The Sunday Gentleman (50 page)

As the first day gave way to the first week, and then to the first month, Bertillon recognized the unavoidable flaws in his system. Juvenile delinquents or aged criminals, whose bone structures were changing, growing, deteriorating, were not represented in his file. Then there was the human element involved in measuring. Some Sûreté operators measured a convict in a slipshod fashion, some so carefully as to exaggerate reality. Nevertheless, Bertillon felt that his identification method was accurate enough to catch most repeaters. Yet, at the end of two months, he had failed to identify a single one.

It was on a dreary afternoon, in late February of 1883, that a stocky young man, about thirty years old, stood before Bertillon. He said his name was Dupont. Bertillon snorted. This was the day’s sixth Dupont, a name which in France is often used as a fictitious name, as Americans use John Doe. The man had been arrested while committing an act of burglary. As a first offense, this was not so serious. As a second offense, they could throw the book at him. Dupont insisted that this was his first crime. Bertillon took his measurements, and then began checking his new files. He came up with two cards. The statistics on one did not completely correspond with Dupont’s. The other card bore the measurements of a man named Martin, who had been arrested for burglary eight weeks before. Martin’s measurements, from ear to fingers, and forearm, were exactly the same as Dupont’s!

Trembling, Bertillon confronted Dupont. “Do you recognize those photographs. Monsieur Martin? They were taken on your last visit here.”

Dupont stared. “He looks like me, but his nose is longer.”

“Exactly. You altered your nose. But you could not alter, your bone structure. Read the measurements for yourself!”

Faced with the facts, Dupont surrendered, admitted that he was Martin, and confessed to a half-dozen previous offenses.

Bertillon had won his long-shot gamble. In less than three months, his new system had succeeded The sensation it created was tremendous. The prefect promoted him. The Sûreté honored him. The press pestered him. There was an avalanche of requests for interviews, speeches, and banquet appearances. But Bertillon was busy. In the first year, 7,336 criminals were measured, and 49 repeaters caught and jailed. In the second year, 241 repeaters were caught. Before ten years were up, Bertillon’s identification system would place 3,500 dangerous criminals behind bars in France alone. In 1885, the Sûreté officially adopted anthropometry, and three years later, Bertillon was promoted to chief of the new Identity Department with a sizable raise in salary.

The individual cases solved by Bertillon’s system were spectacular. A body, swollen and distorted by immersion in water, was fished out of the Marne River. The shirt was monogrammed P.C., the key ring initialed J.D. Bertillon took measurements, consulted his files, identified the body by its large skull, found the victim’s previous history, and through it the clues that led to the murderer. Another time, a bricklayer named Rollin disappeared. His wife and friends identified him as one of three corpses in the morgue. Bertillon wasn’t sure. An hour before the funeral, he measured the corpse, found it to be the body of a famous criminal and not that of Rollin. Later, Bertillon proved that Rollin was still alive.

Then there was the case of a tall, blond German known as Hiller who had committed a cold-blooded murder outside of Lyons. Witnesses thought that they had seen a tall, blond man hurriedly catch a train to Paris, only the man had appeared to be French, not German. Fortunately, there was a Bertillon index card on Hiller, which included the notation, “Roman nose with turned-down base, triangular ears; he habitually gnaws at his nails.” Sûreté detectives watched the exits of the Gare de Lyon. A tall, blond, Roman-nosed foreigner came striding through. The detectives started, but halted. This man’s nose base was straight, his ears round. The detectives made a quick decision. A commotion about the wrong man might scare off the real fugitive. The detectives waited. And then, seconds later, came another tall, blond man. The Sûreté ignored his French clothes, concentrating only on his face. Roman nose with turned-down base. Triangular ears. The detectives swarmed over him. When they pulled off his gloves, they saw that his nails were bitten. At headquarters, his measurements coincided with Killer’s. He was Hiller. And he confessed to the killing.

But skeptics wondered if Bertillon’s system could penetrate a really professional disguise. To prove that it could, Bertillon dramatically caught an absconding bank teller, who had managed to change himself from a plump, bushy-haired, popeyed businessman to a skinny, bald, rheumy-eyed tramp, caught him by the unchanged appearance of his ears.

