Forensic Histories of Stained Clothing: The Coppet Murder and the Bollo Poisoning

Content Warning: 

Please be advised that this article contains graphic details of actual forensic investigations and harm to the persons involved including assault, poisoning, violent bodily harm, homicide and femicide. 

“The stains, the drips and seepages, which colour our clothes, are perhaps the most explicit manifestation of the intermingling of the self and the world…” 

Sampson, Ellen. “Stains.” Worn: Footwear, Attachment and the Affects of Wear (2019): 149. Bloomsbury. 

On Friday, May 2nd, 1913, just over a year before the start of World War I, a Swiss Morel mushroom hunter discovered something much less pleasant than tasty fungi on his foraging trip. In the underbrush of a ravine, he found a young man’s body lying only a hundred yards from the scenic lakeshore path between Lausanne and Geneva (see Figure 1). Located near a river on the property ironically named des Vues, this crime was not a pretty sight. The local judge, a Monsieur Collioud, summoned Rodolphe- Archibald Reiss (1875-1929) to the by-then trampled crime scene to document and investigate the grisly murder. Reiss was an art photographer, chemist, physicist, and early proponent of photography as a forensic tool (see Figure 2).[1] His team photographed the scene from multiple angles, but Reiss was frustrated because police had moved the body and the rural judge had not fenced off the crime scene; the unguarded and muddy scene had been “ransacked” by the public, destroying potentially useful traces of the struggle.[2] Based on the report he wrote, we can assume that Reiss’s photographic tableau with the body below was re-staged for effect. The man’s corpse was then transported to the forensic laboratory at the University of Lausanne. He would have been carefully undressed and meticulously examined, photographed, and documented. Reiss reported his findings, from the blood encrusted on a black wool fibre the man held in his right hand, to the abundance of the victim’s own chestnut-coloured curly hair. Because no one had stepped forward to declare him missing, it was hoped that clothing and accessories would furnish important clues to his identity. Over the next few weeks, the police launched a desperate hunt to identify both the unknown murder victim and his killer, or more likely killers. 

Long before the advent of DNA analysis, forensic experts, judges, and juries examined clothing implicated in crime, making implicit and explicit moral judgements about stained garments and the people who wore them. Unravelling the complex moral and spatial choreographies of violent acts after the fact required painstaking documentation and careful interpretation. Yet these often-heartbreaking accounts, images, and documents rarely provided satisfying resolutions for the victims of crime. 

Figure 1

Rodolphe- Archibald Reiss, Crime scene with unknown man, murdered in 1913. Since the body was removed, this may have been a photograph “re”staging the body where it was originally found. May 1913. (UNIL Archives Photographiques Reiss). https:// collections.unil.ch/ idurl/1/56255 

Figure 2

Left : Jongh, Francis de, [Portrait de Reiss], n.d. Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire de Lausanne, Collection photographique Reiss – Police scientifique, IS_5475_1_2_09, https://collections.unil.ch/idurl/1/44464. Right: Reiss, Rodolphe-Archibald. « The Training of a Modern Detective » The Pall Mall Magazine, 39, no. 168 (Apr 1907): 456-461. British Periodicals.

In the context of these crimes investigated by Archibald Reiss, stains revealed otherwise private and personal narratives around queerness, alcoholism, and homicidal intentions. These cases are detailed illustrations of how stains operate in broader social and judicial contexts, both literally marking shame and stigma, but also serving as a register of class, gender, and vestimentary norms; some that have long since disappeared, as well as some that are still with us. At this time in Switzerland, where Napoleonic Law held sway, criminal investigations involved the interrogation of both live suspects when available, and the objects that came into contact with them. In crimes involving assault or sexual violence, clothing was a key “material” witness. Not incidentally, Reiss’s meticulous attention to details of cloth and clothing are reflected in his own stylish and carefully engineered sartorial self-presentation, including his trademark boater hat and lit cigar. Clothing was both a personal and professional subject of expertise for Reiss. In a popular article he wrote for the British magazine Pall Mall on “The Training of a Modern Detective,” Reiss cites Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, noting that truly modern and “scientific” policing required investigators to become, like the novel’s hero, “philosophers in the matter and mystery of clothes…”[3] 

This article focuses on two of Reiss’s early twentieth-century investigations involving compelling stain evidence: the so-called “Assassinat de Coppet” or “Coppet Murder,” also called the “Crime de Founex” (1913), and “L’Affaire Bollo,” “Bollo Affair,” or “Bollo Poisoning” (1910). In the early twentieth century, Reiss and his team unravelled narratives of violence by painstakingly documenting and interpreting the clothing of victims, suspects, and in one case, a perpetrator.[4] Moral and social imperatives at the time demanded that women cleanse clothing stains because of their associations with shame, disgust, and the abject body. The forensic fascination with exposing the potential meanings of stains led mostly male investigators like Reiss to seek out and reveal vestigial traces of these seepages. These two case studies highlight the physical materiality, and the often morally ambiguous, even mysterious nature of clothing as forensic evidence. 

