Cough Syrup, Dead Children, and the Case for Regulation

By Deborah Blum

Kathleen Hobson was eight years old when her mother unknowingly dosed her with poisonous cough syrup. She’d only taken a couple spoonfuls but when investigators came round, they still found nothing left to test. After the little girl died, her mother had set the bottle on fire and then thrown it into the trash.

Charlene Canady was just four when she died from the same medication. Her father had carefully packed the cough syrup bottle, waiting for justice to come calling. I always imagine him silent when he handed the bottle over, grief and his daughter’s name caught like a kind of suffocation in his throat.

Both little girls lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, both came down with nasty little colds in the fall of 1937, and both died because they were dosed with a brand new medication, a popular, raspberry-flavored cough syrup. In all, the syrup would kill 11 people in Oklahoma, within a few weeks. Ten in Alabama. Ten in Georgia. Twenty-three in Mississippi. Nine in South Carolina. Seven in Texas. More in California, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Virginia, Louisiana, and more.

More than one hundred dead nationwide, in fact, and most of them children, Charlenes and Kathleens scattered across the United States like so much storm wreckage. “Nobody but Almighty God and I can know what I have been through these past few days,” a Louisiana doctor later wrote to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, after six of his patients died in one week.

As FDA scientists would quickly realize, the syrup was lethal because it was sweetened by a compound known as diethylene glycol which kills by causing acute kidney damage. Both diethylene glycol and the obviously closely related compound, ethylene glycol (even more toxic) are best known today for their use as antifreeze agents and homicidal weapons on more than one occasion.

But at the time that Elixir Sulfanilamide came to be, produced by the S.E. Massengill Company of Bristol, Tennessee, that wasn’t well understood. There was actually no legal requirement that companies understand their products, much less safety test them.

The company chemist who designed the cough syrup by mixing a sulfa drug into the poisonous sweetener claimed to have no such knowledge. And as the company president, Samuel Massengill responded: “We have been supplying a legitimate professional demand and not once could have foreseen the unlooked-for results. I do not feel that there was any responsibility on our part.”

The resulting Elixir Sulfanilamide scandal – and it was, indeed, an incendiary, nation-rocking scandal at the time - is mostly forgotten today. But it shouldn’t be. Those rippling deaths, the feeble government response, the indifference of the manufacturer and its big business allies - provoked such a passionate outcry that a year later, the long-delayed U.S. Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act was signed by President Franklin Roosevelt.

The 1938 law was first major upgrade of 1906 legislation. The earlier law established the U.S. government as a guardian of the American people’s safety, set precedents in regulating toxic chemicals in food and drugs. But that turn-of-the century law was in many ways a piece of regulatory lace, full of exceptions and exemptions. The new law filled many of those holes, gave power to protective rules.

Now, for the first time, manufacturers were required to safety test their wares and could be held responsible for consumer death and injury. In the case of Elixir Sulfanilamide, the company could not be held liable for a single death. It could only be charged with mislabeling – elixirs were supposed to contain alcohol and the cough syrup contained none.

The 1938 law also required manufacturers to list ingredients on their labels in some detail – another first. One of my favorite books of the 1930s, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, by Arthur Kallet and F.J. Schlink, is basically a litany of the hidden dangers that preceded that rule: the toothpaste that contained so much potassium chlorate that it was possible to commit suicide by eating a single tube; the high levels of lead in hair dye,;and the use of the toxic element thallium in depilatory creams. One of the side effects of thallium poisoning is that hair falls out. Cosmetic manufacturers of the 1930s thus found it handy in hair-removal products. They expressed surprise at the small epidemic of baldness, paralysis and occasional death that resulted. But, as they reminded irate physicians, they could not be held responsible for that.

But although advocates like Kallet and Schlink spent years marshaling such evidence in an effort to persuade the government to give the FDA actual enforcement powers, they were stymied by business opposition until the Elixir Sulfanilamide scandal galvanized the country. In an essay for the Annals of Internal Medicine, toxicologist Paul M. Wax called it “one of the most consequential mass-poisonings of the twentieth century.”

And it’s that case that always comes to mind when I hear politicians trumpeting the wonders of an unregulated marketplace, as with the current Republican party mantra that we don’t need strong environmental protections or – at the most extreme vantage point – even a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at all. Last year, along the same lines, conservative legislators were busily trying to defund the FDA as well.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein points out that Americans tend to sound anti-regulation when queried. But, he adds, if you press them on which oversight they’d like to give up, the picture becomes more complicated. Klein cites a Pew Research survey done in February which found that 53 percent of respondents wanted food and food product regulation increased – only seven percent thought it should be reduced. For environmental regulation, slightly more – a full 17 percent – argued for relaxing the rules. The survey was, actually, unable to locate a majority of American citizens seeking to be less well protected.

