The perfect crime of the past is most definitely not the perfect crime of the present. “Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer,” author Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote in 1995 - and his observation has only become more relevant as time goes on and forensic science evolves.
What does it take to pull off the "perfect crime?" A little bit of luck, a little bit of planning, and whole lot of cover up. However, brilliant detective work belongs to all eras, and an ingenious crime-solving strategy is still an ingenious crime-solving strategy, whether the year is 1875 or 2016. Below are some notable true crime examples of sleuthing techniques that went above and beyond the investigative norm, either by lucky accident or by calculated intent.
9 Ingenious Ways Seemingly "Foolproof" Crimes Were Solved,
Radioactive Teeth: The Crime-Solving “Silver Lining” Of Nuclear Annihilation
Back in the Cold War era, America was carrying out above-ground nuclear testing, preparing for a potentially catastrophic war with the Soviets. However, one byproduct of said experiments was Carbon-14, an isotope that dispersed rapidly into the environment, and also into people's dental enamel. Hence, many individuals who were born during that time still have teeth that are a "tiny bit radioactive.”
This makes dental record identification, otherwise known as “radiocarbon dating,” a particularly useful way of determining forensic info like age-at-death, time-of-death, etc. This method has helped investigators solve cold cases, identify victims of natural disasters, and get to the bottom of more murder mysteries, across the board.
Jerome Caminada, The "IRL" Sherlock Holmes, And The Ghost In The Machine
Celebrated detective Jerome Caminada is famous for being the real life inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. One of his most whimsical and memorable cases involved a perpetrator who became known as “The Music Thief.”
According to the book The Real Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Story of Jerome Caminada, Manchester's Free Trade Performance Hall was once “haunted by a burglar with a fondness for sheet music." The thief generally struck during performances, pilfering songbooks while staff and musicians alike were occupied.
Caminada's stakeout plan involved a particularly unorthodox and innovative method: he ordered a custom-designed piano box, "large enough for a human to crouch inside, and full of specially placed eyeholes.” He then hid himself in the container, crouching there in the darkness and awaiting the perpetrator.
Eventually, Caminada witnessed none other than the performance hall's elderly, longstanding librarian hobble into the room and make off with the sheet music. However, when the musicians returned after the performance, they piled their instruments over the piano box, inadvertently obstructing Caminada's exit. And after they left for the evening, the famous detective found himself with no way to escape.
The gasman was still there, however, preparing to turn off the lights and lock up for the night, and it's then that things became really cinematic. Unaware that Caminada was in the box, he freaked out and assumed he was in the presence of the supernatural when the detective called for help.
Contact Lenses Help Detectives See Murderer More Clearly
What happens to contact lenses when they're in the eyes of a corpse? It's not a question many people have pondered, but one particularly savvy North Carolina detective named Charles Sole did, and his morbid speculation made all the difference.
In 2005, 26-year-old Janet Abaroa was stabbed to death as her young child slept nearby. Her husband Raven's alibi (that he'd been out playing soccer and had come home to find her body) didn't sit well with investigators. Sole was haunted by one detail, in particular - no one could find Janet's contact lenses.
Raven Abaroa claimed that his wife had been in bed watching TV when he'd left for his game. The only problem was that Janet usually took out her contact lenses before getting into bed, something her family and friends all knew about her. On a hunch, Sole called an ophthalmologist to find out if it would still be possible to “identify contact lenses from a body that had been exhumed after five years.” The doctor replied that the lenses would likely have disintegrated, but that it was worth a shot.
Abaroa’s body was recovered, and though her lenses had indeed all but disintegrated, remnants of them were still there, which proved that she hadn't removed them before bed after all. Prosecutors began to build on the hypothesis that she had already been dead by the time her husband left for the evening. Abaroa pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2014, though he continues to maintain that he didn't kill his wife.
The Murder That Brought A Whole New Meaning To The Term “Umbrella of Suspicion”
In 1978, novelist, playwright, and “communist dissident” Georgi Markov was struck by a small flying object as he walked to work. He thought nothing of it at the time, but as the day wore on, he developed a red, pimple-like bump on his leg. He subsequently became inexplicably ill, and died several days later.
While in the hospital, the playwright had recalled feeling a "little pinprick … similar to an insect bite” on his leg as he walked. Sure enough, an autopsy revealed “a tiny pellet containing a 0.2 milligram dose of the poison ricin” embedded in the site of the wound. But how had it been administered?
The answer, as it turned out, was in the rain. On the day he sustained the "bite," Markov had also been briefly struck by the falling umbrella of a passerby. It was a blustery day, and the stranger in question “stooped to pick up his umbrella from the ground and mumbled ‘I’m sorry,' before hurriedly crossing the street and jumping into a taxi.”
Based on this description, investigators determined that the death-pellet had been injected via a parasol that had been “adapted into a lethal killing machine with a poisoned tip.” It would be years before the crime would be traced to the KGB. Eventually, two defecting agents confirmed that the Bulgarian government had sought the Soviet organization's help in “eliminating” Markov; they also confirmed that such an umbrella had been specially designed as a method of dispatch.
The probable assassin/parasol dropper was eventually determined to be Francesco Giullino, who now admits to working for the Soviets, but denies having participated in Markov's murder. No one will ever know for sure: when the Bulgarian Communist regime collapsed in 1989, almost all of their classified files were destroyed, including those that likely would have proven Giullino's guilt. The case was officially closed in 2013.
