Case notes

What happened

Cora Crippen sang in the music halls as Belle Elmore. Her friends last saw her on the last night of January 1910. Her husband, an American doctor who sold patent medicines by post, told her friends a first story, that she had gone to America, then a second, that she had died there.

Her friends did not believe him. In July a chief inspector named Walter Dew called at the house, and Crippen told a third story: she had left him for another man, and he had invented her death to save face. Dew searched, found nothing, and left satisfied. Days later Crippen and his typist were gone.

One search had found nothing, and the man with three stories had run. What had Dew missed, and could he still catch him?

The record, filled in

From Dew's second visit to the arrest. Watch what the second search turns up, what tied it to Crippen, and how a ship's captain gave him away.

Dew came back days later, found the pair gone, and searched again. This time he had the cellar floor taken up. Under the bricks lay part of a human body; the head, the limbs and the bones were never found.

The Home Office analyst found hyoscine in the remains, a sedative that kills in a large enough dose. On 19 January 1910, twelve days before Cora was last seen, Crippen had collected five grains of it from a chemist and signed the poisons Register, the book a buyer must sign for a dangerous drug.

A scar on a strip of the skin matched the mark of an operation Cora was known to have had, and on that the court named the body hers. A pajama jacket in the grave was of a cloth a Holloway shop first stocked in late 1908, and the shop had sent nightclothes of it to the Crippens in January 1909. So the body went under the floor after late 1908, while they lived there.

Crippen was already at sea, bound for Canada on the SS Montrose with his typist, Ethel Le Neve, her hair cut short and her clothes a boy's, a disguise that fooled nobody for long. The captain knew them and sent a wireless telegram to Scotland Yard; ship to shore radio was new enough in 1910 to make headlines by itself.

Dew took a faster ship on the same route, the Laurentic, boarded dressed as a harbor pilot, and arrested the pair before the liner could dock at Quebec.

The payoff

Running is what sent Dew back to dig. The poison Crippen had signed for was in the body, and the court named that body as Cora's. He was hanged that November. Ethel, tried separately, was acquitted.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

Crippen denied it to the end. In 2007 a Michigan State team tested DNA from the surviving 1910 slide of the skin that named the body, and reported that it did not match the maternal line of Cora's living relatives. The finding is contested and no court has revisited the verdict.

The disappearance and the arrest at sea are not in doubt. The identification that hanged him is.

What happened

Andrew Borden was one of the richest men in Fall River. On the morning of 4 August 1892 he and his wife Abby, sixty four, were killed in their house on Second Street, ninety minutes apart. The servant was outside. His younger daughter Lizzie, thirty two, lived there. When her father was killed, she said, she was out in the barn loft looking for fishing weights.

Nothing had been forced. The house had no corridor, so anyone crossing it walked through an occupied room, and the inside doors had been kept locked since a robbery the year before. It looked like someone inside. Days in, police brought up a hatchet head from a cellar box, its handle broken off.

No blood was found on anyone in the house. Everything police took went to a Harvard chemist. Could he tie a blade to the killings?

The record, filled in

Lizzie's trial, 1893. The state says the cellar hatchet head was the weapon, washed afterwards. Knowlton prosecutes, Adams defends, and Wood is the state's chemist.

Wood, On The Other Blades The claw-hammer hatchet had several stains on it which appeared like bloodstains, on handle, side and edge. All the stains on the head of the hatchet were subjected by me to chemical and microscopic tests for blood, and with absolutely negative results. The two axes, which I designated A and B, had stains which appeared like blood, but tests showed them absolutely free from blood.

Wood, On The Cellar Hatchet Head ... There were several suspicious spots on the side of it, but they were not blood.

Knowlton, For The State ... Assuming this hatchet to have been used for inflicting the wounds ... and then subjected to some sort of a cleaning process, whether or not that could be reasonably possible to have occurred without your having discovered traces of blood upon the hatchet ...?

Adams We object to that question.The Chief Justice He may answer.

Wood, Answering Knowlton ... Before the handle was broken, not after.

Knowlton ... That is to say, the conditions I named could have existed before the handle was broken off. Why do you make that difference, Professor?

Wood ... Because it would be very hard to wash blood off that broken end.

Wood, Later, Cross-Examined By Adams ... As to the break in the handle ... I would not express any opinion as to the freshness of the break.

The payoff

No blade showed blood. A broken end is hard to wash, so the cellar head fit only if its handle broke after it was washed. Wood would not say when it broke, so nothing tied it to the killings: not guilty.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

Nobody else was ever charged. She died in Fall River in 1927, and her sister nine days later.

What happened

Albert Snyder was the art editor of a boating magazine, and on a Sunday morning in March 1927 he was found beaten and strangled in his bed at home in Queens Village. His wife Ruth lay bound in the upstairs hallway. Their nine year old daughter loosened the gag, ran along the street for help, and the neighbor who came back untied her and called the police.

Ruth said a tall man with a dark mustache had knocked her out and left her there for five hours while he went through the house. Drawers were out, the rooms were turned over, and she said he had taken her jewelry.

Nobody believed in her intruder, but nobody had another name. How did police get from that bedroom to the man in the picture?

The record, filled in

The police side of that Sunday: how the intruder story fell apart, and where a small pin found on the bedroom floor led them.

Nothing had been forced, not a door and not a window, so whoever came in had been let in. The jewelry Ruth said he took was still in the house, under a mattress.

Tying leaves marks and her wrists had none, and a doctor found no bruise to explain five hours knocked out. Albert's revolver lay on the bed, never fired: a clumsy try, as the police read it, at showing he had fought back.

By the afternoon the police were sure the burglary was staged, but they still had no suspect. Then, on the bedroom floor, they found a small pin with the initials J.G. on it.

The detectives looked for a J.G. in Ruth's address book and found Judd Gray, a corset salesman and Ruth's lover. Asked about him, Ruth asked whether Gray had confessed. The police said yes. It was a bluff, and Ruth made a statement naming Gray and herself.

Gray was arrested at the hotel Ruth named, upstate in Syracuse. That room was his alibi: a friend had rumpled the bed so it would look slept in.

The pin was Albert's memento of Jessie Guishard, a fiancée who died before he married Ruth. J.G. fit Gray by pure chance. The motive was on paper: Albert's life insurance paid double for a violent death, and Ruth paid the premiums herself, without his knowing.

The payoff

So a pin that had nothing to do with Gray led the police to him, and their lie made Ruth talk. Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray were both convicted that May and executed at Sing Sing in January 1928.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

Each blamed the other for the plan and the blows. The clause that paid double gave James M. Cain the title of his novel Double Indemnity, and Billy Wilder filmed it in 1944.

A reporter smuggled a camera into the execution chamber. That photograph is not reproduced here.

What happened

Early on 6 May 1840 a housemaid at 14 Norfolk Street, off Park Lane, found the ground floor ransacked. Upstairs her master, Lord William Russell, an elderly member of the Duke of Bedford's family, lay dead in his bed.

The police judged the break-in staged from inside, and within a week found his rings, a banknote and his watch hidden in the pantry of his Swiss valet, François Courvoisier.

At the trial in June the defense attacked every one of those searches. Then, late on the first day, a solicitor came into court with a parcel. Whose was it, and where had it been?

Nobody had seen the killing, and everything against the valet had come out of searches the police had made themselves.

The record, filled in

Day two. Mrs Peolaine, a hotel keeper's wife, on the parcel Courvoisier left with her; then Cumming, the solicitor who brought it to court. Watch when it was left.

Mrs Peolaine We keep the Hotel Dieppe, Leicester-place, Leicester-square; I know the prisoner ... he came to a situation, to take a place in the hotel as waiter ... I saw him again ... it was on a Sunday evening ... he had a paper parcel in his hand; he asked me if I would take care of it till the Tuesday following, and he would call for it ... I put the parcel in a closet, and locked it up ... tied with a string, and sealed.

