Silent Witnesses Page 3
It made no difference; after hugging his wife and children, a tearful Lesurques went to his death.
Dubosq, the man named by Couriol, was finally captured. He did indeed bear a remarkable likeness to Lesurques. He was eventually tried and executed, four years after Lesurques had answered for the same crime. To this day, despite a general acceptance that he was innocent, Lesurques has never been reprieved.
In many cases victims of a crime might need to be identified too, particularly when that crime is murder. The earlier case of Catherine and John Hayes provides a grisly example of this.
At around dawn on March 2, 1725, a watchman discovered the severed head of a man lying on the muddy foreshore of the River Thames at Westminster in London. It had obviously not been there very long, as decomposition was yet to really set in. The facial features were still intact, meaning that with luck someone might recognize the unfortunate individual. The head was presented to local magistrates, who ordered that it should be cleaned up and its hair combed. After it had been prepared in this way, it was taken to St. Margaret’s Parish Church and stuck on a pole for all to see. The queue to view the remains was apparently so long that vendors worked the crowd selling food and water. Parish constables were stationed near the head and around the graveyard, the idea being that the guilty party would surely react in some way if they saw the head. There was also an age-old belief that if a murderer touched the corpse of their victim, it would bleed. Therefore anyone who seemed particularly upset at seeing the head was forced by the constables to touch it so that they could observe whether blood oozed forth from it.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this approach failed to produce a suspect, and it was not long before the head began to decay and to be pecked at by the local birds. Fearful of it becoming unrecognizable, the magistrates ordered that it be immersed in a large jar of gin to preserve it, then taken inside the church. This was duly done and that, for the time being, was that.
Catherine Hall was a dominant, attractive woman who drew admirers easily. She was born near Birmingham, England, in 1690, the daughter of a pauper, and left home at the age of fifteen to seek her fortune in London. On her way she fell in with several military officers, who took a shine to her and brought her with them to their billets at Ombersley, Worcestershire, where she stayed with them for some time. She eventually left them and was next picked up by a respectable farmer called Hayes. He was much older than she, and she quickly formed a relationship with his son John instead. The two were married in secret. When John’s father found out, seeing that it was too late to do anything about the relationship, he set up his son in business as a carpenter. However, the rural life wasn’t enough for Catherine—she wanted more. She wanted London and all that it had to offer her. After putting considerable pressure on her new husband, she finally convinced him to move there. The pair established a lodging house and soon also became successful coal merchants, moneylenders, and pawnbrokers. They quickly amassed considerable savings. Later, Catherine took in two young lodgers called Thomas Wood and Thomas Billings.
An organ-builder’s apprentice by the name of Bennet had by now seen the head on display in St. Margaret’s. Having done so, he felt compelled to call on Catherine at her residence on Tyburn Road (now Oxford Street), to tell her that he believed the head to be that of her husband, John, with whom he had once worked. Catherine was incensed. She assured Bennet that John was quite well and warned him that if he continued to spread such nasty false rumors, she would have to ask the police to arrest him.
But one Samuel Patrick had also been to see the head, and he too felt certain that he recognized it. Later that day, he told anyone in the Dog and Dial pub who would listen that the head bore a striking resemblance to John Hayes of Tyburn Road. Thomas Billings, one of Catherine’s lodgers, happened to be drinking in the pub at the same time. He assured the company that all was well and that he had left John Hayes sleeping soundly when he set out from home that morning. Despite this reassurance, several of Hayes’s friends remained suspicious. Eventually, a man by the name of Ashby asked Catherine about her husband to her face. She came up with a most bizarre explanation, telling him that John had been forced to flee to Portugal, having killed a man during a quarrel. Ashby was quite rightly unconvinced by this explanation, especially since Billings had completely failed to mention this rather dramatic occurrence. Another friend of Hayes, a Mr. Longmore, also questioned Catherine on the matter and similarly felt sure that she was not telling the truth. As a result the two men went to see a magistrate, who agreed with them that it all seemed rather suspicious and issued a warrant for Catherine’s arrest. She was found in bed with Billings. Both were promptly arrested, as were two other lodgers, Thomas Wood and a Mrs. Springate.
