The Sunday Gentleman (51 page)

At his peak, Bertillon was the embodiment of today’s detective. A great, stern, bewhiskered man, he was unsentimental in his work, tough, explosive. His foremost student. Dr. Edmond Locard, France’s leading detective today, affectionately remembers him as “a bad-tempered werewolf.” A Sûreté technician, recalling him, says, “He was a perfectionist. We feared him. Silence was his best praise.”

Bertillon never forgot an offense. Juan Vucetich, the Argentine police scientist who did pioneer work in fingerprinting, once ridiculed Bertillon’s system. Later, when Vucetich came to Paris, he asked to see the Sûreté Identity Department. Unsmiling, Bertillon met him at the entrance. “Monsieur,” said Bertillon, “you attempted to harm my system”—and then he slammed the door in the South American’s face. More often, however, he resolved his feuds good-naturedly. When a Paris columnist named Sarcey ridiculed Bertillon’s photographic methods in print, Bertillon invited him to the Sûreté. As they strolled through the laboratories, the columnist explained that he doubted if anyone could photograph a man candidly if the man did not wish to be so photographed. Bertillon listened in silence, and then, at the end of the tour, handed Sarcey ten remarkably true photographs of himself—all automatically snapped by hidden, secret cameras that caught the columnist whenever he passed through a Sûreté door.

Unquestionably, Bertillon’s personal genius made the Sûreté what it is today, and through the Sûreté, made the FBI and Scotland Yard what they are today. “Ask yourself two questions about every premeditated murder,” Bertillon would say. “Who profits by this crime? Where is the woman?” He proved 90 percent of major French crimes have a woman involved in them. He cautioned his detectives, “I distrust a man who always smiles.” When grilling a suspect, Bertillon always made him take off his shoes. “A man without shoes is less arrogant,” he would say. He taught his colleagues that women are usually the killers of little children, that men are almost always the forgers, and women the blackmailers.

The French claim Bertillon first discovered a criminal’s height could be determined by his stride marks, and that he was the first to insist on photographing the scene of a crime. He enjoyed putting criminal photography to odd and new uses. When the
Mona Lisa
was daringly stolen from the Louvre by a little Italian named Perugia in 1913, and later, recovered in Italy, it was Bertillon’s enlarged photographs of the brush strokes that identified the disputed oil as the fabulous original.

Friends and enemies alike knew Bertillon solely as a brilliant human bloodhound. But there was another side. One afternoon in 1882, while crossing the Rue de Rivoli, he had met a young blonde with a Viennese accent. She had turned to him and asked: “Sir, would you help me across the street? I am nearsighted, and have forgotten my spectacles.” That was how he met Amelie Notar. She had come to Paris from Austria, and was teaching German for her keep. Bertillon found that the only way he could woo her was by taking German lessons from her. After his identity system had succeeded, Bertillon married Amelie, Suzanne Bertillon, a niece who now resides in Paris, remembers the marriage as a wonderfully happy one, and recalls that her uncle was far less a terror at home than at the Sûreté. “On summer Sundays, he loved to fish, swim, go boating,” Suzanne recalls, “but on winter nights we would all sit around the dining room table, under the petroleum lamp, in the family place in the Place du Trocadéro. Bertillon would frighten us with horror stories, but they always ended in a funny way. Perhaps so that we would sleep. He had a great taste for fun.”

Bertillon’s favorite form of relaxation, which he indulged in regularly at his summer country house on the Marne, was to meet with three colleagues: Lacassagne, the laboratory expert from Lyons; Reiss, the German crime photography wizard; and Minovici, boss of the Bucharest police. The quartet would exchange wild crime experiences by the hour, ranging from the killing which Reiss had solved by analyzing the substance scraped from under a human nail, to the strange clue Lacassagne had found in Lyons, the fingerprints of a pair of large monkeys trained to rob.

Bertillon enjoyed conversation on all subjects, but there were two subjects he did not like to discuss. One was the Dreyfus case. While this case was in its earliest stages, he had been called in to study examples of handwriting, a subject with which he was less familiar than with most other techniques of crime detection, and he had unequivocally-reported that his analysis proved Dreyfus the author of the treasonable document in question. Later, when the scandal over evidence forged by Major Henry (who committed suicide) broke into the open, Bertillon was among the many experts proved wrong. Ignoring the decision of the Supreme Court of Appeals, Bertillon refused to retract his analysis, insisting it had been correct and scientific.