We hear legislators suggest that hard economic times demand the loosening of regulations. But don’t forget that our country was still mired in the long-reach of the Great Depression when that 1938 law was passed. The government recognized, even then, that protection of American citizens meant more than policing our cities and defending our borders. It meant dedicated protection of public health.

Do we sometimes wish that such protection was smarter, moved faster, was more richly knowledge-based? Less influenced by politics, on occasion, by corporate lobbyists? Of course, we do. But I see that as a call to keep the process as politics free as possible (dreaming, I know), to invest more in good risk research and to use that knowledge to improve protection against everything from food poisoning to chemical contamination.

We may not remember by name the Kathleen Hobsons and Charlene Canadays of our past. And as I said, the Elixir Sulfanilamide story, is mostly forgotten as well. But we should be grateful for the way it changed our lives. And we should occasionally acknowledge those lost children; whether we recognize it or not, their ghosts still walk among us today, reminding us of what is right.

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Murder on the Metro

by Gayle K. Brunelle

On the afternoon of May 16, 1937, the train doors opened at the Porte Dorée station of the Paris subway to reveal a single passenger, a woman sitting on a bench with a nine-inch stiletto buried in her neck. There were no witnesses and little evidence to help the police unravel the first murder ever committed in the Paris Métro. The baffling crime captivated the French reading public as journalists and the police uncovered the shocking truth about the victim. Laetitia Toureaux was not who she seemed to be. The beautiful young Italian immigrant, a cheerful widow, who called herself “Yolande,” was a friendly, hard-working factory worker by day.

But by night, Toureaux was a “limier-en-jupons,” a sleuth addicted to the seamy Paris underworld of dance halls.

The trail of investigation into Toureax's murder led to the Comité Secrète d’Action Révolutionnaire, a secret right-wing terrorist organization popularly known as the Cagoule, or “hooded ones.” Obsessed with the Bolshevik threat they perceived to be growing in France, Cagoule leaders were determined to overthrow France’s democratic Third Republic government. In its place, they aimed to install an authoritarian regime allied with Italy's Fascists. They did not shrink from committing violent crimes and fomenting terror to accomplish their goal.

With Benito Mussolini as their patron and Italian fascism as their model, the Cagoule obtained funds from powerful industrialists, clandestine support from the French military, and the quiet approval of World War I hero Philippe Pétain. In 1936, Laetitia Toureaux became enmeshed with this dangerous group of terrorists and the lover of Gabriel Jeantet, one of its leaders.

Much of the press coverage of the Toureaux case was not really about the sensational murder. Rather, the focus was on Toureaux herself. It derived from journalistic anxieties about assertive young women, the so-called flappers and single female of the inter-war period. Lack of actual breaks in the case was by no means a hindrance to the flood of reporting about it. On the contrary, the less the reporters, all men, actually knew about Toureaux, the freer they felt to speculate, reflecting their fears of modern female sexuality, their own erotic fantasies, and their fixation on the Paris underworld and the dance halls (known as bals musettes) that Toureaux loved.

Laetitia Toureaux’s murder was a godsend for them, because much of the Parisian reading public shared the obsession with the gangsters and prostitutes who haunted the bals musette.

The press at first portrayed Toureaux as a “douce brébis” (gentle lamb), a little naive, maybe even a flirt, but essentially an innocent victim. Yet within days after her murder, the popular press began to turn against her as deeper investigation exposed hints of a darker side to her identity.

First, it turned out that her in-laws knew next to nothing about the attractive but poor Italian immigrant who had married their now deceased son, a wealthy, handsome but socially awkward young man. Then, troubling hints of a double life began to surface -- of nights spent at bals musette and engaged in even more nefarious activity.

"LAETITIA TOUREAUX SPENT MORE THAN SHE EARNED: DID SHE HAVE A LOVER?" ran the sensational headlines in Paris-Soir on the 21st of May. Her apartment, it seemed, was decorated with a taste and elegance too rich for a mere Italian factory worker. The papers trumpeted the fact that on the night of her murder, Toureaux’s purse contained a book of first-class metro tickets. Since most Parisians knew that high-class prostitutes frequently traveled in first-class cars, the journalists speculated about just what Toureaux had been up to in the days, or nights, before her death.