The Prosecution Had the parcel been left with you before you heard of the murder, or not?

Mrs Peolaine Oh yes ... I also sent for Mr. Cumming, an attorney, who is an intimate friend of ours ... the parcel was opened in the presence of those persons; it had never been opened before, from the moment it came into my possession ... the parcel contained spoons and forks, silver I suppose ... I think it is tow, round the plate; it is like raveled rope, that would have the effect of preventing the plate being felt, or from jingling; it did not make the least noise.

Cumming I am a solicitor ... I opened it myself ... I noticed a crest on the forks and spoons; after doing it up, I proceeded to a bookseller's shop, in order that I might see by the Peerage-book the crest of the Bedford family, and having satisfied myself that a goat, which was on the spoons, was the crest of that family ... I immediately came here in a cab; I arrived here about six o'clock.

The payoff

That crest was the Bedford family's: Lord William's own silver, left a week or two before the murder and locked away where no policeman could reach it. The planted-evidence defense fell, and the jury convicted him.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

Courvoisier was hanged outside Newgate on 6 July 1840, with Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray in the crowd. He had confessed to his counsel during the trial.

What happened

Vincenzo Peruggia, a former employee, hid inside the Louvre overnight. On Monday 21 August 1911, the museum's weekly closed day for cleaning, he lifted the Mona Lisa off the wall, took the small panel out of its frame and glass case, and walked out with it hidden under his clothes. The frame was left behind in the museum. Nobody noticed the empty wall until the museum reopened on Tuesday.

The theft made the painting famous overnight and set off a nationwide search. That autumn, French police questioned dozens of former Louvre staff, Peruggia among them, and let every one of them go without a second look.

Police had spoken to the thief and let him go. Two years on, the wall was still empty. What finally brought the painting out?

The record, filled in

From the police call at Peruggia's lodgings in 1911 to a meeting in Florence in 1913. Watch who finally brings the painting out of hiding.

Peruggia was a glazier, a glass fitter, and had worked on the painting's own protective case. A photograph and a set of his fingerprints sat in a Paris police file from an earlier arrest. Detectives went down a false trail instead: they held the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and questioned the painter Pablo Picasso, because a man the two knew had once stolen small statues from the Louvre. Both were released.

That autumn a police inspector called at his lodgings on a routine round of former museum staff. Peruggia had carried the panel out under his smock, the loose white overall the Louvre's own staff wore, but he told the officer he had only read about the theft in the newspapers.

Judged an ordinary workman, he was let go, and nobody opened his file. For over two years the painting lay in a false-bottomed trunk in his room.

In late 1913 he wrote to Alfredo Geri, an art dealer in Florence, offering to sell it. He gave his motive as patriotism: he believed Napoleon had looted it from Italy.

In December 1913 Peruggia carried the panel to Florence. Geri brought in Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi gallery, and the two men met Peruggia and checked the panel against photographs. It was authentic. They called the police, who arrested him at his hotel.

The payoff

No detective found the Mona Lisa: the thief brought it out himself, trying to cash it in. It went back to the Louvre in January 1914, and an Italian court jailed him for about seven months.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

France had in fact owned the painting lawfully since the sixteenth century, long before Napoleon. Peruggia later married, had a daughter, and died near Paris in 1925, on his forty fourth birthday.

What happened

Roger Tichborne was the eldest son of a Hampshire baronet and heir to the estates. He was born in Paris in 1829 and raised by a French mother, and sent to school in England only at sixteen, by which time French was the language he thought in. In 1854 he sailed from Rio de Janeiro on the Bella. She never arrived, and after some years the family had him declared dead.

His mother never accepted it. She advertised for years, and in 1866 a heavy man arrived from Australia saying he was her son. She met him and said at once that he was. The rest of the family said he was a fraud.

A mother's word against a family's. Was there anything on Roger himself that could settle who this man really was?

The record, filled in

Twenty years in dated steps, from the wreck to the verdict. Watch for what Roger had and the man from Australia did not.

April 1854. The ship Bella sank off Brazil with Roger aboard; only her longboat was found, floating and empty. He was twenty-five, slight, under ten stone (140 pounds), and had spent his schooldays at Stonyhurst.

July 1865. The Dowager Lady Tichborne, Roger's mother, advertised for him in the Australian papers. A butcher at Wagga Wagga, known there as Thomas Castro, answered. He landed in England in December 1866, nearly twenty stone (280 pounds), to be known as the claimant to Roger's title.

1867. An inquiry agent took his photograph to Wapping, in East London, and came back with a name: Arthur Orton, a local man in the same trade who had gone to South America and then Australia.

May 1871. The man from Australia sued for the estates as Roger. Asked in the witness box if he could speak French, the language Roger thought in, he said no. Testifying for him, an old family valet, Andrew Bogle, swore he had seen Roger's bare arms and never a mark on them. Then a schoolfellow of Roger's, by then Lord Bellew, swore that he had himself tattooed a cross, a heart and an anchor on Roger's left forearm.

Yet the man in the witness box had no tattoo on his left forearm at all, only a mark where some other one had been removed. Evidence was given that Arthur Orton had once had his initials on his arm. The civil case collapsed in March 1872.

The payoff

The arm settled it: Roger's bore a schoolfellow's tattoos, and the arm in court bore only the mark of a removed one. He was Arthur Orton of Wapping, and in 1874 a jury gave him fourteen years for perjury.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

He served ten years, sold a confession to a newspaper in 1895, then took it back, and died in poverty in London in 1898. The Tichbornes let a plate reading Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne go on his coffin all the same.

What happened

A woman walking above a stream in the Scottish borders on 29 September 1935 looked over a bridge and saw what she took for a human arm. A search of the gully below brought up about thirty separate parcels.

Whoever wrapped them had removed everything a body is recognized by. No faces, no fingertips. Two professors, John Glaister and James Brash, spent weeks reassembling the parts before anyone could ask who these people were.

One wrapping was a special Sunday newspaper edition sold only around Lancaster and Morecambe, where Isabella Ruxton and Mary Jane Rogerson, the maid in her husband's house, had been missing since 15 September. The husband was Buck Ruxton.

No faces, no fingertips, nothing left to match. Without names for the dead there was no case. How could anyone say who they were?

The record, filled in

Ruxton's trial, Manchester, 1936. Professor Brash laid photos of both skulls over portraits of the two missing women. Birkett, defending, objects that it is too rough.

Birkett ... I submit that the evidence ought not to be allowed ... It is constructed evidence which is so liable to error ... approximate is the best that can be done; and in such a matter, where the purpose of the evidence is to show exactitude ...

The Judge I gather that it is the superimposition of one photograph upon another in some form ... I do not feel able to exclude the evidence on that.

Birkett The objection really went to the weight of the evidence and not to the admissibility.

Brash ... each skull was placed in the position of the photograph of Mrs. Ruxton, the one wearing the tiara ... I found in dealing with the tracings, that the tracing of Skull No. 1 would not in any way fit the tracing of Photograph A, but I found that the tracing of Skull No. 2 would fit it ...

The Judge When you put them together, which do you put on which?Brash That does not matter: they were both done on transparent X-ray film.

Jackson, For The Crown What conclusions do you draw ...?Brash In my opinion these demonstrate conclusively, in the first place, that Skull No. 1 could not possibly be the skull of Mrs. Ruxton.

The Judge That is clear: they may demonstrate that something is not something else, but do they demonstrate more than that?Brash They also demonstrate, in my opinion, that Skull No. 2 might be the skull of Mrs. Ruxton.

The payoff

Each skull fit one woman and was ruled out for the other: the same test on Mary Rogerson's photographs showed No. 2 could not be hers. So the dead were Isabella and Mary. Ruxton was convicted and hanged in May 1936.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

His written confession was published after he died. The press called it the jigsaw murders.

