At midnight in a snow-covered cemetery in Ralls County, workers winched a casket out of a grave and pried open the lid. Dr. Rutherford Birchard Hayes Gradwohl began his examination.
“The proper incisions into the lungs hadn’t even been made!” he later told reporters.
Amanda Watson had died by drowning, and that fact freed her husband, Dr. Taylor Jones Watson, from a murder charge.
The Watsons had been driving their buggy across the Organ Ferry Bridge, over the Salt River, when their horse ran away. Amanda was found dead in the river, under the bridge; Taylor’s only injury was a concussion. The Ralls County prosecutor was trying Watson for murdering his wife by poison, claiming he had killed her and then dumped the body. A group of lawyers from New London had come to find Gradwohl, telling him “a crooked autopsy” had been done.
The year was 1904, and Gradwohl was barely out of medical school, but he’d already made a name for himself as a bacteriologist and consultant for the St. Louis coroner. Science had reached a turning point. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department was about to stop using the Bertillon system—painstakingly using calipers to measure criminals’ skulls, ears, hands, and feet to track repeat offenders—and begin using fingerprints. A Viennese professor had discovered there were different types of blood. Louis Pasteur, dead just nine years, had made microbes a known enemy. And the fictional Sherlock Holmes had become famous as the first scientific detective.
Gradwohl would go on to testify in scores of murder cases, winning surprise acquittals and making sure science sent the guilty to the gallows. Known as “the father of forensic pathology” and “the dean of legal medicine,” he established the metropolitan police department’s first crime lab and the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. The academy would inform and certify pathologists, toxicologists, and other experts who were about to revolutionize the detection of crime.
Gradwohl’s father, Emmanuel Gradwohl, came to the U.S. from Strassburg, Austria, in 1856. He rode in the 1st Cavalry Regiment during the Civil War, before marrying Sarah Wetzler, who was from one of Baltimore’s old German families. The last of six sons, Rutherford dreamed of going into the Navy, but when he graduated from St. Louis’ Central High School, he chose Washington University’s medical school instead.
After graduation, he interned at City Hospital—and was immediately made director of its fledgling bacteriology department. He described the hospital laboratory as “a room no larger than my office, three or four broken test tubes and a microscope you couldn’t see through.” Eventually, the hospital director plucked $500 from the drug fund and bought more equipment.
Gradwohl seems to have preferred even that first humble lab to the live mess of clinical work. Nonetheless, he had to take his turn as the hospital’s Officer of the Day. In March 1899, a young married woman, Bertha Scharf, was brought to him unconscious, after she’d begged a moment’s rest in a hardware store and, pale and trembling, crumpled to the floor. Her husband ran in, saying he’d been searching for her nearly all night. “I am sure she did not attempt suicide, as she had nothing to worry her,” he said, adding that she rarely used intoxicants and at the most might drink a single small glass of beer. Gradwohl siphoned her stomach and found she’d drunk a great deal of wine, and there were traces of cocaine or “morphine poison” as well. What he couldn’t learn, though, was why.
Back on the wards a month later, he treated five poisoned women on a single Sunday. Mamie Walsh had quarreled with her husband and wanted to punish him. (Gradwohl rolled his eyes when he learned that she’d taken only 12 drops of laudanum.) Gertie Wilson had tried to cure a hangover with morphine and overdosed. Jennie Spellman had accused another woman of trying to kill her, but she was, it turned out, simply hysterical after an overdose of cocaine. Emma Meyer had despaired after receiving a letter from her sick grandmother in Illinois and tried, with more determination than Mamie, to kill herself. The most seriously ill, Birdie Wilson, had drunk carbolic acid, and no one knew why.
Gradwohl fled from such uncertainty. He liked knowing things, putting them under his microscope or into one of his test tubes. The next morning, he hurried back to his lab, where he was hunting for ways to treat the cerebrospinal meningitis microbe. He waved an assistant away to find him a cat, so he could inject the serum and observe the effects. The assistant returned with a huge yellow tom, yellow eyes blazing. He was a rat-catcher from the hospital basement, as peppery as Gradwohl.
When the scientist moved closer with his syringe, the cat clawed the assistant. He screamed, nurses fled, and glass bottles full of microbes crashed to the ground as the cat leapt onto a shelf.
Next time, Gradwohl announced, he wanted a kitten.
While at City Hospital, Gradwohl saved enough money to sail to Europe in 1900. In Berlin, he attended lectures by Dr. Rudolph Virchow, who was famous for his observation that a whole organism does not get sick, only certain cells. Gradwohl copied (and would save, for the next six decades) the inscription above the entrance to Virchow’s necropsy room: “Hic Locus Est Ubi Mors Gaudet Succurrere Vitae.” Roughly translated, it meant, “This is the place where death delights to help the living.”
