Luke S. May

Luke Sylvester May (1892-1965) was an American forensic scientist and detective, known to colleagues as America's Sherlock Holmes, who at age 22 founded the Revelare International Secret Service, an agency notable for combining investigative fieldwork with forensic evidence analysis under one roof, an unusual pairing for its time. In 1922 May invented the Revelarscope, a comparison microscope he later improved in 1928, and that same year he identified a defendant's pocketknife as the weapon used in a child abduction case, State v. Clark, establishing a landmark precedent in toolmark identification evidence that was later cited during the Lindbergh kidnapping trial. From 1933 to 1934 he served without compensation as chief of detectives for the Seattle Police Department, and he sponsored criminology programs at Northwest University, work acknowledged by President Calvin Coolidge in 1924, while also helping establish crime laboratories in Chicago, Regina, Saskatchewan, and Seattle.