This section gives a broader historical overview of how past and present forensic investigators worked and continue to work with stains. It contextualizes the importance of stains as trace evidence to help explain their pivotal role in the two detailed early twentieth case studies that follow. Clothing implicated in crime is rarely clean or pristine. Blood and bodily fluids splatter it from without and seep and stain it from within. Inseparable from moral judgments, stains made by bodily fluids in particular can evoke powerful visceral and emotional reactions, including feelings of disgust and repulsion. Yet, tainted dress and the ways in which it reflected soiled identities was a source of fascination in early forensics. 

The job of forensics was and is to extract bodies from the stains they produce. It wants to label the seepages, pinpoint the substance of a stain, identify where and whom it comes from, and when and how it was deposited. Since the nineteenth century, stains have become even more powerful agents in the solving of crime Sometimes, the blood shed by a victim on their own or another’s clothing can explain exactly what occurred during a struggle or lead directly back to the aggressor. Even without specialized forensic approaches to clothing, the fact that a suspect had attempted to wash blood or other stains from their clothing was perceived as potential evidence of their guilt. 

Criminal investigation is one of the few realms in which physical stains are actually valued, recorded, and preserved rather than immediately cleansed. In forensics, stains are a priceless repository of evidence; their nature and placement can bear witness to what might have happened at a crime scene and who might have been involved. Forensic clothing experts Jane Moira Taupin and Chesterene Cwiklik write extensively on stains and deposits in their book Scientific Protocols for Forensic Examination of Clothing.[5] As the authors argue, the investigator must distinguish between activities that produced stains during an incident, which “can shed light on what transpired, in which locations, by what means and in what order,” but they must also be distinguished from deposits that “reflect the banal accidents of daily life, including spilled wine or coffee, sweat stains, mustard on a tie, muddy hems or blood from a shaving nick.”[6] The site for this scrutiny is a scientific laboratory. In the best of cases, experts painstakingly record them photographically, map them through drawings, and analyze them chemically, biologically, and now often genetically. On a recent visit to the Forensic Department of the Toronto Police Service, I was able to observe that clothing from each case was carefully examined, hung, dried, documented, and preserved in purpose-built closets to aid in ongoing investigations.[7] Despite the attention given to stains and the fact that scientists and medical experts are able to tell new and more complex, if still problematic stories around identification with them, they do not always bring justice to victims. DNA evidence and investigative genetic genealogy are now increasingly used to solve mystifying cold cases—cases that are often decades old, thanks to the stains that been held safely in the fibres of clothing and cloth preserved in locked evidence rooms. Yet, in many cases, the backlog, mismanagement or loss of cloth and clothing has meant that cases have no resolution for their victims. This lack of procedure and care for garments is central in the recounting of the sexual assault of academic and author Laura Levitt, who courageously and eloquently tells the story of her own unsolved rape in 1989. In her book The Objects that Remain (2020), Levitt’s work poetically recounts her journey as she looked “carefully at the rites of custody in all their detail.” She considers how a criminal act stripped her of her intimate clothing and protective coverings. Despite what forensic analysis is capable of, evidence in the form of a pair of her soiled sweatpants and sheets provided to the Atlanta Police vanished without a trace: they were probably never tested, nor have they led to the identification of a suspect, much less to a conviction.[8]

Genetic evidence in the form of DNA testing was not available to historical forensic experts like Reiss. Like any “scientific” technique, DNA testing can be flawed or contaminated, though properly collected and analyzed stains can often furnish telling evidence even after perpetrators have attempted to clean their own clothing. It can be possible to demonstrate that “washed” blood is still present in microscopic amounts. In one twenty-first century case, a scientist examined the leather jacket worn by a suspected attacker. A young man was held from behind and cut across the throat. There was no visible blood remaining on the suspect’s leather jacket, but because leather is usually “wiped clean rather than laundered in a washing machine,” the scientist used a stereomicroscope to look “in the seams and crevices… and found blood on the sewing thread in the seams of the garment’s arms,” exactly where one would expect when a victim is restrained from behind.[9] In another case involving a violent rape and beating, a suspect who had deliberately disposed of his bloodstained clothing was caught because he kept his shoes. Police handed them over to a laboratory, where a scientist noticed that although the immaculately white tennis shoes had probably been washed in a machine, the laces were now a tan colour, leading them to investigate further. By consulting with a local shoe store to confirm that the laces would originally have been white and examining “all of the fabric surfaces and threads with a stereomicroscope,” the scientist found “reddish brown stains on the threads at the side soles.”[10] These brown marks turned out to be blood and matched the DNA profile of the victim,[11] thus linking the suspect with a crime he had denied committing.[12] 

As these two cases suggest, stains are persistent. Particles of blood on the threads of a leather jacket and tennis shoes prove that clothing and textiles are “inherently able to catch and collect” and are indeed stains’ “preferred support.”[13] 