Bertillon was even more stubborn about his identity system, anthropometry. It was his brain baby, his life, and he refused to listen to the growing clamor about another identity system—fingerprinting.

Today, many persons believe that Bertillon invented fingerprinting. This is not true. Today, many specialists think Bertillon had nothing to do with fingerprinting. This, also, is not true. To begin with, fingerprinting as an identification method is not a recent discovery. The Chinese were using thumbprints for signatures fifteen hundred years ago. In 1856, an Englishman in India, Herschell, who was entrusted with the job of paying Indian moguls their pensions, learned that many undeserving recipients were collecting under false names. In one particular case, a pension had been doled out to the same name for two hundred years. So Herschell conceived the idea of fingerprinting all Indians who came to collect their pensions. But fingerprinting did not become popular outside of India until Sir Francis Gallon, the great English scientist, devised a workable dactyloscopic system in 1892.

The exponents of the fingerprint system bombarded Bertillon and his adherents with a series of spectacular statements. Human fingers always are perspiring lightly, they argued, so they cannot touch a smooth surface without leaving behind a telltale mark. Fingerprints never change, they argued. The adult pattern exists in a foetus at four months. And clear prints can still be taken from stuffed monkeys, and from Egyptian mummies five thousand years old. Fingerprints are not affected by race, class, or intelligence. They are made by savages and anthropologists, geniuses and idiots, queens and prostitutes, in related and recognizable patterns. When the fingertip is injured or cut off, the newly grown skin assumes its original pattern (sensationally proved, in our time, in the case of John Dillinger, who had a doctor alter his fingertips; yet, after his death, the FBI found that his new prints already had over three hundred points identical with the old ones). Above all, according to various experts, the odds range from sixty-four million to one, to a ratio of novemdecillion to one, against the probability that two human beings would ever have exactly the same fingerprints.

Bertillon snorted. He had found, he said, twin brothers whose fingerprints bore thirty marks of exact resemblance. He respected, he said, the efforts of his friend, Sir Francis Galton, but fingerprinting was too new, too untried. Had it ever caught a murderer? Solved a crime? On the other hand, his own anthropometry, while more cumbersome, was surely tried, proved, and infallible. Suddenly, one day, an incident occurred in the Federal Penitentiary, Leavenworth, Kansas, that shook Bertillon out of his complacency.

A criminal, Will West, had been committed to Leavenworth, and given prison number 3426. As he was being photographed and measured according to the Bertillon system, one of the operators remarked that he appeared familiar. He asked Will West if he’d been there before. West said that he had not, that this was his first offense. Brought before the chief identity clerk, West still claimed that he never before had seen the inside of a prison. The clerk said, “West, you are lying, you’ve been here. We have your photographs and measurements. I’ll show you.” The Bertillon files were quickly consulted. Sure enough, there were photographs and an index card marked “William West, Number 2626.” Will West admitted the photographs looked like him, that the measurements tallied with his, but violently insisted he had never been in Leavenworth before. Annoyed, the clerk flipped the identity card over, and read on the back, “William West Committed to this institution September 9, 1901. Murder.” The clerk blinked. If this was true, it meant the William West on the card was already in a cell of the prison. The second Will West was summoned. In ten minutes, the two men stood side by side: Will West, Number 3426, and William West, Number 2626. They were not twins, not even relatives, but their faces were the same, their bodies, and their Bertillon measurements were exact in five out of eleven points, and differed only a fraction of an inch on the other six points.

The West case caused an eruption in police circles. Bertillonage had not been discredited, but it had been severely shaken. Several years before, Bertillon himself, to please Gallon, had added four fingerprints to each of his measurement reports. But he remained an enemy of fingerprinting. Now, his basic honesty asserted itself. Still the scientific man, he suddenly did an about-face. He would prove that he was not too old to change, to accept new ideas, to accept and
improve
upon new ideas. At once, he had the Sûreté fully adopt fingerprinting. To his own measurements of each new criminal, he had all ten fingerprints added.

