George Lawlor: An Early Visionary

By Katherine Ramsland

“I have met Mr. Luck several times, but I have always been introduced to him by his friends, Mr. Persistence and Mr. Hard Work.”  So quipped Superintendent George Lawlor in a diary he kept in anticipation of writing his memoir.  He never did, but Irish journalist Tom Reddy rescued him from oblivion by publishing his crime stories.  Relatively unknown outside Ireland, Lawlor deserves more recognition than he’s received, because he established Ireland’s equivalent of England’s famous “Murder Squad” and brought scientific methods to the national police force.  During his watch, his team of detectives had one of the best records in the world for solving murders.  Yet Lawlor was hardly a solid candidate for such a career. 

During his youth in the early 1900s, Lawlor considered police work to be “dull and monotonous,” and he soon had reason to despise authority.  An idealist and Republican, he joined several movements that resisted British rule in Ireland, including the extremist Sinn Féin, and during the 1916 uprising in Dublin, when Lawlor was 18, he learned what it felt like to be on the wrong end of a Bobby’s baton.  Thrown into prison, he was held for more than a year, until his release after Britain signed a treaty.  Free again, Lawlor watched his former comrades disintegrate into political factions, so he withdrew.

To earn a living, Lawlor decided to join the fledgling Irish police force, the Garda Síochána.  Finding himself half an inch too short, he stretched up on his toes, and passed.  However, he found the training to be no more than an uninspired imitation of methods used for the British police, which left recruits ill-prepared for investigating serious crimes.  Because he was intelligent and responsible, Lawlor became a detective sergeant in 1928, whereupon he received his first case.

Galway, in western Ireland, has long been famous for its horse racing, and during one season Lawlor was assigned with other detectives to watch for petty crimes. A man reported the theft of his gold watch and chain, on which his initials, W.R., were inscribed.  Given the transient crowds, its recovery seemed unlikely, but then a scoundrel was caught committing fraud and the watch was found in his pocket.  When W. R. received it back, he went to a pub and sang Lawlor’s praises to anyone who would listen.  Gratified, Lawlor grew more interested in what it meant to “detect” and resolve a crime, which inspired him to read about other investigations, especially murder.

“I came to realize and appreciate,” he wrote in his diary, “that in the investigation of crime many old methods were becoming outdated and that the time had arrived when science should be applied to assist in crime investigation.”  He grew aware of developments in the U.S., particularly with regard to the use of fingerprinting methods and trace evidence examination.  By this time, Edmond Locard in France had set up the world’s first private crime lab, a sensational trial in Britain had brought international attention to fingerprint identification, and a U. S. appeals courts had affirmed fingerprint methodology as scientific.  Blood types had been distinguished, ballistics was gaining a database, microscopy had improved, and there was even a vacuum apparatus to collect trace evidence.  In addition, the popularity of Sherlock Holmes had brought more attention to the art of crime detection.

Lawlor took a correspondence course in fingerprinting and photography sponsored by Chicago’s Institute of Applied Science and became acquainted with a local forensic pathologist, who taught him about blood tests, toxicology, and wound analysis.  Lawlor even wrote a manual for identifying John Does by how their specific trades left distinct marks on fingers and hands.  

Unfortunately, his colleagues failed to share his enthusiasm for these “newfangled” ideas, so he met with resistance.  In fact, for the purpose of classifying fingerprints taken from prisoners, one doubting Thomas had simply used his own print rather than collecting them, resulting in a dismissal of the fingerprint system until the lazy maneuver was discovered.  Thus, Lawlor had to prove the worth of the scientific approach. 

Through his self-taught knowledge and skill, he eventually solved a case of murder that involved the coordination of expertise in several areas and gained him international attention. By this time, he led a special investigation unit for major crimes, the Garda Technical Bureau.  He himself had suggested the blueprint for it in response to an essay contest, citing the need for widespread, standardized training in basic police methodology and emerging forensic science.

The body of young woman was discovered lying on a Dublin footpath, near a city park known as St. Stephen’s Green.  The deceased was covered with a black overcoat, soon to be identified as hers, but her skirt had been removed and dumped onto her head and her panties had been pinned to a cloth used to drag her to this area.  A nylon stocking and scarf were tied tightly around her neck.

Lawlor directed his team to place each article of clothing into a separate bag, and they searched the area for anything that could help identify the victim.  The autopsy indicated that she had died from air embolism leading to heart failure, rather than from strangulation, as initially assumed.  The stocking and scarf had been tied around the victim’s neck postmortem, staging the scene.  It was also clear that an abortion had been performed, which seemed the likely cause of the embolism.

A search of records turned up Mamie Cadden, a convicted abortionist on that street, about 50 feet from where the victim lay.  Mamie claimed she knew nothing about the incident, although a search of her premises turned up surgical instruments that could have been used.  She kept a log of clients, identified by code, who purchased cures for minor ailments, and on the day before the murder, she had written “blue coat.”  However, Lawlor noted something strange about this entry; it appeared to be over-written. He had his experts take photographs and refine them until the original entry was clear; they could now see that Mamie had first written, “black coat.”  Mamie denied that was what it said, claiming she had written the first entry with red ink and had difficulty reading it, so she had traced it over with blue ink.  This suspicious circumstance nevertheless maintained her status as a suspect.