Gradwohl then traveled to Paris, where he studied for a year at the Pasteur Institute. When he returned home, he took a teaching post at a university and supplemented his $25-a-month salary by assisting the city coroner. It no doubt felt a little anticlimactic. Still, his European sojourn had given him global street cred: When a Berlin scientist identified the germ that caused scarlet fever, he waited for Gradwohl’s experiments to confirm his findings in 1902.
Gradwohl established his own free-standing Gradwohl Laboratories in St. Louis, Chicago, Bloomington, Ill., and Paducah, Ky. A few years later, he opened a school in midtown, near the present-day Scott Joplin House, that would train thousands of laboratory technicians in the latest practices and send graduates all over the world.
Never shy about his opinions, Gradwohl soon began dispensing public-health advice, urging ventilation and fresh air, warning of the peril of damp walls, and pointing out the absurdity of polar-bear swims. Right after medical school, he’d started working to rid St. Louis’ water supply of the bacteria that he could see quite clearly under his microscope. He pronounced the city’s milk supply “bacterial soup.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published his screeds and quoted him endorsing, as “a most excellent thing,” a proposal to screen flies away from grocery produce. Above a recipe for “How to Cook and Serve the Royal Boar’s Head for Christmas,” he prescribed aftercare for holiday overeating: “Cleanse out the intestinal tract with castor oil, or with calomel and soda.” Later, when he became editor of the Weekly Bulletin of the St. Louis Medical Society, he would attack quacks and patent medicines, fee-splitting, tendencies toward socialized medicine, and the abuse of free clinics.
At the time, Gradwohl’s greatest claim to fame was his expert testimony at murder trials. In 1904, he was the first witness called in the infamous Barrington murder trial in Clayton. The defendant, “Lord” Seymour Barrington, showed up in a Prince Albert coat, dark trousers, and a silk hat, his English accent more drawled than crisp. Women crowded the courtroom to see the bold, handsome man who’d been called a “bogus lord” and “morbid egotist,” who was eventually convicted and executed.
Later that year, a visiting New Yorker died at the Lindell Hotel, and Gradwohl found that the grayish powder in her stomach was tartar emetic—a poison—and not the cream of tartar she thought she was taking for a case of hives.
In January 1905, Gradwohl’s testimony cleared Rebecca Stewart of a murder charge: Her elderly friend Mary Bach had died insisting that Stewart had poisoned her with a gift of caraway seeds. A physician called to the scene insisted the seeds contained arsenic. Gradwohl analyzed them and found the suspicious white flecks to be a harmless dusting of cereal. After Stewart’s release, reporters learned that Bach had feared poisoning for years. She had eaten austerely and barely fed her animals, and when her kittens starved, she’d insisted they had been poisoned.
By 1915, Gradwohl had grown so famous that a brazen 16-year-old car thief, Harry Gildersleeve, chose his name to forge on a check. But one celebrated case stung every time that Gradwohl thought of it. He’d been asked to testify as an expert witness in Scott County, in Missouri’s bootheel. An autopsy revealed the dead man’s body was full of morphine—and the man’s wife was seen leaving the house one morning in the company of the town druggist. The mood in the courtroom changed, though, when the defense attorney—whom Gradwohl later described to reporters as bull-headed and apoplectic—asked him, on the stand, how much he’d been paid to testify. When the jury heard $100 a day, they brought in a verdict of not guilty.
Years later, a man told Gradwohl he was the most famous doctor in Scott County. Remembering the debacle, Gradwohl bitterly asked why. Because, the man said, you said that lawyer was apoplectic—and three weeks later he dropped dead of apoplexy.
When the first shot of World War I rang out, Gradwohl joined the U.S. Navy. He was commissioned lieutenant commander in the Navy Medical Corps, and he stayed active, rising to the rank of commander. It was at his recommendation that the U.S. surgeon general began the practice of blood-typing soldiers and engraving information on ID tags.
In 1934, Capt. Elias Hoagland of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department came to see Gradwohl. Hoagland was a career cop; he’d started as a telephone boy for the commander at age 14, to support his family after his policeman father was killed in the line of duty. When he became a detective, he earned the nickname Camera Eye: He studied criminals’ photos so carefully, he’d often stop suspects walking down the street. Now he’d been put in charge of the department’s Police Identification Bureau, and he wanted to set up a crime lab.
Gradwohl knew medical science, not forensics, but he was intrigued. Violence leaves a trace; evil casts a measurable shadow. He started visiting laboratories around the country, finding out how they approached the new sciences of crime investigation. Three years later, he set up the SLMPD’s first crime lab and was paid $600 a year to direct it.
