by E. J. Wagner
By 1900, the British government, which had adopted a combination of anthropometry and fingerprinting, appointed Lord Belper to head a committee to study the “Identification of Criminals by Measurement and Fingerprints.” Edward Henry was called as an expert witness and gave testimony supporting fingerprinting as a method superior to bertillonage, a position with which the committee ultimately agreed. The following year, Henry was placed in charge of the new fingerprint branch at Scotland Yard.
It might have appeared that England was the new leader in identification techniques, but France still had extraordinary contributions to make. Edmond Locard, a student of Bertillon, was an assistant to Alexandre Lacassagne. Dr. Locard was qualified in both medicine and law, and in spite of his great respect for Bertillon, he became an early enthusiast of fingerprinting. He was a passionate researcher, and in the interest of acquiring accurate data, he had been known to burn his fingertips merely to satisfy himself that prints were truly indelible. He was a reader and an admirer of both Hans Gross and Conan Doyle, and he suggested that students of forensic science read the Sherlock Holmes tales as examples of proper scientific approach and to obtain a perspective on the new directions forensic science might take.
Appointed in 1910 as head of what was then a tiny police laboratory in Lyon, France, Locard proceeded to build it into a highly efficient and creative facility. He established the first rules for the minimum number of ridges that must concur before a fingerprint match might be declared. Basing his opinion on Galton and Henry’s work, he stated that if twelve concurring points are present in a sharp, clear print, the identity is certain. (Often referred to as “Galton’s Details,” the number of points that must match vary from country to country. On the federal level in the United States, no minimum number of points is required.)
Addressing the difficulties raised when prints recovered from a crime scene are blurred or only partial, Locard stressed that the accuracy of identification depended on multiple factors including the clarity of the prints, the rarity of their pattern, and the visibility of pores and of the core, or center, of the figure.
In 1913, his research led him to discover that it was possible to plant fraudulent fingerprints by the use of a finger modeled of gutta-percha (a rubberlike gum made from the sap of a tree in Malaysia), with ridges molded realistically upon it. A story most likely more amusing than true made the rounds among the police that a skilled Parisian burglar always left the fingerprint of the police chief at the scene of his crimes. To make sure that this did not become a reality, Locard developed a new method of identification to supplement fingerprinting. He called it poroscopy, and it depended on the observation of the patterns formed by thousands of pores between the ridges of fingerprints. There being many more pores than ridges, pore patterns would be infinitely more difficult to counterfeit.
Latent prints (those not visible to the naked eye) were made visible by iodine fumes and then photographed, because the revealed prints would soon fade. Fine-grained powders in colors that contrasted with the background of the prints were also used; the powders were delicately brushed on the latents and then photographed. Since the prints would be shown in court only in a copy, it was important that each step of the process be recorded, to avoid charges of planting prints.
Locard’s highly astute mind, imaginative flair, and reputation for integrity made the Lyon laboratory a highly respected facility. It also trained a number of world-class forensic scientists, among them the Swedish criminalist Harry Söderman.
Söderman, both in his memoir and in his conversations, recalled a strange case that took place in Lyon during the 1920s. (He did not specify the exact dates.) A series of burglaries were committed, always during the daytime, through windows that were about a foot open. Although the thief often took the risk of climbing to the second or even the third floor, only one or two objects were stolen, usually of shiny real or imitation gold or silver. In one case, a set of false teeth disappeared while the apartment owner was out of the room for just a few minutes. Police considered the possibility of youngsters daring each other in some sort of initiation rite, or of an individual with a bizarre sexual compulsion to enter forbidden space and abscond with a souvenir.
Eventually, the detective assigned to the case discovered a fingerprint on a windowpane. It was photographed and taken to the laboratory, but not only did it prove impossible to find a match with any print on file, the print was also most peculiar, as the ridges all appeared to run vertically.
Locard pondered the problem and came up with a startling idea. Perhaps he remembered Faulds’s original paper, “On the Skinfurrows of the Hand,” in which he had discussed studying the prints of primates. Perhaps, as an admirer of Sherlock Holmes, Locard thought of the description in “The Adventure of the Creeping Man”:
As we watched him he suddenly began with incredible agility to ascend it. From branch to branch he sprang, sure of foot and firm of grasp, climbing apparently in mere joy at his own powers, with no definite object in view… . It was the monkey, not the professor, whom Roy attacked, just as it was the monkey who teased Roy. Climbing was a joy to the creature.
Edmond Locard ordered all the local organ grinders and their simian employees brought to his laboratory. A number of the monkeys, perhaps concerned about an infringement of their civil rights, resisted fingerprinting and had to be restrained. The organ grinders were more cooperative. When the burglarizing beast had been identified, his companion’s rooms were searched and there the missing items were found.
The organ grinder, who had trained his pet to enter empty rooms on command and return with small glittering objects, spent several months in prison. The monkey served his sentence at the local zoo.
