Things That Make Your Skin Crawl

Of all the things that make your skin creep and crawl (if something or someone makes your skin crawl, you think they are very unpleasant or frightening), or make our teeth stand on edge, the majority stem from things we do to ourselves or each other. Many of us are irked by crimes and there are some catalysts for skin crawling, while not universal, they are certainly understandable.

There's a reason millions of people try to solve crossword puzzles each day. Amid the well-ordered combat between a puzzler's mind and the blank boxes waiting to be filled, there is satisfaction along with frustration. Even when you can't find the right answer, you know it exists. Puzzles can be solved; they have answers.

But a mystery offers no such comfort. It poses a question that has no definitive answer because the answer is contingent; it depends on a future interaction of many factors, known and unknown. A mystery cannot be answered; it can only be framed, by identifying the critical factors and applying some sense of how they have interacted in the past and might interact in the future. A mystery is an attempt to define ambiguities.

Puzzles may be more satisfying, but the world increasingly offers us mysteries. Treating them as puzzles is like trying to solve the unsolvable—an impossible challenge. But approaching them as mysteries may make us more comfortable with the uncertainties of our age. Solving puzzles is useful for detection. But framing mysteries is necessary for prevention.

In a recent issue of the New Yorker, writer Malcolm Gladwell made a fascinating observation about the Enron scandal. He noted that law-enforcement investigators and, later, prosecutors treated the case against former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling as a puzzle: Enron either lied or dissembled about its finances; either way, the public received too little information.

But a year before the scandal broke, Gladwell also noted, several financial analysts treated Enron as a mystery. Parsing the company's voluminous financial statements and quarterly findings, they realized that its vaunted profits—it claimed $111 billion in revenues in 2000—constituted a giant mystery: that is, the gains had not yet been realized, and depended on events that had not yet occurred. The company's actual cash flow was virtually nil. The analysts pursued the matter with Enron, and the company flew its accounting team to Dallas for a meeting. For the mystery-framers, the challenge was not too little information, but too much noise. A summary of a single set of Enron's complicated financial deals would have come to over a hundred thousand dense pages.

Ultimately, the mystery ended calamitously, as Enron's profit scenario failed to materialize, and the company collapsed. At that point, Enron became a puzzle, and the prosecutors' approach to solving it worked. After Skilling was convicted of fraud, he was sentenced to 24 years in prison, one of the most severe prison sentences ever given for a white-collar crime. You might say that the puzzle-solvers succeeded, in that criminality was punished. Or you might conclude that the mystery-framers failed, in that the crime was not prevented.

Forensic anthropologists analyze bones and artifacts to crack historical mysteries. Since the 1990s, the Lost Towns Project in Annapolis, Maryland—which aims to rediscover settlements that have disappeared from the landscape—has conducted excavations in Anne Arundel County, a social and political hub in colonial Maryland. Interns unearthed a skull in a 17th-century cellar. The skull belonged to a Caucasian male. Further analyses indicated the male was of European descent and 15 to 16 years old. The boy's spine and teeth were damaged from hard labor or disease. This profile fit that of an indentured servant in the Chesapeake Bay of the mid-17th century. During this time, young European men and women signed indenture contracts with Chesapeake planters, merchants and tradesmen. Typically, servants needed to work for at least four years to pay off the debt, but it was not uncommon for them to die during the harsh conditions of bondage.

Based on the artifacts surrounding the body—including a coin dated 1664 and a piece of window that has a date stamp of 1663—archaeologists determined that the boy had died between 1665 and 1675. That time frame corresponds to when laws were being passed against the private burial of indentured servants, to prevent owners from covering up instances of abuse. The boy's right wrist was fractured in a way that suggested he used his arm to block a strong blow shortly before his death. That injury, along with the awkward burial, points to a violent end.

The name Scotland Yard invokes the image of a foggy London street being patrolled by a detective in a trench coat puffing smoke from his pipe. But Scotland Yard has an easily muddled history, full of misnomers and controversy. Neither in Scotland, nor in a yard, it is the name of the headquarters of London's Metropolitan Police and, by association, has become synonymous with the force. The Yard doesn't serve the city either, but instead the Greater London area. With all this confusion, it's time to investigate the story of Scotland Yard and some of its most infamous cases, from Jack the Ripper to the 2005 London bombings.

The London police force was created in 1829 by an act introduced in Parliament by Home Secretary (similar to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior) Sir Robert Peel—hence the nickname "bobbies," for policeman. The new police superseded the old system of watchmen. By 1839 these men had replaced the Bow Street Patrols, who enforced the decisions of magistrates, and the River Police, who worked to prevent crime along the Thames.

The responsibility of organizing the new police force was placed on Colonel Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne, who occupied a private house at 4 Whitehall Place, the back of which opened onto a courtyard: the Great Scotland Yard. The Yard's name was inspired by its site, a medieval palace which housed Scottish royalty on their visits to London.

The staff of Scotland Yard was responsible for the protection of important individuals, community patrols, public affairs, recruitment and personnel management. When the Yard sent out its first plainclothes police agents in 1842, the public felt uncomfortable with these "spies" on the streets. But the force's role in several important cases, and the charisma of many of its detectives, helped it win the people's trust.

