Doctor Wood. Modern Wizard of the Laboratory: The Story of an American Small Boy Who Became the Most Daring and Original Experimental Physicist of Our Day-but Never Grew Up

Furthermore, it seemed to me evident that it must have been originally a staple article or part of some staple article of machinery, extemporized as a container for the explosive. The next problem was to find out where it had come from, whether from a plumber’s shop, an automobile factory, an engine factory, or where. This part, of course, was up to the police. I was overoptimistic perhaps about their skill in running such clues to earth. Captain Gegan asked if I had any further suggestions. I called his attention to the fact that all the iron sash weights had serial numbers and two letters cast in relief on their surfaces. I advised detailing a squad of police to scatter to every iron foundry within a radius of miles, with samples of the window weights, and to see whether any foundry could recognize them or identify their “vintage”. Their age might show whether they came from a building that had been torn down or from a new one in process of construction. These might all be basic clues when suspects began to be rounded up and when their backgrounds, locales, and occupations were checked. I don’t know what obstacles and dead ends the police ran into — but as you know, the perpetrator was never found. Since the police were aided by Burns and by the Department of Justice, and since rewards totaling over $80,000 were offered, it is a mystery they never got anywhere.

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Dr. Wood recalls a little argument he had with Burns, Senior, concerning the window weights. Burns felt Wood was wrong in believing they could possibly have come from a new building under construction, or from an old building, either, for that matter. Burns insisted they had been on a junk pile, subjected to the weather for many years. In support of that theory, he pointed to yellowish ingrained discolorations on some of them. “But”, Wood had insisted, “that’s from the sandstone walls of the Morgan bank they hit”.

Young Sherman Burns had said, “That’s just what I told papa”. Subsequent analysis of the discolorations showed that Dr. Wood and Sherman were right.

Some years later Captain Gegan, of the Bomb Squad, wrote a magazine article entitled “How I Reconstructed the Wall Street Bomb”. Dr. Wood never objects, any more than does the fictionally famous “Dr. Thorndyke”, when the police follow up suggestions he has given them and make good use of his ideas as their own. So, indeed, had Captain Gegan reconstructed it — after Wood had found the overlooked fragments and shown him how.

The Wall Street bomb was only a beginning. Wood was later called in to help solve, and did solve, the famous Brady Bomb Case, in Maryland — generally referred to in the annals of mysterious crimes as the Candy-Box Murder. In this case, Dr. Wood not only reconstructed the entire mechanism of the bomb, but turned advisory detective himself, and followed to their ends the clues which brought the murderer to justice.

Both the crime and its solution by Dr. Wood — if one merely pasted together the columns of space devoted to it by the Baltimore and Washington papers, without the inside story given me by Wood himself — had every dramatic element for a super detective novel, in which Dorothy Sayers and Austin Freeman (who invented Wood’s best replica in fiction) might collaborate to put an end to all scientific detective novels — with Lord Peter Wimsey left out. Here’s the true-life story reconstructed with the help of Dr. Wood, supplemented by reference to newspaper files.

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Seat Pleasant is a sparsely populated, unimpressive rural hamlet, with modest houses, on the Carmody Road in Maryland, near the District of Columbia line. One of these houses was occupied toward the end of December, 1929, by a Mrs. Anna Buckley, with a family of small children, whose Christmas had been meager. On the evening of the day after Christmas, just before dark, she had chanced to go out on the front porch and remembered later that there was nothing on the porch and nothing near it on the ground. Her front yard was bare clay. Next morning when she went out on the porch again between seven and eight o’clock, there was a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with white string. It looked like a box of candy or cookies or something of the sort, left by a neighbor for her children as a belated Christmas gift. When she picked it up she was disappointed to find written on it, or rather hand printed, in bluish black ink, the name “Naomi Hall”.