Tracking Down Metals by Keith Stanley (1 results)

Soft cover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. 1st Edition. Original typescript report. Foolscap, title with typed label, 30pp., [2p.], 2 photos in the text, 8 x 20 x 25.3 cm., (including borders) b&w crime scene and evidentiary photographs, typed captions on versos, one in photomontage with handwritten labels, text typed on rectos only, in the original brown card folder, bound with screws, typed label on upper cover. Red Bank, New Jersey, n.d., c. 1948. In very good condition, endemic browning. Keith was a well known and respected metallurgist who had worked on the infamous Lindbergh kidnapping case. He established his groundbreaking expertise and authority with nails by matching examples from a ladder to other ones used by the child kidnapper Richard Hauptmann. The case is described in the text. This informal memoir type report discusses three cases that the metallurgist was involved in; the aforementioned Lindbergh kidnapping, a bomber and a forger. The first was a series of mail bombs sent to inhabitants of Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania two of which ended in the slaughter of members of a family and the other a church warden.The bombs were sent in wooden cigar boxes with the panel pins removed and then replaced with small shoe nails. The expertise needed to rig up the bomb and of course the dynamite focused police efforts on mining and in time this was narrowed down to four miners. Four pairs of shoes were requisitioned and the nails extracted and a disgruntled miner from Hanover Township called Michael Fugmann was arrested, tried and convicted for the bombing campaign and sent to the electric chair. Keith was commended in court for '.blazing a new trail in scientific testing.'. For the first time, photographic evidence was presented to the jury in a sterescopic device that presented '.three dimensional enlargements of these tiny nails.'. The gory crime scene photographs, taken by a State Trooper, resemble Otto Dix's series of murder paintings and prints from Weimar or Cindy Sherman's reconstructed murder photos.Or, perhaps the murder and rape tableaux of Ed Kienholz such as ?Five Car Stud' . They depict very chilling domestic scenes with mutilated bodies entangled with clothes, plaster and furniture in the aftermath of bombs being opened at kitchen tables. A very noirish account of a pioneering case. 130916.