In the still-dark morning of October 9, 1908, two Ohio farm hands made a chilling discovery: a bundle of cloth, a tangle of limbs, and a mess of matted hair. They fetched a lantern and returned to the lonely spot to discover a young woman, stiff, bloody, and quite dead. She had been shot at close range, a blue entry hole livid against her temple and another where her eye ought to have been. Dark welts left grooves in her flesh; it seemed she had been thrown from a carriage after death and then driven over by the wheels. Her name was Ora Lee, and she was four months pregnant.
The brutality of the murder shocked the little town of Rittman, Ohio, not least because one of their own would be arrested for the crime: Guy Rasor, a respectable landowner and Lee’s fiancé. The only evidence would be rust-flecked stains on Rasor’s coat. Pig’s blood, he claimed, and no one could prove otherwise—or so it was assumed. With character witnesses to back him, and no one willing to come forth on Ora’s behalf, unraveling the case would require unusual expertise in a brand new science. Ora Lee’s murder would see the first testimony of a “blood test expert” in an American courtroom. Justice hinged upon it.
How are cases decided? We think we know. Popular television shows and movies track down murderers, solves mysteries, fight crime. The darker the plot, the more enthusiastic the fans, and today, terminology like CSI (crime scene investigation), DNA or biological evidence, and contamination are bandied about in fan forums and used by everyday people. Forensics has become so entrenched in our modern imagination, that we can scarcely imagine a time before white-suited, blue-gloved specialists canvased crime scenes—much less an era where the crime scene itself had little to do with solving the crime.
MARRY OR KILL the headlines barked. Rasor brought forth a marriage license purchased the day of Ora’s murder as proof of his good intentions. And yet, someone of Rasor’s description also purchased a brand new revolver and three bullets just the next town over. The prosecution called the license a ruse; Rasor had promised to marry only to stall for time, despite the fact that Ora carried his child. And yet, even the prosecution struggled to find meaning in the crime’s extraordinary violence. Rasor, described as angelic, boyish, and charming, remained the picture of innocence. The papers seemed inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, for his face showed none of the pallor, none of the black grief and anxiety that ought to come with conviction of crime. Could so wretched and vile a thing be done by “this man-boy with unlined face?”
Rasor’s family were (in the farming community) considered well to do, and the constant references to his face and fine features echo a sentiment deeply ingrained: an attractive face—well-fed and clean scrubbed and white—must somehow be innocent of crime. It wasn’t the first (or last) time that class, culture, and race influenced assumption and prejudice, but in 1908, this was considered properly scientific. Popularized by Johann Kaspar (or Caspar) Lavater in the eighteenth century, physiognomy measured facial characteristics to determine personal traits. Criminologist Cesare Lombroso used physiognomy to class people as “born criminals,” and labeled those whose faces didn’t align with “desired characteristics” as savages. Based on completely erroneous, biased, and racially driven data, physiognomy privileged young and attractive men like Rasor. Meanwhile, Ora Lee was but a poor match factory girl who, as her pregnancy became the stuff of news articles, had gotten herself into “trouble.”
Motherless since her infancy, Ora lived with her grandparents. She had moved to town earlier that year to be closer to Guy Rasor, earning a living as a match factory girl. Once aware of her pregnancy, Ora begged him to marry her. He promised twice, but left her (literally) at the altar. Devastated by his abandonment, she wrote a letter to Rasor threatening to expose him as the father of her child, and confiding its contents to a fellow work mate. Testimony of Ora’s distraught state of mind did few favors with the jury, however. The defense built a case around Ora’s smirched reputation and Rasor’s good intentions to make her an ‘honest woman.’ Why would he go through the expense of a marriage license otherwise? Facing a town largely in favor of Rasor’s innocence, and with no possible way of amassing an uninformed, unbiased jury of peers, prosecuting attorneys had only the coat and its stain in their favor.
To the modern observer with our reliance on DNA and our respect for the dust and debris of CSI, the presumed weakness of blood evidence is hard to grasp. Five years prior to the Rasor case, however, no expert would have been admitted at all… and five years after it, expert testimony and forensics would win cases all over America. What we have, in the Lee/Rasor case, is a transitional moment, a trial on the edge of change. Behind it, the old world of colonial jurisprudence based in odd and barbaric antecedents, ahead of it, the science that had already swept across Europe and made inroads in the larger American cities. It hinged on scraps of fabric, and on one man’s insistence on the truth of science and the power of blood analysis to shape history. The prosecution wired to Cleveland for the only forensic and ballistics expert in the region, a chemist who had spent most of his life’s work on analysis of blood.
