Underground History: The Razor's Edge

As retold with more detail by Pepper Trail and Edgard Espinoza, the botched robbery of a Southern Pacific train at Tunnel 13 high in the Siskiyou Mountains is not worth commemorating just for our regional brush with true crime fame, but because this case inadvertently created modern American criminal forensics.

As part of a collaborative effort to mark a century since the Tragedy at Tunnel 13, the Underground History team has been working on a series of podcasts to explore the legacy of this crime. We will be speaking with the Smithsonian National Postal Museum and the National Postal Inspectors Archives about the crime and history of mail cars on trains, which led to postal clerk Elvyn Daugherty’s untimely death in the robbery. The postal inspectors, the law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service, worked with the Southern Pacific Railroad in a multi-year, international effort to track down the three DeAutremont Brothers responsible for the grizzly crime. As a result of their role in this complex investigation which led to millions of wanted posters plastered around the world and a fateful decision to loop in Berkeley chemistry professor Edward Oscar Heinrich, this case is of great importance to the history of that agency. While crime labs existed in Europe at the time, Heinrich pioneered the practice in the U.S. by performing a variety of tests that helped identify the DeAutremont brothers as the would-be-train robbers-turned-murderers. His careful examinations deducted information about the men and their work, and a forgotten receipt deep in a pocket provided names.

The Tragedy at Tunnel 13 project has also brought us to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory here in Ashland. The lab specializes in wildlife crime around the world, and also considers this case to be seminal in the formation of their discipline. In an effort to showcase the role of forensics in this hundred-year-old crime (and as an excuse to shoehorn myself into the lab to play with fancy toys) we asked Anna Sloan, curator of the Southern Oregon Historical Society (SOHS), to join us at the lab and bring by a straight razor held in the collections and attributed to the DeAutremont brothers prior to the robbery. Deputy laboratory director Barry Baker and forensic scientist Jen Tinsman helped us test the razor using a range of specialized equipment. No spoilers here (you have to listen to the show to hear what we found!), but we gathered evidence from the razor that could date to the era of the crime. This process helped us better understand forensic techniques, and as a bonus, the results provided information about the material and condition of the artifact that will help SOHS better preserve it for the future.

While our stint in the forensics lab showcased some new-fangled technology that would make Heinrich jealous, many of these machines really have just refined processes that could have been used a century ago. While we now have DNA, fingerprint databases, and X-ray fluorescence testing (a non-destructive analytical technique used to determine the elemental composition of materials) that have vastly expanded the forensic tool kit, the techniques used to catch and convict the DeAutremont brothers have largely survived the test of time.