04-18-2005
http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/forensics/ballistics/1.html
The Pressure Is On
By Katherine Ramsland
This article is titled The Pressure is On by Katherine Ramsland. This article takes place in Massachusetts on April 15 in 1920. The who in this article is two men and a couple of security guards. This article talks about two men approached a couple of security guards delivering the payroll money for the Slater and Morrill Shoe Factory, and without warning, they opened fire. One of the men shot both guards, and the other pumped several more bullets into them. They then took the payroll boxes containing nearly $16,000 and sped off in a black Buick with three other men. Eyewitnesses described them as "Italian-looking" and one had a handlebar mustache. Investigators recovered six ejected shell casings from the sidewalk around the dead men and traced them back to three manufacturers: Remington, Winchester and Peters. They also found the getaway car, abandoned, and they soon linked it with an earlier robbery. Police surmised that the mastermind was an Italian thug named Mike Boda, but when they located his hideout, he had already fled to Italy.
However, two of his associates were arrested, some sources say at Boda's hideout, some say on a streetcar. They were ordinary Italian laborers who fit the general descriptions: Nicola Sacco, 29, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 32,. While they denied owning guns, they had illegal pistols on their person and Sacco's was the same caliber—a .32 Colt automatic—as the murder weapon. Sacco also sported a handlebar mustache and had two dozen bullets on him made by the three manufacturers matched to the shells. Both men were also members of a radical anarchist group that supported violence to resolve injustice. They were promptly arrested.
Sacco was tried for robbery in the earlier case and found guilty. He was later tried with his partner, Vanzetti, for the murder of Alessandro Berardelli, one of the shoe company security guards. The trial began on May 31, 1921, and public opinion was clearly against them. Regardless of their guilt or innocence in the murders, they were perceived as dangerous men. Yet there were many foreigners, feeling the burn of xenophobia, who sided with them and the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee called the whole ordeal a witch-hunt, with these men serving as scapegoats for America's fear of the political beliefs of other countries. Four bullets had been removed from the murdered payroll guards. Experts were brought in to testify as to whether Sacco's .32 pistol was indeed the murder weapon, and on the prosecution side, opinions were mixed. The experts for the defense were more confident in their opinion, although no one had based what they offered on scientific techniques. All were self-taught. Firearms evidence identification matching bullets to guns was born in 1835 in England when the unique ridge on a bullet taken from a victim was linked with a bullet mold in the suspect's home, exposing a burglary as a fake. Confronted, the suspect confessed. While that's not a very precise method of matching, it was a start.
When smoothbore pistols and muskets were replaced in the late 18th century by rifled weapons, spent bullets acquired a distinct signature. The process of making grooves in rifles for more accurate projectiles meant that they would leave a mark on the softer metal of the bullet as it spun through the barrel. Because of the wearing of the machines that made them, any bullet fired from a specific weapon will bear the same distinct markings. When bullets were then encased in cartridges, even more marks were made, helping investigators make a match between a bullet and a gun. Firearms evidence identification matching bullets to guns was born in 1835 in England when the unique ridge on a bullet taken from a victim was linked with a bullet mold in the suspect's home, exposing a burglary as a fake. Confronted, the suspect confessed.
While that's not a very precise method of matching, it was a start. The first time an expert proved in court that a specific gun was used for a murder was in America in 1902. Oliver Wendell Holmes, says Brian Innes in Bodies of Evidence, had read a book about firearm identification, so he called a gunsmith to test-fire the alleged murder weapon into a wad of cotton wool. He then used a magnifying lens to match marks on the bullet from the victim to the test-fired bullet, and these he showed to the jury. It was a firearms case, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre on a snow-blown February 14, 1929, that led to the opening of the first independent scientific crime detection laboratory in America. Seven men were waiting that morning around 10:30 a.m. in a red brick warehouse for the S-M-C Cartage Company on Chicago's North Side, at 2122 North Clark Street. Three men wearing police uniforms and two dressed as civilians arrived in a police car and went inside. Witnesses in the neighborhood heard multiple gunshots made by machine guns. Then the police left, and a dog inside left alive the building began to bark and howl. Neighbors checked and found a bloody scene: the seven unarmed men lay on the floor, all shot in the back multiple times. The wall against which they had been lined up for the assassination was a gory mess.
The victims, according to the History Channels' Forensic Firsts, were known associates of mobster George "Bugs" Moran. He pointed the finger at Al Capone, while Capone, down in Florida, pointed it back at him. However, many people thought the police had killed a gang in cold blood, so it was left to firearms comparisons to unearth the true story.
The shooters had left behind 70 cartridge casings and the weapons were identified as .45-caliber Thomson submachine guns.
