim that Arbuckle had ripped off Rappe’s clothes, a hypothesis that the prosecutors let go.

As a criminologist, Heinrich risked being imprinted by the suppositions of the men who would pay for his meticulous list of expenses and his fee. It was a matter of ethics and academic discipline. Given the prints he had taken from the bathroom door and the inside of 1219’s room door and the hair he had found on the floor, Heinrich wrote in his notes as early as September 17, that

the action under investigation in this case may be interpreted as an opening of the [bathroom] door from without by a push of the man’s hand and an increase of the opening by the shoving aside of the door by the woman running out toward the hallway door; the woman at the time standing at the end of a rug adjusting clothing from which hairs dropped.

As the trial date approached in November, the evidence and testimony would be mostly limited to the prints on the hallway door. The conjectured image of Rappe escaping from the bathroom and making her way to leave room 1219 via the hallway, of turning to face Arbuckle, frantically straightening out her clothes and brushing herself off, wouldn’t find its way into testimony—at least not yet.

As Heinrich unveiled one of the hotel doors, he moved like a photographer positioning it “so that it catches the light at the right angle,” reported Walter Vogdes of the Examiner.

Visible on the door was a brilliant coat of aluminum dust spattered over one of the upper panels. He pointed out two hand prints, one on top of the other. Then, using a series of photographs and diagrams, he explained to the court what he believed these indicated.

First Heinrich revealed where Rappe’s palm had been pressed against the door. Superimposed, as though the fingers were interlaced, were the fingertips of Arbuckle’s hand. Heinrich had also made drawings that methodically, mathematically identified the owner of each set of prints.

As Heinrich spoke, a rival handwriting expert, Chauncey McGovern, and Ignatius McCarthy, a former investigator for the Department of Labor, looked on from the defense counsel’s table. They were not only there to observe and take notes for when they took the stand, but as supernumeraries for McNab’s theater of incredulity.

McGovern and McCarthy expressed their disagreement with Heinrich’s findings. They made faces for the jurors to see. They rolled their eyes and shook their heads. Arbuckle, too, got in on the act. In a courtroom caricature, a cartoonist for the San Francisco Call depicted the comedian studying his hand in mock skepticism. Heinrich is also depicted, engrossed by his own demonstration, working away with a drawing on a large sheet of paper.

Sitting next to the cartoonist, the reporter Edgar T. Gleeson jotted down the notes that later described Heinrich stepping from exhibit to exhibit, pointing out the various differences in the curves, broken contacts, lifelines, and ridges of the prints made by Rappe’s palms and fingers and then compared them to Arbuckle’s. With his eyes “peering, hands clasped, and brow rising and falling,” Gleeson compared Heinrich to “a man from Mars” and a “human thinking machine” on par with “Professor Craig Kennedy,” the popular pulp novel scientist detective.

In the end, Heinrich told the court that his evidence suggested the possibility of a struggle between Rappe and Arbuckle, that the comedian had the young actress pinned to the door leading out to the corridor. This theory neatly fit the voices that Josephine Keza heard, of a woman begging as though for her life as much as her virtue, and the cruel voice of the man’s telling her to shut up. Thus, with a ring of circumstantial evidence closing around the defendant, Matthew Brady handed Heinrich over to Gavin McNab for cross-examination.

The defense counsel didn’t take long to get to a simple question.

“If that door had been wiped would not these finger prints have been obliterated?”

“Surely,” answered Heinrich.

“They can be rubbed out, can’t they?” McNab continued. “Otherwise, in a long period of time, I suppose they would protrude into the room. They don’t have to be taken off with an axe, do they?”

Despite McNab’s sarcasm, Heinrich gave him a proper answer. He said the finger prints could be rubbed off. But he had proved to himself—and likely colleagues as well to stress-test his opinion—that prints he found on the door were Arbuckle’s and Rappe’s. He explained that there were thirteen points of identification in the prints of the dead girl’s fingers and seventeen in those of the defendant. The chances of her finger prints being duplicated by another woman were 393,000 to 1. The chance of any man having the same points as Arbuckle were 3,300,00 to 1.