The Power of Circumstantial Evidence

The case against Casey Anthony is almost completely circumstantial evidence. Many have voiced their personal concerns over this matter as they interpret circumstantial evidence to be weak. However, many a cunning murderer has been convicted of his crime based solely on circumstantial evidence – even when there is no body to definitively prove a death. In fact, convictions based on circumstantial evidence have steadily increased since the 1960′s. One review listed more than 250 “bodiless” murders that were taken to trial. That same study found that less than 10% of these cases resulted in an acquittal, or a reversal of decision on appeal. In certain instances, circumstantial evidence can be deemed to have more veracity than eye witness testimony.

The earliest murder conviction based on circumstantial evidence, and without the body of the victim, I have found reference to in U.S. criminal history was the case of Adolph Leutgert. Leutgert was a successful sausage maker in Chicago in the 1890′s. Leugert’s wife, Louisa, disappeared and was ultimately reported missing by the family. During the investigation of her disappearance the investigator, Captain Herman Schuettler, became convinced Leutgert had murdered his wife. This suspicion was based solely on curious behavior by Leutgert just prior to Louisa’s disappearance. He had ordered a large amount of potash and arsenic for his sausage factory, which had been shut down for 10 weeks for remodeling and reorganization. He had been seen by a factory worker with his wife, at the factory, at about 10:30 pm the evening she was last seen alive. Upon meeting that employee in the factory, Leutgert sent him on an errand and gave him the rest of the night off.

Schuettler became convinced Leutgert had boiled his wife’s body in acid and cremated her in the factory furnace. He had a vat cleaned next to the furnace and within the greasy bottom he found one small piece of bone and two rings; one with the inscription “L.L.” Without being able to conclusively prove Louisa was even dead, the prosecution was able to successfully argue Leutgert’s guilt of her murder. Leutgert was convicted of murdering his wife in 1898.

While there undoubtedly were several more convictions in the years between 1898 and 1955, such as the famous case of Chester Gillette’s murder of Grace Brown upon which the novel An American Tragedy and the movie A Place in the Sun are based, the next well-known conviction based solely on circumstantial evidence is L. Ewing Scott. Scott had wormed his way into the upper crust of society by pretending to be something he was not, and presenting himself as such. He landed the big score when he married the widow Evelyn Murper of the wealthy Brewer family.

May 15, 1955 is the last time Evelyn was seen alive. Like Ms. Leutgert, she disappeared from the face of the earth. The similarities between the Scott case and the Casey Anthony case are striking. Scott did not report his wife missing. However the day after she was last seen alive he phoned her beautician to cancel her weekly appointment. When the salon worker asked if this cancellation was for that day’s appointment, Scott stated yes “and all the future ones, too.”

The conviction, based solely on circumstantial evidence which again, could not prove that Evelyn Scott was dead, rested as much on L. Ewing Scott’s telling behavior after his wife’s disappearance as it did anything else. Scott’s behavior, which included not reporting her missing, spending large sums of her money, and statements made such as that to the beautician, were successfully presented by the prosecution as being indicative that Scott knew Evelyn was dead and she was never coming back.

In 1955, unlike today, trained cadaver dogs were not part of the daily tool set available to investigators. During the investigation into Evelyn’s disappearance detectives resorted to driving long rods in the backyard of the Scott property and would kneel down and sniff the holes trying to detect decomposition gases. The search of the property brought no physical evidence that anything suspicious had happened to Evelyn. Not until a dogged detective who had worked a prior case where a man dumped his murdered wife’s body on a neighbor’s property decided he would return to the Scott residence. Just beyond the back property line was an incinerator. The detective raked and poked around in the dense foliage until he found something: a dental bridge, some small female toiletries, some pills, two pair of glasses, and inside the incinerator a partially burned pair of women’s underwear. There were no signs of Evelyn’s remains being cremated in the incinerator other than these incidentals that were discovered.

The prosecution was able to bring in Evelyn’s dentist who testified the bridge was one he had made for her previously. Evelyn’s eye doctor testified the glasses were of the same frame and prescription as what he had prescribed for her. The pills were found to be the same type Evelyn took for diverticulitis. Scott did offer an excuse concerning the partial remains of the women’s underwear. Yes, they were his wife’s, but he had burned them because they were soiled and “smelled foul”.

