“Holmes acted on hunches,” he said. “And hunches play no part in my crime laboratory.”
Three brothers blew up a mail train in Oregon in 1923, killed four men, and got nothing. The manhunt went nowhere until Edward Oscar Heinrich read a pair of greasy overalls like a diary, down to a mail receipt in the pencil pocket. Forensic science got its proof of concept from a robbery that netted zero dollars. Nine thousand words and worth all of them.