By the time of Bertillon’s death in 1913, fingerprinting had been clearly established as the dominant method of identification in police work, even in France. From that day on, those who made crime their living would bear in mind the declaration made by the local inspector of Harrow Weald, speaking of a piece of evidence he did not understand but had preserved, in “The Adventure of the Three Gables”: “There is always the chance of finger-marks or something.”
Whatever remains
• In the United States, the first official use of fingerprinting was in New York State in 1903.
• Even though fingerprinting became the gold standard for identification, it is well to remember that earlier forms of identifying marks continued to remain important. In 1935, in Melbourne, Australia, a recently caught fourteen-foot shark was on display at the aquarium when it suffered a violent attack of dyspepsia. It finally relieved itself by vomiting a mass that contained, among other items, a human arm that had been severed at the shoulder. The arm sported a tattoo of two boxers. The wife of a missing man named James Smith identified the arm as his, and prints at his home matched those of the arm. Although an arrest was made, the accused was acquitted, the jury evidently not being satisfied that the severed arm was definite proof that Smith was dead.
• Recent research indicates that natural residues on prepubescent children’s fingers differ from those of adults. Children’s latent prints are extremely fragile and can be destroyed by sunlight in just a few hours.
• Although identical twins have identical DNA, their fingerprints differ. Within the womb, as the fetuses float and move their limbs, the still malleable ridges of their fingers are affected by what they touch, and they acquire different shapes.
• There are those who argue that the uniqueness of fingerprints has not been conclusively proven, since each and every fingerprint has not been compared with every other fingerprint, past or present. Clearly this is an impossible standard to achieve. As millions of fingerprint comparisons have been made without any duplication being found, it is reasonable to assume that fingerprints are unique. The usefulness of fingerprints as identifiers in crime investigation is often limited as a practical matter because it is common for fingerprints gathered at crime scenes to be blurred, and often only partia
l fingerprints are obtained. It is often difficult, as a result, to positively determine a match. The careful training of fingerprint experts is of great importance, as is their strict adherence to scientific ethics.
For centuries, the bodies of executed criminals had been left in the hands of the executioners. Occasionally, anatomists were favored with a subject, whole or in part.
In the nineteenth century, dissection tables were still the flat wooden ones in use during the eighteenth century.
The dissection tables were often too short, and there was no drainage available. Sometimes the bodies were propped up by ropes to keep the subject intact.
Ropes were also
used to demonstrate the way the limbs extended in life and to allow medical artists to draw
different views.
Skulls and bones were boiled to free them of flesh.
Without the rotating saws available today, skulls were opened by means of knives, saws, and chisels.
Phrenology held that specific parts of the skull were associated with specific abilities. Heads like these were used for guidance.
An example of a Bertillon card used in
the United States in 1910. Curiously,
the identity of the subject is not given,
except for the listed occupation of
“theatrical promoter.”
The nineteenthcentury fear of
sexual behavior sometimes resulted
in drawings like this—of a human
without genitalia. It appeared in a
book of medical advice.
Imaginatively awful treatments abounded during the Victorian era.
CHAPTER 8
Shots in the Dark
“The bullets alone are enough to put his head in a noose.” —Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Empty House”
Sherlock holmes’s eye for detail never closes. As he reminds Watson in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” “You know my method. It is founded upon the observance of trifles.” And the trifles he observes and weaves through his reasoning include not only traces of tobacco ash and varieties of earth but also the effects of bullets. Holmes, hot on the trail, remarks in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” “It is now necessary that we should try to throw some light upon this third bullet, which has clearly, from the splintering of the wood, been fired from inside the room.”
Observations of the direction of a bullet’s path and its individual characteristics are the basis for the science of ballistics. Coupled with Holmes’s vast knowledge of scientific esoterica, these observations often lead to the unraveling of intricate crimes. In using ballistic evidence as a detection tool, the fictional Holmes is following a path already blazed by real-life detectives, such as the dashing Vidocq of the Sûreté and the indomitable Henry Goddard of the Bow Street Runners.
Vidocq is credited by a number of biographers with ordering, in 1822, the removal of a bullet from an aristocratic murder victim’s body in order to compare it with her husband’s dueling pistols. Observing that the bullet was much too large to fit the suspected firearms, Vidocq turned his attention to a weapon owned by the deceased’s lover, which proved to be the appropriate size. The lover confessed and was promptly escorted to the guillotine, to the great relief of the bereaved husband.
Across the channel thirteen years later, Henry Goddard was exploring a gunshot case with even greater rigor on behalf of the London-based Bow Street Runners. The Runners constituted the first government-authorized organization of detectives in Britain and was founded by the novelist Henry Fielding in 1749. Before that time, citizens were expected to enforce the law on their own, and people in the countryside privately hired constables or watchmen to protect them and their property. The very idea of a police force controlled by the government was repellent to most English citizens—they viewed it as a limitation of their freedom and a craven creep toward the embrace of tyranny.
But life in London was more complex than in the country, where everyone knew their neighbors. As the city’s population grew, crime kept pace, and it soon became evident that private citizens required some professional help in maintaining order. Fielding had begun by organizing, on his own authority, a small group of constables. He managed the men’s activities from his Bow Street residence. Eventually, he was granted some funds by the prime minister to give a stipend to members of his group, now popularly referred to as the Bow Street Runners. They were well established by 1835, the year in which Henry Goddard was called to consult on a mysterious case of attempted murder in the seaside town of Southampton.