The person who would make all the difference in this case was a cardiologist named Calvin Goddard—the same person who had confirmed the ballistics evidence in the Sacco and Vanzetti case two years earlier. With Charles Waite, who had test-fired the Stielow gun for proof that the immigrant had not committed the double homicide for which he'd been convicted, he began to acquire data from all known gun manufacturers to develop a comprehensive database. Together they catalogued the results of the test fires from each type of gun. At the time, there were 12 known handgun manufacturers, and they started what would become one of the most comprehensive collections of crime-solving information about guns. Waite died in 1925, but Goddard took over the work, and he was responsible, with his scientific procedures, for bringing the science of ballistics into its own. With the invention of the comparison microscope by Goddard's partner, two objects could be laid side-by-side for high-powered comparative examination using a series of reflective mirrors and lenses. Bullets could be laid out in such a way as to show whether there was a match in the markings that a gun would leave on them after they were fired from that gun. That made for a controlled examination, which was needed as a defensive weapon against the increase in crime during the 1920s. Thus, when the seven bullet-ridden bodies were found in the Chicago warehouse on St. Valentine's Day in 1929, it was just a matter of finding the murder weapon. Goddard came in from New York as an independent investigator and fired each of the eight machine guns owned by the Chicago police. He then compared the results to evidence collected at the scene. No casings matched, which cleared the police. That meant that someone had impersonated police officers to commit the murders. Ten months later, the police raided the home of a hit man for Al Capone. They found two machine guns, which they gave to Goddard. He test-fired them and proved they were the weapons used in the massacre. That sent at least one of the killers to prison. The infamous incident turned out to have been part of a gang war between Capone and Moran. Evidently the men had been lured there—and Moran was supposed to have been among them—by a call from Detroit indicating that a truck full of hijacked whiskey was coming in. Moran himself was late, and he just missed being victim number eight. In fact, he had spotted the police car outside the warehouse and left.
Goddard's work inspired two businessmen who had been on the coroner's jury to set him up at Northwestern University in Chicago in the first independent crime lab in the country. Ballistics, fingerprinting, blood analysis and trace evidence were brought under one roof and the lab became a prototype. Science and the police were united, and according to Nickell and Fischer, Goddard then advised the FBI in 1932 when they set up a similar criminological laboratory. Their first piece of equipment was a comparison microscope.
To develop the science of firearms comparison, the most important tool was the microscope. The earliest crude microscopes were invented in the 1600s, allowing a magnification of ten to twenty times, but images were still blurred. The invention of the compound microscope that relied on multiple lenses fused together improved the situation, as optics magnification and clarity increased exponentially. From years of data collection and experiments, firearms identification specialists can: Compare bullets and match them to a specific firearm Accurately estimate the distance of a shooting Detect gunpowder residue around wounds and on shooters Restore obliterated serial numbers.
The author wrote this article because It was February 27, 1991. Jim went to see Artie and they got into a bad argument. Even as Artie's girlfriend was screaming to a 911 operator, gunshots could be heard. Officers came and found Jim walking around in a daze and carrying a .22 rifle and a .38 Smith and Wesson Special. Inside Artie's house, they found Artie in the bedroom. He had been shot through the eye, abdomen and right arm by a .22, and he was dead. Eight spent cartridges were picked up in the room. While Jim was charged with premeditated murder, he claimed it had been the result of an argument and a struggle while trying to get his brother to get help. He had never intended to kill him. However, there were those who said that Jim had a motive: he wanted to sell the business and Artie was not about to let that happen. A lot of money was at stake. The 911 recording was brought into evidence, and Dr. Harry Hollien, an expert in acoustics, said that he had isolated the shots. He used a room in his own home that was about the same size and came up with recordings of his test shots. From his experiments, he concluded how many seconds there were between each of five shots recorded on the tape. Between the third and fourth shot, there had been a significant gap of about half a minute. The prosecution viewed that as evidence of a clear and deliberate act, not something done in the heat of the moment or by mistake.
Then expert Lucien Haag showed a video of his devising of a computer simulation of the incident. Artie was shown as being shot twice on his way into the hallway and then shot in the head in the hallway. Haag included all eight shots as he believed they would have occurred, although there were only five recorded on the 911 call. The way he did this was to trace the paths of the bullets by calculating in room angles and impact points from the point at which Jim Mitchell was standing when he fired. Haag represented these trajectories with dramatic red lasers. When the defense, who had stridently opposed having this tape admitted into evidence, asked Haag if there were other possibilities besides the ones he had mapped, he was forced to admit that there were quite a few other possibilities. It was not an exact science, but an interpretation based on speculation. That was a blow to the prosecution, and it made a difference in how the jury voted. On February 18, 1992, they found Mitchell guilty only of manslaughter. He was sentenced to six years but served only three.
From the time a bullet was first matched to a weapon until now, the technology of projectile behavior in motion and firearms evaluations has only gotten better, but it still depends to some extent on interpretation. Bullets do not always behave as expected.
