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

Lieutenant Itzel said, “Oh, we’ve got the shotgun all right, but we didn’t bring the caps along. We left them on the mantel”.

I sent the detectives back. But in the meantime the evidence had disappeared.

When District Attorney Ryan heard the story, he said: “Well, I guess, just the same, we can ask the Grand Jury for an indictment”.

“Not quite yet”, I said. “I want to make a firing mechanism exactly like that of the bomb, with similar tube, springs, steel plugs, percussion cap and everything, and then explode a stick of dynamite against it and see whether we cannot get an exact reproduction of the fragments”.

This was direct scientific experimental method, and the District Attorney had sense enough to approve it.

I asked Lieutenant Itzel to obtain the dynamite and arrange a place where we could go out into the country to try it.

In the meantime I had learned that a spring similar to the one used in the bomb was used in the manufacture of the door-handle mechanism of Chevrolet cars. From a piece of identical spring, therefore, from a piece of tube cut from that bought from the garage in Washington, and from a piece of steel cylinder obtained in our own Johns Hopkins machine shop, I made a model of the mechanism as I conceived it.

Next day I was driven in a police car out into the country, to the place of a man who sold dynamite. Behind the house was a shed in which he kept the dynamite and detonators. We cut off half a stick, attached my model of the firing mechanism to it, dug a hole in the ground, placed the combination at the bottom, covering it over with a large box, lighted a fuse, retreated to a distance, and let it explode. Digging in the earth at the bottom of the hole, we discovered the wreckage of the firing mechanism which I had made. In every way it was identical with the wreckage of the firing mechanism of the original bomb. Everything had been exactly reproduced, including the flattening of the tube, the spiral grooves on the inside, and the U-shaped hooks formed by the fractures of the coils of the spring.

* * *

The grand jury returned an indictment of both the brothers. The trial resulted in a hung jury, but at a second trial Leroy was convicted of second-degree murder and was given ten years. A good deal of the technical evidence had been ruled out, and he escaped the death penalty. Herman had been indicted as an accessory, but the case against him was dropped, despite the fact that he had accompanied Leroy when the bomb was delivered and the crime had obviously been committed to get him out of a jam… .

A year later, further confirming Leroy’s guilt, a box was found, concealed in an abandoned flue of the garage in which he’d worked, containing eight sticks of dynamite wrapped in a newspaper dated just a little prior to the murder.

The old adage of the prophet without honor began to be dis- proven in Dr. Wood’s case. Already famous in New York, London, Berlin, Vienna, for his work in pure science, he was now regarded by the police and populace of Maryland as a genius and wizard in the realm of bombs and high explosives (which interested him only incidentally). Soon, consequently, he was begged to aid in the solution of further crimes and mysteries.

From time to time throughout the intervening years, and still today, a stock three-column headline, with variations, announces in the Baltimore and other big southeastern dailies to all and sundry:

DR. WOOD SEEKS CLUE

TO NEW DEATH BOMB

or:

FAMED JOHNS HOPKINS SCIENTIST

CALLED IN TO AID POLICE

or simply:

WOOD INVESTIGATES THE CASE

Under the headline is generally, again with variations, the picture of a gentleman seated in a laboratory, surrounded by microscopes and more mysterious instruments, sometimes gazing at a pile of jagged metal, sometimes looking out the window. The profile is startlingly like that of Sherlock Holmes — and always includes the pipe. The pipe is no pose. He’s given up cigars and never smoked cigarettes. Added to the keen Holmes, classic-actor profile, the pipe is just a piece of luck for the cameramen. These pictures appear also from time to time in New York and other metropolitan dailies when one of the investigations develops a national twist or angle, as was the case a few years ago, after which he was invited by J. Edgar Hoover to lecture before the G-man’s police training school.