What happened

On the afternoon of 15 April 1920 two men from a shoe company were carrying the week's wages along Pearl Street in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Both were shot in the road and died of it, and a car took the two steel boxes away.

Three weeks later a garage owner in West Bridgewater telephoned the police about a car nobody had collected. Two Italian immigrants who called for it were in custody within hours. Nicola Sacco was carrying a loaded .32 Colt automatic pistol, with loose cartridges in his pocket. Bartolomeo Vanzetti was carrying a loaded revolver, which the state said had been taken from one of the two men in the road. Both men were anarchists, and both had lied about their movements.

The state's firearms witness would only say one bullet could have come from Sacco's pistol. Could anyone ever say more than that?

The record, filled in

Seven years in dated steps, from the robbery to the last test before the executions. Watch the sixth bullet, and one cartridge case from the road.

15 April 1920. About fifteen thousand dollars of payroll money left Pearl Street in a car. A bystander picked three or four spent cartridge cases out of the road, and six bullets were taken from the two men and numbered.

5 May 1920. Sacco and Vanzetti were taken off a streetcar at Brockton, hours after calling at the garage the police were watching. Sacco's pistol was a .32 Colt automatic, the same caliber as the bullets.

14 July 1921. Five bullets had been cut by barrels spiraling right. The sixth, bullet III, had a left-hand twist, and among American makes that meant a Colt, like Sacco's. Bullet III was Winchester ammunition, and so was one case from the road, marked W. The state's firearms witness, Captain Proctor, would only call bullet III consistent with being fired by Sacco's pistol. Both men were convicted of murder.

20 October 1923. Proctor swore an affidavit that his wording had been agreed with the prosecution beforehand, and that, asked plainly whether the bullet came from that pistol, he would have had to answer no.

3 June 1927. Calvin Goddard brought a comparison microscope to Boston: two microscopes joined, so the marks on an exhibit and on a freshly fired round sit side by side in one view. He test-fired Sacco's pistol and said bullet III and case W had come from it and no other. The defense's own chemist, Augustus Gill, came round to the match, and its firearms expert, James Burns, who had sworn in 1921 that the bullet was not from Sacco's pistol, recanted.

The payoff

So the microscope said what the 1921 witness would not: bullet III and case W came from Sacco's pistol. Eleven weeks later, on 23 August 1927, both men were executed. The test never touched Vanzetti.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

Examiners went back to the exhibits in 1961 and 1983 and reached the same finding. Some historians argue the exhibits were tampered with before any test. In 1977 a governor of Massachusetts called the trial unjust without ruling on guilt, and historians disagree still.

What happened

In July 1912 a woman drowned in her bath at Herne Bay. A doctor guessed at a fit and the verdict was misadventure. In December 1913 another drowned in a Lancashire boarding house, and that hearing took half an hour. In December 1914 a third drowned in north London, the day after her wedding.

Each woman had made her money over to her husband days before she died. Each husband gave a different name. There was no witness to any of the three and no mark of violence on any of the bodies.

Taken one at a time, each was exactly what the coroner called it.

The record, filled in

How Scotland Yard joined three deaths into one case, from two newspaper readers to the trial at the Old Bailey. Watch what the three deaths had in common.

The third death made the papers: a bride found dead in her bath in Highgate, north London, the day after her wedding. Two readers saw an earlier death in it. The father of the second woman to die sent a report of the Highgate inquest to the police, and the landlord of the Blackpool house where his daughter had died posted Scotland Yard the story with a cutting about her death.

Detective Inspector Arthur Neil followed bank and savings accounts through more than a dozen towns and half a dozen names, and found one husband behind all three deaths: George Joseph Smith. Every marriage after his first, in 1898, was bigamy, because that first wife never divorced him.

The money moved the same way each time. Days before each death a will was signed or insurance taken out on the wife's life, always in his favor, and he collected afterwards.

Smith was tried at the Old Bailey for the first death only, the one at Herne Bay. Over the defense's objection the judge let the jury hear about the other two, so it could decide whether three deaths so alike were chance or a system.

How does a grown woman die in a bath without a mark? One of the detectives found out before the trial. A young woman he knew, a practiced swimmer, sat in a bath filled to the Herne Bay depth, knowing the detective would try to put her under. Then, suddenly, he did. Once her head went down she could not lift it or cry out, and almost at once she stopped struggling. He ended the test then and there, satisfied how easily a strong man could do it.

The payoff

Put side by side, the three accidents were one man's routine. The jury took twenty-two minutes to find Smith guilty of the Herne Bay death, and he was hanged at Maidstone on 13 August 1915.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

The ruling that let the jury hear all three deaths is still taught: other acts cannot show that a man is the sort to do it, but they can show that an apparent coincidence is a method.

The other two deaths were never charged at all, because they did not need to be.

What happened

John Parsons Cook, twenty eight, owned racehorses. In November 1855 his mare won at Shrewsbury, and he came back to Rugeley with about two thousand pounds in winnings due to him on his bets. He fell ill at the Talbot Arms, across the road from his friend William Palmer, a surgeon turned racing man, and four days later he was dead. Palmer had attended him throughout.

Palmer owed thousands on bills he had raised by forging his mother's signature, and he had bought strychnine twice in the town that month. At the post-mortem he jostled the men opening the body, and the sealed jar holding the stomach turned up in his hands with a cut in its cover. It went up to London all the same.

Strychnine leaves the mind clear through every spasm. What did the bedside see, and what did London find in the jar?

The record, filled in

Elizabeth Mills, the inn's chambermaid, on Cook's last days. Then Dr Alfred Taylor, the poisons expert who opened the jar in London, questioned for the Crown.

Mills Mr. Cook got up at one o'clock on that Monday. He appeared a great deal better ... About eight o'clock that night Miss Bond, the housekeeper, gave me a pillbox to take upstairs to Mr. Cook's room ... It was wrapped up in white paper. ... Palmer came, and went into Cook's room.

Mills There was one mold candle burning. ... His body, his hands, and neck were moving then, a sort of jumping or jerking. ... Cook was conscious while this jerking of the body was going on. He recognized Palmer when he came in.

Mills I next saw Cook again about six o'clock on the Tuesday morning. ... I asked “What do you think was the cause of all that, Mr. Cook?” and he said the pills that Palmer gave him at half-past ten.

Attorney-General How did you account physiologically for the absence of any indication of strychnia where you know strychnia to have been given and to have caused death?Taylor By absorption into the blood so that it is no longer in the stomach ... If the minimum of the quantity required to destroy life was given, I do not think I would find any.

Taylor After the post-mortem examination on the body of Mr. Cook some portion was sent up to me. ... We sought for prussic acid, oxalic acid, morphia, strychnia ... the poison of tobacco, hemlock, arsenic, mercury ... We only found small traces of antimony. ... The stomach had been completely cut from end to end; all the contents were gone ... In journeying up to London it must have been shaken in every possible way.

The payoff

No strychnine was found in a stomach that reached London cut open, emptied and tossed about. The jury went by the bedside: a man clear-headed through every spasm, who blamed what Palmer gave him. It found Palmer guilty.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

Palmer was hanged at Stafford on 14 June 1856, saying to the last he had not poisoned Cook.

What happened

On the first morning of September 1934, on a country road outside Albury in New South Wales, a man found the body of a young woman pushed into the drain that ran under the road. She had been badly beaten and burned. She wore the remains of yellow silk pyjamas, and the papers called her the Pyjama Girl.

Her fingerprints matched nothing on file, and her description went to every police station in two states. Rather than bury her nameless, the police preserved the body and for years showed her face to anyone who thought they might know her.