Worse, it seemed that police found hundreds of letters in her apartment, tied in neat bundles, from many different men. Journalists frequently exaggerated or just got the facts wrong. Still, it was becoming clear that this woman named Laetitia, who called herself “Yolande,” had more than one career and more than one identity. After all, bals musette were where "young girls go for misadventures!" cried the papers.

The idea of Laetitia Toureaux as a female private detective or "cachottière," as her brothers Riton and Virgile called her, fascinated the press and the French reading public. Toureaux, journalists suggested, would have been fair game for any of the Paris underworld criminals because she inhabited their dark milieu of indigence and crime. She may even have been informing on them for the police. Lacking hard facts about the murder, at least any police permitted published, the press made Toureaux a lightning rod for much of the cultural angst of inter-war French society. Parisian journalists molded Toureaux’s mysterious demise into a story which made sense to its readers, re-enforced a law-and-order mentality in precarious times, and supported the established social order of the late 1930s.

To this day, Laetitia Toureaux’s murder remains officially unsolved and one of the most significant “locked-room mysteries” in the annals of historical true crime. Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010) is the first English language book devoted to this crime or to the Cagoule. Authors Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite (photo above left) contend that Toureaux infiltrated the Cagoule while working for the French police, and the information she uncovered ultimately cost her life.

Toureaux's tale reflects the turbulence of the 1930s, when France faced the coming of a war most people dreaded but which seemed inevitable. It was a period of great anxiety.But it also offered new opportunities, and risks, to women like Toureaux who embraced the identity of a “modern” woman. In reporting on the murder, the Parisian press was determined to fit Toureaux into their model of a “loose” woman and to enlist her in their exposé of espionage, corruption and crime in 1930s Paris.

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Black-Eyed Borgia

by Deborah Blum

Mary Frances Creighton, Fanny to her friends, was a rather appealing 24-year-old in the summer of 1923. She had curling dark hair, pale skin, “deep, luminous eyes,” according to The New York Evening Post, and lush, “petulant lips,” according to The New York American.

The New York Times more sedately described her as a “comely brunette,” or as “a young mother.” She had a three-year-old daughter, Ruth, and a newly born son, John Jr. The baby had been born in the Newark, N.J. jail, while both she and her husband, John, (together, above left) awaited a trial on charges that they’d killed Fanny's young brother with arsenic.

Hence all the publicity. The newspapers ran few photos of scrawny sandy-haired John. But Fanny Creighton willingly posed for admiring photographers: dressed in long-sleeved demure black, despite the summer heat, eyes lowered, carved silver cross hanging around her neck, infant cradled in her arms.

The image was of a gentle Madonna, the least likely person to have killed a younger brother for a life insurance payout.

The jurors also believed her an unlikely murderer. Both the Creightons were found innocent of the charges. But, in fact, although her husband was only a dupe in the affair, Fanny Creighton was guilty. She admitted to the killing a dozen years later. That was after she’d been charged with yet another arsenic murder.

In the second case – the murder of a close friend’s wife on Long Island – Creighton (and the close friend) went to the electric chair. This time, the press did not find her so appealing: “The Black-Eyed Borgia” screamed one headline. And this time the evidence was not so easily brushed away – the forensic results were so precise that the laboratory could identify the brand of arsenic-laced rat poison used – and the guilty decision came very quickly.

The different endings to two prosecutions of the same woman offer a remarkable measure of how much and how fast forensic science had grown up in the intervening decade. Today, we tend to take such scientific expertise for granted. This is not to imply perfection in a human enterprise. We’ve all followed recent scandals involving overworked criminal laboratories that misstated or even made up some of the findings. But that involves people making bad, really bad, decisions. The basic science itself – our ability to tease a poison out of tissue, identify a blood type, analyze traces of fibers or soils – those techniques stand as solid.

That was far from true in the early 20th century. Elected coroners often knew nothing about science or how to determine cause of death. As I learned in researching my book, The Poisoner's Handbook, death certificates from the time period sometimes merely gave “Act of God” as the cause. Police detectives regarded these strangers from laboratories with real suspicion, refusing to accept their findings. And lawyers found laboratory results to be a wonderfully easy target.

All of that worked perfectly to Fanny Creighton’s advantage in her first murder trial: “My clients know nothing of how this boy came to be poisoned!” her lawyer declared.

John Creighton and Mary Frances Avery were long time friends when they married in 1919. He was the son of an executive with the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. She, her brother and two sisters were orphans, cared for by affluent grandparents.