Blood, vomit, semen, urine, fecal matter, sweat, and other fluids on cloth and clothing are linked to deeply culturally ingrained and often taboo concepts of pollution and bodily abjection, and are all the more freighted in the context of crime. Both in everyday life and in advertisements for laundry detergent, underarm deodorants, and menstrual products laughably imbued with blue “blood,” we seek to prevent or remove any evidence of our bodily fluids from cloth as soon as humanly possible, washing and perfuming them out of existence. With notable exceptions, fashion designers and exhibitions seek to present flawless, literally immaculate or “unspotted” clothing and accessories for display on the catwalk or in the vitrine of a museum. A person’s ability to present an impeccable sartorial front to the public is and has been linked to the size of their income, wardrobe, and access to laundering. Indeed, stains make historical class and gender dynamics visible in fascinating ways. These dynamics are individually and historically contingent—what is considered a morally and/or physically “shameful” stain in one time or place or by one individual is contingent on multiple factors. As Luna Donezal makes clear in her book The Body and Shame (2015), “Shame is a fundamental fact of human life; a necessary part of embodied experience, it reaches the foundation of who we are, simultaneously revealing that which is most personal—our hopes and aspirations—while encompassing the generalities of our social world—culturally sanctioned norms and mores.”[14] Forensics tries to abstract these personal and cultural experiences of shame or shamelessness into schematic diagrams and scientific terms, but re-reading forensic approaches reveals a rich and often indelibly messy web of personal and social entanglements. 

Technologies drawn from medicine, physics, and chemistry were developed over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and applied to unravelling the mysteries of soiled cloth. Though the police and judicial processes around stains varied considerably in different geographical locales, historians of forensics Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton explore the history of a field dubbed “criminalistics” and the detailed analysis of trace evidence developed by figures including Hans Gross in Austria and Czechoslovakia and Edmond Locard in Lyon, France. In the United Kingdom, these “continental” approaches were incorporated into manuals and police training by the 1920s and 1930s.[15] In the British system, the medically trained forensic pathologist had been at the centre of the judicial system’s approach to the bodies involved in cases of homicide, for example. In continental Europe, a broader range of trace evidence, including stains, had long been in the purview of investigators like Reiss, Gross, and Locard, who had been trained in a wide range of scientific disciplines. 

One of the first comprehensive manuals aimed at “Magistrates, Police Officers, and Lawyers” was the hefty thousand-page tome by Hans Gross entitled Criminal Investigation: A Practical Handbook. Originally published in German in 1893, it was revised in 1904, translated into Russian and Spanish, and constantly re-printed for the next few decades. The edition I quote from was translated into English in 1906 by two British barristers in Madras, and “adapted to Indian and Colonial practice,”[16] demonstrating the imperialist dimensions of forensics and the exportation of Western scientific methods and methodologies to colonial contexts. In his section on “Traces of Blood,” Gross notes one extreme case “in which the murderer had made himself entirely naked, so that his clothes might show no marks of blood,” but nude murders were rare, and he cites a plethora of cases in which blood on clothing played a key role in reconstructing the crime and eliciting a confession from the perpetrator.[17] These included a case where after a medical post mortem focusing only on the victim’s undressed body, his shirt was examined as well and revealed “a very characteristic stain of blood” which seemed to be caked on the cloth near the shoulder. Experts concluded that the murderer had knelt on his victim’s shoulder and “impressed” the mark of his bloodstained knee on the shirt, leaving a mark that matched the “identity of the texture of the cloth of his (washed) trousers.” One imagines that the trousers must have had a very distinctive texture to have become, as Gross notes, “the strongest piece of evidence” linking victim and suspected murderer.[18] 

The most interesting observation Gross makes, and one that reveals gendered roles in relation to clothing and its maintenance, regards blood and washing. He calls any attempt to wash clothing in the context of crime “always a suspicious circumstance,” but noted that many people contented themselves with merely scraping off encrusted stains, or only washing parts of garments and footwear that were visible, forgetting “the inside of the pockets, clothes of dark colour, or dark stains not easily noticed.”[19] Many men accidentally provided hard evidence of their guilt by washing their bloody clothes in hot water, which “fixes the colouring matter, making it almost impossible to remove. Women know this better than men, for they have often to get rid of the blood of menstruation staining their linen; they therefore rarely commit the fault of washing out blood in hot water, which men regularly do in the hope of better success.”[20]

Even when washing appeared to successfully remove stains, sometimes blood particles were deposited in hems, seams, sewing cotton and in the folds of the cloth, leading Gross to advise investigators to “unstitch the hems and seams in order to the more carefully observe them”[21] (see Figure 3). Keeping clothes clean in the nineteenth century was a constant battle against dirt, horse excrement and other polluting substances. While grooms and coachmen might have groomed horses, cleaned and polished tack and carriages, and valets cleaned and brushed gentlemen’s suits and coats, soap and water laundering were the province of women. 

Figure 3

Hans Gross on stains translated showing the “curtilage” of a stain when washed. From Gross, Hans, John Adam and J.Collyer Adam. Criminal Investigation: A Practical Handbook (1906): p. 577. Madras A. Krishnamachari. 