In a frenzy, he decided to make up for lost ground. His enemies had insisted that he was suppressing the growth of fingerprinting by the prestige of his opposition. Now he would show them. He invented fingerprint photography. He perfected a white powder for picking up prints. He experimented with a new classification system. But one thing bothered him. Fingerprints had solved no major crime.

On an October night in 1905, an unknown person broke into the home of a Parisian dentist. The criminal smashed a glass case, removed some valuable antiques, and then, apparently, as he was about to escape, was confronted by the dentist’s servant. From the wreckage, it appeared a wild battle had been fought. In the end, the servant had been floored, kicked unconscious, and then battered to death. Bertillon came to study the crime. There seemed to be no clues. Bertillon poked through the debris, carefully collected pieces of broken glass, and returned with them to his laboratory.

“On one fragment of glass, he noticed four clear fingerprints,” says Suzanne Bertillon. “Powder was not necessary. The prints were plain enough to be photographed and enlarged. In great excitement, Bertillon hurried to his files and began poring over them. At last, he came up with an index card. It belonged to a hardened ex-convict named Scheffer. The prints on it exactly matched those on the broken glass. Immediately, Bertillon sent out a description of Scheffer, based on photos and measurements in his files. All European police were notified. In three days, the killer was trapped. Scheffer, a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde personality and a homosexual, had planned his crime as a murder and tried to make it appear like robbery. He had gone to kill the dentist’s servant, whom he had lost as his boy friend. He was sure he had escaped successfully. He had not reckoned with Bertillon.

“This was the first time in world history,” said Miss Bertillon, “that a murderer was caught through fingerprints. It created an international sensation in police circles. It helped popularize and establish the new system of fingerprinting. And, in the end, it was Alphonse Bertillon who did it!”

Bertillon died February 13, 1914, aged sixty-one. His funeral, three days later, was a national event. Because he lived, thousands of criminals died by the hemp, under the blade, or in the electric chair. Because of him, the earth’s two billion men, women and children, from St. Louis to Singapore, from Rio to Rome, sleep more safely tonight.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

I had not yet determined to do a story about Alphonse Bertillon that late summer afternoon in 1949, when the detective’s niece, Suzanne Bertillon, came to call upon me at my Paris hotel. I will never forget my first sight of her: a tiny gnome of a woman, middle-aged, full of vitality, pedaling a bicycle up the Rue de Bern to the California Hotel where I was waiting. We went into the bar for a drink, and there she presented me with a copy of
Vie d’ Alphonse Bertillon
, the biography she had written about her illustrious uncle, published by Gallimard eight years earlier. I suppose it was my conversations with Miss Bertillon about her uncle, and the reading of her biography, as well as my visit to Alphonse Bertillon’s great admirer in Lyons, Dr. Edmond Locard, that made me decide to undertake the writing of “Monsieur Bertillon.”

Until then, what had made me resist a project that held enormous interest for me was the scarcity of research materials. In his lifetime, Bertillon had produced thirteen scientific papers and books, all highly technical, and none revealed anything of the man himself. There had been a work on him written jointly by Dr. Locard and Professor Lacassagne, published in Lyons, and another work published in Belgium, but neither offered the kind of material I desired. The truth about Bertillon had to be excavated from beneath a mound of sensational and often inaccurate newspaper clippings in several languages, scientific treatises, and popular memoirs written by other detectives who had known and admired him. Could a story be derived and constructed from these fragments? I was doubtful. And so I had held back, until Miss Bertillon’s biography in French, her wonderful anecdotes in English, supplemented by additional colorful material from Dr. Locard, made the story possible.

I wrote “Monsieur Bertillon” late in 1949. It was published in the January, 1950, issue of True magazine, and reprinted in the February, 1950, issue of the Reader’s Digest under the title “France’s Greatest Detective.” I had enjoyed writing the story, but I had expected it to have a short life after its publication, inasmuch as I felt that few Americans would identify with a French hero. I was wrong. As a direct result of my story, millions of Americans first became acquainted, or became better acquainted, with the life and exploits of Bertillon. For, as chance would have it, the television rights to my story were acquired by TV Reader’s Digest, which produced it as a half-hour television film starring Arthur Franz in the role of Alphonse Bertillon. The television film was shown coast-to-coast in the United States. And even in recent years, it has continued to be replayed on television.