Tracking down the Culprit (eBook)

THE MUMMY IN THE LIVING ROOM

The first French pioneers of forensic entomology were very exciting. Insect experts were, from the very beginning, allowed to testify before a judge, as illustrated in the following depiction by Doctor Bergeret, who worked in a hospital, not in an Institute for Legal Medicine, as we know it today.

Bergeret had already taken part in many cemetery “round-ups,” meaning mass exhumations. These were undertaken not for scientific reasons, but rather, as today, within the framework of construction project encroachments in large cities. Since Bergeret also examined the numerous corpses, however, he knew his way well around interred corpses – and in the warm, dry environs of Toulouse, to boot.

In 1850, he was tasked with examining a child’s dehydrated corpse that had been removed from a closet in a living room. The question was the identity of the child, as several rental parties were under suspicion. Genetic fingerprints or other classification methods didn’t exist at that time. What was to be determined, instead, was the time at which the child had been placed in the cupboard. In doing so, according to the logic of the investigator, it would become clear whose child it was.

On March 28, 1850, Bergeret wrote to the judge:

“I was brought to renter Mme. Saillard at Rue de Citoyen 4 in order to examine the corpse of a child of 46 centimeters [1.5 feet]. Over the previous three years, three different parties had inhabited the examined home. The first family had moved out in December 1848 and had been living there since 1844.

The questions that presented themselves were the following: First, was the child born in a normal manner? Second, was it alive when it was born? Third, how long did it live? Fourth, how did it die? Fifth, how much time had passed between the death and the discovery of the corpse?”

While Bergeret was able to answer the first four questions through a coroner’s inquest, meaning a forensic examination of the body, he had a different idea for solving the fifth question. He writes: “In order to answer this, the forensic medicine expert has to work together with another scientific field, the natural sciences.”

Bergeret had found larvae on the corpse! But, led astray by his experience with very slow corpse decomposition in bodies that were buried, he assumed it would have to have taken an entire year for an insect to develop from egg to animal. He also believed that every egg was laid in summer and that all would then, until early spring, continue developing into larvae. Only then would they pupate and hatch. He based his repository estimation as follows:

“The larvae were found in March 1850. Thus, the eggs must have been laid in mid-1849. The person must have at least been dead since then. Since we also found many pupal cases in addition to the living larvae, these must stem from an earlier egg-laying, for example in 1848.

The fly that emerged from the discovered larvae is the flesh fly Musca carania. It does not lay its eggs on dried-out tissue.

We additionally found pupae from small night butterflies (moths) that are only found on dried-out corpses. In the event that the corpse was to have lain there since 1846 or 1847, we would have no longer found their larvae.

In total, two insect settlement waves have thus taken place, which signifies a two-year repository time: The flesh flies laid their eggs in 1848 on the fresh corpse, and the moths laid their eggs in 1849 on the dried-out corpse.”

According to modern standards, the forensic-entomological side of Bergeret’s statements is more than shaky. Since he supported these estimations very tightly with forensic medicine and criminal findings, regardless, his result was correct.

Such a warped assessment – even if it provides the correct result at the end – is not something we would like to compile today. Here, the only thing that helps these experts is a sense of determination and the understanding that they do not, in the end, know everything. That means that we cannot work on some cases – for example, when we don’t have an existing growth curve chart for the animals discovered at a crime scene.

It is also good to have candid, skeptical assistants who don’t believe what I’m saying. As a certified court expert with a great deal of trial experience, I am forced to prove every statement – and cannot adopt the attitude that I “just know.” This is yet another reason to interact as often as possible with colleagues and students from other areas of study: Because mutual consideration can only serve to strengthen a person – and it leads to deriving the correct conclusion.

THE FIRST MODERN INSECT CASE

The following case, too, deals with the corpse of a child. It is the first recorded case in which not a doctor, but rather a biologist, contributed his expertise.

In 1879, the president of the scientific academy “French Society for Forensic Medicine,” Paul Camille Hippolyte Brouardel, was asked to examine the corpse of a newborn child. He autopsied the body on January 15, 1878, during which he discovered and collected mites and “butterfly larvae” (meaning moths). Unlike Bergeret, Brouardel now turned to his colleague, Perier, an insect expert from the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and also to a veterinarian, Mégnin, who would go on to publish La Faune des Cadavers. He showed them both the biological traces.

The two discovered that the corpse must have been mummified, since there were no signs of early corpse settlers (blow flies), as Bergeret had already discovered, but animals suited for a dried-out corpse, instead. It revolved around the “butterflies” or moths, in fact, of the species Aglossa (Pyralidae family). Perier was of the opinion that the presence and development period of those moths might indicate a death from the past summer. That corresponded to a repository period of seven months.

Mégnin proposed another possibility. He found it more interesting that quite a few of the larval skins found there, as well as the excrement, originated from the same species of mite. He assumed, therefore, that only a few sexually mature mites had settled the body, with their now-observable offspring having stemmed from these founding pairs. He estimated the number of living and dead mites on the corpse at roughly 2.4 million.

Extrapolating from his assumptions about mites’ development periods, he calculated that, after fifteen days, roughly ten females and five males could have been alive; after 30 days, 100 and 50; after 45, 1,000 and 500 – and so on. At this increasing rate, Mégnin arrived at a settlement period of one and a half months, or a million females and a half-million males. Due to potentially poor survival conditions, he doubled this time period, thereby arriving at a roughly three-month-long settlement period for the mites.

Since the animals only first began consuming the corpse after it had dried out, he calculated a further three months for the mummification. Mégnin thus arrived at a combined repository period of six months, or the previous summer.

Although this, the world’s first real forensic-entomological calculation, contained numerous weaknesses, this lovely case came back to me many years later – and I was therefore able to avoid serious disgrace because of it, as the following case shows.

THE HORROR HOUSE IN COLOGNE

Even though the rent had not been paid for ages, and even though the city utilities had already turned off the water and shut off the electricity, it occurred to no one that, in a corner apartment on the first floor of a somewhat dilapidated building in Cologne’s Kalk district, something wasn’t right. One day, things became a bit too ripe for the property manager, who allowed the apartment’s door to be broken down. The sight stunned them: In a room absolutely empty save for a table and couch, a partially mummified, partially skeletonized corpse lay on the couch (see fig. 44).

The neighbors recalled that the renter of the apartment had a long, gray beard. A similar beard was found on the corpse. Just as in the lung snail case (see: The Lung Snail Case), we first assumed the corpse to stem from a mentally and socially incapacitated individual who had died there alone. The neighbors reported unanimously that he had often lived “off the land,” meaning in the wild. Only when the weather became too cold for him, did he turn to his apartment.

That was also the reason no one had thought anything of his disappearance. He was often gone for long stretches. Even when it began to smell strongly from inside the apartment, no one noticed. The neighbors said they had long since given up on trying to do anything about the smells coming from inside the man’s apartment. He had been disorganized, they said, and allowed groceries to remain in his apartment until they spoiled. On top of that, the apartment contained neither a bathroom nor a shower – just a tiny toilet.

The last factor was that his apartment was on the building’s corner, with a continuous, walkable outdoor balcony. When odors forced their way outside, they were then quickly whisked away through a window on the small outside wall of the home or through the balcony. The building had no real entry hall that would have otherwise trapped the smells.

Back in the laboratory, my assistant reported on where the collected insects had originated. It had already occurred to us that there was an error in the story. The majority of apartment corpses are not typically discovered because of their smell, but because of the maggots that crawl...