The Pressure Is On
By Katherine Ramsland
This article is titled The Pressure is On by Katherine Ramsland. This article takes place in Massachusetts on April 15 in 1920. The who in this article is two men and a couple of security guards. This article talks about two men approached a couple of security guards delivering the payroll money for the Slater and Morrill Shoe Factory, and without warning, they opened fire. One of the men shot both guards, and the other pumped several more bullets into them. They then took the payroll boxes containing nearly $16,000 and sped off in a black Buick with three other men. Eyewitnesses described them as "Italian-looking" and one had a handlebar mustache. Investigators recovered six ejected shell casings from the sidewalk around the dead men and traced them back to three manufacturers: Remington, Winchester and Peters. They also found the getaway car, abandoned, and they soon linked it with an earlier robbery. Police surmised that the mastermind was an Italian thug named Mike Boda, but when they located his hideout, he had already fled to Italy.
However, two of his associates were arrested, some sources say at Boda's hideout, some say on a streetcar. They were ordinary Italian laborers who fit the general descriptions: Nicola Sacco, 29, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 32,. While they denied owning guns, they had illegal pistols on their person and Sacco's was the same caliber—a .32 Colt automatic—as the murder weapon. Sacco also sported a handlebar mustache and had two dozen bullets on him made by the three manufacturers matched to the shells. Both men were also members of a radical anarchist group that supported violence to resolve injustice. They were promptly arrested.
Sacco was tried for robbery in the earlier case and found guilty. He was later tried with his partner, Vanzetti, for the murder of Alessandro Berardelli, one of the shoe company security guards. The trial began on May 31, 1921, and public opinion was clearly against them. Regardless of their guilt or innocence in the murders, they were perceived as dangerous men. Yet there were many foreigners, feeling the burn of xenophobia, who sided with them and the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee called the whole ordeal a witch-hunt, with these men serving as scapegoats for America's fear of the political beliefs of other countries. Four bullets had been removed from the murdered payroll guards. Experts were brought in to testify as to whether Sacco's .32 pistol was indeed the murder weapon, and on the prosecution side, opinions were mixed. The experts for the defense were more confident in their opinion, although no one had based what they offered on scientific techniques. All were self-taught. Firearms evidence identification matching bullets to guns was born in 1835 in England when the unique ridge on a bullet taken from a victim was linked with a bullet mold in the suspect's home, exposing a burglary as a fake. Confronted, the suspect confessed. While that's not a very precise method of matching, it was a start.
When smoothbore pistols and muskets were replaced in the late 18th century by rifled weapons, spent bullets acquired a distinct signature. The process of making grooves in rifles for more accurate projectiles meant that they would leave a mark on the softer metal of the bullet as it spun through the barrel. Because of the wearing of the machines that made them, any bullet fired from a specific weapon will bear the same distinct markings. When bullets were then encased in cartridges, even more marks were made, helping investigators make a match between a bullet and a gun. Firearms evidence identification matching bullets to guns was born in 1835 in England when the unique ridge on a bullet taken from a victim was linked with a bullet mold in the suspect's home, exposing a burglary as a fake. Confronted, the suspect confessed.
While that's not a very precise method of matching, it was a start. The first time an expert proved in court that a specific gun was used for a murder was in America in 1902. Oliver Wendell Holmes, says Brian Innes in Bodies of Evidence, had read a book about firearm identification, so he called a gunsmith to test-fire the alleged murder weapon into a wad of cotton wool. He then used a magnifying lens to match marks on the bullet from the victim to the test-fired bullet, and these he showed to the jury. It was a firearms case, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre on a snow-blown February 14, 1929, that led to the opening of the first independent scientific crime detection laboratory in America. Seven men were waiting that morning around 10:30 a.m. in a red brick warehouse for the S-M-C Cartage Company on Chicago's North Side, at 2122 North Clark Street. Three men wearing police uniforms and two dressed as civilians arrived in a police car and went inside. Witnesses in the neighborhood heard multiple gunshots made by machine guns. Then the police left, and a dog inside left alive the building began to bark and howl. Neighbors checked and found a bloody scene: the seven unarmed men lay on the floor, all shot in the back multiple times. The wall against which they had been lined up for the assassination was a gory mess.
The victims, according to the History Channels' Forensic Firsts, were known associates of mobster George "Bugs" Moran. He pointed the finger at Al Capone, while Capone, down in Florida, pointed it back at him. However, many people thought the police had killed a gang in cold blood, so it was left to firearms comparisons to unearth the true story.
The shooters had left behind 70 cartridge casings and the weapons were identified as .45-caliber Thomson submachine guns.