Jailhouse Playing Card Decorated With Fugitives Leads To Tips
In 2010, the Connecticut Department of Corrections began to implement an experimental new method of attempting to identify perpetrators: the use of playing cards as “Have You Seen Me?” milk cartons.
According to reports, said decks are distributed throughout prisons. They feature crime descriptions and suspect (or victim) photos, and have generated a huge number of crucial leads. They recently helped to find the murderer of one Derrick Comrie, who was killed after an unknown assailant shot him in the face as he sat in his car.
A card-playing inmate apparently read about Comrie on his Jack of Spades, and connected him with a fellow prisoner whose description of a murder he'd once committed matched the card's account of Comrie's demise. The fellow inmate's victim indeed turned out to be Comrie, and the case was finally solved after five years of fruitless investigation.
Son of Sam - The Complex Mystery Solved By A Run-Of-The Mill Parking Ticket
Serial killer David Berkowitz eluded capture for over a year, perplexing investigators and the public alike with the bizarre, enigmatic, and deranged letters he sent to New York City newspapers.
The way the Brooklyn madman was eventually apprehended, however, was so simple that it was ingenious in itself. The tip that finally cracked the case came from a woman who happened to be walking her dog on the night of Berkowitz's final killing. She encountered “a young man who walked strange, like a cat," and who leered ominously into her face as he passed. A few minutes later, the woman heard shots and a car horn go off. She called police and described her encounter, adding that she'd seen a cream-colored car near the murder scene that had been illegally parked. On it was a parking ticket.
Berkowitz had apparently been using his own, registered vehicle as his regular getaway car, so in the end, he was caught simply by virtue of the parking ticket he'd acquired that night. On it was his home address.
The Gang Murderer Who Literally Painted His Crime On His Body
It's one thing to commit a murder, but quite another to tattoo a veritable mural of said crime scene across your chest. Yet (in a scenario that resembles a contemporary twist on Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man), that's exactly what gang member Anthony Garcia did.
On January 23, 2004, Garcia gunned down rival gang member John Juarez in front of a liquor store, and managed to flee the scene of the crime. Shortly thereafter, however, he also commissioned a tattoo of the crime with Sistine Chapel-level detail, chronicling Juarez's demise in vivid pictures. According to reports, it even featured “The Christmas lights that lined the roof of the liquor store where Juarez was shot and killed, the direction his body fell, the bowed street lamp across the way, and the street sign. Above everything read the title, RIVERA KILLS, a reference to the gang. A helicopter was also placed above the scene raining down bullets, a nod to Garcia's alias 'Chopper.'"
Garcia's crime might have remained undetected were it not for a couple of observant detectives who were going through random photos of gang tattoos. One of them happened to be familiar with the liquor store case, and when he noticed the tattoo's startling play-by-play pictorial, he put two-and-two together. Garcia was arrested and sentenced for multiple “revenge murders,” which he was tied to via subsequent investigations.
As Jimmy Stewart told Kim Novak in Hitchcock's Vertigo, “you shouldn't keep souvenirs of a killing.” Especially if said memorabilia is permanently etched into your torso.
The Blood Tranfusion Murder That Almost Put Louis XIV's Doctor Away For Good
The 1600s were a golden era for dramatic, Shakespearean-level crimes, and for groundbreaking blood transfusion research. One particularly notable murder mystery involved the personal physician of King Louis XIV.
In 1667, royal doctor Jean-Baptiste Denys made headlines after he somehow successfully transfused sheep's blood into the veins of an ailing teenage boy. Denys attempted another animal-to-human transfusion shortly thereafter, and this one didn't end well. He decided to treat “Parisian madman” Antoine Mauroy with a infusion of calf's blood, assuming that its freshness would somehow overpower the diseased, insanity-infected substance coursing through Mauroy's veins.
Unsurprisingly, the patient died, and Denys was promptly arrested and charged with murder. But it wasn't actually the transfusion itself that killed Mauroy. Investigators, finding the appearance of the corpse to be inconsistent with mere calf's blood contamination, suspected an alternate method of death. The real killer was revealed to be Mauroy's wife, Perrine, who was found guilty of “poisoning her husband with draughts of arsenic.” Her accomplices were none other than Denys' rivals in the medical and scientific fields, who were on a mission to discredit his work, and who knew they'd be able to pin the crime on the doctor's already-controversial experiments.
Through meticulous detective work, Mauroy was eventually acquitted, but his interest in blood transfusions had been permanently stilled. He retired from the medical business, and transfusions were banned in France shortly thereafter.
The Encrypted Letter That Solved a 526-Year-Old Mystery
In 1478, Giuliano de Medici, co-ruler of Florence, was violently ambushed by a group of knife-wielding assassins as he strolled in the magnificent Cathedral of St. Mary of the Flowers. His brother Lorenzo survived the assault, but Giuliano's murder was widely attributed to Francesco de Pazzi, the son of a Montague-and-Capulet like “rival family.”
The assassination was relegated to history as “the Pazzi conspiracy,” and nothing further was concretely made of it until 2004, when historian and scholar Marcello Simonetta “deciphered an encrypted letter that he had discovered in a private archive.”
According to the New York Times, the letter revealed that Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino (and a noted humanist whose nickname was “The Light of Italy”) had actually been the one to orchestrate the slaughter. In the document, the Duke chronicled his “personal insistence on getting rid of the Medici brothers, and discussed his military contribution to the plot (550 soldiers and 50 knights).”
Pretty impressive detective work, for a case that masqueraded as solved for 530 years.