Though, as Gross noted, perpetrators often tried to wash away the stains of their acts, early experts like Archibald Reiss attempted to retrieve and reveal disguised evidence of fluids, including cleansed blood, by inventing almost “magical” optical technologies. Sara Ahmed’s observation that the “…double play of concealment and exposure is crucial to the work of shame… the word ‘shame’ is associated as much with cover and concealment, as it is with exposure, vulnerability and wounding.”[22] Sometimes this idea of “exposing” shame and violence literally drew on the photographic lens. As Reiss, who was also an art photographer, illustrated in his early 1903 Police Manual for “judicial photography,” the camera operator could add a blue filter and make washed blood invisible to the naked eye “reappear” (see Figure 4): “Since the areas containing traces of blood are more yellowed than the rest of the linen, but not yellow enough to be visible to the eye, one will interpose a blue filter to reinforce the contrasts.”[23] This technique could also be used to reveal bruises on the skin of a deceased victim or to document distinctive or faded tattoos; however, sometimes not even the most astute detective could extract and interpret bloodstains. Gross mentions a case from the 1880s where overheating was probably deliberately used to foil investigators: “blood-marks on a coat could not be loosened because they had been ironed over by a tailor.”[24] Because of damage from the tailor’s red-hot iron, bloodstain evidence could not be used to convict the suspect in court. 

Figure 4

Rodolphe- Archibald Reiss, Photographic technique to make bloodstains (also faint bruises and tattoos) appear with greater contrast by using interposed, blue-tinted glass filters, slow-acting ferrous oxalate developing solution and high-contrast “Rembrandt” or black label “Velox” photographic paper. From La Photographie Judiciaire, (1903): pp. 96-99. Charles Mendel. 

Though “continental” European figures like Gross and Reiss, and perhaps others, had advocated for the meticulous treatment of clothing evidence and the documentation of stains since the early 1900s, by the mid 1930s, British police began to adopt their methods. F. G. Tryhorn, a chemistry professor at University College London, explained how to comprehensively measure garments using a “searching board” (see Figure 6). Tryhorn instructed investigating officers to pin items like this working-class man’s jacket to a board, map stains on a lettered and numbered grid, stitch outlines around stain perimeters using brightly coloured sewing thread, turn garments front to back and inside out, allocate and affix exhibit numbers and labels and finally, to record a detailed journal entry on how the “pinning out was done.”[32] As Burney and Pemberton observe, these methodical, bureaucratized procedures and physical aids “participated in a broader framework of managerial care designed to secure the history of objects as they passed through the custodial chain from crime scene to courtroom.”[33] 

Despite more systematic and accurate clothing forensics in the early twentieth century, justice was not always served. It is a case of femicide where stained clothing held incriminating evidence of a husband’s guilt. In the so-called “Bollo Affair,” a deadly trail of sulphuric acid told a clear story of premeditated murder.[34] The perpetrator of this case of gender-based violence had additional moral taints on his character: he was an unfaithful, proven adulterer as well as a murderer. Cases of sexual abuse and intimate partner violence are extremely difficult and sensitive, if important topics to address in a chapter on stains.[35] 

Figure 6

F. G. Tryhorn, “Searching Board” for Stains in Police Journal (1936) 

The brutal murder of a young, unknown man on the eve of the Great War provides the first critical case study of how physical stains could lead to negative moral judgements. Reiss “attentively examined” the victim’s clothing and items found at the crime scene itself, and his laboratory took multiple photographs related to the case.[36] Reiss penned schematic drawings to map the stab holes in the cloth, including his trousers and braces, waistcoat, and shirt front and back (see Figures 7-8). Though he photographed the victim’s body, the garments are preserved only in drawings since they were likely too bloodied and mud-stained to provide the clear picture Reiss wanted as a lasting testament to the violence of the attack. The murder itself was named after the wooded area where it occurred, dubbed the “Assassinat de Coppet” or the “Crime de Founex.” In French, the word assassinat translates to “premeditated murder,” reflecting the intentional nature of this homicide and the “execution” of an innocent victim. In his role as forensic expert, Reiss wrote a typed, eleven-page report on the crime in general, four-and-a-half pages of which were devoted to meticulously and intimately describing Raussis's shirt and the victim’s body and dress.[37] Parts of the report were published in local newspapers to aid in the man’s identification. 

Figure 7

Rodolphe-Archibald Reiss, Schematic drawing of unknown victim’s waistcoat illustrating and mapping position of ten of his stab wounds. These wounds were measured and elaborately triangulated by Reiss. This type of diagram Waistcoat: https:// collections.unil.ch/idurl/1/45700 

Figure 8

Rodolphe-Archibald Reiss, Schematic drawings of unknown victim’s shirt front and back, suspenders/ braces and trousers. The diagrams illustrate and map the position of multiple stab wounds. (Left) Shirt front: https:// collections.unil.ch/idurl/1/44750 (Center) Shirt back and suspenders: https://collections.unil.ch/idurl/1/45169. (Right) Trousers: https://collections.unil.ch/idurl/1/45488 

