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(1/10) THREAD 👇16 February 1914: it was a wintery night when Theresa Hollander’s father discovered her body near a shed in St. Nicholas’s Cemetery. The 20-year-old had been brutally beaten to death. Theresa’s eyes were wide open, her hands clutched in frozen agony. 
(2/10) Her former boyfriend fell under suspicion. A week later, newspapers around the country began reporting that Theresa's eyeball had been removed and photographed in the hopes that the image of her slayer could be retrieved from her retina.
(3/10) The idea that the eyeball could “record" the final moment of death was first put forward in the 17th century by Jesuit friar Christopher Scheiner, who claimed to observe a faint image on the retina of a frog he had been dissecting.
(4/10) It wasn’t until the invention of photography that “optography” (as it was known) emerged as a scientific pursuit. It reached the height of popularity after the German physiologist Wilhelm Kuhne devised a process in 1878 to “preserve" details from the retina of the eye.
(5/10) Kuhne performed his experiments on Erhard Gustav Reif, who was sentenced to death by guillotine for murdering his sons. Reif retrieved the murderer’s decapitated head, removed the eyeballs, and reported seeing “violent and disturbing movements” on the dead man’s retina.
(6/10) Other similar experiments were carried out in the 1880s and 1890s. It was even suggested that an optogram should be produced from the eye of Mary Jane Kelly, one of Jack the Ripper’s victims, though there’s no evidence this was actually carried out.
(7/10) The idea that optography might have forensic potential was later popularized by the science fiction writer Jules Verne in Les Frères Kip (1902). Indeed, so widespread was the idea, that some murderers even went to great lengths to destroy their victims’ eyeballs.
(8/10) Ultimately, optography fell from fashion due in part to the impracticalities of processing retinal images. The last serious scientific attempt at retrieving images from retinas took place in 1975.
(9/10) Police in Germany invited the physiologis Evangelos Alexandridis to repeat Kuhne’s experiments. The scientist placed anesthetized rabbits in front of “panels bearing high-contrast patterns or images (one of which was a portrait of Salvador Dali) before being killed.”
(10/10) But what of Theresa Hollander (pictured here)? Unsurprisingly, the removal of her eyeball revealed nothing that helped the case against her ex, who was tried not once, but twice, and found not guilty on both occasions. Theresa’s murder remains a mystery to this day.
There seems to be some confusion, so just to clarify: this theory has since been disproven. Your retina does not contain the image of the last thing you've seen.