The newlyweds moved in with Creighton's parents, who owned a big, two-story home in Newark’s comfortable Roseville neighborhood. They shared the space for a year until his mother died at age 47 of apparent attack of food poisoning in 1920. His father, also 47, died the following year, of a sudden heart ailment.

 

In the 1920s, a powdery form of arsenic called white arsenic, also known as arsenic trioxide, was mixed into an astonishing array of home products. These included a tonic to improve one’s complexion (Fowler’s solution), prescription medicines, weed killers and pesticides, such as the popular rat poison Rough on Rats, which was 10 percent soot and 90 percent white arsenic. In their analysis of Charles Avery’s body, forensic scientists could easily detect arsenic in the tissues – tests had been available since the mid-19^th century – but they were unable to figure out which of these many poisons was responsible.

Fanny Creighton used Fowler's Solution to improve her pale complexion. But as her attorney pointed out, the mixture was so dilute that it would have taken gallons to kill the boy. Avery had access to rat poison at the grocery where he worked. The Creightons' attorney suggested that he might have taken it himself. His sister said he was depressed about a girl. The jury found the poison evidence so inconclusive that they quickly returned a not-guilty verdict. The angry prosecutor – convinced that Fanny, at least, was a murderer - then charged her with using arsenic to kill her mother-in-law. But that case foundered on even thinner scientific results. As Fanny Creighton walked away from the courthouse, she sent the prosecutor a message of forgiveness: “I bear no malice toward anyone.”

After the trial, the Creightons left New Jersey and moved to the small town of Baldwin on Long Island. During the Depression, they rented part of their home to another couple, Everett and Ada Applegate. Fanny had lost her dark Madonna looks by then. But her daughter Ruth was a rather lovely 15-year-old, and Ev Applegate decided he'd much rather be married to Ruth than to Ada, who was both fat and ill-tempered. Ev began sleeping with Ruth on the sly, and he told Fanny that if only he were free, he'd be glad to marry her daughter.

On September 27, 1935, Ada Applegate died of acute gastrointestinal distress. Prompted by an anonymous letter, the police opened and investigation and requested a forensic analysis. This time the tests -- done by New York's star toxicologist Alexander Gettler -- were inarguable. Not only did Gettler find three times the lethal dose of arsenic in Ada Applegate's body, he was able to identify the impurities in the poison as soot -- in fact, the exact proportion of soot found in Rough on Rats. The police traced the purchase of the poison, and Applegate and Creighton admitted to buying it together.

Creighton (left) also admitted, in an interview, that she'd used Rough on Rats to kill her brother. Investigators just hadn't known then how to identify it so precisely. It was such precision -- and a new awareness by police and the public of the science itself -- that changed the way we think about forensic medicine. There also was a very definite message in the end of Mary Frances Creighton's story. 

On July 16, 1936, she and Everett Applegate went to the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison.

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Jazz Age Science Enters Courtroom

by Deborah Blum 

The first week of December 1926 was clouded in fog. The mist lapped along the rivers, muffled the harbors, made eerie the dry creak of boats rubbing against docks in the water. 

Far too early one morning a Brooklyn police officer patrolling along the East River caught a half-glimpse of a man hurrying through the fog.  As the figure neared the edge of a wharf, the officer could see that the man walked slightly bent as he carried a heavy-looking bundle. The patrolman shouted for the man to halt but instead he hastily dropped his burden and kicked it into the river.

The officer called again as the man fled. Together with a hurriedly approaching fellow patrolman, he tackled the fugitive to the ground. But the stranger refused to answer any of their questions. They took him to the station house where, in the sudden brilliance of a lit room, the officers suddenly realized that their captive’s trouser cuffs and socks were sodden with blood. Once they’d pried out his name, they hurried to his apartment.  The kitchen was a scene from a horror movie, complete with bloody cleaver and jagged saw on the table and a woman’s body on the floor.

Half a body, actually. Everything below the waist was missing – and the police now deduced, long lost in the East River.

I’ve had a love-hate reaction to this story ever since I discovered it in the forgotten archives of New York City history. It’s terrible and it’s tragic.  It’s soaked in blood, literally. But it has a really terrific twist at the end. And even more important, it’s a classic story of chemical detective work from a time when forensic science was so new that scientists were a peculiarity in the courtroom.

I’ve been working as a science writer for most of my career, first at newspapers (won a Pulitzer in 1992 for writing about primate research) and as a book author. In the past decade, I’ve published books on the biology of sex differences, on the science of love and affection, and on whether it’s possible to prove life after death. I sound, I know, like someone with a short attention span. Mostly I just like exploring the different ways that science changes our lives, alters our history, explains who we are today.