According to Reiss’s examination, the victim was at most twenty years old. He was a relatively diminutive five feet two inches tall (157 cm), had curly light brown hair and a medium build. He was dressed in a jauntily coloured three-piece greenish suit striped with blue. This suit was numbered 11,197 and this almost brand-new ensemble had been purchased on April 1st, just over a month before the attack. It came from the Excelsior men’s store in Geneva,[38] though the salespeople were unfortunately not able to provide Reiss with their client’s name. The trouser legs, which were too long for the young man’s short frame, had been folded up (retroussés) towards the inside of the hem. He wore a wide-brimmed English-style dark plaid cap, yellow-striped handkerchief with white polka dots stitched with a V, an initial that was also stitched into his shirt and his socks knit from “quite thick” violet-coloured wool.[39] He carried a Swiss-made pocket watch from the house of Obrecht et Cie (compagnie) from Granges in the Canton of Soleure, that had stopped, unwound, but unlike the famous clue in mystery novels, the watch left no indication as to the exact time of the crime. As an avid cyclist himself, Reiss remarked that the well-worn soles of the man’s leather ankle boots bore the imprint of bicycle pedals, and the autopsy revealed that his last meal had consisted of macaroni, dried sausage, bread, coffee and probably white wine. Reiss’s expert report tells us a great deal about the young victim’s colourful sartorial tastes and fashionable appearance, but not enough to lead us to his given name and identity. 

The victim’s clothing was not the only “material” evidence Reiss examined in this case. Reiss also photographed a very soiled shirt, taken from the back of a possible murder suspect. It lies flattened against a dark background, stretched out and pinned at the sleeves, arms, and waist like an emptied textile corpse lined up for a mugshot or the morgue (see Figure 9). 

Figure 10

Rodolphe-Archibald Reiss, Detail of Felix Raussis's right sleeve showing bloodstain. Reiss questioned whether it was the mark of a knife being wiped on the cloth or a nosebleed. May 1913. (UNIL Archives Reiss). https://collections. unil.ch/idurl/1/45382 

Despite the plethora of information assembled by Reiss and his team, a forensic examination that was as thorough as possible for the period and multiple articles in the press seeking information, neither the name of the young male victim, nor the identity of his murderer(s) was ever found.[44] Nevertheless, the clothing evidence as examined by Reiss, who was likely homosexual himself, provides an additional clue as to why it might have been so difficult to discover this man’s identity.[45] Reiss noted the fact that the victim had removed his suit jacket—a jacket that bore no sign of perforations from the knife, taken off his shoes, and mostly unbuttoned his fly at the time of the assault. These clues led Reiss to suggest the hypothesis that he “had wanted to undress himself when he was attacked.”[46] He goes on to conjecture that “the victim was preparing himself for a sexual act or that the aggressor had unbuttoned the man for a special practice.” The victim’s defensive wounds and mud-splattered suit indicated that a great fight had taken place at what Reiss calls the “theatre” of the struggle.[47] Despite the investigators’ best efforts, and although newspaper reports did not allude to these details of the victim’s state of undress, the likelihood that even though homosexual activities were not technically illegal in the Swiss Canton where the crime took place, moral stigma around same-sex encounters may have prevented family or accomplices from coming forward (it seems that there was more than one assailant). 

Even with the most meticulous forensic methods that Reiss could mobilize in 1913, and all of the effort and care devoted to interviewing, drawing, photographing and publishing the results of those investigations, the identity of the man in the woods and his murderer or murderers will remain forever unknown. I did pursue two leads, but both led to dead ends. One is a group photograph, dated May 31st, 1913, in the photographic archive, of a man who looks very similar to the victim with a cross marked beside him, presumably to signal that he was deceased (see Figure 13).[49] Suggestively, the two other men in the photograph have their arms draped over the shoulders of women, hinting at close physical relationships, while the third young man rests his hands on his own legs. An article from the 13th of June also mentions a suspect in the case, “Alias Mettbach, real name Johann Pohl,” who attempted armed murder in France and who was the “presumed author” of the Crime de Founex. He had escaped custody while being brought to the anthropometric service of the police in Lausanne.[50] The French police had recaptured him, but the trail in French and Swiss newspapers then goes cold.

Figure 13

Rodolphe-Archibald Reiss, reproduction of a group portrait. 13 x 18 cm [Photograph]. https://collections.unil.ch/idurl/1/50220 

Figure 14

Diagram of the holes in Elisa Bollo’s blouse front with 3 different kinds of holes indicated. The holes were produced by 1. Acid, (provoqués par l’acide) 2. Wear (usure) and 3. Spots left on the garment as a result of wrapping the garment for transportation to the lab (taches provoquées par suite d’emballage). The third indication notes spots where acid came into contact with other parts of the garment after the poisoning but were not indicative of the unfolding (so to speak) of the crime itself. The right front of the blouse was almost completely corroded, with a gaping, jagged hole of 6-18cm in width on the breast piece. Holes caused by wear appear on the right shoulder, and there are multiple smaller acid spots (and traces of vomit at her left elbow) indicated in faint pencil lines. https:// collections.unil.ch/idurl/1/46699 

