A few months later, Professor Victor Balthazard at the Sorbonne, in France, published a technical paper on the subject. When suspect weapons are of the same make and model, he wrote, “One must resort to the study of the fine scratches” inscribed by a particular gun. In fact, the year 1922 was pivotal in the history of the technique. Among other milestones, Arizona courts ruled that such evidence was admissible, even in a capital case. Still, it was not until three years later that the general public in this country heard about it. That summer, The Saturday Evening Post published a long two-part article about the advance: “Fingerprinting Bullets: The Expert Witness.”
May’s case in 1923 illustrates both the strengths and the limitations of the technique. The dispute revolved around the family of Karl Kirsch. Born about 1880 in Hanover, Germany, Kirsch immigrated to the United States in 1903. He made his way to Seattle, where, in 1908, he married local girl Minnie Williams. Over the next seven years the couple had four children: Alice, Irene, Arthur, and Caroline. Karl started out as a common laborer. However, by 1918 he was operating a dairy farm about two miles from Hoquiam, Washington. Hoquiam is a logging and mill town on Grays Harbor Bay, about 45 miles west of Olympia.
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| Kirsch Family, ca 1922. Family Archives. |
Karl’s oldest daughter, Alice, was fourteen years old in the spring of 1923. She was tasked with minding the dairy cows in a nearby meadow. There, however, she attracted the attention of a middle-aged neighbor, Pedro Panichini.
Panichini was born around 1873, somewhere in Chile. He seems to have moved to the United States around 1901, or perhaps before. (The records are somewhat muddled.) From at least 1910 until after 1920, he worked as an unskilled sawmill laborer on Bainbridge Island, across Puget Sound from Seattle. But in the spring of 1923, Panichini was living alone in a cabin near Kirsch’s place. (There is no record that he ever married.) He probably worked as a firewood cutter and bay fisherman.
The third player is this drama was Maximo Valverde Perez, who also lived nearby and may have worked part-time for Kirsch. Born in Mexico in 1885, he entered the U.S. as a farm worker in 1912. Six years later, he was living in Seattle and doing seasonal work at a fish cannery in Alaska. It’s unknown when he moved to the Grays Harbor area. In any case, he and Panichini did not get along, although Perez never said why.
Newspaper accounts were vague about Panichini’s behavior toward Alice, but it made her uncomfortable and she had complained to her parents. In the late afternoon of May 25, 1923, she, as usual, went out into the meadow to shoo the cows into the barn. Panichini appeared and began to follow her. Her mother was apparently watching and alerted Karl. Kirsch called to Perez for help and hurried out to confront the Chilean.
Matters quickly escalated to the point where Karl received a blow to the head, probably from the revolver Panichini had drawn. Kirsch and Perez tried to wrestle the gun away, and during the struggle, Panichini was shot fatally in the chest. Karl later said Perez had control of the weapon when shots were fired, but he had been dazed at that point … and Perez denied it.
Luke May received evidence for the case on May 31, the day authorities charged Perez with murder. He recorded: “One Imperial Arms Company 38 Calibre Revolver #A-1486 and one fired 38 calibre deformed lead bullet and two empty brass cartridge cases.” The package also included three unfired cartridges for the gun, “one cartridge having the primer slightly dented, apparently a miss fire.”
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| Imperial Arms .38 Caliber Hammerless. Classic Firearms Sales Site. |
The brand name on the weapon was used by a large gunmaker in Connecticut for their line of cheap, low-quality hammerless revolvers. And, indeed, May found that the death weapon misfired twice before each successful test shot. Still, its individual traits were clear enough that he “was able to pick out the bullets from this revolver each time.” The same assertion could not be made for the actual death bullet, although he was satisfied that it had come from the submitted weapon. However, because of the deformation, he was only willing to testify that the bullet had been fired from the same make and model of revolver.
Luckily, that distinction mattered little when the case went to trial in July. The context – an older, nonwhite foreigner pestering an attractive white teenage girl – would have surely set a lenient tone, even though the accused was also a nonwhite foreigner. Perez was acquitted with virtually no notice in the larger regional newspapers. Some time after the acquittal, he left the state and disappeared from public records for seventeen years. Perez told the 1940 census taker that he’d been in western Nebraska in 1935. In 1940, he was staying with a married niece in El Paso, Texas.
Sadly, Panichini indirectly caused yet more trouble for the Kirsch family. Karl paid his estate for title to the Chilean’s rowboat. However, a neighbor who thought he had bought the entire estate felt it should include the boat. When Karl tried to retrieve the craft from the neighbor’s property, he was wounded by a shotgun blast. Charges were filed against the neighbor, but nothing further seems to have come of that. Karl died a bit over a year after the shooting.
With the main bread-winner gone, the family splintered. Alice married in late 1925, presumably with Minnie’s consent. The youngest daughter, Caroline, died the following year. Irene married in early 1927, with her mother attesting that she was 18 years old. She was, in fact, only a couple months over 17.
Both girls would marry three times. In fact, Alice was listed as already divorced in the 1930 census. She married a second husband in 1936, divorced him (date unknown), and then outlived her third. She died in 2006. Irene’s first marriage lasted less than two years; she divorced in March 1929. She married again in 1937, that husband passing away in the summer of 1967. She married again in early 1969, but died six years later.
Arthur would have been 19 at the time of the 1930 census. He was not at his mother’s home in Hoquiam at that time, and cannot otherwise be located. He wed in 1935, a marriage that lasted until his death in 1980. Mother Minnie (Williams) Kirsch remarried in 1934, but that husband died in 1956. She married again a little over a year later. He passed away in 1966, leaving her a widow again until her own passing in 1983.
| References: Evan E. Filby, American Sherlock: Remembering a Pioneer in Scientific Crime Investigation, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland (2019). |
| Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969). |
| “[Panichini Death News],” The Oregonian, Portland; (May 26, 1923 – August 17, 1923). |
| Ned Schwing, Standard Catalog of Firearms, Krause Publications, Iola, Wisconsin (2002). |
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