Charms that Excused Perjury: A 19th Century Detective’s List

A witness testifying under oath. By bikeriderlondon, Shutterstock, with permission.

Is the witness lying?

It’s an important question for a detective – a train switch that can change the course of the investigation. Modern detectives can rely on lie detectors and subtle clues in body language. They get training based on sophisticated psychological research.

In the 19^th century, a detective had to rely on his or her knowledge of human nature. A common technique was to question a witness over and over again to see if the story remained consistent. Detectives still do that today.

Crossing the fingers behind one’s back was one of the charms that excused perjury. Photo from Pixabay.

But because folklore and superstitions about perjury ran rampant in bygone eras, detectives had to watch out for a whole list of things that would never occur to a modern detective. Witnesses used talismans or charms that excused perjury in the eyes of God – similar to a witness crossing his fingers behind his back. They thought these tricks negated the consequences of lying and absolved a perjurer from any moral and legal consequences. Just as a detective today would question the veracity of a person with crossed fingers behind his back, a 19^th century detective had a list of folklore tricks to watch out for; they indicated the witness was lying.

Hanns Gross, father of modern criminology, public domain.

 Charms that excused perjury

Hanns Gross, the 19^th century Austrian professor and father of criminology, researched folklore about perjury and wrote about it in his landmark handbook for investigators. Austrian detectives put witnesses under oath when they interrogated them, but they needed to keep a sharp eye out for the tricks a witness might use to wiggle out from the weight of the oath. Here are some of them:

 Bird eyeballs

The eyes of two European birds, the hoopoe and lapwing, were supposed to bring luck in court. A person carrying them on their chest became “beloved.” In the courtroom, that meant one could escape from the consequences of the oath and lie even if sworn. The eyeballs would help the judge to view the witness’s case favorably.

Folklore ascribed magical powers to the hoopoe’s eyeballs. Pixabay.

 Bones of one’s own child

Carrying the bones of one’s own deceased child supposedly excused perjury. Gross doesn’t mention how people obtained the bones. My mind doesn’t even want to go there. But the presence of a bone on a witness’s person should have been enough to arouse the detective’s suspicion.

 Bent thumbs

“Pressing” the thumbs is the German equivalent of the English crossing of the fingers; it’s supposed to bring luck. Bending the thumbs during testimony is another variation. Austrian detectives needed to watch out for witnesses employing this trick.

 Actions with the left hand

Putting your left hand on your side, making a fist with it, stretching out your left fingers, or holding your left hand backwards supposedly balanced out the right hand’s gestures in taking the oath. Left hand activity signaled possible charms that excused perjury to the astute 19^th century detective.

 Actions with the mouth

According to folklore, spitting following taking an oath negated the oath. So did a gold piece under the tongue or seven pebbles in the mouth.

 Twisting the pants button

Twisting one’s pants button was another one of the charms that excused perjury Hanns Gross encountered. Witnesses did it while taking the oath to nullify its consequences.

Mistletoe in the shoe? That was one of the 19th century charms that excused perjury. Pixabay.

 Mistletoe in the shoe

Mistletoe is for much more than kissing during the Christmas season. If you put it in your boot, on the sole, when you gave sworn testimony, it protected you from the consequences of your perjury.

 Burial shroud

The southern Slavic culture, according to Professor Gross, viewed parts of the burial shroud as charms that excused perjury. Carrying the clothing that bound the deceased’s chin, especially if it was still knotted, had magical powers that prevented the court from detecting or punishing perjury. Wearing the part of the shroud that bound the dead man’s feet in our own shoe had the same effect.

Watch out for a burial shroud in court. Pixabay.

 Raising the right leg

In the Turkish culture, raising the right leg while taking an oath negated the oath and allowed the person to commit perjury.

 Can you add to this list about charms that excused perjury? Or superstitions about lying in general?

Literature on point:

Hanns Gross, Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter (Graz: Leuschner & Lubensky’s, 1899) 372-373.

Johann Gotthold Kunstmann, The Hoopoe: A Study in European Folklore (Dissertation, Univ. of Chicago, 1938) 14

Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Republic of Turkey, Superstitions

Tramp Signs: Secret Symbols of Criminals and Vagabonds

Criminals used to use secret tramp signs, sometimes carving them into wood. Photo AVN Photo Lab, Shutterstock.