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Forty-four years old, John George Spenzer had been educated in Germany. Forensic detection of blood had its earliest roots there; in 1853, anatomist Ludwig Teichmass discovered that haemoglobin converted to crystals when heated in acetic acid. The test did not allow the chemist or pathologist to determine human blood, however, and despite additions and alterations to the procedure, the nineteenth century ended without any reliable means of distinguishing between human and animal. That breakthrough would not occur until 1901, through the work of immunologist Paul Uhlenhuth. A local carpenter had been charged with murdering two young boys, but conviction only came when Uhlenhuth managed to build a test differentiating human blood from than of sheep. The case and its notes, however, were still little known in the United States. Dr. E.S. Wood in New Hampshire attempted the test in relation to a possible murder in New Hampshire in 1902, but with no published results of the trial. In 1903, Patek and Bennett attempted the same, but the results were never admitted as evidence in court. Given its general obscurity, then, when prosecution suggested that a specialist might somehow solve the Rasor case from a few drops of blood, Defense Attorney Jacob Kohler, retired judge, and former attorney general for the state, merely laughed. No one could tell fresh from old, human from animal, he claimed. He would be very nearly right; even the textbooks consulted by prosecution and defense contained nothing of the new science.
Dr. John Spenzer, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence (later to be folded into forensics), received the blood stained coat on October 27th, just weeks after Ora Lee’s funeral. Though Spenzer was familiar with Uhlenhuth, the “test” for human blood was not a simple matter to recreate. He began with less complicated versions like the Guaiac reaction. Familiar even to Sherlock Holmes (who mentions it in Study in Scarlet, published in 1887), the Guaiac relies upon peroxide. The chemist “impregnates” a swab with gum guaiac, a tree resin, and then smears it with suspected blood; a drop of peroxide acts as a reagent and changes the color from green brown to blue. On initial inspection, Spenzer also performed a microscopic analysis of the size of corpuscles, as human blood has particular shape and size at that magnification. He then conducted spectroscopic examination using electromagnetic radiation, and lastly a Teichmann crystal test just for good measure. Assured by these lesser means that the stain was blood, and in fact quite fresh, Spenzer at last proceeds with Uhlenhuth’s “precipitin reaction.” It was not for the faint of heart.
Precipitin tests rely on an unusual property in blood serum that “repels” any foreign substances. When a foreign body like a protein is introduced, the antibodies in the blood form a cloud of precipitated substance. Immunologists were interested because antigens—proteins that produce antibodies—would lead to better vaccines and blood typing. For Spenzer, how and when (and if) the reaction occurred would allow him to determine what sort of animal the blood came from. The original procedure involved a great deal of effort, however, and a strong stomach, because the chemist must first prepare the antibody serum in a process that reads more like witch-doctoring than scientific method.
To begin, Spenzer acquired several large buck rabbits. He wanted the animal’s blood to develop an antibody that would cloud around a specific foreign substance: human blood. To accomplish this, Spenzer withdrew blood from his own arm and repeatedly injected it into the veins of his rabbits. By delivering 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 c.c. of blood injections at three-day intervals, the rabbit’s blood developed antibodies that recognized and attacked the human blood, causing the proteins to precipitate out. The rabbits were then starved for 18 hours to make the blood free of fat globules, after which it could be bled for antiserum.
The faded cloth jacket would be slices into convenient sections around each stain. Spenzer then dissolved the stain proteins with acids, filtering them into glass test vials. Droplets of rabbit antiserum mixed with each preparation, and within hours, a precipitin formed. The stains were surely human, not pig, but Spenzer repeated the test over and over through the dark months of December and January, just to be certain. On Feb 12, 1909, just days before the jury could be sworn in, He sent his results to the prosecution team. The response was necessarily guarded: “we will determine, if possible, whether the coat can be sufficiently connected with the defendant […] unless this can be done very clearly, we may not determine to undertake it.” Science had arrived on the case, but had not yet been invited into the witness box.