These cases gave Bertillon prestige inside France, but his methods were still little understood by the world at large. This was remedied by the antics of Michel Eyraud and his pretty, twenty-one-year-old mistress, Gabrielle Bompard. One evening in July of 1889, Gabrielle Bompard lured a well-off government official named Gouffé to her Paris apartment with promises of love; then, as she disrobed, she teasingly slipped the cord of her dressing gown around his neck. That moment, she signaled Eyraud to step from behind a curtain and yank the cord tight. The murdered official was robbed, stuffed into a trunk, and the trunk dumped off a road near Lyons.

In search of a prosperous new life, Eyraud and Bompard sailed for Canada, spent time in Montreal, and then in San Francisco, and finally went into the wine business in the small community of Saint Helena, California. Meanwhile, a month after the crime, the French Sûreté had located Gouffe’s corpse and the trunk. By November, 1889, based on clues unearthed by a brilliant inspector named Goron, and through use of Bertillon’s system of identification, the Sûreté decided that the murderer had been Eyraud, and his accomplice had been Gabrielle Bompard. Two Sûreté detectives, Huillier and Soudais, were sent on a fantastic chase across Canada, the United States, Mexico, hunting for the fugitive pair. However, on her own, Gabrielle Bompard, and a new male companion she had acquired, returned to Paris, where she surrendered herself to the Sûreté. And shortly after, Eyraud was trapped in Havana, and brought back to Paris. The pair were turned over to Bertillon, who photographed them, measured them three times, and filed their statistics away with others in his growing list of criminals. After a sensational trial, in which Gabrielle’s susceptibility to hypnotism became the cornerstone of her defense and received headlines throughout the world, the two were found guilty of premeditated murder. Eyraud was sentenced to death, and executed on the guillotine in 1891. Gabrielle was sentenced to a jail term, and not released until 1905. The international publicity that Bertillon gained from his minor role in this case, as well as added publicity that he obtained from measuring the battered face of an anarchist named Ravachol, who had blown up the home of the Paris public prosecutor, helped familiarize other nations with the new identity system.

Bertillon’s fame spread. Among the first of the foreign cities to adopt his system was Chicago, after Major R. W. McClaughry, warden of the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet, translated Bertillon’s methods into English and became his foremost disciple. In New York, the crack detective. Inspector Thomas Byrnes, who worked under Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, adopted Bertillon’s criminal photography and invented an album whose nickname was soon to become a byword in the United States, the “Rogues’ Gallery,” The International Association of Chiefs of Police organized a global clearinghouse of Bertillon records in Washington, D.C. Bertillon himself never found time to visit America. Instead, as his ambassador, he sent his brother, Jacques, who amazed him by reporting back that even a railroad porter in Philadelphia recognized the family name. The only concession Bertillon made to help spread his gospel was his attendance at crime congresses throughout Europe. He was terrified of speechmaking, and when forced to speak in public, wrote out every word in advance. At the International Prison Congress, in Rome, he satisfied detectives of every nation with a thorough ninety-five-page report on his system.

His name became a part of the language. People spoke of “bertillonage.” In the nightclubs on Montmartre’s hill, in Le Lapin Agile and in Moulin de la Galette, painted ladies sang topical tunes about Bertillon’s “I’identification anthropometrique.” Czar Nicholas II sent him a gold-and-pearl clock, and Queen Victoria sent him a medal, for helping with identity work in Russia and Great Britain. The future King Edward VII, Victoria’s son, came to see the Sûreté laboratory, and requested Bertillon to measure two criminals before him personally. Fourteen foreign governments, including Sweden and Austria, honored or knighted him. His name and his invention were everywhere, and the world was becoming a safer place in which to live.

With his system apparently established, Bertillon restlessly searched for new crime problems. Intrigued by so-called perfect crimes, he risked his reputation by going into the field to solve them. And in these efforts, he gave law enforcement one of its earliest tastes of modem psychology and deduction.

A robbery suspect was jailed with only the weakest evidence against him. Bertillon felt sure of the man’s guilt, but he could not prove it. Privately, using his police as actors, he reconstructed the crime as he deduced it had happened. At last, satisfied with his theory, Bertillon prepared to verify it. One night, he slipped into the burglar’s cell. Then, pencil and pad in hand, he sat patiently beside the sleeping man. At dawn, the man woke, yawned, was about to turn over, when he saw Bertillon making notes beside him. He sat up with a shriek. “What are you doing here?” Bertillon waved his notebook. “Taking down your full confession, monsieur. You talked in your sleep. You told me every detail of your crime. Ah, you do not believe me? Very well. I shall read your confession from my notebook.” Bertillon looked down at the blank pages in his notebook and pretended to read. Step by step, he described the man’s crime as he had earlier reconstructed it. The criminal gave up any further resistance. He signed a formal confession of guilt. Bertillon’s deductions had been correct to the most trivial detail.