A black shape emerges from the misty shadows of the night and slinks up to the door. A glint of light flashes from a knife. There’s a scratching sound as the man begins to whittle a symbol into the wood. You probably won’t be able to read what he’s carving, because it’s in a centuries-old secret language: the tramp signs of Europe.

Frequently used from the 17^th to 19^th centuries, these symbols provided secret information to other criminals and vagabonds. Tramp signs told which houses provided refuge and which were dangerous. Even if a criminal was illiterate, he could still read these symbols.

By the 20th century, law enforcement had deciphered many of the symbols. Here are few listed in a criminal investigator’s handbook:

Historical tramp signs from Europe.

Some of these symbols became the basis for the hobo symbols that flourished in North American starting in the late 19^th century and through the Depression. Compare the tramp signs above to some of these hobo symbols from North America:

Ryan Somma, Key to a few hobo signs, National Cryptologic Museum, Creative Commons.

In Europe, however, tramp signs were also used by mischief-makers who were much more dangerous than hobos. Some tramp signs would tell a criminal which house to burglarize, which to burn, or even which occupants to murder. Here are two ominous examples from 19^th century Europe:

Instructions to commit murder by arson found on a chapel in the forest in Germany. The first line means “In the night of the last quarter moon, the fourth house in the direction of the arrow will be attacked.” The symbols on the bottom line are the signatures of the participants. From Hans Gross, Handbuch, 1899.

These symbols indicate plans to burglarize the church on Christmas night. The stones and the child wrapped in swaddling clothes indicate the date. Hans Gross, Handbuch, 1899.

In the modern age of cell phones, the need for such communication has largely died out, although police do occasionally still find tramp signs. In 2009, police in Vienna found several on houses, mailboxes, fences, and doors. You can view photographs here. One of the symbols used looked like an upside down table. That means “old people live here.”

A modern variation of tramp signs is warchalking, symbols on streets or lampposts indicating the availability of an open wireless access point.

Maha, Warchalking on a street in Bamberg, Germany, Creative Commons

Have you ever seen secret symbols in a public place?

Literature on point:

Hanns Gross & Ernst Seelig, Handbuch der Kriminalistik (Berlin: J Schwietzer, 1954)

Hanns Gross, Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter als System der Kriminalistik (Graz, Austria: Leuschner & Lubensky’s Universitäts-Buchhandlung 1899)

Cadaver Dogs in the 19th Century

A beagle tracks a scent. Soloviova Liudmyla, shutterstock.

A landscape of odors….

Compared to canines, humans smell in black and white. We live in a world of sight and sound, words and letters. If you wrote a novel for dogs, you’d have to use smells – it would be a scratch-and-sniff book. Dogs find their literature on the ground, on trees, and under bushes; a stroll in the woods is to browse through a library. They “see” the world as an aromatic landscape colored with scents we can’t even imagine.

The nose knows. MorgueFile free photo.

It’s precisely that facility that makes dogs so useful to law enforcement. Their olfactory perception complements a detective’s visual perception and can offer critical clues in a criminal investigation.

Cadaver dogs begin their careers

Hanns Gross, father of forensic science in Austria. Public domain.

Systematic training for cadaver dogs began in the 1970s. Modern human remains detection dogs learn to distinguish the odors of human decomposition from those of animal decomposition and track them through varied terrains. But that doesn’t mean that no one ever used dogs for finding dead bodies before the 1970s. One of the first recorded instances of a court purposely using a dog to search for a murder victim occurred during the investigation of the Bavarian Ripper in 1809.

Hanns Gross, an Austrian criminologist and the father of modern forensic science, wrote about the need for cadaver dog searches as early as 1899:

Johann Elias Ridinger, Leithund, 18th c.; public domain

“Undertaking outdoor [searches] is difficult under any circumstances. Systematic searching is almost always impossible due to the size of the territory; success is due to chance. Only in one circumstance is outside assistance advisable: searching for a human body. For that purpose, a good tracking dog can be used. Not every bloodhound or Leithund [a 19^th c. German breed similar to the Weimaraner] can be used, however; only a few dogs possess the right facilities for the task. But if the investigating magistrate needs help in such a case, it won’t suffice if he just orders: “Get me a tracking dog.” He most certainly won’t obtain any help in this manner. He must, as discussed above, prepare for war during peacetime. This is all the more necessary because you often find such dogs in completely unexpected places, and can’t find one on the spot when you need one.”