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The trial began in the midst of a late-season ice storm, but the courtroom still filled to capacity. The first medical men to take the stand were Dr. Miller, who performed the autopsy, and the stolid local coroner, H. E. Hard. Miller described the bullet wounds, grisly as they were. Blood stained the road for twelve feet, leading Miller to conclude that her head had ricocheted backward and hung outside the buggy, while the murderer worked to toss her body into the street. The driver never slowed, not even though the wheels went over her where she lay. Miller concluded his testimony by “proving” Ora’s pregnancy; he held up a jar within which floated the fully formed fetus—and prosecutors proceeded to parade it about the court. The aim had been to gain sympathy for the murdered mother; no one had yet been able to identify the buggy tracks, and the witness who claimed a Rasor-look-alike purchased a revolver refused to appear. Court would adjourn for President’s day, but a special edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer hit stands over the weekend: “Rasor Trial May Depend on Blood Spots.” They were bringing Dr. John G. Spenzer in as an expert witness to testify about his findings; very probably the very first court appearance of a precipitin test expert outside of Europe. He would be the Prosecution’s very last witness and their last hope.
Dittrick Medical History Center
The day dawned so dark that the gas lamps weren’t enough and the courthouse had to agree to the extravagance of electric lighting. Cold, wet, February weather seeped into bones and between fingers and toes. Spenzer walked through the crowded court and took the stand. “I have been busy with the detection and analysis of blood spots for 25 years,” Spenzer continued—then he proceeded with a chemistry lesson.
Spenzer spoke as though lecturing a crowd of colleagues, walking the jury through blood analysis with the rigor and enthusiasm of a proselyte. He started with definitions of terms, mainly because even the prosecution required clarification; “a chemical reagent [is] the solution of blood shaken with air or oxygen, or the addition of hydrogen dioxide, will produce oxyhaemaglobin.” What, sir, is that? Asked Anderson, and Spenzer gave the following account, produced here in total for its sheer academic bloodymindedness:
“Oxyhaemaglobin is the coloring matter found in fresh blood, in arterial blood. This has two distinct absorption lines. If now, this solution be treated with acetic acid it produces the spectrum of acid hematin which is characteristic; or, if it be treated with alkali, it produces the spectrum of alkalin hematin. If this last one, the alkaline hematin, be now treated with ammonium sulphide, it produces reduced hematin or oxyhaemoglobin.”
Blank gazes. Empty expressions. Defense attorney Kohler interjected with some heat: “Cannot you use ordinary English, Doctor?” to which Spenzer replied, “Those are the simplest words we have.” The rest of his testimony goes a long way toward proving it. Corpuscles and microns, pipets and test tubes, the names of tests and the means of them, and at last his own quite lengthy description of what he had to do to a rabbit to make it all possible, injecting them in the belly with ten cubic centimeters of fresh human blood. He concludes with the spectroscopic test, still new and developing, walking his captive audience through the stages with evident delight, without a pause, and without the hint of uncertainty. Papers would later describe him as fierce and with twinkling dark eyes as he delved into the uses of caustic soda and ammonium sulphide. “The trouble is,” Kohler objected again, “we don’t understand.” This time, Spenzer took personal aim. He accused the former judge of a “faulty education.” The next day’s headlines would say it far more plainly: CHEMIST CALLS SPOTS ON COAT HUMAN BLOOD. The coat was not spattered with the blood of butchered hogs, old and dry; it was human blood, still fresh and red when the coat was seized. So animated was the testimony that the Press rendered the scene as an illustration, showing Guy Rasor turning pale, the defense team shouting objection! and the stolid Spenzer looking on unmoved: “Let blood speak!” Surely, science had won the case.
Rasor was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to twenty years hard labor. And yet, despite best intentions, even good science may miss its audience. In the aftermath of the trial, jurors claimed the decision had not been made from courtroom evidence at all. They decided the case based upon what they read in the papers and how they felt at its end. When interviewed, most claimed they never considered the bloody coat as proper evidence. The science was “too new,” unpredictable and for them, unreliable in its very complexity.
Science should be as easy to sell as the florid prose of sensation news; it ought to be as significant as the antics of courtroom lawyers—it ought, in fact, to supersede them, to protect a jury and the accused from bias, to keep the law firmly grounded in the real. It often isn’t, at least not in the heat of the moment. In August, 1911, attorney Kohler admitted that he was wrong, that the spots on Rasor’s coat were damning, and that Rasor, “the man with a boyish face” had murdered Ora Lee. Spenzer added his words as a coda to his own case notes, but chose not publish his use of the precipitin test. In three years, such tests would become usual to the solving of crime in the United States, but the Rasor case and its largely unknown forensic chemist would be long forgotten.
—Featured image: Dittrick Medical History Center