One such personality, Inspector Charles Frederick Field, joined the force upon its establishment in 1829. He became good friends with Charles Dickens, who occasionally accompanied constables on their nightly rounds. Dickens wrote a short essay about Field, "On Duty With Inspector Field," and used him as a model for the all-knowing, charming Inspector Bucket in his novel Bleak House. Field retired as a chief of the detective branch in 1852.

In 1877, four out of the five heads for the detective branch were brought to trial for conspiring with criminals in a betting scheme. In an effort to repair the force's tarnished reputation, Howard Vincent submitted a restructuring proposal to the force. Soon Vincent was appointed director of criminal investigations and he reorganized Scotland Yard, strengthening its central unit. And with that, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), a respected unit of plainclothes police detectives, was born.

The turn of the century saw many monumental events at Scotland Yard. Britain's "Bloody Sunday" occurred on November 13, 1887, when 2,000 police officers disrupted a meeting in Trafalgar Square organized by the Social Democratic Federation, resulting in more than 100 casualties. A few years later, the force moved to its new building on the Victoria Embankment. The premises became known as New Scotland Yard.

Also during this time, one of Scotland Yard's most durable detectives, Frederick Porter Wensley (a.k.a. "the weasel"), began his 40-year post. Wensley joined the force in 1888, and his career was highlighted with many landmark cases, including the murder of 32-year-old French woman Emilienne Gerard, also known as the "Blodie Belgium" case. On the morning of November 2, 1917, street sweepers found Gerard's torso along with a note reading "Blodie Belgium." Wensley questioned Gerard's lover, Louis Voisin, asking him to write the message "Bloody Belgium." Voisin made the same spelling error, sealing his guilt.

Earlier in Wensley's career, he did minor detective work on the infamous case of Jack the Ripper, which had gripped London's East End. Jack the Ripper was the self-proclaimed alias of the serial killer (or killers) responsible for five murders between 1888 and 1891. The officers of Scotland Yard were assigned to apprehend the suspect who was responsible for 11 attacks on prostitutes in the largely impoverished Whitechapel area. Police determined the killer's pattern—he would offer to pay for sex, lure the women away and slice their throats—but struggled to track down the criminal.

Without modern forensic technology, the officers of Scotland Yard, namely Inspector Frederick Abberline, relied on anthropometry—or identifying criminals by certain facial features, such as brow thickness or jaw shape. More than 160 people were accused of the Whitechapel murders, ranging from Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll to painter William Richard Sickert. The force received many letters from people claiming to be the killer; two in particular gave detailed facts and were signed "Jack the Ripper." Still, in 1892, with no more leads or murders, the Jack the Ripper case was officially closed.

Since its inception, Scotland Yard has always held a place in popular culture. The officers have appeared frequently as characters in the backdrop of mysteries, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. On television and in magazines today, Scotland Yard "bobbies" can be found standing stoically behind the royal family and other dignitaries that they are assigned to protect.

In 1967, the force moved once again to its present location, a modern 20-story building near the Houses of Parliament. The CID has become well-known for its investigative methods, primarily its fingerprinting techniques, which have been borrowed by the FBI. Today, Scotland Yard has roughly 30,000 officers patrolling 620 square miles occupied by 7.2 million citizens.

On July 22, 2005, during the investigation of the 2005 London bombings, police officers mistook Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes for a suicide bomber and fatally shot him. Menezes lived in one of the flats the police were staking out, wore bulky clothing that day and, according to police, resembled an Ethiopian suspect that was later arrested for the bombings. Members of the Metropolitan Police Authority, Scotland Yard's watchdog, denounced Commissioner Sir Ian Blair for "not knowing where the truth lay." The commissioner has repeatedly stated he will not resign over the killing.

Gregory F. Treverton. Risks and Riddles. . June 2007. Joseph Caputo. Solving a 17th-Century Crime. . March 2009. Jess Blumberg. A Brief History of Scotland Yard. . September 28, 2007.

For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago In 1924, Nathan Leopold, 19, and Richard Loeb, 18, both intellectually precocious scions of wealthy Jewish Chicago families, kidnapped and brutally murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in an attempt to commit the perfect crime. Historian Baatz, of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, replays the crime (on which Meyer Levin's 1956 novel Compulsion was based) from the killers' point of view, detailing their intense, often sexual, relationship that culminated in the murder. But they left a crucial piece of evidence and eventually confessed to the murder. Clarence Darrow cleverly had the boys plead guilty to avoid a trial, and the legendary defense attorney went head to head with State's Attorney Robert Crowe in a sentencing hearing before Judge John Caverly. Both sides trotted out psychiatrists to testify whether Leopold and Loeb were mentally ill. Darrow's gamble paid off in life sentences. Loeb was murdered in prison in 1936; Leopold was eventually paroled in 1958. Baatz gives an acute portrait of the two murderers bound together in a web of fantasy, but his heavy reliance on novelistic techniques (there!—he had done it) and meandering pacing prevent this from being as convincing as his exhaustive research deserves.

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