Of course, when I first started thinking about writing a book about poison and murder it was also because I just found the subject fascinating. I grew up with my mother’s collection of early 20th  century crime fiction: Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Georgette Heyer, Leslie Ford, all of whom found poison to be the most seductive of murder weapons. I liked the idea of trying to catch some of that seductiveness in a book that would also explain the science of how poisons actually work. 

But it wasn’t until I started looking at the early history of forensics that I found a way to tell the story.  My book, "The Poisoner's Handbook," would become the tale of two forgotten scientists – medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler -- from early 20th century New York City who helped launch the science of forensics in the United States and also solved some of the most famous murder cases of their time.

The 1920s was a treasure trove of innovative, dangerous chemistry.  There were compounds created by military innovations of the Great War, by industrial applications, research into new medicines, and the speakeasy culture born with Prohibition, with its smoky jazz clubs and dubious cocktails. Morphine went into teething medicines for infants; opium into routinely prescribed sedatives; arsenic was an ingredient in everything from pesticides to cosmetics.

Against that background, early forensic scientists literally had to invent rules of chemical detection as they went.  Alexander Gettler, for instance, wrote the fundamental paper on cyanide (still cited by the EPA), created the first tests that could prove intoxication at time of death, discovered how to detect chloroform levels in the brain of a dead person, and did some of the fundamental work on the still-dangerous gas carbon monoxide and how it kills us.  He’s still mentioned by experts as “the father of forensic toxicology in the United States.”

The twist on that dismembered body story I mentioned earlier comes from work done by both Gettler and his boss, Charles Norris. As it turns out, it’s not so much a story of death by hacksaw as death by poison. The toxic material in question turns out to be the very lethal gas, carbon monoxide.

Norris was the pathologist on duty the night Brooklyn police discovered the partial body of Anna Frederickson in the apartment of Francisco Travia. By the time Norris arrived at the scene, the police had already charged Travia, a longshoreman, with hacking the woman to death. But Norris, after looking at the body, insisted that they were wrong.

The woman’s face and what was left of her body was flushed an odd cherry red. People who bled to death, he pointed out, tended to be waxy pale. He took the half-body back to the morgue at Bellevue for autopsy and sent tissue and blood samples to Gettler.

If you know carbon monoxide, you know it’s characteristic for people poisoned by the gas to be flushed pink, even after death. Carbon monoxide crowds oxygen out of the blood stream. Its chemistry gives it a more effective grip on blood-borne proteins that normally distribute oxygen.  As the blood is saturated with the by-products of carbon monoxide, a unique chemical reaction causes to become a brighter, pinker color.

Not only does the skin of a carbon monoxide victim become strangely rosy but also internal organs are stained a deep cherry-red. This effect is so persistent that carbon monoxide saturated blood will often remain that startling crimson weeks or even months after death.

Before the Travia case, Gettler had run experiments proving that the body cannot absorb carbon monoxide after death. So when tests showed that Travia’s victim had lethal levels of carbon monoxide in her blood, it was obvious that she had to have absorbed those killing levels while still alive. In other words, she was dead of carbon monoxide poisoning before Travia cut her up.

Faced with the evidence, Travia confessed that he and the victim had been drinking (illegally, since this was during Prohibition) that night. Both had passed out and when he awoke, she was dead. Not realizing that his gas stove was leaky, he was afraid that he’d be suspected of murder. So he decided to make the body disappear, cutting it apart and putting the pieces in the river.

The police refused to accept his explanation or the new strange science of forensics. But when Travia went to trial, the jury believed his story. He was found guilty of illegally dismembering a body and sentenced to a year in prison. If convicted of murder, he would have been destined for the electric chair at Sing Sing prison. The chemical detective work of Norris and Gettler saved his life – and would go on to make forensic toxicology an essential part of solving crimes today. 

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The Extreme Measures Taken to Hide Fingerprints

by Andrea Campbell

John Herbert Dillinger got an extraordinary share of newspaper headlines as a notorious bank robber in the 1930s. His violent gang terrorized the Midwest between fall 1933 and summer 1934. They robbed banks, killed 10 men, wounded seven others, and staged three jail breaks, during which Dillinger killed one sheriff and wounded two guards. It is believed that he tried to obliterate his fingertips, but FBI agents say they were still able to match what was left of his prints.

From the moment fingerprints became the most reliable way to identify criminals and match evidence to crime, criminals have been trying to get rid of them.