In his Memoirs, Goddard describes his adventure with a detective’s flair for the salient detail. The chief magistrate had been informed that the Southampton home of Mrs. Maxwell, a lady of independent means, had been invaded by burglars in the still hours of the night. Guns had been fired, evidently in an attempt to slaughter the butler as he lay asleep in his bed. Intensely irritated by a bullet piercing both his repose and his pillow, the butler had leapt from his bed and valiantly fought off the intruders. In their haste to escape the righteously enraged servant, the thieves had left behind the large amount of household jewelry and silver plate that they had already securely wrapped.
Saying that this was “a grave matter,” the magistrate ordered Goddard to travel to the scene by that night’s mail coach and investigate. By nine the following morning, Goddard was at the Maxwell home interviewing the lady of the house and the intrepid butler, Joseph Randall. He found Mrs. Maxwell prostrate with fear.
Goddard examined the brave butler’s room and his bed, which stood opposite stoutly shuttered windows. The shutters each had a hole near the top about the size of a saucer to admit air and light.
The butler explained to Goddard that on the night of the attack, he had secured the doors and windows as usual before going to bed. He had been awakened at about one in the morning by an unfamiliar sound outside the pantry windows, which he likened to that made by a chain being dragged over gravel. He thought he heard footsteps inside the house and then heard the door to his bedroom being slowly opened. He could see, reflected on a small picture that hung opposite his bedroom door, a lantern held at arm’s length “and the shadow of a man before it and a man behind the one that carried the lantern.”
Randall said he pretended to sleep and heard the men back away. Thoroughly alarmed, the butler reached under his pillow for his pistol, when a gun was fired into his room from the outdoors through one of the holes in the shutters. The bullet passed through the butler’s pillow and pierced the headboard of the bed. If Randall had not turned to reach for his pistol when he did, he excitedly told the detective, he would “have been left a corpse.” The butler then jumped from his bed and chased the masked burglars into the hallway, where he struggled with them, frightening them into escaping and leaving behind the household goods.
The local watch, who had been promptly summoned by Mrs. Maxwell, discovered that the back door had been forced and that the house was in a state of disarray. Goddard, who had listened with great care, was uneasy with the butler’s description of the lantern that cast “the shadow of a man before it.” He examined the back door as minutely as Holmes ever examined a door and found it had been forced by a Jemmy (a short crowbar favored by wellschooled burglars for gaining entry), but he thought the impression on the outside of the door “did not correspond with the inside.”
He discovered still another inconsistency. In 1835, bullets were not mass produced but were formed in individual molds by the gun owner. Goddard asked Randall for his pistols, his molds, and the bullet that had been fired through the headboard of the bed and recovered.
Upon examination, each of the bullets, including the slightly flattened one that had been fired, possessed a very tiny, round pimple that corresponded with an equally tiny hole in the mold. It appeared clear to Goddard that all the bullets had been made by the same hand, but he asked for a second opinion from a local gunsmith, who agreed with Goddard’s conclusion.
Strongly pressed for an explanation, Randall finally confessed he had staged the entire incident in hopes of obtaining a handsome reward from Mrs. Maxwell and of ensuring his continued employment. He managed to achieve neither goal. As Mrs. Maxwell preferred to avoid “a scene” (the bête noire of nineteenthcentury British life), no charges were brought against him. The shifty servant was allowed to sidle off into obscurity.
Fifty years before Sherlock Holmes first appeared, the Bow Street Runner had used the Sherlockian method of careful observation of trifles. The Randall matter was the first case of ballistic identification to be documented, and Henry Goddard remains forever inscribed in forensic history as the man who proved that the butler did it.
The years that followed were not particularly fruitful for the study of guns and bullets as a part of criminal investigation, and it was largely by happy accident that there was an occasional success. In 1860, a policeman found a paper wad torn from the March 24, 1854, issue of the Times of London near the body of a gunshot victim. It smelled of powder and had evidently been used to stuff powder and a bullet down the barrel of a muzzle-loaded firearm. A man named Richardson was under suspicion, and a search of his residence disclosed a double-barreled pistol, one barrel of which had been recently fired. The other was still loaded and furthermore contained a paper wad similar to the one found at the scene. The clever policeman checked with the editor of the Times and determined that the second wad came from the same sixyear-old issue of the paper. The evidence was damning, and Richardson confessed.
Here and there, there were a few similar cases, but while they were morally satisfying, they were unfortunately no harbingers of great strides in ballistics. The nineteenth century witnessed many changes in the design and manufacture of firearms, including the use of spiraling grooves within the barrel, which gave the weapons greater accuracy and range. Spiraling grooves were possible once guns no longer had to be loaded at the muzzle. They also produced distinctive markings on the spent bullets. Since each gun maker had a different number and type of rifling grooves, the key existed for determining which bullet was fired from which gun. But the key was not systematically used.
