Carella and Hawes shrugged; this was all old stuff to them.
The technician went on to explain that if the fiber direction on any given rope seemed at first glance to support a finding of “true hanging” this might not necessarily be valid since the murderer might have first manually lifted an already dead body and only later manipulated the noose around its neck. This was enormously difficult to do, however, since a corpse was heavy and limp and clumsy to maneuver. Besides, the arm of the lamppost in this case was some twenty-five feet above the street. Given the height of the lamppost arm, then; given as well the downward direction of the rope fibers, the technician could only conclude that the killer had fastened the noose around the neck of the corpse, thrown the rope over the lamppost arm, and then hauled the body up, tying the loose end of the rope around the supporting post some five feet above the base.
The technician went on to report that the knot removed from behind the dead girl’s neck was a true hangman’s knot, the sort used in legal hanging executions. In essence, it was a variation of a slip knot, sometimes called a running knot—
Both detectives turned to look at each other when they came to the word “running”...
— fashioned for the executioner’s purposes into a noose with eight or nine turns of rope above it. In this case, there were nine turns.
The technician had not expected to find any latent prints on either the rope or the knot, and he was not disappointed. He had, however, recovered fibers that when examined under the microscope were discovered not to be sisal fibers, and which he had ascertained were fibers consisting of 55 percent wool and 45 percent polyester. In addition, he had found particles of human epidermis clinging to the coarse rope of the knot, and he had identified these as unpigmented skin, or, in short, skin from a white man.
The photograph of the knot tied around the lamppost — actually, the technician pointed out (intending no pun), it was not a knot but instead a hitch, commonly used to tie a rope to a ring, a post, or a spar. The hitch, then, that had fastened the end of the rope to the lamppost was called a half hitch. In the technician’s opinion, the killer had chosen this particular hitch because it could be tied easily and swiftly, even — as in this case — when two half hitches were used in concert. It was not as strong or as safe as a timber hitch, for example, but taking into consideration the fact that the killer had 124 pounds of dead weight dangling from the other end of the rope, speed and facility must have been a prime consideration. The technician concluded the report by mentioning that the half hitch was a knot familiar to virtually every sailor or fisherman on the face of the earth.
The second sealed packet contained a report on the robe (and its contents) found in the dead girl’s apartment.
Upon examination of sample fibers, the robe proved to be 100 percent wool, as claimed on the label. The size, as further indicated on the label, was a large — made to fit men who wore a U.S. 42. Carella wore a 42. Hawes wore a 44. A considerable quantity of hair had been vacuumed from the robe, and this had been compared with hair samples taken from the head, eyebrows, eyelashes, and genital area of Marcia Schaffer’s corpse. Some of the hairs on the robe matched Marcia Schaffer’s head hair. Some of them matched the pubic-area hair samples. One of them matched an eyelash. The other hairs on the robe were foreign — what the lab assistant in his report called wild hairs.
All of the wild hairs had dry roots, as opposed to living roots, which indicated they had fallen out and not been pulled away by force. All of the hairs had a medullary index — defined in the report as the relation between medullary diameter and whole-hair diameter — of less than 0.5, which indicated they were either human hair or monkey hair. But the air network in the medulla of these hairs was fine-grained, and the cells invisible without treatment in water; the cortex resembled a thick muff, and the pigment was fine-grained; there were thin, unprotruding scales in the cuticle, covering each other to a greater degree than would be found in the hair of an animal. The technician had determined that these hairs were indeed human, and since they measured 0.07 centimeters in diameter, that they were hairs from an adult human.
These same hairs, when measured under the micrometer eyepiece, were all shorter than eight centimeters, which indicated they had come either from a scalp or from a beard. The medullary index of the hairs, however, was 0.132, which seemed to indicate they were hairs from a man’s scalp, as opposed to a woman’s, whose medullary index would have been 0.148. Moreover, the ovoid shapes and the peripheral concentration of the pigment in the cortex of the hair indicated that the man was a white man.
Some of the other recovered hairs were curly and coarse, with knobby roots that indicated they had come from a man’s genital area, a surmise strengthened by the fact that the medullary index was established as 0.153. Hairs from a woman’s genitalia, although also curly and coarse, normally had a fine root and a medullary index of 0.114. The orange-red color of the pigment in the shaft of all the hairs — male or female, head, eyebrows, eyelashes or genital — together with the amount of granules present, established in support of visual findings that Marcia Schaffer and the man whose robe was found in her apartment were both blondes. Moreover, they were natural blondes; not a trace of any chemical dye or bleach was found on any of the hairs. A microscopic examination of the tips of the adult male head hairs revealed clean-cut surfaces that indicated the man who owned the robe had had a haircut not forty-eight hours before the hairs were deposited on the robe.
Reading all this about hair, Hawes seemed even more fascinated by Meyer’s toupee. He kept looking up from the report to where Meyer sat hunched over the typewriter, and he kept wondering whether a microscopic examination of all those hairs sitting on Meyer’s heretofore barren scalp would prove them to be human or animal. Meyer kept ignoring him. Meyer was thinking Hawes was trying to figure out something clever to say.
The laboratory report went on to state that the package of Marlboro cigarettes had been tested negatively for controlled substances. The cigarettes were just what they purported to be: tobacco marketed by Philip Morris Inc. The lighter was indeed a Dunhill and not one of its many knockoffs.
There were good latent fingerprints on both the lighter and the cigarette package.
A cross-check with the Identification Section had produced no criminal record for the man who’d left his prints on both articles. But he had been fingerprinted when he enlisted in the Navy during the Vietnam War. His name was Martin J. Benson, and his last known address was 93204 Pacific Coast Highway, just outside of Santa Monica, California.
Carella and Hawes divided between them the telephone directories for all five sections of the city. Hawes hit pay dirt with the Isola phone book. A Martin J. Benson was listed as living at 106 South Boulder. They were heading out of the squadroom when Hawes turned and asked Meyer, “Did you know that horse hair has a medullary index of seven point six?” — something he made up on the spot, and something Meyer did not find comical.