Catherine now asked to see the head and was taken to it. On being shown the pickled remains, she snatched the jar up in her arms and screamed dramatically, “Oh, it is my dear husband’s head!” and kissed the jar. Clearly this was not a sufficient display of her feelings, for then, in one of the most bizarre incidents in the history of forensic detection, she lifted the now seriously decomposed head from the jar by its hair and kissed it passionately on the lips. She then asked for a lock of her dead husband’s hair. The constable refused, telling her the head was bloody and that she already had enough blood on her hands. Perhaps realizing that her dramatic display had not fooled anyone, Catherine then passed out.
Thomas Wood proved to be the weak link in the group. When questioned he quickly broke and confessed that he and Thomas Billings had both been Catherine’s lovers. Tired of her husband’s “mean spirits,” Catherine had persuaded the two men to murder him. They got him drunk on six pints of wine so that he fell asleep, at which point Billings hit him over the head with a pickaxe. Wood was then handed the hatchet and told to finish the job, thus ensuring that he was fully involved in the murder. He struck John Hayes across the head several times, until they were sure he was dead. They then put his head above a bucket and sawed it from his shoulders using a sharp carving knife. Catherine wanted to boil the head in order to destroy its features, but this was deemed a step too far by Wood and Billings and they refused to do it. Instead they took it away in a bucket and threw it onto the foreshore of the River Thames. They then returned home and dismembered the rest of the body before throwing the bits into a pond in Marylebone. When the pond was dredged, the rest of the body was indeed discovered.
Catherine Hayes was not to be charged with murder but rather “petty treason”—her husband was supposed to be her lord and master, and she had rebelled against him. The penalty for this was not hanging but the far worse fate of being burnt at the stake. On learning this, Catherine finally confessed her part in events while trying to pin the crime on Wood and Billings. However, this made little difference and she was condemned to be burnt.
While being held in prison, Catherine attempted to poison herself, no doubt hoping for a less painful end. The attempt, however, failed, and on May 9, 1726, she was duly burnt alive at Tyburn, where the Marble Arch now stands. It was normal practice to strangle the condemned before the flames reached them, an act of mercy, but in Catherine’s case the executioner burnt his hands while throttling her and so was unable to complete the work. She survived the flames for longer than anyone could have imagined. It was said that her screams could be heard all over London. She was the last woman in England to be burnt alive for petty treason (although the bodies of women were burnt after execution until 1790).
As for the amorous, murderous lodgers: Thomas Billings was hanged in chains in Marylebone Fields, close to the pond where he had dumped John Hayes’s body. Thomas Wood avoided the gallows by dying of fever in prison.
In this case the correct identity of the victim was established serendipitously by a few people who knew him seeing the severed head while it was on display. However, we can well imagine that without this good luck, the culprits might have escaped punishment for their crime. Equally, if the head had been boiled as Catherine Hayes had
wished, then even those who knew him well would almost certainly not have been able to make an identification. Better methods were needed, though their development would take more than a hundred years.
One of the major problems that continued to confront the police was the issue of how to identify habitual thieves. A man arrested in, say, Nottingham, might already be wanted for crimes in London, Liverpool, or Norwich but would escape punishment for them because the authorities had no way of making this connection. Advances in transport infrastructure, such as the growing railway system, only exacerbated the situation: criminals were now able to move quickly around the country to commit crimes in widely different locations within a short space of time, and with no system to keep track of them, they were at complete liberty to do so.