Gradwohl had a station wagon outfitted with gear for crime-scene examinations. He hired Sidney Kaye, a world-famous toxicologist. He had a patrolman trained to compare handwriting samples, examine explosives, identify firearms and laundry marks, and conduct polygraphs. To do blood work, he shocked the officers by hiring a woman, Ruth McKnight, a trained serologist.
By the 1960s, the lab had taken over an entire floor of police headquarters, and the FBI had pronounced it one of the finest in the country.
On January 19, 1948, Gradwohl stood like a just-crowned king at the entrance to the St. Louis Police Academy, formally greeting 150 forensic authorities from around the world. He was, as always, flawlessly groomed, his suit coat tailored to leave a half-inch of cuff showing. He nodded to the experts as they filed past him: pathologists, serologists, psychiatrists, toxicologists, lie-detection authorities… Each one had a spotlight that made a piece of the puzzle visible: an unconscious motive, a damaged bit of tissue beneath the skin, a poison, a lie.
Years earlier, as a young physician, Gradwohl had been invited, along with the city’s most prominent doctors and lawyers, to a meeting at Dr. Sidney Schwab’s home on Westminster Place. (Dr. Malcolm Bliss, whose name eventually christened the South City mental-health center, was in attendance as well.) The goal was to organize a medico-legal society and eventually get laws passed to correct abuses in medical-expert testimony. It fizzled, but Gradwohl had never forgotten that collaboration. “This is not a single-discipline profession,” he’d been insisting for years.
At the end of the St. Louis meeting, a committee formed to explore the possibility of a professional society. Gradwohl paid for the committee’s next planning meeting, in D.C. There, the group decided to forge ahead.
God help them if they hadn’t. “Dr. Gradwohl didn’t take over the conversation, but you clearly knew you were talking to a leader,” recalls Kenneth Field, the American Academy of Forensic Sciences’ first executive director. “There were people who didn’t like him because he was so authoritative. But he was exactly the right man to do the job.”
The first official AAFS meeting took place in Chicago in 1950. Gradwohl served as president for the next three years, setting priorities for the organization that would set the nation’s standards for crime labs and the approved practices for death investigation—not to mention instruct the producers of CSI.
After a scratchy few seconds, during which you can hear the film spooling and see the smudges left by dirty projectors, an off-camera voice announces the name of the show in ponderous newsreel tones, hitting each syllable as though it’s a triumph: Brundige’s Crime Report. Mr. Brundige announces that his guests tonight are forensics experts, and this is “the first such program to be presented on television.” (It’s around 1951.) He introduces New York City’s chief medical examiner, a crime reporter from the Post-Dispatch, and Dr. Rutherford B.H. Gradwohl, “for 50 years a leader in the field of crime detection.”
Gradwohl wears a polka-dotted bow tie, and his flouncy pocket handkerchief taunts the stern face above it. His lips press together in a narrow horizontal; above them, a pencil-thin mustache makes a second straight line, perfectly parallel. Stagily scripted with cues from Brundige, he says, why yes, quite a few murders do get overlooked, especially poisonings. They watch a demo that puts congealed blood in a chloroform solution in order to drip heroin out through a filter. To today’s sensibilities, it’s all so primitive, it’s shocking.
“Would you believe that Dr. Gradwohl once robbed a grave?” Gradwohl asks Brundige in an arch, teasing tone that he can’t quite pull off. He’s referring to the old Ralls County case. “Much to my surprise, I found the first pathologist hadn’t opened the chest at all.”
“He hadn’t gotten the inside story,” jokes the reporter. But they turn serious when Brundige asks Gradwohl, “Doctor, did you ever get a murderer acquitted?”
“Yes, sir,” Gradwohl replies, describing a case in which a woman was accused of poisoning her husband with arsenic. The analysis had been wrong; she’d poisoned him with morphine. So she went free. “I’ve seen bungling by pathologists and bungling by chemists,” he says. “In my mind, the best system is the medical-examiner system.” He’d watched too many coroners elected with no credentials, yet with huge power. Not only could they subpoena and arrest, but they could throw together a coroner’s jury of winos in need of a few bucks and come up with a verdict. In rural areas, often a funeral-home director did double duty. (St. Louis finally switched to a medical-examiner system in the 1970s, three decades after Gradwohl started nudging.)
