The Case of the Nervous Accomplice

Foreword

Dr. Joseph W. Spelman, the state pathologist of Vermont and an associate professor in pathology at the University of Vermont, is a shrewd, cautious, level-headed investigator. He is a member of a group which, unfortunately, is all too small, a group made up of men who by training, aptitude and temperament are qualified to investigate homicides in a scientific manner, determining the cause and the time of death. What these men can discover by examining a dead body is startling to those who haven’t realized the strides made by science in the field of forensic medicine.

Dr. Spelman, like Dr. Richard Ford, head of the Harvard School of Legal Medicine and medical examiner in Boston, has spent a great deal of time preparing a collection of colored slides showing various aspects of deaths due to violence.

These men have amassed thousands of such slides, covering unusual gunshot wounds, the typical pattern of powder tattooing, wounds of exit and wounds of entrance, cases where murder was perpetrated under such circumstances that it appeared to be suicide, cases where suicides would almost certainly have been branded the victims of murder by less well-trained investigators.

These colored slides form a constantly increasing reference file which is of inestimable value in the detection of crime, although it may take years before prosecutors generally realize the extent to which their work can be aided by reference to such photographs.

Not only is Dr. Spelman interested in forensic pathology and in the detection of crime, but he has gone further and has devoted a lot of thought to the problem of penology, of punishment, of rehabilitation, of probation and parole.

Those who know Dr. Spelman best have high regard for his unusual abilities in correlating those legislative conflicts which inevitably arise when the modern medical examiner system supplants the older coroner system.

The thing that particularly impresses me about Dr. Spelman, however, is his objective, intellectual perspective. It is hard to tell just what makes for a well-balanced mind. Some men who are experts in one line, whose judgment is perfectly sound in dealing with the highly technical problems with which they are familiar, are likely to have a warped perspective when dealing with problems arising in fields which are strange to them.

This is not the case with Dr. Spelman. He has an alert mind which is remarkably well balanced and he has, what I can only define for want of a better term, intellectual perspective.

A short time ago, a rather remarkable group of men gathered at my ranch in Southern California. These men collectively knew more about murder than all of the fictional detectives in history put together. They were Dr. Richard Ford of Harvard, Dr. Russell Fisher of Baltimore, Dr. Samuel Gerber of Cleveland, Dr. LeMoyne Snyder of Lansing, Michigan, and Dr. Joseph Spelman of Vermont.

We sat up until the small hours of the morning discussing some of the off-the-record facts and the behind-the-scenes backgrounds of some of the famous cases in which these men had participated. (Each one of them had, at one time or another, been connected with cases which made newspaper headlines from coast to coast.)

For some years now, I have been trying, through these forewords and dedications, to make the reading public aware of the importance of forensic medicine and the necessity for greater public appreciation of this branch of medicine. The public should have a better understanding of what can be done by these expert forensic pathologists, who approach the detection of crime armed with well-developed powers of observation and a background of technical knowledge. Some of these men have even gone so far as to become attorneys at law after having secured their degrees as doctors of medicine. All of them have encyclopaedic knowledge of the technique of crime detection.

As it happened, four out of the five men who were gathered at my ranch that night had been the subjects of forewords and dedications.

I had from time to time heard a great deal about Dr. Spelman and had followed his career with interest. What I saw of him that evening interested me even more. I was particularly impressed with his astute appraisals, his sound, sane judgment. He is a quiet man, shy to the point of diffidence, and it is necessary to look beneath the surface in order to recognize his true character. He is competent, forceful, and his thinking is always logical.

So it gives me great pleasure to dedicate this book to my friend:

JOSEPH WORCESTER SPELMAN, M.D.

Erle Stanley Gardner