The modern car usually carries the spare tire standing upright at one side of the trunk. Dr. Snyder felt that the murderer had used a car which had a big turtleback with the spare lire on the floor of the car.
Clues came in by the dozen — only they turned out not to be clues. There were numerous perplexing coincidences which can so easily throw an investigator off the track.
I personally became convinced the wounded murderer must have gone up a certain barranca to hide some of the girl’s school books and personal belongings. I suggested to the district attorney that if this assumption was correct we would find drops of blood on the rocks, probably about every twenty feet apart.
Searchers were dispatched to that dry stream bed. Sure enough they found the drops of blood, a whole trail of drops, about twenty-two feet apart.
Dr. Snyder tested the bloodstains. They had been made by a wounded rabbit.
And then finally the steady, relentless pressure of publicity paid off. The wife of a man who lived only a few miles from where the body had been discovered came to the authorities in an almost hysterical state. She knew that her husband had committed the murder.
Neighbors told a very peculiar story. The day after the crime the suspect had washed his car inside and out. Then he had raised the turtleback of the car and had given that a good scrubbing. After that he had left the hose running in the car for hours and hours, washing it out thoroughly. Then he had dried the car, and when the interior of the turtleback was completely dry he had given it a good thick coating of red lead. Afterwards he had put on a second coating of red lead.
The gravel guard of chrome steel had been taken into the kitchen and scrubbed and scrubbed with a polisher until it shone like a mirror.
Yet Dr. Snyder had the answer to all that. He knew of certain scientific tests for the detection of bloodstains, tests so delicate that a cotton shirt stained with blood could be sent to a commercial laundry for seven successive times and the stain still be detected.
Officers who worked on the case told me they had never seen a car inspected for evidence the way Dr. Snyder inspected that car. He scraped away the red lead from around the bolts of the automobile, then with a wrench he carefully loosened those bolts and underneath the heads of the bolts he was able to find faint traces of blood.
He dug up the soil under the place where the automobile had been standing all the time the water was running out from the turtleback. In that soil he was able to find traces of blood. He was even able to find the telltale blood reaction on the car’s polished gravel guard.
During the course of that investigation there were half a dozen false leads. There was one individual who could have been taken into custody and perhaps his entire life ruined. There were bizarre coincidences.
It was a pleasure to work with the district attorney who realized so thoroughly the responsibilities of his office, who marshalled such a deadly array of facts that the murderer was convicted despite the fact that his wife could not-be called as a witness under the law of Colorado.
Yet the most important clue in the case was invisible to all human eyes. Only the lens of the camera and the super-sensitive panchromatic film picked up that circle on the girl’s hip and enabled the authorities to deduce that the girl had been attacked by but one man. Knowing that fact, authorities deduced that in the terrific struggle which had ensued this man had probably been injured.
That invisible circle was really the key clue in the case.
The Case of the Knockout Bullet
Almost everyone knows that Stanley Ketchel was one of the great boxing champions of all time, but many have forgotten that he was murdered — and under baffling circumstances. All the evidence pointed to a gambling syndicate yet the case was obscured by a missing diamond stickpin, a lucky bracelet, and a pretty cook. Here Erle Stanley Gardner relates how this strange case was solved by not following the logical clues.
By a twist of irony, the famed sports celebrity destined for death at the hand of a murderer, that autumn morning long ago, had been known to millions as “The Michigan Assassin.”
It was an appellation in no way related to the crime of murder, in its customary meaning. Sportswriters had created it as a tag for a brilliant young boxer as he fought his way in the prize ring to a world’s championship title.
So, oddly, in this case it was to be the “assassin” who would be the victim. And it was a bullet instead, of the fist of an opponent that delivered the knockout that ended forever the career of Stanley Ketchel, world’s middleweight champion of his day.
This case always has intrigued me, for a number of reasons.
First, it is a murder yarn right down the alley of any writer of mystery stories. Second, in my youth I was greatly interested in boxing and for a time fancied myself a fighter of some promise. Ketchel’s career was one that would appeal to any American youth.
Approximately my own age, Ketchel had proved himself an athlete of great personal integrity, with the exceptional skill and fighting heart that has characterized true champions. Virile and handsome, with a magnificently chiseled physique, he was not only the idol of the boys of the land but, wherever he went, he found himself the target of starry-eyed women who fancied him as the answer to their romantic prayers.
But perhaps the most unusual element of all is the fact that today almost no one appears to be aware that murder wrote the final chapter in the record books of one of the greats in the history of boxing — murder that lashed out from far beyond the ropes and canvas of the ring.
It was a crisp fall, morning — October 15, 1910 — in the Ozarks of Southern Missouri. Stanley Ketchel, middleweight champion of the world, rose early to take his accustomed road work along the by-ways of a cattle ranch to which he had quietly withdrawn a few weeks earlier. The ranch was owned by R. P. Dickerson, Ketchel’s close personal friend and financial advisor. It was in Wright County, 42 miles from the city of Springfield.
Ketchel, upset and deeply annoyed by furtive but persistent overtures that had been made to him in New York by a Broadway gambling syndicate that he throw a fight, had gone to the ranch after publicly disclosing the efforts that had been made to draw him into the gambling conspiracy. He had been extremely bitter in denouncing the gamblers.
He left the ranch house shortly after 4 A.M., returning some two hours later after completing his exercise. The 20-odd hands on the place meantime had risen and gone about their duties.
Ketchel called through a window to the cook, requesting that a breakfast of ham, eggs and a glass of milk be served him on the porch. Then he went to his bedroom and thence on to the ranch wash-shed to bathe.
In the bedroom, it developed later, he put on a dresser a mysterious object that was to inject an almost occult touch into events about to occur.
Not far from the house, the foreman, Charles E. Bailey, and another employe, John Nolen, were piling logs in a woodshed. Shortly after 6:30 o’clock they heard a gunshot. Because the noise had seemed to come from in or near the house, Bailey and Nolen hurried to investigate.
The porch was unoccupied. Silverware lay on the floor. The tablecloth was in disarray. The glass of milk had been overturned. The ham and eggs were untouched. On the floor the two men discovered several small spots of blood. These formed a trail leading inside the house. In his room, sprawled face up across the bed, lay Ketchel. He was breathing but obviously dying.