PROOF FROM ASHES

Evening Star, Issue 22596, 13 March 1937, Page 10

PROOF FROM ASHES

FEAT BY DETECTIVES BUSHED BOND RESTORED Working in a sealed room which, grew hotter and hotter until the thermometer touched IfiOdcg, two young detectives of the New York Police Research Bureau—Thomas Paolo and John A. Stevenson—have worked the miracle of turning a heap of muddy ashes into a legible document which convicted a forger. It is the most remarkable piece of crime detection yet achieved. They started with a heap of tiny fragments of paper-ash. The black ashes, each the size of a tea leaf, had been found in the mud, mashed down by two rainstorms, and carefully emptied into an old tomato tin. HUNDREDS OF PHOTOGR APHS. In their laboratory—sealed to exclude draughts, since even the air current set up by a passer-by might ruin the ash—the two detectives photographed each fragment. Doggedly they toiled, making dozens, scores, hundreds of photographs of the ashes—using surgical needles to coax each fragment into position. The pictures were magnified hundreds of times, re-photographed in red, blue, and green lights on ultra-sensi-tive plates. Curled and bent fragments were photographed from half-a-dozen angles. And from the heap of muddy ash the detectives built up a jigsaw which, after days and nights of weary toil, at last became a 5,000d0l bond of the Langcndorff Baking Company.

Paolo and Stevenson, their pale faces streaked with sweat, looked silently at one another in the unbearably hot atmosphere of their sealed room. They knew that' this company had never issued 5,000d0l bonds. And they knew that Walter A. Rath, bourne, property agent, then in Sing Sing Prison on a forgery charge, had not only justified his boast that ho could smuggle a forged engraving plate out of prison, but by a stupid mistake had convicted himself. The prelude to the two detectives uncanny feat of reconstruction started when Rathbourne was arrested for trying to sell bonds which were proved to be clever forgeries. Rathbourne;, while awaiting trial in the Tombs prison, boasted to a prisoner in the next cell that, even if the police sent him to Sing Sing, he would bo able to engrave bonds and smuggle the plates out to his associates. INFORMER GUIDES' POLICE. The other convict told the prison authorities and Rathbourne was sent to Sing Sing on a sentence up to five years. By some means still unknown Rathbourne actually smuggled forged plates outside. Detectives were set to catch the gang who circulated thq forged bonds. At the last moment the forgers took fright. One who was caught turned State’s evidence. When asked where the forged bonds were, he took the Eolice to a piece of deserted ground on ong Island and showed them fragments of ashes in the mud. Carefully the police scooped up the ashes in a tomato tin and handed over the exhibit to Detectives Paolo and Stevenson, who began a task which even experts declared beyond human power. In this way thousands of separata pieces were photographed and fitted into a complex jigsaw—and finally tfaa bond, with its lettering quite legible, was recreated.