Some of those who filed past her gave a name. Her dental chart said they were wrong.

The record, filled in

How the police got a name for her in 1944, and how a Melbourne court closed the case that June. Keep an eye on the dental chart.

In February 1944 the police asked a new dentist to chart the teeth of the body, which had been kept all those years in a bath of formalin at the University of Sydney. The new chart showed what the 1934 examiner, a local man with no forensic training, had got wrong: he had missed fillings and mistaken one tooth for another. Those two errors had ruled out the right woman.

The new chart matched a woman the police already had on file as missing: Linda Agostini, born Linda Platt in London. As a check, freckles on the upper arm of the body matched those in old photographs of her, and friends who were shown the body named her too.

Her husband, Antonio Agostini, was by then a waiter at Romano's, a Sydney restaurant where the state's police commissioner, William MacKay, often ate. On 4 March 1944 MacKay, who had reopened the case, questioned Agostini in person, and Agostini made a confession.

Agostini said they had quarreled in bed at home in Carlton, Melbourne, in 1934, and that she was shot with a pistol which, he said, she had been holding. To keep the police away he drove her body across the state border, hid it in a culvert on the Howlong road and tried to burn it.

The payoff

Charted properly, the dental work named the body, and the name led to her husband. The jury rejected his story of an accident but, the judge said, thought years of her conduct had provoked him: manslaughter, not murder.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

Agostini served part of six years with hard labor, went free early under a general amnesty and was sent back to Italy in 1948. The name is still argued over: the 1934 description gave the body light blue eyes, Linda's were brown, and the historian Richard Evans argues the body was never hers.

What happened

Madeleine Smith was the daughter of a wealthy Glasgow family. For two years she had secretly courted Pierre Emile L'Angelier, a warehouse clerk her parents would never have received. They met at night at the window of her ground-floor room and wrote to each other almost every day.

In February 1857 she accepted a proposal from William Minnoch, a merchant her family approved of, and asked L'Angelier for her letters back. He refused. On Sunday 22 March he went out at night and came home violently ill, and by the next morning he was dead, with nearly a fifth of an ounce of arsenic in him.

She had signed for arsenic three times. To convict her, the Crown had to prove she saw him that Sunday night.

The record, filled in

Madeleine Smith's own statement to the sheriff, a Scottish judge, eight days after his death. Watch what she says about that Sunday night, and about the arsenic.

My name is Madeleine Smith. I am a native of Glasgow; twenty-one years of age; and I reside with my father, James Smith, architect, at No. 7 Blythswood Square, Glasgow. For about the last two years I have been acquainted with P. Emile L'Angelier ... I had not seen M. L'Angelier for about three weeks before his death ... he tapped at my bedroom window ... I talked to him from the window, which is stanchioned outside, and I did not go out to him, nor did he come in to me.

... I expected him to visit me on Saturday night, the 21st current ... but he did not come, and sent no notice. There was no tapping at my window on said Saturday night, or on the following night, being Sunday. I went to bed on Sunday night about eleven o'clock ...

... He was very unwell for some time ... and he complained of sickness, but I have no idea what was the cause of it. I remember giving him some cocoa from my window one night some time ago, but I cannot specify the time particularly.

I have bought arsenic on various occasions. ... I used it all as a cosmetic, and applied it to my face, neck, and arms, diluted with water. The arsenic I got in Currie's shop I got there on Wednesday, the 18th March, and I used it all on one occasion, having put it all in the basin where I was to wash myself.

... on all the three occasions, as required in the shops, I signed my name to a book in which the sales were entered. ... I never administered, or caused to be administered, to M. L'Angelier arsenic or anything injurious. And this I declare to be truth.

The payoff

Nobody proved he came to her window that Sunday. Shops had to dye arsenic by law, but nobody searched his body for dye, so nothing tied hers to his death. Not proven: she went free, but was not declared innocent.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

His sickness in February had become two more charges, ending not guilty and not proven. She was twenty-two, was never tried again, and died in New York in 1928.

What happened

Charles Lafarge owned an ironworks, a business that smelted and forged iron, at Le Glandier in central France. In December 1839, away on business in Paris, he fell ill after eating a cake his wife had sent him. He came home sick, grew worse, and died on 14 January 1840.

His mother accused his wife of poisoning him. Marie Lafarge was twenty three and had married him only months before, after answering a marriage advertisement. Local pharmacists ran the newest chemical test there was on what was left of his stomach, and it found nothing.

The test had found nothing. Either he was never poisoned, or the test had been run badly.

The record, filled in

How the court at Tulle settled it in 1840, and why chemists went on arguing. Watch what the second chemist tested besides the body.

After Charles Lafarge came home, servants saw Marie Lafarge stir a white powder into food meant for her husband, and she had bought poison from a local druggist, saying it was for rats. The pharmacists had tried the Marsh test, a method for detecting the poison, then four years old, but they were new to it and got nothing they could use.

The court summoned Mathieu Orfila, the leading toxicologist in France, a specialist in poisons and the traces they leave. He ran the test himself, on tissue from the body, which had been exhumed, and found arsenic in it. The pharmacists, Orfila said, had run the test wrongly.

Then Orfila did what settled the trial. A body in the ground lies in earth that can hold the same poison, so he also tested soil from the grave. It held none, so the poison in the body had not come from the ground.

The court at Tulle convicted her in September 1840 and sentenced her to life with hard labor. Historians call her the first person convicted largely on the evidence of a chemical test.

Other chemists were not satisfied. Francois-Vincent Raspail argued that impure chemicals could put the poison into a test, that it could turn up naturally in any buried body, and that her guilt had never been proven.

The payoff

Testing the grave as well as the body ruled out the ground as the source of the poison, and Orfila's evidence carried the trial. Twelve years later, in failing health, she was released with a pardon.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

Marie Lafarge died a few months after her release, still saying she was innocent.

This was the case that brought forensic chemistry into a courtroom, and the argument over whether it was ready has never been settled either way. This book does not claim to know which side was right.

What happened

A farmer named Charles Phelps and his housekeeper Margaret Wolcott were shot at his farm near West Shelby on a March night in 1915. At five in the morning his farmhand, Charles Stielow, found her in the snow on the doorstep of his own house across the road. Phelps lay shot in the farmhouse and never woke.

Stielow and his brother in law, Nelson Green, who lived with him, had told the inquest they owned no firearm. Detectives found two guns hidden with a relative, one of them the caliber used that night. By July Stielow had been convicted, and the judge told the jury that without the statement taken from him in his cell he would have directed an acquittal.

By 1917 he had come within an hour of the electric chair. The bullets that convicted him had been sworn to, never compared.

The record, filled in

The case against Stielow, step by step, from his arrest to the day he walked out. Watch who finally looked at the bullets, and how.

Stielow lived as a tenant in a house Phelps owned, and he was illiterate. The confession detectives typed after days of questioning was read to him, not by him. He refused to sign it, and it reached the jury unsigned.

The state's firearms witness was a charlatan, a druggist who called himself doctor and sold expertise in chemistry, poisons, handwriting and guns all at once. He swore that marks on the fatal bullets matched a flaw in the barrel of Stielow's revolver. The witness had never once test-fired it.

Stielow was sentenced to death three times over. The last reprieve, from a judge, came with forty minutes left, after his head and legs had been shaved. That winter the governor, Charles Whitman, cut the sentence to life, saying he still thought the man guilty but could no longer be sure.

In 1917 a state investigator, Charles Waite, and an expert from the optical firm Bausch and Lomb did what nobody had done in two years. They fired Stielow's own gun and compared its bullets with the fatal ones under a microscope. A barrel cuts its own pattern of lines into every bullet it fires, and the grooves did not match. Stielow's gun, thick with rust, had not been fired in years.

A state inquiry then found that a listening device had secretly recorded his talk in jail and caught not one word of guilt. Nothing backed the confession he was convicted on.