Possibly of more importance than the fact Scott’s behavior seems to be the template of Casey Anthony’s behavior after Caylee “went missing”, are the statements and decisions rendered concerning L. Ewing Scott’s conviction. The prosecuting attorney, Leavy, in his closing arguments explained the power of circumstantial evidence to the jury:

In no circumstantial case does one bit of evidence stand alone in establishing a corpus delicti of murder, establish the essential elements of murder, or the guilt of the defendant. You have to take one circumstance that may be meaningless standing alone, then you take another circumstance that may be meaningless standing alone, and the two together may not give meaning. But maybe there’s another circumstance, a fourth, a fifth. When you take all of the circumstances together, they are a mosaic, a picture, of the corpus delicti of murder. They establish together each link in the chain of circumstances that is inconsistent with any rational hypothesis of innocence.

By your good reasoning, by your good judgment, you will come to the conclusion that Evelyn Scott is deceased…and that the defendant is the perpetrator. No, we can’t say that she was suffocated, chloroformed, poisoned, or whatever, but that by some criminal agency she met foul play. And there is only one person, with the exclusion of all others, that the evidence points to, and that is L. Ewing Scott.

L. Ewing Scott was convicted of murdering his wife.

Of course, he appealed his conviction, and there are interesting legal statements made by the appellate court upon reviewing his case. Scott contended there was insufficient evidence to establish the corpus delicti of murder. But the California District Court of Appeal thought otherwise. As Marilee Strong states, the appellate court’s decision upheld the standard set forth in previous decisions that circumstantial evidence was, indeed, sufficient “to prove guilt if it is so convincing as to preclude every reasonable hypothesis of innocence.” Strong points out that the appellate court’s decision sent a clear message that just because a murderer is clever enough to eliminate the body and physical evidence of their victim does not give them “a free pass”.

In its decision the appellate court wrote:

Appellant contends that since no body was produced, no direct evidence of death was introduced and there was no confession, the people’s case was based on mere suspicion and conjecture. If this contention is valid it would mean that a man could commit a secret murder and escape punishment if he was able to completely destroy the body of his victim, however complete and convincing the circumstantial evidence of guilt. No one would say that the law should be powerless to uncover such a crime and inflict punishment unless the accused had made a confession.

Every circumstance in evidence respecting the conduct of appellant tended in some degree to shed light upon the question [of] whether he believed his wife would return, or knew she could not return. There were many incidental questions to be answered. What did the evidence prove as to appellant’s character? Would he have been capable of taking the life of the woman who had been his wife of six years? Why would he have wanted to be rid of her? What were the reasonable deductions from his conduct after May 16th with respect to his state of mind? Did it indicate that he knew his wife was dead? Presumably the jury gave answers to these questions that were unfavorable to appellant.

The jury could reasonably have found, and no doubt did find, that every statement of appellant, every act and failure to act, tended to prove that he was pleased to be rid of his wife. We can only conclude that appellant has felt immune from a conviction of murder in the belief that his wife’s body lies where it cannot be found.

Shinn, presiding judge over the appeal stated concerning the circumstantial evidence that it “was as strong and convincing as a confession would have been”. But more importantly Shinn stated:

He [Scott] has evolved from the evidence no theory of innocence; the jury could not find a theory, nor can we….They would have to rest their belief upon some mythical or miraculous hypothesis, since it could not find support in any reasonable deduction from the established facts. But the law is reason; it does not proceed upon fantasy or remote and unrealistic possibilities.

And in this last statement we see the present state of Casey Anthony’s defense. Resting on spurious, wild accusations of a murderous, conniving WoW-playing meter reader who some how absconded with a baby, the family’s duct tape, the trunk of Casey’s car and a long-term plan to…

…collect $5000?

The physical evidence in Casey’s trunk has already outweighed the physical evidence of either the Leutgert or Scott trial. Neither man was ever directly shown to have possession of their wife’s body after it was deceased. The circumstantial evidence from Casey’s trunk alone has given more evidence of her physical custody of Caylee’s dead body than either of these men faced at trial.

No matter what the circumstances are at this moment…Casey has no theory of innocence. Her current defense is one of “fantasy and remote, unrealistic possibilities.”

A special thank you to reader Silverspnr for looking over the legal issues of the L. Ewing Scott case. I look forward to reading her comments on this article.

Valhall.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/27/AR2008062702867.html

http://www.prairieghosts.com/sausage.html

http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/1/31/131526.shtml

Strong, Marilee, Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives, 2009, San Francisco, CA, Jossey-Bass.