It was the French scientist Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) who took the first major steps toward solving this problem, though he arguably would not have done so were it not for the influence of several important figures. The first of these was the Belgian astronomer Lambert Quetelet, seen by many as the father of modern statistics. In his 1835 book Sur L’Homme et le développement de ses facultés (published in English in 1842 as A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties), he attempted to apply the statistical method to the development of human physical and intellectual faculties—in layman’s terms, he wanted to know what made people tick. Alphonse’s father, Louis-Adolphe, then a young medical student, was fascinated by Quetelet’s ideas on “social physics.” During the 1848 Revolution in France, he found himself in prison for six months with one of his professors, Achille Guillard, who was also interested in this field. (Guillard, who was considered a dangerous liberal, also invented and developed demography, the study of regional groups and races.) The two must have got on well because shortly afterwards Louis-Adolphe married Guillard’s daughter Zoe. Guillard and Louis-Adolphe went on to found the School of Anthropology in Paris and in doing so formalized a new science. There can be little doubt that the indirect influence of Quetelet and Guillard and the direct influence of his father shaped Bertillon’s work.
That said, Bertillon did not get off to a promising start in life; he was a rebellious child, often referred to as l’enfant terrible. He was thrown out of schools and his German tutor resigned in disgust. The death of his mother in 1866 only caused his behavior to deteriorate further. As an adult he drifted through life, working first as a teacher in England, then joining the army, and finally settling down as a clerk in the department of the Prefecture of Police (thanks almost solely to his father’s influence). The work, however, was repetitive and boring and almost drove Bertillon out of his mind. To alleviate this boredom, he began to apply himself to the problem of identification. He quickly realized that most of the techniques being used by the police were at best defective and at worst totally useless—there was no proper system in place to facilitate efficient identification. Bertillon took his inspiration from Quetelet’s Anthropometry, or the Measurement of Different Faculties in Man (1871), reasoning that if human faculties could be measured and recorded, surely physical characteristics could as well.
He began to work on a system of identification that today we would refer to as “photo-fit pictures.” He cut up photographs and stuck the pieces to sections of cardboard so that they could be arranged together in different combinations of component parts (ears, eyes, noses, mouths, etc.) to create new faces. Using them, a witness could construct a rough likeness of a person they had seen. A refined version of this system is still used to this day as a method to identify people.
At first Bertillon’s system convinced few people but, despite lack of support from his colleagues, he persisted. Thanks to Quetelet’s work, and that of his own father, he knew that human characteristics tend to fall into statistical groups. And he knew —as all French hatmakers and tailors had known for years—that no two human beings have all the same measurements. He realized that if he could devise a quick and simple system of measuring various parts of a criminal’s anatomy (such as the circumference of their head and the length of their arms, legs, and fingers), he could then match these measurements against any individual that came through his door. Through doing so, he would quickly be able to ascertain if a person was giving his real name or, if he did not have a name (as in the case of some dead bodies), to identify him and give him one. He then went on to devise an easy-to-use card index in which to store all this personal information. This done, Bertillon was satisfied that he had designed the ideal method of identification.
With high hopes, he submitted a report on his work to his chief, Louis Andrieux. Andrieux completely ignored it. Not one to give up easily, Bertillon submitted another, more detailed than the first. This finally managed to attract Andrieux’s attention. He sent for Bertillon, who hurried to his office full of excitement. However, far from heaping deserved praise on Bertillon as expected, Andrieux poured scorn on the idea. Bertillon’s attempts at explanation fell on deaf ears; he was thrown out of Andrieux’s office and returned to his desk. As if this wasn’t enough, Andrieux also wrote an angry letter to his father telling him that he thought his son was “quite mad.” Luckily, in spite of Bertillon’s checkered background, his father did not take such a dim view of things; when Bertillon submitted his paper to him, he read it with interest and then told his son that he thought it was “a very important idea.” He went on to say, “If this works, it will prove what I have spent my life trying to demonstrate … that every human being is unique.” Louis-Adolphe was normally a reserved, unemotional man, but on this occasion Bertillon saw tears in his eyes.
