Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (12 page)

On July 17, 1889, a constable found a woman who had just been murdered; her body was still warm to the touch. She was identified as “Clay Pipe Alice” McKenzie, a heavy drinker and possible prostitute. Bond offered a second opinion after the original autopsy by Dr. Bagster Phillips, concentrating on the stab wounds to the neck. They were not the Ripper’s typical slashing method, but there had been incisions in the abdomen. While Bond insisted that this was a Ripper victim, Phillips believed just the opposite; in fact he did not think that the earlier five victims had all been the work of one person, and he claimed that he’d arrived at this conclusion “on professional grounds.” He had performed five of the seven autopsies, and without including the circumstantial evidence in his calculation, he made his judgment from the bodily wounds alone.

While the detectives from Scotland Yard were roundly criticized for their inability to identify and arrest the killer, they did keep some suspects under surveillance. They also surveyed their approach, resolving to tighten it up, rely more on science, and become more rigorous in their methods.

BACK TO FINGERS

Many problems arose among those police agencies relying on
bertillonage
, notably that not everyone taking the measurements was careful or patient with its time-consuming demands. Bertillon was a perfectionist and while he took pains to teach others how to apply the techniques, he could not be everywhere at once. Even as he attempted to retain control, the method of analyzing fingerprints gained momentum. Some sources claim that Bertillon opposed it, but others indicate that he was pleased to add fingerprints to his own card system, although he did not see how they could be used to categorize the cards the way his system could. In any event, there were too many people in separate places taking note of the value of fingerprints for the method to remain dormant for long.

Francis Galton had studied
bertillonage
up close, being instructed by Bertillon himself, but when he decided the system was too complicated, he went to see Herschel in England to learn more about fingerprints. Like a true scientist who cared about advancing knowledge, William Herschel offered everything he had, hopeful that Galton could take it further than he’d managed to do. Galton set about studying the method in a painstaking manner for a period of three years, as well as trying to figure out a way to systematize it. He found Czech physician Johannes Evangelista Purkinje’s technique from earlier in the century too complicated and believed there must be an easier way. He published a paper in
Nature
in 1891, which—not surprisingly—drew a venomous reaction from Henry Faulds, claiming again that
he
was the inventor of the fingerprint technique. Galton ignored this rivalry and continued with his work.

The following year, he published the first book about fingerprints and their forensic utility, simply titled
Finger Prints
. He proposed that fingerprints bore three primary features and from them he could devise sixty thousand classes. But he was stuck at completing a practical system and he knew there were flaws. He needed help, and like Herschel before him, was eager for a collaborator.

Across the ocean in La Plata, Argentina, an enterprising investigator had already made this method work. The chief of police, Guillermo Nuñez, had learned about the idea of matching fingerprints to offenders and he charged Juan Vucetich, head of the statistical bureau, with implementing it. Vucetich soon had the opportunity.

In 1892, in the small town of Nocochea, Francisca Rojas claimed to have found both of her children, ages four and six, brutally bludgeoned to death. She accused a man she knew named Velasquez, who wanted to marry her and who had threatened her when she said no. He protested his innocence, so the police chief required Velasquez to spend the night next to one of the corpses, with the hope it would rattle him sufficiently to start talking. But there was no confession, not even when torture was applied.

But rumor had it that Rojas had a young lover who had declined to marry her because of her children. Now
she
had a motive, along with a reason to frame someone else, so the chief turned to a rather unorthodox technique: He tried to frighten her into a confession by making ghostly sounds outside her home. This, too, advanced the case no further.

By then Vucetich had formulated his own system from fingertip ridge patterns for identification. He had told Chief Eduardo Alvarez, the official in charge of this investigation, about it so when the chief found a brownish smudge in Roja’s home that was clearly a bloody fingerprint, he compared the pattern with both suspects and identified the mother as the person who had placed her thumb in blood. That indicated that she had murdered the children. When she was told about this evidence, she broke down and confessed that she had killed them both with a rock. Velasquez was freed and Rojas convicted.

Vucetich went on to identify more people with this method. He wrote two books describing “dactyloscopy” and defending the system as superior to all others. He nevertheless traveled to England to meet Bertillon, who remained aloof in his inimitable and annoying manner, refusing to meet with him. By then, fingerprinting dominated others in Argentina as the method for criminal identification. Still, it lacked a system, and it remained for Edward R. Henry, a magistrate in India, to finish the job.

Henry had tried a simplified method of anthropometry, but finding it cumbersome, had then looked to fingerprints as the source for identification. Independent of the developments in Argentina but influenced by Galton’s work, Henry had started a fingerprint classification system as inspector-general of police in Nepal, India. He traveled to England to show someone, and Galton proved eager to offer him materials and support. Henry saw the problems that had stymied Galton but did not immediately see a solution.

His inspiration occurred while looking at his own fingerprints during a train ride in 1896, and he soon devised a loop and delta system. He separated fingerprints into two basic groups: value patterns (whorls) and nonvalue patterns (arches and loops), and described how the lines could be counted for individualizing them within these categories. With assigned values for different fingers, he formed codes for each set of prints. Thus, the prints were filed via their numeric codes and could easily be retrieved for comparison. This process decreased the time heretofore involved to look them up. However, the system required all ten prints for an identification and crime scenes often turned up only a few—even just one. But this issue had not yet become a major problem and professionals were starting to encourage others to use this system. Nevertheless, reliance on fingerprints as proof of identification needed a defining case, which was still years away.

In the meantime in France, another forensic expert had been busy making a different kind of mark.