Gradwohl railed against politics in the coroner’s office. Despite his affiliation with a police department, Gradwohl testified in a police brutality case. For years he ran a lab concerned with venereal disease, not caring a hoot about the stigma. He introduced the Wassermann test for syphilis to St. Louis (and later improved upon it). In one society-page newspaper clipping, a group of wealthy wives had agreed to let him administer the Wassermann test to them, to set a good example for public health. (“Dr. R.B.H. Gradwohl gave the tests,” wrote a St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat reporter, “which were taken by all but Mrs. Bennett.” Why the unfortunate
Mrs. Bennett demurred, we’ll never know.)
Gradwohl treated the rich and famous and their relatives, handling press inquiries with a tact that he didn’t bother invoking for himself. When a brewery salesman, Dewey Hickey (related by marriage to Adolphus Busch), demonstrated signs of a nervous breakdown after a golf game, Gradwohl told the Post-Dispatch that overexercise might have hastened the trouble. When Tony Faust, son of the restaurateur, died after a month at Gradwohl’s sanitarium, no cause was given to the papers, although he’d been ill for five years with what, judging from his symptoms, could have been syphilis. (The Post-Dispatch did note that “in his young manhood, Faust was known as a Beau Brummell, and was a favorite in South Side society.”)
If only Gradwohl had been so diplomatic about his love life. After a quarrelsome nine-year marriage, he fell in love with his lab assistant and got a scandalous divorce. His second wife later charged him with desertion, then stayed with him after all.
His wives’ discontents seem not to have lessened his fun, though. He set up a fireman’s band, and he and a firefighter named Mike Cunningham used to dominate the city handball courts. Later, Gradwohl took up fencing—the Florentine style, if you care—and parried with the Cuban vice-consul at the Missouri Athletic Club. Gradwohl reached the 32nd degree in Scottish Rite Freemasonry. He was unanimously elected a foreign correspondent, first of France’s Society of Legal Medicine and Criminology, then of Germany’s. He became a fellow of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine.
At the 1953 AAFS meeting, he met Erle Stanley Gardner, who’d come looking for inspiration, either for his trial work or his Perry Mason series. When Gardner heard Gradwohl say he’d found certain types of primate blood to react exactly like human blood, he raced back to his typewriter and wrote The Case of the Grinning Gorilla, one of his most imaginative mysteries. He gave Gradwohl full credit, and the two men became friends.
The following year, Gradwohl helped Gardner exonerate a young woman who’d already spent three years in prison in Carson City, Nev. Emma Jo Johnson had been convicted of murdering her landlady. They’d gotten into a fight, and the state held that Johnson beat the landlady so severely, a resulting blood clot caused her death two weeks later. Johnson said she’d only grabbed the landlady by her braids in self-defense, and the older woman had slumped to the floor, unconscious. Gardner tracked down a physiotherapist who said the landlady had been dying of a brain tumor, and Gradwohl gave the opinion that she’d died of a brain hemorrhage.
Five years later, he would meet the same fate.
On January 9, 1959, retired but still consulting vigorously, Gradwohl returned from a three-week idyll in Hawaii. Two days later, one of the vessels in his fine brain burst open. In seconds, clusters of tiny gray nerve cells were slippery with blood. As it pooled, it cut off the oxygen that those cells needed to survive.
He spent the next 17 weeks at Jewish Hospital and died May 9. He was 82 and suffering from hypertension; nonetheless, and perhaps per his prior wishes, an autopsy was performed. The New York Times ran an obituary glowing with praise (but shorter and terser than the stories of his marital scandal).
Gradwohl’s niece, Addine Erskine, who had taken over as director of his school, ceremoniously presented many of his personal effects to the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in D.C., including his ceremonial Navy sword and a ring that had belonged to the Empress of China.
A dozen years later, Harold Messler, chief scientist at the crime lab, got a phone call: “They’re getting ready to swing a headache ball at Gradwohl’s school.”
Not only was Gradwohl legend, Messler was accustomed to scavenging for cheap equipment. He raced to 3514 Lucas. The first floor was already hollowed out, but upstairs in Gradwohl’s office, odd bits of stuff littered the floor. A commodore’s cap, a pencil-thin swagger stick. Glass slides and photos taken through his microscope of Schistosoma japonicum intestine, Microfilaria nocturna, cysts on a mosquito’s stomach. An unopened glass phial labeled “Giemas Azur-Gemilch.” An empty paper evidence bag stamped “St. Louis Metropolitan Police.” Film canisters, most of them labeled, documented his travels to North Africa, Europe, Mexico, and Hawaii, mixed in with training films about making blood smears and doing urinalysis. Gradwohl’s National Geographic Society membership notice was tucked inside a Daughters of the American Revolution envelope addressed to his second wife, Ida.
Messler saved it all, creating an exhibit for AAFS’s 50th anniversary, then donating the collection to Wash. U. It was trace evidence.
