Man who debunked validity of Shroud of Turin dies

CHICAGO -- Walter C. McCrone Jr., who looked into his microscope to confirm the Shroud of Turin was created 13 centuries after Jesus Christ was buried and conclude Ludwig van Beethoven's died of lead poisoning, has died. He was 86.

McCrone died July 10 of congestive heart failure in his home on Chicago's South Side. His 60-year-plus career included everything from analyzing crime scene evidence to debunking the authenticity of formerly priceless works of art, something he said he did for the thrill of the chase.

McCrone took what was present in some of the items he analyzed -- such as lead in Beethoven's hair -- to solve a mystery. And he took what wasn't there to do the same. He found, for example, very little arsenic in a lock of Napoleon Bonaparte's hair, helping debunk the theory that he died of arsenic poisoning. A pigment he determined didn't exist until 1920 raised more than a few questions about the authenticity of the Vinland Map, which was reputed to show the New World as discovered by Leif Ericson long before Columbus sailed from Spain.

His work also helped tie Wayne Williams to the murders of 29 young men and boys in Atlanta in 1982.

Identify on sight

McCrone boasted that he could identify on sight individual tree pollens, fly ash, aspirin, TNT, cholesterol and remnants of the singular blue pigment Claude Monet used to paint water lilies. He said each item was among the 30,000-odd substances he'd seen beneath his lenses.

"Most of the world never sees what I see," he told the Chicago Tribune in 1998. "It is more beautiful than anything outside the microscope."

McCrone published 600 papers on microscope work and 16 books and book chapters, including "The Particle Atlas" in 1970, which is recognized as one of the best handbooks for materials analysts.

"Anyone who's gone through a graduate program in art conservation knows him, his name, has his pigment handout, or their teacher was taught by him," Eugena Ordonez of the Museum of Modern Art in New York told the Tribune in 1998. "In your first year, it's McCrone, McCrone, McCrone."

McCrone earned a chemistry degree from Cornell University in 1938, followed by a doctorate in organic chemistry in 1942 and two years of postdoctoral work. In 1944, he began to conduct research and teach microscopy and materials science at what is now the Illinois Institute of Technology.

He left the school in 1956 and opened McCrone Associates, an industrial problem-solving lab, on the South Side, and opened research and teaching laboratories in London and Chicago.

In 1978, McCrone joined the team of 30 scientists who analyzed the Shroud of Turin, the piece of cloth believed by many to be Jesus Christ's death shroud. He was the first to conclude through scientific experiments that pigments on the cloth were red ochre, not blood, and dated to 13 centuries after Christ was buried.