IT STARTS IN THE WOMB

Friction ridge patterns that create fingerprints start in about the fourth month of pregnancy. Their purpose is to help us grip objects we pick up. They remain the same throughout our lifetimes, although they  grow larger until we become adults. Then they stay distinctively ours until we decompose.
 

Jim Patten, a staff writer for The (Lawrence, Mass.) Eagle-Tribune, tells the story of Edgardo Tirado, who, in a February 7, 2008, drug arrest, surprised police when he took off his gloves in the booking room. Lawrence police Detective Daron Fraser says, “I thought right away this guy is hiding from something in his past and is not who he says he is.” When the gloves came off, Tirado showed the booking agent thick stitches in rows on the tips of his fingers and thumbs (photo right). His story wasn’t credible; he told officers the wounds came from defending himself in a knife fight and claimed the other man had cut his fingertips and thumbs. As to where the fight took place, he wouldn’t say. While the police had their doubts, next day information came in from an officer who had dealt with the man earlier.

 
According to reporter Mimi Hall, writing for USA TODAY, “It was after dark when Border Patrol agents in Douglas, Arizona, nabbed Mateo Cruz-Cruz allegedly jumping the fence from Mexico. At first, they noticed nothing unusual about his fingers. But when they got him to the station to take his prints, special operations supervisor Ulysses Duronslet says, the agents made a gruesome discovery: "The tips of the 25-year-old man’s fingers were blackened and burned.” Apparently, Cruz-Cruz had a prior conviction for sexual assault of a minor in Iowa and was deported in March of 2004.
 
Officials claim finding more and more criminals who alter their fingerprints by burning the tips, using acid or other corrosives. A 2007 federal court recently sentenced Dr. Jose L. Covarrubias, of Nogales, Mexico, to 18 months in prison for replacing the fingerprints of a fugitive named Marc T. George with skin from the bottom of his feet. Although a U.S. citizen, Dr. Covarrubias holds a Mexican medical license. The 49-year-old doctor faced a maximum sentence of five years in prison. George, a Jamaican national who was involved in a drug ring, was caught and arrested sneaking across the U.S.-Mexico border May 2006, bandaged and limping badly from the painful procedure. He was facing money-laundering charges.

Every time our government ratchets up efforts to catch and identify people, Manuel Padilla, chief border patrol agent in New Orleans, says: “Whenever we do something, there’s always a counteraction to try to beat it.” Since 9/11 and our government’s tightened security measures, more people are taking similar steps to erase fingerprints, just as John Dillinger did when he tried to burn off his prints with corrosive acid in the '30s. 

 WE COUNTER
 
 When officers suspect something suspicious while printing, they inquire further. Today, in more serious crimes, the printing procedure involves taking full palm prints. Eagle-Tribune writer Patten says that in 2006, police used facial recognition software technology at the Middleton jail to identify a prisoner who had bitten off his fingertips to avoid being deported. (Photo above left. Source: Andover Police Department and an IAI Presentation; Courtesy, Mr. K. J. Burke).
 

The software breaks up facial images and assigns them numeric values, similar to the AFIS system for fingerprints. Of course, in the case of Middleton jail, officials also took a digital picture of the prisoner's hands and fed the image into the computer.

IT'S EVERYWHERE
 

In Calais, France, migrants hoping to get into Great Britain are also mutilating their hands, often trying to remove layers of skin to prevent analysis. Prefect Gerard Gavory claimed that at least 57 asylum seekers questioned in the port town over the past few weeks “had their finger prints removed.” Often polyurethane glue or cuts with razors are used. The most common method however, was burning all 10 on a stove burner. In response, a joint database within the European Union, called Eurodoc, stores asylum-seekers' prints. Gavory added: “We're not sending them to their deaths, but towards peaceful zones. In organizing a return, we will be sending a strong signal to the Afghans. At the moment they have a sense of complete impunity in Calais.”

HOW TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?

Criminals often don’t realize that altering their fingertips in extreme ways also makes them more distinctive and, ironically, thus recognizable. History’s most famous case is Robert J. Phillips, aka Roscoe Pitts, who in 1941 had his fingertips sutured to his chest for weeks in an effort to smooth out his prints. A long time-criminal doing bank robberies and burglaries, Phillips made his New Jersey physician perform this painful operation. Phillips, however, was identified on the basis of the unaltered peripheral skin areas surrounding his fingertips and the pattern on the second joint of his fingers.

Another more recent example, this time rather successful, is Randolph Clifton Kling. Kling managed to obtain 83 driving licenses after altering both his appearance and thumb print. He got by for more than a decade, until finally arrested in 2000.