The payoff

The fatal bullets had come from some other gun. On that and the inquiry, Whitman freed him as an innocent man, and he walked out of Auburn prison in May 1918, three years gone.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

Another man confessed twice, and a grand jury declined to indict him; nobody was ever tried for the killings. Nelson Green, who had pleaded guilty to escape the death sentence, was freed too. Neither man was paid a penny.

Comparing a test bullet with the fatal one is now the first step in every firearms examination.

What happened

Fanny Sebastiani married the Duc de Praslin in 1824, when she was seventeen. By 1847 they had nine children, separate apartments on the same floor of the same house, and a marriage carried on in letters. He was a peer of France, so no ordinary court in the country could put him on trial. Their children were taught at home by a woman the duchess had spent years demanding he dismiss.

Before dawn on 18 August 1847 the servants heard her bell ring, then screams behind a locked door. When they got in she was dead on the floor. Her husband's rooms lay a few yards away across a shared hall, and he had fresh scratches on his hands.

He said he had heard nothing. The house itself kept a record of the night, from her room to his.

The record, filled in

What the servants and the magistrates found that morning, in the order they found it. Watch which room each trace leads back to.

The duchess's maid could not open the door, so the servants went into the garden and tried the windows of the bedroom and the boudoir beside it, her small private sitting room. The shutters were fastened and everything behind them was dark.

They reached her by a wooden stair on the far side of the house and through the antechamber, the shared hall between her rooms and his. The duke came in a moment later, very pale, and threw himself on her.

The duchess had been stabbed many times and beaten with a pistol butt. Her left hand was closed on a quantity of a man's hair, the color and length of the duke's, and his own pistol lay on her floor with skin and hair stuck to the butt. When a servant went into the duke's room for water, Praslin stopped him, saying the water in the pitcher was dirty. There was not a drop of clean water left.

In the fireplace of the duke's room lay a half-burnt handkerchief and the ash of papers. In a drawer of his desk the magistrates found the broken handle of a dagger, fresh blood on it and no blade. And for six years the duchess had written to him demanding he dismiss the governess, whom she believed to be his mistress.

As a peer the duke could be tried only by the upper house of parliament, so he was held at its palace, the Luxembourg. He died there on 24 August, six days after his wife. The autopsy found he had poisoned himself with arsenic.

The payoff

Every trace ran from her room to his: his hair in her hand, his pistol on her floor, a cloth half burnt in his grate, a bloody handle with no blade. He died before the peers could try him for her murder.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

The children's teacher, held after the killing, was released without charge in November and died in America in 1875. Six months after the killing the July Monarchy fell, partly over this.

What happened

The commander in chief of the Egyptian army was being driven home through the middle of the city at half past one on 19 November 1924 when several gunmen fired into the car. He died the following night. His aide and his driver were wounded and survived.

Nobody who saw it would identify anybody to the British led investigation, and the local force asked to be relieved of the case. What the police had was three bullets whose tips had been cut into a cross so that they would open on impact.

Two brothers who fled toward Libya were caught with four pistols and denied everything. Had any of those guns fired in Cairo?

The record, filled in

The investigation in order, from the shooting to the trial. Watch what the expert, Sydney Smith, does before he will tell the court which gun it was.

The dead man, Sir Lee Stack, was the commander in chief of the Egyptian army and Governor general of the Sudan, shot in his car in the middle of a Cairo afternoon. The bullets taken from him had been filed into a cross at the tip, the old dumdum trick: cut that way, an ordinary round spreads when it hits.

Two young brothers were among the suspects. They ran west for tripoli, were stopped near the Libyan frontier, and were found with four pistols hidden in a basket of fruit. They denied everything.

One of the four was a .32 Colt. Sydney Smith, the medical expert to the Egyptian government, fired it and compared its test bullets and spent cartridge cases with those from the scene. A fault at the mouth of its barrel left a broad scratch on every bullet it fired, and the bullet from the body carried the same scratch.

That scratch might still be something every gun of that make left behind. So Smith got twenty-four more of them and fired them all. None left the same mark, and only then would he tell the court that this was the gun.

Faced with the comparison, the brothers admitted their part and named the others. One of the men they named kept a workman's vise at home, and it still held metal filings that matched the cut bullets.

The payoff

All eight men were convicted. One scratch, tested against twenty-four identical guns, made this one of the first convictions anywhere on a bullet traced to a single factory-made pistol.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

Seven of the eight were hanged together in Cairo on 23 August 1925.

Sydney Smith went on to Edinburgh and taught the method to two generations of pathologists.

What happened

The Knickerbocker Athletic Club stood at Madison Avenue and Forty-Fifth Street in New York, and in the winter of 1898 two people tied to it died seven weeks apart. Henry Barnet, a stockbroker who lived at the club, took a dose of a patent salts that had reached him in the post, and died on 10 November. Nobody looked twice at it.

On 24 December a small parcel came for the club's athletic director. He carried it home unopened. Four days later he made up a headache dose from the bottle inside it for his landlady, Katherine Adams, and she was dead within the hour. Nothing in it said who sent it. Roland Molineux had resigned from the club a year earlier after a quarrel with that same director.

The parcel had no sender's name, and the man it was meant for never drank from it. Who had sent it, and could anyone prove it?

The record, filled in

How the case against Roland Molineux was built and then undone. Watch the earlier death at the club, and what the jury was told about it.

The bottle in the parcel held Bromo Seltzer, the drugstore headache remedy, laced with cyanide of mercury, a poison so rare that hardly anybody in the city had cause to keep it. Molineux, a chemist at a dye works in New Jersey, had fallen out with the director over a member's conduct and an amateur circus the club put on.

Inside the wrapper was a pale blue box, and in it the bottle and a silver holder to stand it in. A jeweler in Newark, New Jersey, had sold the holder to a well dressed man in his thirties who would not wait for it to be polished.

Someone had also written to patent medicine firms in other men's names, the director's and Henry Barnet's among them, asking for free samples to be sent to a letterbox rented on Broadway, a private mail drop. Barnet had lived at the clubhouse, and he had courted the woman Molineux married nineteen days after Barnet died.

At the trial for Katherine Adams's death, the prosecution set the parcel's address and those letters beside pages Molineux had to write out for the experts, and more than a dozen experts on handwriting said one man wrote them all. The prosecutor also put Barnet's death to the jury as a second killing by the same man, who had won his bride only once Barnet was dead. The jury convicted Molineux in February 1900, and he was sentenced to die.

In October 1901 the Court of Appeals threw the verdict out. Barnet's death, it held, should never have gone before that jury: a man may be convicted only on evidence of the crime he is on trial for.

The payoff

The writing pointed at Molineux, but the jury that convicted him had been told about a death he was never tried for. A second jury acquitted him in 1902, and nobody else was ever charged.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

The Molineux rule, as New York courts still call that ruling, limits when a jury may hear about other crimes. Molineux wrote a book about the death house at Sing Sing and died in 1917.

What happened

On the snowy morning of 14 February 1929, four men, two of them dressed as Chicago police officers, arrived at a bootleggers' delivery point on North Clark Street. They lined up seven men against a wall and shot them with two Thompson submachine guns. The papers called it the St Valentine's Day Massacre.

Because two of the killers wore convincing police uniforms, suspicion fell first on the real Chicago police. The killers left no names behind, only seventy spent cartridge cases.

Seven men were dead, the killers had vanished, and suspicion pointed at Chicago's own police. Whose guns had fired those shells?

The record, filled in

From Chicago to a house in Michigan. Watch what is done with the police's own guns first.

