Silent Witnesses (6 page)

As a result of reading Galton's book, Asquith established a committee to examine both systems in detail. He appointed a Home Office official named Charles Edward Troup to head the inquiry, supported by Major Arthur Griffiths (famous for his book
Mysteries of Police and Crime)
and Sir Melville Macnaghten, who was to become an assistant commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police. Although they liked the idea of fingerprinting because of the system's simplicity, they were also concerned that Galton had still not managed to distill everything he had observed into a fast and accurate practical system. The committee also traveled to Paris and were entertained by Bertillon, whose system they were convinced by, but
found complicated. They couldn't make up their minds, and as they pondered, other countries were already deciding the same question for themselves. Austria, under the guidance of the father of criminology, Hans Gross, went for Bertillon's system, as did Germany. Eventually the committee decided to introduce both
bertillonage
and fingerprinting.

Meanwhile, in Argentina, a police officer named Juan Vucetich from Dalmatia (a region of Croatia) was to be responsible for a first in the history of forensics. Vucetich was an energetic man and, in 1891, having resided in Argentina for seven years, was made head of the Statistical Bureau of the La Plata Police. He and his team were ordered to introduce the
bertillonage
system and so set about measuring people and recording their statistics. During this time, however, Vucetich read about Galton's work on fingerprints in the
Revue Scientifique.
The article, written by H. de Varigny, praised the concept of fingerprint identification, but also pointed out that—despite Galton's success—he had still not fully solved the problem of classification.

Vucetich was intrigued by this idea and decided to take up the challenge. He, too, quickly understood that the essential features of fingerprints were their triangles, or deltas, and that there were four basic types. He numbered the fingers one, two, three, and four and assigned the letters A, B, C, and D to the thumbs. So, for example, a suspect might now have her fingerprints recorded as: B, three, three, four, two. The system was easy to store and arrange, making it simple to cross-check for matches.

In an echo of Bertillon's situation years before, Vucetich unfortunately found that his bosses did not share his enthusiasm for fingerprints. But once again the fates were to intervene. In
June 1892 a double murder was committed in the small coastal town of Necochea, not far from Buenos Aires. The victims of the crime were two young children, a girl of four and a boy of six. They had been bludgeoned to death. Their mother, a twenty-six-year-old unmarried woman by the name of Francisca Rojas, had not only discovered the bodies but also claimed to have seen a man running from the scene of the crime. The man, she stated, was her lover, a farm worker called Velásquez. She said he had become a nuisance, making threats against her and her children in order to force her to marry him. When she came home, he had apparently run past her and out of the house, after which she found her children dead in a bloodstained bed.

Velásquez was arrested and interviewed at length. This almost certainly involved some degree of torture. However, in spite of this, he continued to protest his innocence. Other “medieval” tricks were played on him, such as tying him up and leaving him on the bed with the murdered children all night. He still denied any involvement. Given all Velásquez had endured, some doubts began to be expressed about his guilt at this stage, but it was decided to try torture for another week. Even after suffering serious injuries, though, he continued to proclaim his innocence.

Suspicion returned to the children's mother, Francisca Rojas. It was discovered that she had a young lover who had allegedly said that he would not marry her because of her “illegitimate brats.” Alvarez, an investigating officer, now arrested her and tried similar rather questionable techniques to those he had used on Velásquez. Hoping to terrify her into confession, he had her tied up and left outside her own front door so that the spirits of the two children could take their revenge. He even
had men make angry noises outside to try to convince her they were coming to collect her evil soul.

At last, when all these techniques had failed, he did what he should have done in the first place and searched the murder scene. It didn't take long before he discovered a bloody mark on a door. Examining it more closely, he realized that it was a fingerprint, and a good one at that. He cut the plank bearing it from the door and took it back to the police station. He then took the prints of Francisca Rojas and compared the two. They matched. He asked Rojas if she had touched her children at all after she had found them dead. She said she hadn't. If that was the case, he asked, how did her bloody thumbprint get onto the door? He showed it to her. Confronted with this evidence, Rojas finally confessed to murdering her two children with a rock so that she would be free to marry her young lover. She was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. The case is generally acknowledged as the first time that a fingerprint was used to solve a murder.

The Rojas case did for Vucetich what the Ravachol case had done for Bertillon, and he became the most celebrated detective in Argentina. In 1896, Argentina adopted fingerprinting as its main system of identification, and by the first decade of the twentieth century, every major country in South America had followed suit. In England, Galton continued to struggle to devise a satisfactory classification system, but help was about to appear from an unexpected source.

A civil servant named Edward Richard Henry was the inspector general of police in Nepal. In 1891 he introduced Bertillon's system there, amending it to involve six measurements rather than eleven in order to make it simpler and faster to use.
Even then, he still found the system too complicated, as well as vulnerable to the enthusiasm of the clerks taking the measurements, who often couldn't see the difference when it came to “only a few centimeters,” and frequently got them wrong.

While on leave in England, Henry visited Galton. The two men got along well, and when Henry returned to Calcutta, he took with him all Galton's notes. Henry also saw how difficult the process of categorization was going to be. However, during a train journey in 1896, he suddenly realized, quite out of the blue, how the deltas (those triangular shapes found on the tips of the fingers) could be used to create a proper system of identification. They fell into several clear types. Henry observed that “these deltas may be formed by either the bifurcation of a single ridge or by the abrupt divergence of the two ridges that had hitherto run side by side.” Additionally, the triangular shape conveniently lent itself to geometric measurement. He realized that all he had to do was establish the limits of the triangle, or “the outer and inner terminus.” A line could be drawn between these two termini and the number of papillary lines that this line intersected then counted with a needle. This number was the core of Henry's classification. The vast majority of fingerprints fall into the simple loop and delta system. There were occasional examples of what he termed “accidentals” (those prints that for one reason or another didn't match any of the types), but fortunately these could still be absorbed into the general system, meaning that he now had a practical means of categorizing any fingerprint. By 1897, fingerprints had become the sole means of criminal identification in India. And by 1902 they were proving three times more successful at identifying criminals than Bertillon's system.