So what’s next? Likely biometrics — using patterns from the retina and iris. Facial recognition use is becoming more widespread; and, of course, vocal or voice recognition is always an option when circumstances merit. All these systems have their problems though, and so far, DNA is the most reliable. That is, until someone figures out how to manipulate our genes.

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The Thin Line Between Life and Death

by Donna Pendergast

It's been more than 20 years since Joseph Passeno (left) and Bruce (Christopher) Michaels (below right) stunned the suburban Detroit community of Rochester Hills with a gruesome crime that defied comprehension and shocked the public.

After finishing dinner at home on Nov. 9, 1989, Wanda Tarr, 58, was headed out in her Chevrolet Cavalier to meet an insurance client when she was forced out of the car at gunpoint by Passeno, then 17, and Michaels, then 16. They took her to Hawthorne Park in nearby Pontiac, where they robbed her and shot her to death. Passeno and Michaels then used her personal identification to find her home, where they told her husband, Glenn Tarr, that they had abducted his wife. The pair then abducted Tarr and forced him to withdraw money from an ATM. Then they took him to Hawthorne park and murdered him next to his wife's body by shooting Tarr six times.

Passeno and Michaels were arrested shortly after their crimes, when they bragged about their thrill kill to schoolmates. They were found guilty of first-degree murder and multiple other charges in a March 1990 jury trial. They were sentenced as adults to life in prison without parole.

After nearly two decades in separate Michigan prisons, Passeno and Michaels bear little resemblance to the fresh-faced teens they were when they went in. His entire face covered in tattoos, Passeno now looks like a mutant from a carnival midway. Michaels lost the baby face once so at odds with his horrific crimes.

Last week, two companion cases argued before the U.S. Supreme Court could have implications for the mandatory life sentences imposed on Passeno and Michaels. The court was asked to consider whether life sentences for juvenile defendants constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, prohibited by the Eight Amendment.

The cases before the court involve two Florida residents, Terrance Graham and Joseph Sullivan. Graham, now 22, was 16 when he robbed a restaurant at gunpoint. After serving a year behind bars, he violated the terms of his probation by committing another armed burglary, breaking into a man's house and robbing him at gunpoint. Sullivan was 13 in 1989 when he sexually assaulted a 72-year-old woman in her home during a burglary. It was the eighteenth crime committed by Sullivan, who is mentally disabled, during just two years. Both defendants were sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Arguing before the court, petitioners in the current case cited the 2005 Supreme Court ruling in Roper v. Simmons, which banned executing people who commit capital murder before they reach the age of 18, on Eighth Amendment grounds. Lawyers argued that the logic of that ruling should be extended to life sentences, the equivalent of a slow death in prison for an adolescent. As in the Roper case, lawyers highlighted adolescents' limited cognitive capacities to assess and manage impulses because their pre-frontal cortex, which controls them and recognizes consequences, isn't fully developed.

The court could rule in a number of ways. One key point in the pending cases: neither defendant had committed a homicide. The court's opinion could differentiate between juvenile offenders who kill and those who commit lesser crimes. It also could uphold the two defendants' current sentences or set an age limit for when such punishment is inhumane. It could ban life without parole for all juvenile offenders, affecting thousands of cases like those of Michaels and Passeno.

Robust policy discussions have sprung up debating the potential for rehabilitation and reform of juvenile offenders after maturation of the brain. But what about the cold-blooded sociopath who kills with extraordinary brutality and without remorse? What about when the crime is so serious and vile that denying the offender freedom for the rest of his life is the most appropriate response? An antisocial predator who has spent years or decades in prison is extremely unlikely to be able to reintegrate into society. There is no proven treatment for antisocial personality disorders that will drive an inmate to rape or kill if released. Prisons serve not only to rehabilitate and punish but also to prevent those who are a threat to society from harming others.

As a prosecutor, I have seen the bad and the worst for well over two decades. Yet I'm reluctant to dismiss the possibility of reform. I'm more reluctant, though, to release someone who will create more victims if returned to society. Out of 100 murder trials I have prosecuted, only three involved 16-year old-defendants sentenced to life without parole. All three cases involved chronically violent youthful offenders who committed heinous acts beyond comprehension.

Charging a juvenile with an offense carrying the possibility of life without parole is a decision that should not be made lightly. But as a prosecutor, I want that tool in my arsenal.

Statements made in this post are my own and are not intended to reflect the views opinion or position of the Michigan Attorney General or the Michigan Department of Attorney General.

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THE OUTLAW IS IN!