Again, a wealthy, well-known European figure. Baron Zeidler, was found dead in his stables. Nearby, neighing and kicking, was his newest hunter. The baron was examined, and hoof marks were found on his face and skull. He had obviously been knocked unconscious and then kicked to death by the unruly horse. It was a terrible accident. Bertillon, strolling in and about the stables, asked to see the deceased baron’s face. He studied the hoof marks thoughtfully, then announced, “Gentlemen, this was not an accident but murder. Very clever. Well planned. But the murderer slipped. You see, the horseshoe marks on Baron Zeidler’s face are at the wrong angle. He’d have to have been standing on his head when the horse kicked him to receive the marks in this fashion.” Bertillon’s deduction was accurate. After a brief investigation, the murderer was caught. He had summoned the baron to the stables, and then battered him about the head and face with a heavy club to which a pair of horseshoes was tied.

Bertillon believed that too much police evidence depended upon eyewitnesses (“Most people look without seeing,” he would say), too much depended upon hearsay, guesswork, and not enough upon cold scientific factual evidence. He had turned the Sûreté into a mammoth, machinelike laboratory. His enemies, conservative, old-fashioned, at home and abroad, challenged some of his scientific innovations. Bertillon’s reply was to point to the Tellier case.

Here, it appeared, was the perfect crime. The body of a man, clubbed to death, then doubled over, tied tightly with rope, and wrapped around with tar paper, was discovered in the Bois de Boulogne just outside Paris. There was absolutely no clue to his identity. Or at least there was none until Bertillon appeared on the scene. Gravely, he listened to the reports of his detectives. Then, silently, with his traveling microscope, he went to work. A half hour later, he gathered his men around him.

“The victim was an accountant or an office clerk,” he began. “His hands show no sign of having done manual labor. His right shirt-sleeve is cleaner and newer than his left. Accountants and clerks protect the sleeve on their writing hand with a special cuff. This keeps the sleeve almost new. The victim was hit on the head from behind with a club. He was murdered in a large wine cellar, dragged into a second room filled with sawdust, sand, and coal, and then temporarily hidden in a third room—a pitch-black room with absolutely no windows. This was all done in a house beside the Seine.”

The Sûreté detectives were dumbfounded, but quickly Bertillon explained. “My microscope located, on the back of the victim’s shirt collar, two opaque, blind parasites, a rare species of blind arthropod which can only live in a pitch-black room. On the victim’s coat and vest are bacilli, causing alcoholic fermentation, proving these garments were in a room near stores of wine. The grains of sawdust, sand, and coal on the body indicate a cellar room where there are such deposits. The sand also makes it probable that the killing occurred in a house near the Seine.”

Briskly, Bertillon gave his orders. “First, we will look for a recently missing office worker. That will give us the identity of this corpse. Then we will look for a house near the river, with cellars containing wine barrels, loose sand, and a very dark room filled with blind parasites. Find these and we find the murderer.”

After three days of intensive hunting, the Sûreté found a firm near the Luxembourg Gardens that admitted its veteran bookkeeper, Charles Tellier, had been unaccountably missing from his desk for over a week. Tellier’s rooms were searched, his friends and associates thoroughly questioned. The trail led to his bookie. Monsieur Cabassou, beloved and genial proprietor of a restaurant on the Seine.

Bertillon questioned Cabassou, and his beautiful redheaded wife, Marcelle, and learned that they both had known Tellier. But there was no cellar. Later, before dawn, at great personal risk, Bertillon returned, searching again until he found a trapdoor, and a staircase leading into a secret cellar. There was a large room filled with wine barrels, and on the wall a bloodstain. A door led to a second room, its floor covered with sawdust and cut logs, sand from the river, and pieces of coal. And finally, through a trick entrance in the cellar wall, Bertillon entered a pitch-black third room. A flashlight showed thousands of parasites on the walls and ceiling, and the microscope revealed that they were blind, colorless arthropods. Cabassou, realizing his game was up, tried to escape, was caught, and confessed. Having learned his wife was in love with Tellier, he had lured the bookkeeper into the cellar on the pretense of inviting him to sample the wine, and then murdered him. An almost perfect crime—solved because of one clean shirtsleeve and two sightless insects. Bertillon had shown diehards the value of deduction and the power of science.