The dead were men of Bugs Moran's North Side gang. Other suspects included Moran's rival Al Capone and Capone's gunman Jack McGurn. Cook County Coroner Herman Bundesen kept the inquiry out of police hands. He called a coroner's jury of prominent citizens, and its foreman, a Colgate-Palmolive executive named Burt Massee, paid for a ballistics laboratory himself.

The laboratory's expert, Colonel Calvin Goddard, used a comparison microscope, which shows two fired shells side by side in one view, to match the tiny striations, the scratches a gun's own mechanism leaves on a shell. The seventy cases from the garage floor came from two Thompsons: fifty from one, twenty from the other.

To test the suspicion against the police, the colonel test-fired every Thompson in the Chicago police arsenal. None matched the shells from the scene, and the police were formally cleared.

Ten months after the massacre, across Lake Michigan in St Joseph, a patrolman was shot dead after a minor traffic accident. The man who shot him and fled was Fred Burke, a gunman living there under a false name. His wrecked car led police to his rented house, where two Thompsons lay.

The colonel test-fired both guns, and their marks matched the massacre shells. When Burke was caught in Missouri, Chicago wanted him for the massacre and Michigan for the St Joseph killing. Missouri judged Michigan's claim the stronger, and Michigan won his extradition.

The payoff

The microscope cleared the Chicago police and traced the massacre guns to Burke's house. He got life in Michigan for the officer's death, and nobody, Capone and McGurn included, was ever tried for killing the seven men.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

McGurn was shot dead in 1936, Burke died in prison in 1940, and Capone died in 1947. Both guns are still held by the sheriff of Berrien County, Michigan.

What happened

On 2 July 1881 Charles Guiteau, a disappointed office seeker, shot President James Garfield twice at a Washington railway station. One bullet grazed his arm; the other went deep into his back. His doctors were sure it lay on the right side, and probed there with unwashed fingers and instruments.

In late July, Alexander Graham Bell brought a new device built to find metal inside a living body. Dr Bliss, the lead physician, let Bell search only the right side, where Bliss was sure it lay, and the faint readings the device gave there could not be trusted.

Garfield died seventy-nine days after the shooting. Which side of his spine was the bullet on, and why had nobody found it?

The record, filled in

The autopsy report, signed the next day by the doctors who had been sure the ball lay on his right. Watch where it turns up. Suppurating: festering. Septic: infected.

By previous arrangement a post-mortem examination of the body of President Garfield was made this afternoon ... It was found that the ball, after fracturing the right eleventh rib, had passed through the spinal column in front of the spinal cord, fracturing the body of the first lumbar vertebra ... and lodging below the pancreas, about 2 1/2 inches to the left of the spine and behind the peritoneum, where it had become completely encysted.

The immediate cause of death was secondary hemorrhage from one of the mesenteric arteries adjoining the track of the ball ... An abscess cavity 6 inches by 4 in dimensions was found in the vicinity of the gall bladder, between the liver and the transverse colon ...

A long suppurating channel extended from the external wound, between the loin muscles and the right kidney, almost to the right groin. This channel, now known to be due to the burrowing of pus from the wound, was supposed during life to have been the track of the ball.

... the different suppurating surfaces, and especially the fractured, spongy tissue of the vertebrae, furnish a sufficient explanation of the septic condition which existed.

The payoff

The ball sat sealed off on the left. The channel down his right side, taken for its track, was infection from the doctors' unwashed probing. Their report blamed a burst artery; later doctors blamed the infection.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

Guiteau was hanged on 30 June 1882; his defense had argued that the doctors, not the bullet, killed the President. In October 1881 Bell's device found a bullet a Civil War veteran had carried for nineteen years, at the first try.

What happened

Thomas Briggs, sixty-nine, was chief clerk at a Lombard Street bank. On 9 July 1864 passengers boarding at Hackney found blood in an empty first class compartment of his evening train. Briggs lay on the track a mile back and died the next night without speaking.

His watch, his gold chain and his tall hat were gone, and on the seat lay a low black hat that was not his. Two days later a jeweler named Death took the chain in exchange, and a cabman knew the odd hat: he had bought it for a young German tailor, Franz Muller, by then at sea for New York. Detectives took a faster ship, beat him to the port, and opened his box: the gold watch, and a tall hat.

The tall hat in his box was lower than any Briggs wore, and the strip a hatter writes the name on was cut out. Whose was it?

The record, filled in

Daniel Digance made Briggs's hats for twenty-five years or more. At the Old Bailey he is shown the hat from Muller's box; the Solicitor-General prosecutes. Watch how he knows it.

Digance Mr. Briggs has been a customer of mine for at least twenty-five or thirty years; every hat he has had, has been made to order. By referring to my books ... according to the particulars in this book, this hat does not correspond. It is lower in the crown, but it corresponds in the shape of the crown ... It has been cut down. Mr. Briggs's hat was a little too easy in the head, and I placed a small piece of tissue paper round. That tissue paper is not here, but here are fragments of it remaining at the band of the hat.

Digance The hat has been cut down, I should say, from an inch to an inch and a half, and the bottom part of the leather has been cut off ... the piece has been removed from here, and brought over the band and stitched together, and the silk has been pasted down to hide the stitching.

Solicitor-General You say this hat has been cut down, has it been done in the way that a hatter would have cut it down in the course of his business?Digance Certainly not. It is an operation I have never seen ... If a hatter had to do it, he would secure it with gum, and put it on the block, and press it down with the hot iron. That process has certainly not been used here ... I should say that it was neatly sewn, and I should think it was done by a person who understood sewing. With the exception of the cutting down, there is no question about the hat corresponding with the one I made for Mr. Briggs.

The payoff

Except for the cutting down, it matched the hat Digance made for Briggs, scraps of tissue paper and all. Whoever cut off the name strip could sew but was no hatter. Muller was a tailor: guilty in fifteen minutes.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

Muller was hanged outside Newgate on 14 November 1864, and seconds before the drop told the minister beside him that he had done it. Railway carriages got a cord a passenger could pull to reach the guard, and for a generation a tall hat cut down in the crown was called a Muller.

What happened

Emily Beilby Kaye was thirty-eight, a London typist who lived in a women's club off Russell Square. In the spring of 1924 she sold her shares, told friends she was engaged and bound for South Africa, and went to the Sussex coast to join Patrick Mahon, a married sales manager who had taken a house on the shingle at the Crumbles under a false name. Nobody heard from her after mid-April.

His wife had stopped believing his stories about business out of town. On 1 May she went through his suits and found a left luggage ticket. A friend of hers, once of the railway police, took it to a station counter in London, was handed a locked bag, and pulled at one end until he could see bloodstained clothing and a knife.

Detectives watched the counter. Mahon came for the bag and said it had held meat for his dogs. What had happened at the Crumbles?

The record, filled in

Her remains were found cut up at the house. The Crown read out Mahon's signed statements at the first hearing, then its own evidence. Watch the money and the dates.

Mahon's Statement It was at her request that they took the Crumbles bungalow. They went there on April 12th, and stayed a few days. On the evening of April 15th they quarreled over his refusal to agree to her suggestion that he should take her abroad.

Mahon We fought and struggled ... Her head struck an iron coal scuttle, which appeared to stun her. It was midnight. I attempted to revive her for hours, but found that she was dead ... on the following morning I went up to London and bought a knife and saw, and returned to Crumbles ... I returned to London, and left at the cloak room at Waterloo Station a bag containing bloodstained clothing.

The Crown The prosecution said that Miss Kaye gave accused four £100 notes. Three were cashed in a false name, the last one two days before her death ... Accused said that he went into a franc speculation with Miss Kaye, towards which he subscribed £100, but there was no trace of this transaction in Mahon's banking account.

The Crown It would be shown in evidence that Mahon bought the knife and saw on April 12th, not April 17th, as he stated.