The search around the body dump site turned up some interesting items.  The victim had been pulled several feet, as revealed in drag marks extending from the body back toward Mamie’s flat, where bloodstains were found in the hallway of her building.  This gave the detectives reason to process the apartment, and they removed two coconut fiber floor mats, a rabbit fur cape, a red dressing gown, and several combs with head hair in them.

Making comparisons, they found that hairs and fur lifted off the victim’s black overcoat matched the rabbit fur coat, and this same fur was also found on the floor mats.  Hair from the combs was similar in texture and color to strands of hair on the coat.  Also, in the heel of the dead woman’s shoe they found two hair strands, one of which was remarkably similar to the rabbit fur.  In addition, the victim’s head hair was consistent with hair lifted from Mamie’s dressing gown, and red fibers from the gown were similar to several fibers picked off the victim’s coat.  More precisely, eighty-nine fibers were found on the dead woman from the floor mats, closely matched along seven different color shades, including a faded blue. 

Lawlor was gratified to see how the physical evidence brought the case together, and he used the latest methods of microphotography to prepare exhibits for the judge and jury.  Mamie Cadden was convicted of the murder. 

Lawlor believed in coordinating his team and pooling information, so during each significant case he held daily conferences.  They discussed suspects and motives until they whittled down possibilities to what seemed the most effective avenues for investigation.  They also learned how to use the aura of science to trick suspects into believing they had evidence when they did not.  Lawlor also trained them in crime scene processing with exercises that had them on hands and knees going through an overgrown field.  Sometimes they had to return to the same field the following day to identify something placed there overnight that they had not noticed before—even an item as small as a matchstick or hairpin.  This kind of painstaking exercise assisted with another dicey case, a murder in Howth.

During the summer of 1948, in a lover’s lane area in the countryside south of Dublin, the body of a woman was found nestled into a hollow in a hillside.  There was blood on her mouth, and it soon became clear that her killer had bludgeoned her about the head and face several times, and had manually strangled her.  The Technical Bureau arrived to process the scene, photographing the body before removal, and then moving through the area.  Fourteen officers got down on their hands and knees to search for evidence. 

They found two recent newspapers in the hollow, apparently used as seats on the wet grass the previous evening, and a cluster of a dozen burnt matches, as if someone was searching for something in the dark.  Two expensive fountain pens were also found, one of them missing its clip.  Not far away was a purse, stashed under a bush, which provided the victim’s name, Kay Boyne, a 38-year-old widow.  Inside was a desperate love letter from someone named John, and her boyfriend turned out to be John Fanning (who claimed to be her unofficial fiancée). 

Fanning admitted that he had been with Kay the evening before, but he said that a carload of her friends had picked her up, leaving him to find his own way home.  He claimed he stopped at a pub and had then found a ride with a friend.  Nevertheless, questions to his coworkers turned up an interesting item: Fanning had recently confided to one woman that he might commit suicide.  His drink at the pub also proved to have been fabricated, but physical evidence tying him to the murder was lacking. 

Then, through interviews, it became clear that both pens from the murder site had recently been in Fanning’s possession: the broken one belonged to him (he had the clip) and he had borrowed the other pen from a co-worker the day before the murder.  A recognizable pen missing from Boyne’s handbag was found in a pocket of Fanning’s shirt, hanging at his house.  When Fanning was searched, detectives found a number of recent scratches on several areas of his body, as if from a struggle, as well as bloodstains on his trousers.  Then a stash of letters indicated that Kay Boyne had been trying to break up with him and he’d been fiercely resistant.

Arrested for murder, he went to trial.  There, Fanning offered a confession, showing that whatever violence had occurred had been outside his consciousness—he had simply reacted from desperation.  In fact, a medical examination indicated a physical anomaly that his defense used to buttress his apparent insanity: Fanning’s heart and liver were transposed—each was where the other should have been.  Two medical experts testified that this congenital defect was associated with mental deficiency.  The prosecutor had a difficult time proving there had been an intent to kill and the defense countered that since Fanning worked as a chemist’s assistant, he could easily have poisoned Kay if he had intended her harm.  The homicide appeared to have been a tragic over-reaction.

After an hour and a half of deliberation, the jury found Fanning guilty but recommended mercy, as there was no evidence of malice aforethought.  He received death, but this was later commuted to life. Lawlor found himself rethinking his notions about motive, noting the tragedy in someone’s life of one false step, fueled by overwhelming emotional intensity.  “Murder is murder … yet there are cases in which one feels that a line of demarcation may be drawn.”

Superintendent George Lawlor had a stellar career, working long hours for the Garda and incorporating every scientific innovation about which he learned.  He offered advice freely to others who asked, and when he died in January 1961, he was consulting on a case for an inspector general from India. Despite his apparent obscurity, Lawlor deserves recognition as an early role model for an entire police force and an eminent advocate for the use of science in law enforcement.

References

Reddy, T.  (1991). The murder file: An Irish detective’s casebook. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan.

Reddy, T. (2005). Murder will out.  Dublin: Gill & Macmillan.

Thorwald, J. (1964). The century of the detective. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

Courtesy of Dr. Robert O'Block, Founder and Publisher