CRIMINALISTICS

In 1885 in Lyon, France, an elderly man was found dead on the bed in his locked bedroom, with a wound on his skull and his hand firmly grasping a pistol. There was no evidence that someone had forcibly entered the room, so two physicians called to the scene stated that the manner of death was suicide. It seemed obvious. However, when professor of medicine from the University of Lyon Dr. Jean Alexandre Eugène Lacassagne examined the scene, he was unwilling to just accept the obvious. In fact, he noted something odd: The bed linens covered the dead man’s arms, a difficult feat for someone who has just put a bullet through his brain. Upon closer inspection, Lacassagne noticed other indications of staging: the eyes were closed and the typical gunpowder burns on the skin from a close-range shot were lacking. Before making any statements, he decided to do some research.

Lacassagne believed that it was imperative to use observation and critical examination to arrive at the big picture before he made a final judgment. He knew from his experience working on corpses how the typical suicide-by-gunshot would appear, and he was convinced from the appearance of the wound that the weapon that had killed this man had been too far away for him to have managed it. Yet Lacassagne was not certain about the relationship between violent deaths and open or closed eyes, so he questioned a number of nurses. They said that only in natural deaths had they seen the eyes closed; in contrast, sudden or violent deaths generally resulted in the eyes remaining open, even staring. Assured that he was on the right track, Lacassagne turned his attention to the revolver in the dead man’s hand. Such a tight grip would be difficult to achieve by placing the weapon there after death, but he considered several possible scenarios and then collected data from an experiment.

He requested that other medical personnel inform him immediately whenever someone died in the area, and he would then go to the scene to attempt to place an object into the decedent’s hand. He learned that a dead hand, immediately postmortem, could indeed be made to grasp something like a gun, though not tightly. However, once the early stages of rigor mortis set in, a gun placed in an initially loose grip could become more tightly clasped. Relying on the evidence, his experiments, and his own reasoning, Lacassagne decided that the elderly man had been murdered. The police turned their attention toward the victim’s son as an obvious suspect. It seemed that while he’d hoped to dispatch the man, the slight degree of fondness he felt had compelled him to close his father’s eyes and cover him. The son was tried and convicted on Lacassagne’s findings, yet had the police relied only on the doctors who had performed a cursory examination, this killer would have gotten away with his crime.

In his day, due to his careful work, prestigious university position, and authoritative bearing, Lacassagne became a celebrity investigator. Born in 1843, he had attended military school and qualified as a surgeon, becoming an army physician in North Africa. There he’d developed an interest in pathology and the identification of the dead, and was especially adept at the interpretation of wounds and casualties from violent incidents. In 1878, when he was thirty-five, Lacassagne published
Précis de Médicine,
which helped him to obtain the teaching position at the University’s institute of medicine, which was established two years later.

He was an obsessive learner who read documents from a variety of fields, and because his knowledge proved comprehensive he won the respect of colleagues in other disciplines as well. Yet he remained ever cognizant of the limitations of medicine, and among his cautionary practices was to exercise doubt about even the most seemingly obvious situations, because one might otherwise miss the tiny clues that could produce a more accurate opinion. By the time he retired in 1921 and donated his books, he had an impressive collection of over twelve thousand volumes.

Lacassagne’s interest in criminology had a long history. A once-avid student of the works of Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, who believed that criminal types could be recognized via bodily “maps,” Lacassagne redirected the discipline by noting sociological influences on criminal behavior. He formed a group of professionals around his own ideas, becoming famous for the comment “Societies have the criminals they deserve.” While he believed that disease and addiction, passed on to successive generations, could cause mental and physical degeneracy, poverty, social marginalization, and other factors were also involved. In fact, in a speech given in 1881, he stated that the fight against criminality was one of the physician’s social responsibilities. “At the present time, it will be the physicians, once again, who will show judges that some criminals are incorrigible [and] some are organically bad, defective individuals . . .” Lacassagne came to realize that, contrary to the ideas of the physical anthropologists, criminals appeared physically normal but were vulnerable for various reasons to corrupting social influences. “The criminal is a microbe,” he said, “that proliferates only in a certain environment.” He then launched a journal,
Archives de l’Anthropologie Criminelle,
to discuss social initiatives to ease crime.

He also studied tattoos. Lombroso had made the observation that a certain type of person, “locked in combat with society,” resorted to decorating his body with a tattoo, and different designs were indicative of different temperaments in that type. The more obscene and the more percentage of the body involved, the less sensitivity to pain and the greater the tendency to be savage. Lacassagne was more careful as he assembled a large collection of thousands of examples, categorizing them and seeing in them the desire to express ideas in symbolic form. They spoke to something about culture rather than necessarily to savagery or criminality.

Lacassagne’s most memorable contributions derived from his work in pathology, notably his observation of the stages of death. Many nineteenth-century pathologists believed that the time of death could easily and accurately be determined by measuring body temperature and stages of rigor mortis and lividity, but the more homicide cases they saw, the less certain they were. It took observant physicians such as Lacassagne to recognize and admit that the interpretation of decomposition and other postmortem indicators was not sufficiently reliable to be deemed a science. There were too many environmental and individual variables. Nevertheless, he spent considerable time making calculations from the dead to better understand the postmortem interval.

Lacassagne also made a contribution to several other areas of investigation, including the field of ballistics. After removing a bullet from a victim during an autopsy in 1889, he noticed longitudinal grooves on its surface and counted them; there were seven. Then he examined the barrels of several pistols that belonged to the various suspects and identified the one he believed had been used to commit the murder—the only one with seven grooves. Its owner was convicted. While this kind of analysis was primitive and could easily have been wrong, the early scientists—mostly physicians, pathologists, and chemists—were at least moving in the right direction.