However, even with this support, Bertillon found it hard to publicly advance his ideas when Andrieux would not allow him to put them into practice. Andrieux was not an intelligent man, and it is probable that he resented his subordinate’s abilities and education. Still, Bertillon persisted in taking the measurements of anyone who would allow him to do so. As time progressed he was promoted, and eventually Andrieux retired. He was replaced by Jean Camecasse. Although more enlightened than his predecessor, he was still rather dubious about Bertillon’s technique. It took over a year of persuasion on the part of Bertillon’s father, as well as the intervention of the lawyer Edgar Demange, to finally convince Camecasse to take Bertillon’s ideas seriously. In November 1882, he gave Bertillon three months to prove the efficacy of his theories. If, during that time, he managed to identify just one habitual criminal using his methods, Camecasse would allow the experiment to continue. The gauntlet had been thrown down and, even though he knew he did not have long to prove himself, Bertillon rose to the challenge.
The following day, with the help of two clerks appointed by the prefecture, Bertillon began his work. He knew identifying a criminal in the allotted time span wasn’t going to be easy, but he was determined to succeed. Over the previous two years he had settled upon a system that involved taking eleven specific measurements from the body of a person. He had estimated that the chances of any two people having exactly the same eleven measurements were more than four million to one. In addition, to each of his identity files, Bertillon added two photographs, one of the face front-on and the other in profile (see Plate 1). He also included a portrait parlé, a description that involved outlining any distinguishing features that the individual might have, such as tattoos, moles, birthmarks, scars, or anything else that might help a police officer identify the suspect. These detailed filing cards were all stored in an eighty-one-drawer cabinet.
Throughout December 1882 and January 1883, Bertillon continued to work tirelessly. As the three-month deadline grew closer, though, he started to feel anxious; he even considered asking Camecasse to extend his time limit. By now he had other detractors, including the great French detective Gustave Mace, who thought the experiment a waste of both time and money.
It was towards the end of February that Bertillon finally made his breakthrough. Shortly before he was due to go home one day, a suspect was presented to him who gave his name as Dupont.
His face seemed familiar and he was found to have a mole near his left eyebrow. Bertillon set about putting his system into action. He took the necessary measurements and began to flick through his index cards. Those present said later that Bertillon was trembling with anticipation as he searched. After matching the measurements with those on one of his cards, Bertillon declared that the suspect in custody was in fact a man called Martin who had been arrested on December 15, 1882, for stealing bottles. Not only did his measurements match but so did his portrait parlé, which mentioned the mole by his eyebrow. Lastly, the photograph that had been taken of Martin at the time of his arrest confirmed that it was the same man. At first Martin denied his true identity, but when confronted with Bertillon’s evidence, he was forced to admit that he had lied. It was a triumph for Bertillon and, indeed, for his father, who alas died a few days after this success. He had, however, lived to see his son’s system and his own life’s work vindicated.
Alphonse Bertillon, whose method of identifying criminals using anthropometric measurements revolutionized criminal detection.
Over the next few months, Bertillon continued to successfully identify further suspects. It was clear that his system worked. Eventually even Gustave Mace had to admit that Bertillon had single-handedly brought about the greatest advance in law enforcement of the nineteenth century. Within a few years the word bertillonage had passed not only into the French language, but also into many others.
Bertillon went on to apply his technique to identify the dead as well as the living. An inspector asked Bertillon to identify the body of a person who had been shot and dumped in the river. The body had been in the water for at least two months before being recovered and was consequently in extremely poor condition, with no remaining features on the face by which it might have been identified. The inspector considered that Bertillon was his last hope, but felt that in this case even his chances of success were slim. However, Bertillon went through his normal procedures, taking measurements from the corpse and referring to his card index. He managed to match at least five measurements and, to the inspector’s amazement, discovered that the man had been convicted of a violent assault a year earlier. With the identity of the body established, the inspector was able to pick up the trail of the murderer and made an arrest soon afterwards.