Women in Crime Ink is pleased to announce today's release of contributor Laura James' first book: The Love Pirate and the Bandit's Son: Murder, Sin, and Scandal in the Shadow of Jesse James. (Laura is not related to the James Gang.) In this dual biography of Dr. Zeo Zoe Wilkins and Jesse James Jr., our true-crime historian and attorney Laura James lays out the evidence that the son of Jesse James followed in his father's footsteps to lead a life of train robbery, terrorism, and perhaps even murder. The book contains some big surprises for students of the James Gang.

Below, the publisher has given Women in Crime Ink readers an exclusive peek at what true-crime master Gregg Olsen has called a "mesmerizing book, brilliantly researched and compellingly written." We agree with Olsen's assessment that this story is "classic American crime: a toxic brew of love, lies, mystery and murder." Women in Crime Ink is pleased to bring you this exclusive intro to The Love Pirate and the Bandit's Son. Congratulations, Laura!

PROLOGUE

On March 15, 1924, snowdust coated staid Park Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri. The street was quiet for a Saturday night. There were no wild parties on this frigid evening. Around ten p.m., an exceptionally beautiful woman unlocked the front door of her home at 2425 Park.

She must have known him. She let him in the house. But before long something alarmed her. It could have been the late hour or the reek of alcohol, though she was a stranger to neither. She numbed herself that night, as she usually did, with most of a bottle of Jamaica Ginger. Did she see the man lock the door as he turned to face her? Maybe a snarled threat or a flash of steel warned her that he was not there to make love to her. Instead, her premonition of a violent death was coming true. She surely thought–if she could form a complete thought–of all the friends and lovers to whom she had turned for help in her last few days. She told them someone wanted to murder her. She’d even said it would happen that weekend.

No one was there to help her. Nobody believed her.

She fought for her life. She threw every object within reach. She eluded death with “a terrific fight.” At five feet eight and a hundred and thirty pounds, she could have held her own for a while. But the man was stronger. He chased her into a corner, punched her in the chest, and knocked the telephone from her hands. Chairs were smashed in their duel. In her desperate resistance she got the worst of it. He pummeled her and tore at her plaid dress and underwear. If she cried out in pain and terror, the only one who heard her screams was the man killing her.

It must have been a thunderous blow that sent her spinning into a metal stand. She struck her forehead and collapsed onto the oriental carpet in the living room.

The man grabbed her slender throat and squeezed. He gouged her left eye, blackening it and nearly severing her eyeball from its socket. Perhaps she fainted. But she rallied at the last when he brandished a small, rusty pocketknife. As she held out her hands to protect herself, he slashed them. The face that had aroused the passions of so many men now felt the sting of the blade. He sliced open her cheek and jammed the point of the knife into the side of her neck—once, twice—the deep stabs slitting her jugular. Zeo’s blood gushed forth. Within a few heartbeats she was dead.

The blood-drenched killer dropped his knife. It fell onto the rug a few inches from her dead hand. He assured himself she was irretrievably dead.

Without pausing to wipe himself off, he strode to her dining room. He lifted a large metal strongbox onto the dining table, opened it, and tore through her personal papers. Her blood dripped from his hands onto her letters and documents as he rifled through the box for what he sought.

Papers, books, clothes, and bags were heaped onto the floor as her killer ransacked her house, plunging through the closet, roving through the kitchen, smearing blood on drawers and cupboards, leaving crimson tracks throughout the first and second floors. He pulled up the tacks holding down the corners of her carpets. He pulled letters from envelopes. He searched most of the closets, chests, and shelves.

And yet he did not touch many pawnable items, such as her designer clothes and household items. This man was after particular valuables, things he knew she kept in her home. Nothing less was worth even a moment.

His search completed, he entered a downstairs bathroom and washed away her clotted blood. He found a hand towel and dried himself on it as he returned to the living room. Standing near the dead woman, he threw the towel on the rug. He wadded some papers, put a flame to them, and started a fire near her head. He stuffed a strongbox filled with treasure under his arm.

Maybe he looked at her one last time.

Then it seems he yanked open a window, crawled through, leapt several feet to the ground, and fled the scene of his perfect murder.

It was perfect not because of how he did it. He was an amateur killer. He left bloody prints everywhere, and the fire never caught. It was perfect because of the woman he killed. For no matter who cut down Zeo Wilkins, no matter why, newspapers across the country declared on moral grounds that her brutal death was a fitting end for a vampire. They proclaimed that the case would never be solved, officially or otherwise. Their wishes were granted. A lot of folks would come right out and say it: the bitch had it coming to her, and by golly, she sure got it.

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