The person who would make all the difference in this case was a cardiologist named Calvin Goddard—the same person who had confirmed the ballistics evidence in the Sacco and Vanzetti case two years earlier. With Charles Waite, who had test-fired the Stielow gun for proof that the immigrant had not committed the double homicide for which he'd been convicted, he began to acquire data from all known gun manufacturers to develop a comprehensive database. Together they catalogued the results of the test fires from each type of gun. At the time, there were 12 known handgun manufacturers, and they started what would become one of the most comprehensive collections of crime-solving information about guns. Waite died in 1925, but Goddard took over the work, and he was responsible, with his scientific procedures, for bringing the science of ballistics into its own. With the invention of the comparison microscope by Goddard's partner, two objects could be laid side-by-side for high-powered comparative examination using a series of reflective mirrors and lenses. Bullets could be laid out in such a way as to show whether there was a match in the markings that a gun would leave on them after they were fired from that gun. That made for a controlled examination, which was needed as a defensive weapon against the increase in crime during the 1920s. Thus, when the seven bullet-ridden bodies were found in the Chicago warehouse on St. Valentine's Day in 1929, it was just a matter of finding the murder weapon. Goddard came in from New York as an independent investigator and fired each of the eight machine guns owned by the Chicago police. He then compared the results to evidence collected at the scene. No casings matched, which cleared the police. That meant that someone had impersonated police officers to commit the murders. Ten months later, the police raided the home of a hit man for Al Capone. They found two machine guns, which they gave to Goddard. He test-fired them and proved they were the weapons used in the massacre. That sent at least one of the killers to prison. The infamous incident turned out to have been part of a gang war between Capone and Moran. Evidently the men had been lured there—and Moran was supposed to have been among them—by a call from Detroit indicating that a truck full of hijacked whiskey was coming in. Moran himself was late, and he just missed being victim number eight. In fact, he had spotted the police car outside the warehouse and left.
Goddard's work inspired two businessmen who had been on the coroner's jury to set him up at Northwestern University in Chicago in the first independent crime lab in the country. Ballistics, fingerprinting, blood analysis and trace evidence were brought under one roof and the lab became a prototype. Science and the police were united, and according to Nickell and Fischer, Goddard then advised the FBI in 1932 when they set up a similar criminological laboratory. Their first piece of equipment was a comparison microscope.
To develop the science of firearms comparison, the most important tool was the microscope. The earliest crude microscopes were invented in the 1600s, allowing a magnification of ten to twenty times, but images were still blurred. The invention of the compound microscope that relied on multiple lenses fused together improved the situation, as optics magnification and clarity increased exponentially. From years of data collection and experiments, firearms identification specialists can: Compare bullets and match them to a specific firearm Accurately estimate the distance of a shooting Detect gunpowder residue around wounds and on shooters Restore obliterated serial numbers.
The author wrote this article because It was February 27, 1991. Jim went to see Artie and they got into a bad argument. Even as Artie's girlfriend was screaming to a 911 operator, gunshots could be heard. Officers came and found Jim walking around in a daze and carrying a .22 rifle and a .38 Smith and Wesson Special. Inside Artie's house, they found Artie in the bedroom. He had been shot through the eye, abdomen and right arm by a .22, and he was dead. Eight spent cartridges were picked up in the room. While Jim was charged with premeditated murder, he claimed it had been the result of an argument and a struggle while trying to get his brother to get help. He had never intended to kill him. However, there were those who said that Jim had a motive: he wanted to sell the business and Artie was not about to let that happen. A lot of money was at stake. The 911 recording was brought into evidence, and Dr. Harry Hollien, an expert in acoustics, said that he had isolated the shots. He used a room in his own home that was about the same size and came up with recordings of his test shots. From his experiments, he concluded how many seconds there were between each of five shots recorded on the tape. Between the third and fourth shot, there had been a significant gap of about half a minute. The prosecution viewed that as evidence of a clear and deliberate act, not something done in the heat of the moment or by mistake.
Then expert Lucien Haag showed a video of his devising of a computer simulation of the incident. Artie was shown as being shot twice on his way into the hallway and then shot in the head in the hallway. Haag included all eight shots as he believed they would have occurred, although there were only five recorded on the 911 call. The way he did this was to trace the paths of the bullets by calculating in room angles and impact points from the point at which Jim Mitchell was standing when he fired. Haag represented these trajectories with dramatic red lasers. When the defense, who had stridently opposed having this tape admitted into evidence, asked Haag if there were other possibilities besides the ones he had mapped, he was forced to admit that there were quite a few other possibilities. It was not an exact science, but an interpretation based on speculation. That was a blow to the prosecution, and it made a difference in how the jury voted. On February 18, 1992, they found Mitchell guilty only of manslaughter. He was sentenced to six years but served only three.
From the time a bullet was first matched to a weapon until now, the technology of projectile behavior in motion and firearms evaluations has only gotten better, but it still depends to some extent on interpretation. Bullets do not always behave as expected.
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