The second main case study features clothing evidence that was displayed in a criminal trial. In the small town of Bière in Switzerland, a horrific scene of conjugal violence played out: a husband murdered his wife by poisoning her with sulfuric acid, also known as vitriol. Vitriol is both a “fundamental industrial chemical” and a “highly corrosive acid.”[51] Vitriol attacks, by all accounts, are one of the most sadistic and inhumane kinds of harm one person can inflict on another. In literary sources, including the 1924 Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, vitriol is used against a corrupt seducer, the Baron Adelbert Gruner, by his abused and abandoned ex-mistress. The Baron, described as “extraordinarily handsome, with a most fascinating manner,” is completely and literally dis-figured by the vitriol attack. Dr. Watson describes vitriol’s horrific damage to the man’s face: 

…I knelt by the injured man and turned that awful face to the light of the lamp. The vitriol was eating into it everywhere and dripping from the ears and the chin. One eye was already white and glazed. The other was red and inflamed. The features which I had admired a few minutes before were now like some beautiful painting over which the artist has passed a wet and foul sponge. They were blurred, discoloured, inhuman, terrible.[52] 

Because of this acid’s corrosive effects, it was and is often a weapon in gender-based attacks. Unlike the male victim in the Doyle story, it is more frequently thrown in women’s faces, causing “bodily injuries leading to damage to mucous membranes, tissues and skin with blindness, burning, and scars often leading to significant disfigurement with temporary or permanent disability.”[53] It was a deliberately calculated choice in this case. In addition to the damage vitriol caused to the victim’s body, it permanently stained her clothing and bedlinen (see Figure 14). As scholar Jenni Sorkin argues, in crimes involving sexual abuse or violence, both the perpetrator and especially the victim’s stain “becomes… both an enactment and vestige of degradation, violence and coercion.”[54] In this case, the stains were also harnessed to forensic ends. 

Time and an extramarital entanglement had corroded the bonds of one working-class couple’s marriage. The Bollo’s Catholic faith would have made divorce difficult. The protagonists in this Swiss case were Italian immigrant painter, plasterer, and café holder, Frédéric-Angelo-Baptiste Bollo, and his wife Elisa Louise Marie Bollo, born Marie Urasco. Their story is a study in how more systematic and scientific approaches to forensic examination and documentation were applied to a case of femicide. It is remarkable that anything survives at all from this rural Swiss murder, but because of Archibald Reiss and his colleagues’ painstaking work, more professionalized forensics provides us with a dramatic narrative, if not a redemptive tale of justice served by the Swiss legal system. 

Just over five months after the murder, local newspaper coverage of Frédéric Bollo’s trial gives us key information about its familial context. The Feuille d’avis de Bière, the paper from the small town of about 1,300 inhabitants where the poisoning occurred, tells us that Bollo had married his wife about ten years prior and that they had four young daughters together.[55] Frédéric was known as a brutal, abusive man who beat his wife.[56] Out of “chagrin,” his wife, Elisa, found solace in alcohol and understandably neglected her household and children. Her husband, who was thirty-four at the time of the murder, brought his twenty-three-year-old cousin, Carmelina Bollo, from Italy to Bière, ostensibly to serve at the café on the ground floor of their house. He rejected his wife in favour of Carmelina, and by February 1910, Carmelina was pregnant with his child. The Bollos’ marriage deteriorated further and on the 8th of February, when Frédéric and his mistress returned from Lausanne at around 8 p.m. after visiting a midwife, Elisa verbally attacked each of them in turn. Elisa then seems to have fallen on the kitchen floor, prey to a crise alcoolique—a form of alcohol poisoning that causes seizures or convulsions. The timeline of events is not completely clear, but Elisa Bollo dragged herself upstairs, fell a few more times, then cried for help. Her eldest daughter, Henriette, went upstairs to assist her mother but called on her father to come to her aid. Ignoring his wife and daughter at first, Frédéric eventually came upstairs and found his wife on the floor, but he left her there instead of putting her to bed. He probably poured vitriol in her mouth, beat her, then ordered his children to stay downstairs and told Carmelina to close the café for the evening. Elisa, who was still conscious for several days, later told the doctor that her husband had beaten her and that she had fallen, dizzied by the attack, onto the floor. The brass knuckles later found in his left pocket seem to support her claim.[57] Frédéric was then able to put his murderous plan into action. He had created what the newspapers called a mise en scène to make his wife’s death look like the accidental poisoning of an alcoholic. He planted two bottles in a small, windowless alcove outside Elisa’s bedroom—one containing white wine and the other, a Fernet-Branca bottle, filled with concentrated sulfuric acid.[58] With his children and mistress downstairs, he most likely poured the vitriol into her mouth as she lay prone, blackening the skin of her face, right arm, and shoulder and burning a corrosive trail that ravaged her digestive system.[59] This vitriolic attack subjected her to horrible agony and left her in a state of suffering described as “épouvantable”—or appalling—for over five days until her death.[60] These acid-smeared handprints that she left on the bedroom wall speak volumes (see Figure 15). In addition to the damage Bollo inflicted on his wife with his bare fists and brass knuckles, an accessory meant to augment the power and damage caused by a blow with the hand, her defacement and murder by vitriol amounted to a particularly callous emotional and physical attack. 