A watchdog breaks the case

Gross managed to find a good dog and described how it found a body quickly enough to exculpate the suspect:

William Henry Jackson, “Seek Dead,” 1902; public domain. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.

“A tanner in my district had a garden-variety watchdog that didn’t have a bit of hunting dog in him, but (I think it merely due to his voraciousness) could find every single piece of carrion within a huge perimeter. For that reason, the local hunters borrowed him to find all the game they shot that their hunting dogs couldn’t find. The tanner’s dog found everything that was animal and dead. He would come to a standstill for wounded deer as well as a long-dead cat, but he found both. Once, when we needed to search for a missing cretin, presumed to have been murdered by his brother-in-law, this dog found the cretin’s body deep in the woods. At that point it was still possible to determine that the cretin had died as a result of an epileptic seizure, but a few days later, it might not have been possible to make a postmortem finding that no violence had occurred, and the suspicion would have followed the brother-in-law for the rest of his life.”

A landscape of scent. Morguefile photos.

The dogs in this case and the Bavarian Ripper investigation proved their worth. One discovered the bodies, providing the crucial piece of evidence to convict a murderer, and the other found the body quickly for investigators to prove there was no murder, and exonerated an innocent suspect. Hats off to cadaver dogs and their forerunners in the 19^th century!

What are some of the unusual things your dog has found with its nose?

Literature on point:

Hanns Gross, Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter (3^rd ed., Graz: Leuschner & Lubensky’s 1899) pp. 122-124 (translation mine).

Cat Warren, What the Dog Knows (New York: Touchstone 2013)

Birth of the “Forensic Kit” or “Murder Bag”

Sherlock holmes and the open safe; OSTILL/istockphoto.com

Sherlock Holmes had his magnifying glass. A modern detective will bring things like evidence tags, fingerprint kits, and latent bloodstain reagents.

What did a 19^th-century detective pack into his forensic kit to bring to a crime scene?

Hanns Gross (sometimes spelled Hans Gross), the Austrian father of criminology. Public domain.

Let’s ask Hanns Gross (1847-1915), an Austrian who established forensic science as an academic discipline. Gross studied law and worked as a detective (Untersuchungsrichter) before founding the first university institute of criminology. His Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter (Handbook for Criminal Investigation), a field book for criminal investigators that was published in 1893, caused a global tsunami in police work, washing away outdated techniques. Gross integrated science and psychology into criminal investigations. He also developed the field of crime scene photography. In translated form, the Handbook became a standard work worldwide.

In the Handbook, Gross lists the items a detective should keep packed in his forensic kit in order to be ready to process a crime scene at a moment’s notice. The list is long, but here are some of the important contents:

• paper for taking notes
• pen and pencil, ink
• ruler or measuring tape
• pair of compasses for measuring minute distances
• pedometer for measuring distance in paces
• transparent paper for tracing outlines, drawings, and blood splatter
• plaster to make casts
• test tubes for samples of stomach contents of dead bodies to test for arsenic
• candles for illumination during nighttime investigation
• crucifix for the purposes of putting a dying witness under oath for a statement
• directional compass to provide orientation for the detective’s sketch of the crime
• bars of soap, not only for washing, but for taking impressions of small items like keys
• brush for cleaning debris out of a footprint before taking a cast
• magnifying glass
• tape, to which small traces of evidence adhere
• candy for calming children and inducing them to make statements
• first-aid kit, for victims or the detective himself

Yum, old fashioned candy! Hanns Gross recommended investigators bring candy to the crime scene. It can induce children to give statements.

 Which of these items seem old-fashioned? And which were ahead of their time? Do you think anything’s missing?

Hanns Gross’ depiction of a detective bag to contain the forensic kit. Public domain.

Because Hanns Gross developed criminal investigation photography, I was surprised not to see a camera on his list. He might have included that in later editions of his book.

(c) Text Ann Marie Ackermann 2014

Literature on point:

Hanns Gross, Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter als System der Kriminalistik (Graz, Austria: Leuschner & Lubensky’s Universitäts-Buchhandlung 1899)