From the acclaimed author of Death in the Air comes the riveting story of the birth of criminal investigation in the 20th century.
Berkeley, California, 1933. In a lab filled with curiosities - beakers, microscopes, Bunsen burners, and hundreds upon hundreds of books - sat an investigator who would go on to crack at least 2,000 cases in his 40-year career. Known as the "American Sherlock Holmes", Edward Oscar Heinrich was one of America's greatest - and first - forensic scientists, with an uncanny knack for finding clues, establishing evidence, and deducing answers with a skill that seemed almost supernatural.
Heinrich was one of the nation's first expert witnesses, working in a time when the turmoil of Prohibition led to sensationalized crime reporting and only a small, systematic study of evidence. However, with his brilliance and commanding presence in both the courtroom and at crime scenes, Heinrich spearheaded the invention …
From the acclaimed author of Death in the Air comes the riveting story of the birth of criminal investigation in the 20th century.
Berkeley, California, 1933. In a lab filled with curiosities - beakers, microscopes, Bunsen burners, and hundreds upon hundreds of books - sat an investigator who would go on to crack at least 2,000 cases in his 40-year career. Known as the "American Sherlock Holmes", Edward Oscar Heinrich was one of America's greatest - and first - forensic scientists, with an uncanny knack for finding clues, establishing evidence, and deducing answers with a skill that seemed almost supernatural.
Heinrich was one of the nation's first expert witnesses, working in a time when the turmoil of Prohibition led to sensationalized crime reporting and only a small, systematic study of evidence. However, with his brilliance and commanding presence in both the courtroom and at crime scenes, Heinrich spearheaded the invention of a myriad of new forensic tools that police still use today, including blood spatter analysis, ballistics, lie-detector tests, and the use of fingerprints as courtroom evidence. His work, though not without its serious - some would say fatal - flaws, changed the course of American criminal investigation.
Based on years of research and thousands of never-before-published primary source materials, American Sherlock captures the life of the man who pioneered the science our legal system now relies upon - as well as the limits of those techniques and the very human experts who wield them.
Solid biography of E.O. Heinrich, early forensic investigator
3 stars
Lots of retellings of the cases Heinrich participated in, both from both sides of the prosecutorial divide. Heinrich comes off as an insecure person who is dedicated to the truth. It feels a bit like copaganda, because there's no discussion of Heinrich ever getting anything wrong. And we know that forensics often embraced junk science (as the Epilogue covers). The one case discussed in the book about his embrace of blood spatter analysis (which is mostly junk science), was that of David Lampson, and Heinrich sided with the defense there. But he did thousands of cases. As a portrait of early forensic investigation, it's good though.
