An extraordinary case of mistaken identity occurred some fifty years ago in Milwaukee, in the States, for the details of which I am indebted to a gentleman of that city, Mr. John W. Hinton. No fewer than ten reputable, straightforward witnesses swore positively to a dead body as that of a man with whom they were intimately acquainted and in more or less daily intercourse. They based their identification upon certain physical facts of the most unmistakable kind. They were not only satisfied as to the general features—the height, shape, size, the colour of the hair and eyes—but there were other peculiar and distinctive marks, such as scars, loss of teeth, a missing eye, that carried absolute conviction to the witnesses. Yet they were all absolutely and entirely wrong; completely deceived by the remarkable resemblance, the strange, almost incredible similarity of personal traits in two different people.
The case arose out of a mysterious crime. About 9 a.m. on the morning of the 14th of April, 1855, a party of rag-gatherers were seeking their harvest from the river just below one of the Milwaukee bridges. A mass of floating débris—chips, scraps of timber, and general rubbish—was collected in an eddy at the water’s edge, and amidst it a boy espied what he at first thought to be a bag, and afterwards a bundle of rags. He dragged it on shore with his boat-hook and began to examine it. All at once he dropped the parcel with a loud yell and took to his heels. Some of his more courageous fellows then tore it open and exposed its ghastly contents. Inside was the trunk of a human body, with the head all but severed, and held only by a few ligaments. The brains had been dashed out by a blow on the back of the skull, which made a deep indentation several inches long. A great gash had been made in the throat; the left eye protruded; both legs had been chopped off and were gone. The bottom of the bag, as the cover proved to be, had been frayed out or forced open by the action of the water, and the missing portions of the trunk had fallen through or been washed out of the aperture.
The Milwaukee police, headed by the Deputy-Sheriff, who had been at one time Chief of Police, were soon upon the scene. The cause of death was plain. The weapon used was indicated by the wounds; it was evidently an axe which had cut into the skull, and the protruding eye had been sliced out by the same instrument. Close scrutiny of the bag revealed one or two clues of importance. The bag was a wheat sack, with the name of “Vogt” stamped upon it; it had been securely tied by peculiar knots, which an expert eye recognised as French, knots tied by no one but Frenchmen, and French sailors to boot. Weights had evidently been inserted in the “slack” of the bag, which had been thus knotted, and portions of the rope remained attached to the bag. The weights were gone, and had no doubt been detached at the bottom of the river, with the result that the corpse had risen to the surface.
The first step towards the detection of the murderer was to identify the body, and trace back the victim’s habits, acquaintances, and surroundings. Here followed the marvellous mistake made by persons who on the face of it could not be believed to be in error. A mass of testimony was immediately forthcoming, all stating in the most explicit, positive terms that the deceased was a certain John Dwire, well known in Milwaukee. All who spoke did so definitely, declaring their reasons, which appeared conclusive. They knew Dwire well, they recognised his face and its features, his body, the colour of his hair and eyes. This last was a weak point, however. Dwire was said to have only one eye; the corpse had two. Although one had been nearly cut away by the axe stroke, it was still hanging to the head. The witnesses were not to be silenced by this discrepancy; they pointed triumphantly to other physical proofs: a scar or burn mark on the left cheek, the size of a sixpence, “a five-pointed starry scar” which all deposed that Dwire bore; again, he had lost two front teeth—one in the upper, the other in the lower jaw, just as was seen in the corpse; the whiskers, of the leg of mutton pattern, were Dwire’s; the bald head also, for hair was growing round the base of the skull only, curly, and of a sandy hue, as in the case of Dwire. There was a cut, made in shaving the chin, Dwire’s; scars on one finger of the left hand and on the thumb of the right hand, again Dwire’s; and a nose slightly inclined to one side, also Dwire’s. Such was the evidence of the witnesses, corroborating each other in every particular, the testimony of people who had known him for years, the woman of the house where he lodged, the keeper of the boarding-house where he fed, whom he had not paid in full, the associates who worked with him and frequented the same haunts.
Yet while the inquest before which these statements were made was proceeding, unequivocal evidence was adduced which entirely falsified the story as told. The John Dwire supposed to have been murdered was alive and well at no great distance from Milwaukee. A whisper to this effect had been put about, and some of the officials, another deputy-sheriff, and the city marshal travelled to a point higher up the river, some sixteen miles distant, where Dwire had been seen at work since the discovery of his supposed corpse in the stream. He was living near Kemper’s Pier, and had been there uninterruptedly for months—since the previous Christmas, indeed. Had the Court hesitated to accept this startling news, all possible doubt must have disappeared by the next incident. John Dwire himself walked into the court, saying with some humour, “Lest anyone here should still think I’m dead I have come in person to assure him that I am not the corpse found in the river last Saturday morning.”
His reappearance, of course, dumbfoundered all present, more particularly those who had sworn so positively to his mortal remains. It had another and more beneficial result: it saved an innocent man from arrest and probable conviction. The first act of the police on the mistaken identification of the body had been to commence a search in certain low haunts where Dwire had at times been seen, and they had come upon an axe recently used lying on a wood-pile in the possession of a French sailor, commonly called “Matelot Jack,” who was the bar tender of a drinking-shop. The Frenchman had disappeared, but suspicion fell upon another foreigner, a German, who was an associate of Dwire’s, and had accompanied him when the latter left Milwaukee. This German had come into the lodging-house asking for Dwire’s clothes; he came twice, the second time armed with a letter from Dwire authorising him to receive the clothes, but they were impounded for moneys owing. Steps were being taken to arrest this German, and had not Dwire shown up it might have gone hard with the suspected person. It had been in Dwire’s mind at one time to leave the neighbourhood, and had he done so the case against the German would have been pretty complete.
That there had been a murder still remained self-evident, but it was never positively known by whom it was committed, nor who was the actual victim. Some years later a man was arrested on suspicion as a thief; he was carrying a bag heavily laden, and it was found to contain a number of copper articles, all of them stolen. The bag was inscribed with the same name, “Vogt,” as that picked up in the river. A farmer named Vogt now came forward and stated that about the time of the picking up of the unknown corpse he had sent his carter in with a load of wheat packed in bags such as the two mentioned. The man was supposed to have delivered his load, driven his team outside the city, the waggon filled with the empty sacks, and then made off with the price of the wheat. A more probable theory was that he had been murdered and rifled, his body being then thrust into one of his own bags, which was thrown into the river. The case was never carried through to the end, and neither the thief who was caught with the second bag nor the French sailor, Matelot Jack, was tried, presumably from want of sufficiently clear evidence to warrant prosecution.
A SCOTTISH CASE.
Our next case of mistaken identity occurred in Scotland many years ago, when a farmer’s son, a respectable youth, was charged with night-poaching on the evidence of a keeper, who swore to him positively. It was a moonlit night, but cloudy. Other witnesses were less certain than the keeper, but they could speak to the poacher’s dress and appearance, and they saw him disappearing towards the farmer’s house.