The payoff

He blamed a fall against the scuttle, which the pathologist said could not have killed her. And he bought the knife and saw on 12 April, before they went to the coast: he came prepared. He was convicted of murder.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

Mahon was hanged at Wandsworth that September. The pathologist, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, had found detectives sorting remains with bare hands, and out of that afternoon came the murder bag, the kit of gloves, tweezers and jars Scotland Yard has carried to a scene ever since.

What happened

Thomas Neill Cream had already served ten years in an Illinois prison for poisoning a man with strychnine before he was paroled and crossed the Atlantic in 1891. In Lambeth, south London, he began calling on young women he barely knew, carrying pills he said were medicine.

Four of them died within six months, each death first written off as something else: drink, a bad supper, an ordinary fever. Before anyone had connected the deaths, letters reached a doctor and a coroner accusing named men of murders the writer could not otherwise have known about.

Matilda Clover was certified dead of drink and buried, yet one letter called her a poisoning victim. Could anyone prove it now?

The record, filled in

Clover had lain six months in her grave when the letter naming her got her dug up. Dr Thomas Stevenson, the Home Office analyst, tells Cream's jury what he found.

Stevenson On 6th May, in consequence of instructions from the Home Office, I went to the cemetery at Tooting ... I noticed on the coffin a plate with the name "M. Clover, 27 years." The coffin was opened in my presence ... for the most part the body was in a very good state of preservation.

Stevenson I detected strychnine in the stomach, liver, the fluid in the chest, and the brain ... I obtained ... an appreciable quantity of strychnine which I tested on a frog, injecting it beneath the skin of the ... back ... it had tetanic convulsions, was very rigid ... quite characteristic symptoms.

Stevenson I made, eventually, a quantitative analysis ... one-sixteenth of a grain. That one-sixteenth would represent nearly a full medicinal dose. One-twelfth is the maximum medicinal dose ... in my judgment, from the evidence I have heard in the case to-day about the woman vomiting frequently, and from my finding her stomach empty ... it points conclusively to a larger and fatal dose having been administered.

Stevenson Twitchings, convulsions and rigidity, with intermittence, I should say, would at once suggest the taking of strychnine ... in delirium tremens the mental faculties are obscured and perverted, in strychnine spasms they are often very acute and are not at all impaired.

The payoff

So the letter was right: Clover had been poisoned, and when it was written to blackmail a doctor, only her killer knew. A British Museum expert matched its hand to Cream's own, and he was found guilty of her murder.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

Cream was hanged at Newgate on 15 November 1892. The letter naming Clover had sat in a Scotland Yard file for months, put down as the work of an insane person.

What happened

Louisa Luetgert left her house in Chicago on the evening of 1 May 1897 and was never seen again. Her husband Adolph, a German-born sausage maker, said she had gone away to visit her sister. Her brother did not believe it and went to the police.

The factory had stood shut for weeks, yet that Saturday night Luetgert sent his watchman out twice on errands and worked alone in the basement behind a locked door, with steam kept up to a vat until two in the morning. Two weeks later the police drained the middle vat. What had been in it?

No body was ever found. The indictment never said how she died, and the judge ruled that the state did not have to.

The record, filled in

The state said he dissolved his wife in the middle vat with a caustic he bought in March. His own lawyer, Lawrence Harmon, asks him about it, and about that Saturday.

Harmon You purchased a barrel of potash early in March? ... For what purpose?Luetgert To make soft soap.Harmon What arrangement, if any, had you made with reference to cleaning the factory?Luetgert ... there was a chance to sell the factory. ... I thought it was cheaper to make soap. When I used to work for Engel Bros., I learned the recipe for making soap.

Harmon ... Did you give any orders about that barrel?Luetgert Yes, I told Smokehouse Frank to break it up and told him it was bad stuff, that it would burn him, and that he should cover his face so he would not get hurt.

Harmon What time Saturday, May 1, did you return home?Luetgert ... It was late in the afternoon. ... At home I saw my wife sitting in the kitchen against the east wall and reading a paper. ... I could not find the tea and asked her where it was. ... I found the tea, in the basement pantry, and went up stairs again. ... I turned and left the house by the north door. Yes, that was the last time I saw my wife.

The payoff

Soap, he said. But the bottom of the middle vat held two gold rings, one engraved inside L. L., her initials, and bone an anthropologist swore was a woman's. A second jury convicted him of her murder.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

His first jury had split nine to three. He got life, and died at Joliet in July 1899, still saying he was innocent. Experts today doubt that fragments so small could be read that far.

What happened

Marion Gilchrist, eighty-two and wealthy, was killed in her Glasgow flat on 21 December 1908 while her maid was out for ten minutes. A man walked out past the maid and a neighbor. Only a diamond brooch was taken.

Police traced Oscar Slater, who had tried to sell a pawn ticket for a diamond brooch. But it was his own, pledged a month before the murder. A witness, Mary Barrowman, picked him out as the man she saw running alone in a fawn coat and a Donegal hat. The prosecution said Slater lived off a prostitute; the judge told the jury such a man had less right to be presumed innocent. Nine of fifteen jurors voted guilty. Sentenced to hang, he was reprieved two days before the date.

The Crown listed one more witness, but nobody called her at the trial. What had she seen?

The record, filled in

She swore this before the trial; the jury never heard it. Compare what she saw with what Mary Barrowman saw.

Brown On Monday, 21st December, 1908, ... I left the house there to attend evening classes ... two men came rushing past me ... the one nearest me came against me in passing; he merely touched me. ... I did not see the face of either man ... The man furthest from me was of medium build, but seemed to be squarer than the other man. He had very dark hair, probably jet black, well groomed and glossy, and was bareheaded. He wore a navy blue overcoat with velvet collar, dark trousers, and black boots.

Brown, After The February Line-Up I adhere to the above statement as correct, and have to add that on Sunday, 21st February, I saw in the Central Police Office prisoner, Oscar Slater. ... I recognized him as one of the two men I had seen running away on the Monday night in question. ... the man who was with him was wearing a dark, close-fitting cap. ... I did not get a front view of his face, but I picked him out of a number of men, twelve to fourteen, as I think, in the police office, and I have not the slightest doubt about him. It was not only by his profile and back view but the shape of his neck and ears and square shoulders.

The payoff

Barrowman saw one man, in a hat. Brown saw two and named Slater as the hatless one. They could not both be right, and the jury never heard Brown. In 1928 the verdict was quashed; the murder was never solved.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

Freed in 1927 with the verdict still standing, he pressed for the appeal and was paid six thousand pounds. A detective who said in 1914 that police held evidence back was sacked.

What happened

On the night of 31 May 1908, in Paris, the painter Adolphe Steinheil and his mother-in-law Emilie Japy were found dead in their home. His wife Marguerite was found tied to a bed nearby. She said masked strangers had broken in, killed them and made off with her jewels.

Police could find no sign of a break-in, and her story shifted with each telling. Then, that November, one of the jewels she said the strangers had taken turned up again. Where had it been all along?

No weapon was ever found, and no stranger who matched her description. The only witness to that night was the widow herself.

The record, filled in

What the police and the press turned up over the next eighteen months, in order. Keep your eye on the jewels she said were stolen.

Marguerite told police that four masked intruders, three men and a woman, had left her bound and gagged and carried off her jewels. The papers hunted for a political plot: she had been the mistress of Felix Faure, the French President who died in 1899.

In November a pearl that she said came from one of the stolen rings was found in the wallet of her manservant. He was arrested that night, suspected of murder and robbery.

Then her jeweler saw the pearl pictured in a newspaper and went to the police. She had brought him the ring it came from to be reset in June, weeks after the night it was supposedly stolen. A ring in his shop in June had not been taken in May.

So the pearl had been hers all along, and she admitted slipping it among his things herself. Next she named her cook's son, who could prove where he had been that night. When she admitted he was innocent too, she was arrested for her lies.

