| Introduction |
| The Art of Detection
Rhymes of Ancient Mariners " I propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a textbook which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume. " Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Copper Beaches Most suspicious deaths arouse little public interest. Many never involve trials. Others pass for natural deaths, perfect crimes because they remain for ever unnoticed. The murderer escapes detection, lurking behind a fog of subterfuge, deceit, and ordinary circumstance. Death investigators must penetrate this fog to discover hidden clues to explain the death and follow the path to the killer. Like mariners navigating without landmarks under a starless sky, investigators lacking reliable witnesses and coherent confessions plot their course through the clues by applying their own style of dead reckoning. “Dead reckoning,” first described in Bourne’s Regiment for the Sea published in 1577, became a useful method to determine a ship’s position when adverse conditions prevented navigating by the stars with a sextant. Under a dark sky, a sailor could estimate position by considering the distance recorded in the log, the course steered according to the compass, the specific effects of the currents, and different signs of land, such as gulls, or smells carried by prevailing winds. The seasoned mariner also had to know when the ship had drifted too much to allow an accurate estimate of its position or course. The method’s accuracy depended upon the knowledge, skill, and experience of the sailor. As Lowell said, “The mind, when it sails by dead reckoning . . . will sometimes bring up in strange latitudes.” Following the course of ancient mariners, investigators and forensic scientists also reckon their way through cases in the daily work of death investigation. As with sailors, sometimes the method fails them, too, but more often, Lowell’s “strange latitudes” turn out to signal a successful end to the voyage, a correct explanation of the death. In an age blinded by misconceptions of science and illusions about technology, this art of detection often remains as invisible as the clues it uncovers. Many practitioners of this art go quietly about their business without much public acknowledgment. Many of the people who die the sudden, unexpected, or violent deaths investigated also remain invisible. They seldom lead glamorous lives, or enjoy the notoriety and fortune of interest to an increasingly fickle and fame-focused public. What makes a case interesting for those doing this work has little to do with what makes a case interesting for tabloid-television producers. Applications of logic and science forming the heart of an investigator’ s method lack the sound bites and segue important to the death-as-entertainment industry. But they do supply investigators with the kind of stimulation that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used to animate his fictional 19th-century scientific detective, Sherlock Holmes. The effect of solving a difficult case through reconstructing the crime by disciplined observation, careful reason, and practiced sagacity supplies the rush of a powerful drug. Holmes became so addicted to this intellectual pleasure that Doyle has his character resort to a 7% solution of cocaine between cases just to fill the void that its absence created. Holmes no doubt would have become just another overdose statistic, another passive passenger on a cold morgue gurney, if he had not been saved from drug abuse by the rush derived from the applied logic I call dead reckoning. The intellectual pleasure supplied by applied logic often must remain its own reward. The pleasure grows as a byproduct of hard work over a long time through diligent exercise. The work demands internally motivated persistence and effort. Albert Einstein said, “It is a grave mistake to think that the joy of seeing and searching can be prompted by [an external] means of coercion or a sense of duty motivated by outward pressures].” While those familiar with such intellectual rewards fill the 10 different cases detailed in the following pages, they can merely invite others to witness this logic in action for themselves, and to develop its exercise on their own. |
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