Fingerprints stored in modern police records, illustrating a “whorl” fingerprint. The Henry system described three basic fingerprint patterns—loop, whorl, and arch—which together constitute the majority of fingerprint variations.

Considering that fingerprinting stood to supplant his own system, it is perhaps surprising—and to his credit—that Bertillon readily accepted its value. Indeed, since 1900 he had been adding fingerprints to his own files, which proved to be invaluable. On October 17, 1902, Bertillon was asked to attend the scene of a murder at the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The victim was a valet by the name of Joseph Reibel. He was discovered sitting in a chair. His shirttails were pulled out of his trousers and his legs were outstretched. The murderer had strangled him by hand. The room was a mess with overturned furniture, suggesting that a struggle had taken place. This, combined with the discovery that some drawers and a cabinet had been forced open, suggested that the motive was robbery. Bertillon, however, wasn't convinced; the amount of money that
had been stolen was hardly enough to justify murdering a man.

A glass panel in the cabinet had been smashed and there was blood on the glass, suggesting that the culprit might have been injured. One of the police inspectors went to pick up one of the shards, but Bertillon stopped him; he had spotted a fingerprint. In fact, it transpired that the killer had left an almost perfect set of fingerprints in blood. With great care, Bertillon had the glass taken back to his laboratory and photographed. From this he produced a first-class image of three fingerprints and a thumbprint.

Of course, Bertillon now wanted to make a match, but the only chance of that was if the killer already had a record. Initial results were discouraging, but Bertillon kept searching and eventually, in a moment of great elation similar to the one he'd experienced during the Dupont case, he discovered a match for the fingerprints. The card belonged to a well-known twenty-five-year-old swindler called Henri-Léon Scheffer. Scheffer was tracked down to Marseilles, but before the police had time to arrest him, he turned himself in and confessed to the murder, explaining that he and Reibel had been lovers and had fought and that he had stolen the money to try to cover his tracks. Once again fingerprints had triumphed. Bertillon could now add to his long list of successes being the first man in Europe to solve a murder by way of fingerprints. Even so, he still did not adopt fingerprints as his primary means of criminal identification, refusing to give up his own system of body measurements. To have accepted that fingerprints alone could operate as well as, or better than, his own system, rather than simply being a helpful addition to it, would have meant admitting that his life's work no longer had a useful application.

It was also around the turn of the century that fingerprints at last began to show their worth in Great Britain. On Derby Day 1902, Scotland Yard deployed a number of fingerprint experts to the horse race. Since its beginnings in 1780, the Derby had become a well-known target for pickpockets and other criminals, who would flock there from across the country. All day long the fingerprint experts inked the fingers of arrested suspects. When, at the end of the day, they came to cross-check the fingerprints against those on file, they discovered that twenty-nine out of the fifty-four men from whom they had obtained prints had previous convictions. When the suspects were put before the magistrate the following day, these records were produced. With such strong evidence of their previous convictions, they were all sent to prison for at least twice as long as a first-time offender would have been.

But it wasn't until 1905 that fingerprints were first used to solve a murder case in Britain. The case in question was that of the infamous Deptford murders.

At 8:30
AM
on Monday, March 27, 1905, one William Jones arrived at his place of work, Chapman's Oil and Color Shop on the High Street in Deptford, just southeast of London. He found it still closed, which immediately concerned him, as it would normally be opened up by the owner, seventy-one-year-old Thomas Farrow who lived in the small flat above it with his wife, Ann, aged sixty-five. Jones tried knocking but received no response. Becoming even more concerned, he peered through a window and saw that several chairs had been overturned.

Now seriously worried, he ran to a local store where he found employee Louis Kidman; Jones asked him to come back with him to force an entry. Once inside, they discovered Mr. Farrow
lying on his back in the downstairs parlor. He was dead. They then discovered Mrs. Farrow in bed in the upstairs flat, still alive but badly injured. Both showed signs of a serious and sustained beating. The police and a doctor were summoned, and Mrs. Farrow was rushed to the hospital.

An empty cash box was found on the floor, which would usually have contained the weekly earnings. Jones explained that Mr. Farrow would normally deposit these in the bank on a Monday morning. Trying to be helpful and clear the scene, Sergeant Albert Atkinson pushed the cash box aside with his bare hands. When they became aware of this, Chief Inspector Frederick Fox and Assistant Commissioner Melville Mac-Naghten (head of the Criminal Investigation Department) decided to take over the case and preserve any remaining evidence.

The motive, then, had been robbery. The police were able to deduce several other details. From where they had been found and from the evidence of the scene, it was clear that Mr. and Mrs. Farrow had been attacked separately. Both were still in their nightwear, and there was no sign of a forced entry, so it was likely that Mr. Farrow had opened the door to his attackers before being beaten unconscious. The assailants must then have gone upstairs to the flat and attacked Mrs. Farrow, before finding the cash box and stealing the cash. From the blood trails at the scene, it looked as if Mr. Farrow had then somehow managed to get up again, only to be beaten once more, this time to death. The discovery of two black stocking masks pointed to the likely involvement of two perpetrators, who had coolly washed their hands in the sink after killing the shopkeeper.