Bollo was negligent in seeking treatment for Elisa as she lay dying: he left the house saying he was going to get a doctor but returned without one. He then left on unnecessary trips out of town the two days following. He stopped in Geneva, where he enjoyed himself by going out on the town and attending the theatre.[61] Meanwhile, the neighbours, hearing her agonized cries, seem to have called Elisa’s sisters, who fetched a Docteur Blanchod at last on the morning of the February 11th, three days after the poisoning. Little could be done for her, and she died on February 13th. Blanchod suspected murder and reported Elisa’s death to a local judge who launched an investigation, eventually calling on thirty-three witnesses and three experts, one of whom was Archibald Reiss in Lausanne. 

Figure 15

Rodolphe-Archibald Reiss, Elisa Bollo’s acid-stained handprints on the wall. Affaire Bollo, 1910 (UNIL Archives Photographiques Reiss). https://collections.unil.ch/idurl/1/52293 

Reiss’s expert report, including his examination of Elisa Bollo’s clothing, was a key factor in her husband’s conviction, proving that poisoning from pouring the toxic substance down her throat was deliberate and not accidental or self-inflicted. Much of the clothing implicated was underclothing or inner layers, worn in their home on the cold February date of the homicide. Elisa was wearing a short-sleeved shirt (chemise), a petticoat (jupon), a blouse, and had covered herself in a worn duvet as bed-clothing. These were all examined, as was her husband’s clothing. Because of the lack of prestige of the actors involved in the Bollo Affair, as well as the corrosive acid and vomit soiling the garments, the surviving evidence comes from Reiss’s forensic photographs of the crime scene, his detailed drawings of the clothing and duvet, his report, and articles from local newspapers at the time of the trial. I will focus on the line drawings in particular, which are simple and meant to be schematic. As in the “Coppet Murder” case, the size and damaged condition of the garments would presumably have made them difficult to preserve and photograph as evidence for a jury. Though Reiss believed that victims’ garments should be photographed and even microphotographed in general, he chose to illustrate these ones, arguing that schematic sketches showing “the mechanism of the attack” could help the investigating judge and jury interpret the actual soiled clothing evidence exhibited in the courtroom.[62] He did photograph the crime scene as well, including photographs of the victim herself, staged resting peacefully as if she were sleeping on her bedcovers after her garments had been removed for investigation. Several crime scene photographs show Elisa’s body on her bed with burns on the flesh of her face, neck, and arm that appear as dark splotches on her pale skin.[63] 

At the trial, the prosecutor argued that Frédéderic Bollo’s reasoning for his mise en scène must have been something akin to: “I would say she had concealed a bottle of white wine… next to her room, and that she wanted to drink from it… in the darkness she took a different bottle beside it that contained sulfuric acid. I would explain that because I do plaster molding (gypsier), I need sulfuric acid for different jobs in my trade and that won’t surprise anyone.”[64] His planting of the Fernet Branca bottle containing acid became clear when one witness claimed that Bollo usually kept vitriol for his work under lock and key in his workshop, clearly labelled with the word “poison.”[65] This caution would be understandable in a café full of beverages and a household with four young children. His motive was a secret to no-one, and several witnesses claimed he had told them: “If I were permitted to kill her…I would do two years in jail to be rid of her.”[66] 

Archibald Reiss’s formal, typed, eight-page expert’s report, dated March 3rd, 1910, draws strong conclusions from his detailed analysis of the clothing. The investigating judge sent Reiss both Elisa Bollo’s clothing and that worn by Frédéric Bollo on the day of the poisoning, although his clothing was most likely confiscated several days after the event. The report focuses on Elisa’s attire, but the suspected assailant’s clothing furnished damning evidence. Reiss photographed and drew careful layouts of the rooms and their contents, measuring the size of puddles of acid, describing and chemically testing the remainder of the liquid in the deadly Fernet Branca bottle. He devoted particular attention to Elisa’s body and clothing to prove his suspicions of murder (see Figure 16). In his line drawings, he mapped patterns made by the acid burns on her right front shoulder and sleeve of her blouse. He included a helpful legend, a key for the jurors and judiciary to understand which holes had been “produced by acid,” which were “holes from wear (usure), and which were “produced after the cloth was packed (emballage),” presumably to be sent to his laboratory in Lausanne. Procedures for carefully packing evidence to avoid cross-contamination were not yet standardized, and whoever folded Elisa’s garments did not do it carefully enough to prevent the acid from touching other surfaces. These packing stains were important because Reiss was able to observe that the acid marks on the petticoat were caused by packing, whereas the stains on the blouse and chemise were mostly caused by direct splashing from the acid during the crime (see Figures 14-17). Most importantly, the back of her clothing had no burns except for the neck of her chemise and blouse.

Figure 16

Rodolphe-Archibald Reiss. Photographed forensic diagram sketches of top of Elisa Bollo’s chemise/shift. Affaire Bollo, 1910 (UNIL Archives Photographiques Reiss). https://collections.unil. ch/idurl/1/47017. 