Tried for both deaths in November 1909, she was cleared after a jury deliberation of two and a half hours.

The payoff

The pearl proved she had lied about the theft and framed her own servant, an innocent man. It could not prove she had killed anyone, and her acquittal left the night of 31 May unexplained.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

She moved to England, became Lady Abinger by marriage in 1917, and died in Hove in 1954. Some writers still argue she was guilty; the court never said so.

What happened

London, 1895. A well-dressed stranger stopped women in the street, promised them travel, dresses and jewels, and vanished with whatever they lent him. Police arrested Adolf Beck, a Norwegian, and decided he was the 'John Smith' jailed for the same trick in 1877.

One woman after another picked him out, and he was convicted in 1896. Released in 1901, he was arrested again when the trick broke out anew in 1904, picked out again, and convicted a second time. How could so many be so sure?

Beck swore he was never John Smith and had been in South America in 1877. The women swore he was their man.

The record, filled in

A music teacher, she swore this at the police court. Her word and other women's put Beck in prison in 1896. Notice how sure she is.

I met the prisoner on the 26th November. ... In passing through Victoria Street I met the prisoner. I did not know him before. He passed and turned back and said, "Pardon me, are you not Lady Everton or Egerton?" ... He told me that he had an estate in Lincolnshire and kept ten gardeners.

He asked me to join him in going to the Riviera. ... He also gave me the check ... for £40, to pay for the dresses, boots and shoes, bonnets and hats he was going to buy me.

He said he was a cousin of Lord Salisbury's ... I gave him an old-fashioned ring to have one made for me from it. He asked me to give him my diamond ring; it was too small, he would have it made larger. ... He said he would send them back the next day by a porter with one arm, and would send some jewels for me to choose.

Three minutes after he left I missed an antique enameled watch about the size of a shilling from the table. ... I went to the Union Bank in Trafalgar Square, and found he had no account there. ... Yesterday, at ten minutes to five, I saw him standing at the door of a house in Victoria Street. ... I gave him into custody just opposite the clock at Victoria station. I am sure it is the man. I noticed his right cheek was drawn and his left cheek fuller. He took a pocketbook out at my house, and wrote in it about dresses, silk stockings, and gloves.

The payoff

She was sure, and wrong. In July 1904, with Beck in a cell, a man was caught pawning rings two actresses had lent him. An inspector from both trials knew him: the real John Smith. He pleaded guilty; Beck was pardoned.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

The real swindler, William Augustus Wyatt, got five years. Beck was paid £5,000.

What happened

Walther Rathenau was the Weimar Republic's foreign minister, an industrialist the nationalist press had spent a year naming as the enemy inside the government. On the morning of 24 June 1922 a second car drew level with his open car in Berlin, and the men in it shot him and threw a grenade. He died within minutes.

Their car and their war-surplus submachine gun were both rare in civilian hands, which pointed to former soldiers. But which three men had been in that car?

The car and the gun told the police what sort of men to look for. They could not say which ones, or where.

The record, filled in

How the three men in the car were found, step by step, from the morning of the shooting to the trial that October.

The car had been brought in from Saxony for the job. It pulled level with Rathenau's on the Koenigsallee, in the Grunewald district, and afterwards was hidden in a garage lent by a sympathizer in nearby Schmargendorf.

The break came from a man on the edge of the plot who could not keep it to himself. His loose talk betrayed him, and once arrested he told police everything. His statement named the man at the wheel, Ernst Werner Techow, and the two gunmen, Erwin Kern and Hermann Fischer.

Five days after the shooting Techow was taken at a relative's estate east of Berlin. Kern and Fischer, both veterans of the war, had fled.

After a manhunt of more than two weeks police cornered them on 17 July at Saaleck, an old castle in Thuringia. The siege ended with Kern shot dead by an officer and Fischer dead by his own hand.

Of the three men in the car, only Techow lived to be tried. In October 1922 he was convicted as an accessory to murder and given fifteen years, later cut short by an act of clemency.

The payoff

The car and the gun only said what kind of men to look for. A plotter who could not keep quiet gave the names, and by 17 July all three men in the car were caught or dead.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

Techow left prison in January 1930 and was killed fighting near Dresden on 9 May 1945. Whether anyone higher up the network ordered the murder was never settled.

What happened

On the evening of 6 May 1882, in Dublin's Phoenix Park, two men were stabbed to death in view of people nearby: Lord Frederick Cavendish, sworn in as Chief Secretary for Ireland that same afternoon, and Thomas Henry Burke, the permanent Under-Secretary and the real target.

A secret society calling itself the Invincibles claimed the killings. Months went by without a charge. In January 1883 police rounded up a group of suspects. Which of them would talk?

The society's oath bound every member to silence. The way in had to be through one of its own.

The record, filled in

What came of the January 1883 round-up, and what talking cost the man who did it.

The man who talked was James Carey, a Dublin town councillor, respected in city politics, who had secretly been directing the Invincibles as one of their leaders. Facing the gallows beside his own men, he turned informer in February to save his life.

His evidence unmasked the society: who had planned the attack, who had struck, and who was the driver who carried the killers off. Five of his accomplices were hanged at Kilmainham Gaol that May and June.

Carey was given a new alias, Power, and sent with his family to start again in South Africa. On the voyage out he made friends with a fellow passenger, an Irish bricklayer named Patrick O'Donnell.

At Cape Town, where they changed to a coastal steamer, the Melrose, O'Donnell was told that his friend Power was James Carey. On 29 July 1883 he shot Carey dead on board. Whether O'Donnell had been sent to find him has never been settled.

The payoff

The society could only be broken from inside, and its own leader broke it: Carey's word sent five men to the gallows. His new name lasted barely three weeks at sea.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

O'Donnell was hanged at Newgate in December 1883. A 2021 study of the long-sealed Home Office file argues his judge misreported a question from the jury and steered them away from a lesser verdict. No court has tested that claim.

What happened

Giacomo Matteotti was a socialist member of the Italian parliament who had just accused Mussolini's government, in a speech to the chamber, of winning the last election by fraud and violence. On the afternoon of 10 June 1924, walking along the Tiber in Rome, he was dragged into a car by five men and never again seen alive.

Passersby saw the struggle but could tell police little about the men. Their car, though, had been seen in the area the night before. Had anyone taken note of it?

For two months there was no body and no confession. All the police had was a car and the names it led to.

The record, filled in

From the car to the courts, in order. The case took twenty-three years to close, and the reason is in the last step.

The five men used a big black Lancia. The night before, it had been driving round the neighborhood, and a concierge in a building nearby found it suspicious enough to write down its number. That note let police trace the car within two days. The editor of a pro-government newspaper had rented it and handed it to the leader of the five, Amerigo Dumini.

Dumini was arrested at Rome's main station on 12 June, two days after the kidnapping. But there was still no body, and nobody confessed.

On 12 August a road worker found a bloodstained jacket in a drainage ditch beside a country road north of Rome. Matteotti's widow said at once that it was her husband's.

Four days later his body was found in scrubland nearby. After two months in the open it could only be identified through dental records.

In 1926 a court at Chieti, held under the regime's tight control, found Dumini and two others guilty of manslaughter alone and acquitted the other two. Amnesties soon freed the three. Only in November 1946, with Fascism gone, did Italy's highest court overturn that verdict as one reached under the regime's pressure. At the retrial in 1947 Dumini and two others, one of them acquitted in 1926, got life.

The payoff

One number, jotted down the night before, gave police the car, the newspaperman who hired it and Dumini within two days. Punishing the killers took twenty-three years and the fall of the regime that shielded them.

The grid, solved

Afterwards

The life sentences were later cut to thirty years. Dumini left prison for good in 1956 and died in 1967. Whether Mussolini himself ordered the killing has never been proven either way.