Bollo claimed his wife made a massive puddle of acid on the floor when clumsily spilling the bottle after attempting to drink from it (see Figure 18). Reiss demonstrated that this puddle was false evidence poured onto the floor after the fact. If Elisa had in fact accidentally spilled it while drinking, the entire back of her clothing would have been soaked with acid. Reiss concludes that “the clothing shows… clearly that it is impossible that dame Bollo had been standing or sitting at the moment when the acid was ingested.”[67] The fact that “neither the petticoat nor the back of the blouse show acid burns” indicated that she had been lying down at the time of the crime. Additional and no doubt messy reconstruction experiments in the lab proved that it was almost impossible to deliberately drink by oneself from a similar bottle while lying down without splashing one’s eyes and the front of the chest as well. Those parts of her body were untouched by the acid. Reiss’s thorough examination suggested that her homicidal husband had poured the liquid into her slightly open mouth as she lay unconscious on the ground, corroding the skin of her lower face, neck, and right arm as her head tilted lightly to the left.[68] Reiss’s drawings attest to the fact that Elisa’s linens were so worn as to have pre-existing holes that had not been darned. As surviving examples of working-class clothing from the first half of the twentieth century from rag dumps demonstrate through their extensive darning and patching, only women who were so neglected, and in this case abused, would not have made basic repairs to their own simple cotton garments (see Figure 19).[69] 

Her husband’s clothing, though not illustrated, was equally incriminating. Though “the exterior of his clothing did not have any burns or stains from sulphuric acid,” the outer pockets of his jacket (veston) and their contents told a revealing story. In Frédéric’s left-hand pocket, Reiss found a pair of brass knuckles. His right pocket contained three corks, one of whose ends was blackened by vitriol. Reiss conducted chemical analysis to confirm that the substance was indeed sulphuric acid. It fit the mouth of the Fernet Branca bottle. There was also a leather-covered cigar case with acid burns and the black cloth of the pocket lining had an acid stain. One of the most shocking elements of an already gruesome crime is that its perpetrator was not convicted of murder. On the fifth evening of the trial in a court case that saw the testimony of thirty-three witnesses and three experts, Bollo was sentenced to only two years’ imprisonment, four months of which he had already served, and a paltry one hundred Franc fine.[70] Despite Reiss’s persuasive evidence, only a slight majority, or five of the nine all-male jury members, could agree that Bollo had “voluntarily caused death” to his wife, though they unanimously agreed that he had “caused her death through negligence or imprudence.”[71] 

Figure 19

Working-class clothing from rag-dump in Normandy, early 20th century. Patched and darned patterned cotton women’s blouse, Cotton blouse with patches, Normandy c. 1910-20, from the rag dump, University of Brighton Dress History Teaching Collection, no. 408.07. Professor Lou Taylor [Photograph]. Boy’s woolen socks darned in multiple colours. Study collection, University of Brighton. 

These two cases investigated by Reiss and his team show us that soiled, torn and abject clothing furnished powerful evidence in their investigations and in the Swiss Court of Law. Yet the “Coppet Murder” and the “Bollo Affair” raise larger questions about the limits of law enforcement and the biases of the legal system. There is a stark contrast between the extraordinary forensic work performed in early twentieth-century Switzerland and the tragic lack of answers in the Coppet case, whose victim remains unknown. Who was that young man? I continue to ask myself this question. How did Frederic Bollo receive such a heartbreakingly short prison sentence in 1910 for the murder of his wife, Elisa? Whether it was the young, unknown queer man stabbed and strangled in Coppet, his blood and mud-stained clothing providing clues as to a potential sexual motive for his murder, or the Bollo couple, whose clothing bore marks of the husband’s abusive and eventually homicidal actions, forensic approaches sought to unravel the stories contained in cloth. There is perhaps no rational sense to be made of violent crime, though the roles that shame, stain, and stigma played in these cases and in our own wardrobes and self-presentation bears further reflection. As Ellen Sampson argues, “Stains, in particular, seem to produce ambivalence, a simultaneous cultural fixation and disgust.”[72] When our own clothing is stained, we may feel personal shame at the ways in which our body has failed to navigate the world around us, but others’ perceptions of stains may lead to concrete suspicions of criminal activity, as in the case of Félix Raussis and his most likely innocently bloodstained shirt. Looking at historical dress through a forensic lens leaves us with fascinating but disturbing stories, archival traces of the true messiness of historical lives. 

Author Bio

Article Citation

MLA: Matthews David, Alison. “Forensic Histories of Stained Clothing: The Coppet Murder and the Bollo Poisoning.” Corpus textile, special issue of Fashion Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2025, 1-33. 10.38055/FCT040104.

APA: Matthews David, A. (2025). Forensic Histories of Stained Clothing: The Coppet Murder and the Bollo Poisoning. Corpus textile, special issue of Fashion Studies, 4(1), 1-33. 10.38055/FCT040104.

Chicago: Matthews David, Alison. “Forensic Histories of Stained Clothing: The Coppet Murder and the Bollo Poisoning.” Corpus textile, special issue of Fashion Studies 4, no. 1 (2025): 1-33. 10.38055/FCT040104.