Silent Witnesses Read online

  In light of the success of Bertillon’s methods, in 1888 a new Department of Judicial Identity was established at the prefecture. Bertillon was made its first head. He had come a long way, but he still had further to go—in 1892 he became involved in the case that was to really establish him as a household name in France. It involved the notorious anarchist Ravachol, one of the most famous criminals in the country at the time.

  Ravachol—real name François Claudius Koenigstein—was born in 1859 at Saint-Chamond in the Loire, the son of a Dutch father (Jean Adam Koenigstein) and a French mother (Marie Ravachol). He adopted his mother’s maiden name after his father abandoned the family when François was only eight years old, leaving him to support his mother, sister, brother, and even nephew. For a while he worked as a dyer’s assistant, but he didn’t keep the job for long and subsequently picked up what money he could playing the accordion at society balls.

  Wandering through France looking for work (and only being paid a pittance when he finally found some) taught Ravachol to hate capitalism. At eighteen he began to read Eugène Sue’s Le Juif Errant (The Wandering Jew) and started attending a collectivist circle. As a result he became a convinced atheist, socialist, and anarchist. As well as Errant, he was strongly influenced by Pierre Proudhon, Michael Bakunin, and Prince Peter Kropotkin. Kropotkin argued that zoological evidence indicated that animals live by “mutual aid” and said that if humans could rid themselves of all their lawmakers, judges, police officers, and politicians, then they could live the same way. Proudhon believed in a stateless society where people would live through goodwill and reason.

  On May Day 1891, an anarchist demonstration at Clichy was broken up by the police. Its leaders were arrested and badly beaten. Two of them were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. Six months after this, however, the home of the advocate general—Léon Bulot, who had been the presiding judge at the trial—was blown up by a bomb. Not long afterward, the same thing happened to the home of Benoît, the prosecuting counsel, who had tried to get the death sentence passed on the anarchists. Both the police and the government’s security services began searching for the culprits.

  Someone tipped off a government spy, giving him the name Chaumartin in connection with the affair. Inquiries quickly established that Chaumartin was a technical schoolteacher in St. Denis. He was arrested and “interviewed.” Under this interrogation he finally admitted that, although he had planned the bombings, they had been carried out by a fanatical anarchist called Léger. The authorities quickly discovered that Léger was in fact a known revolutionary—none other than Ravachol. In 1891 Ravachol had been arrested for the murder of an old man and his housekeeper in the Forez Mountains. However, he had escaped and gone on the run. Later that year, two elderly ladies who ran a hardware store in St. Etienne had been murdered with a hammer during the course of a robbery. The description of the killer matched Ravachol perfectly.

  Ravachol was eventually arrested at Restaurant Véry on the Boulevard Magenta in Paris, thanks to an observant waiter who noticed a scar on his left hand. He remembered that this scar had been mentioned as part of the description of Ravachol that authorities had given out, and he informed the police. Ravachol fought like a wild man when they tried to arrest him and had to be subdued with a considerable amount of brutality (see Plate 2). He was taken to the prefecture, where Bertillon noted his measurements. He refrained from taking Ravachol’s photograph at the time, as his face was so swollen from the beating he had received. A few days later, however, he did manage to photograph him. Much to everyone’s surprise, Ravachol sat quietly for him. Bertillon later sent him a framed copy of the photograph for which Ravachol was grateful, commenting, “That Bertillon is a gentleman.”

  Gentleman or not, Bertillon quickly identified Ravachol and established that he had been arrested previously for smuggling and burglary under his old name, Koenigstein. This was an enormously important connection to have made—it almost certainly meant he was the same man the police were looking for in connection with the murder of the old man and the two shopkeepers, as well as for other offences such as forcing his way into graveyard vaults. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for his anarchist activities at his first trial, but during his second trial was found guilty of murder and grave robbing and sentenced to death. Much to the dismay of the anarchist movement, he eventually confessed to his crimes. As a result, Ravachol was denounced as an opéra-bouffe revolutionary (fit only for a comic opera) by, among others, the anarchist Kropotkin. Any sympathy the public might have had with him quickly evaporated, and he went to the guillotine screaming, “Good-bye, you pigs, long live anarchy!” It is a tragic postscript to the story that—before the anarchist movement had become disenchanted with Ravachol—a fellow anarchist had shown support by bombing the restaurant where he had been arrested, murdering the proprietor and a customer.

  As a result of the crucial part his methods played in the case, Bertillon was now a household name in France, the “Sherlock Holmes” of Paris. Indeed, he is referenced in the Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles—a client refers to Holmes as the “second highest expert in Europe” after Bertillon. He crops up again in “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty,” where we are told that Holmes himself “expressed his enthusiastic admiration of the French savant.” There is no doubt that a great many cases that would otherwise not have been solved owe their successful conclusion to Bertillon’s system of measurement. However, things were changing and a new system would soon come to take center stage.

  People have been aware of the patterns we all have on the tips of our fingers for thousands of years. Examples of fingerprints have been found on the walls of Egyptian tombs and as decorative motifs on ancient pottery from various cultures. Perhaps more surprisingly, it seems that there was a crude sense that fingerprints were in some way representative of a person’s individuality; in ancient Babylon in the second millennium BC, fingerprints were sometimes used in order to seal a legal contract. Later, in China around AD 300, handprints were used as evidence in a trial for theft, while in AD 650, Kia Kung-Yen, a Chinese historian, remarked upon the fact that fingerprints could be used as a form of authentication.

  But while this consensus that fingerprints had a certain uniqueness about them persisted, it was many hundreds of years before this would be scientifically described or studied.

  In 1684 the renowned English botanist Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712) published a paper describing the ridge structure on the skin covering a person’s fingers and palm. Almost a century later the German anatomist Johann Mayer (1747–1801) stated for the first time outright that no two prints were exactly alike, that in fact all were completely unique. This was obviously of enormous theoretical importance for forensic science, though it would be a little while longer until such knowledge was put to practical use. It was the British civil servant Sir William Herschel (1833–1917) who seems to have been the first to use fingerprinting in a really formalized system (see Plate 3). He used fingerprints when paying pensions to Bengali soldiers to stop impostors from being able to collect money. Each of the soldiers had to register their fingerprints on their pay books and also provide fingerprints when collecting their pension. Any impostor would quickly be revealed when his prints did not match up with those in the pay book. This system apparently worked extremely well, but the Bengali inspector general of prisons nonetheless rejected Herschel’s idea of creating a larger system of fingerprint classification and analysis. Herschel returned to England in 1879.

  At about the same time, a Scottish surgeon, Dr. Henry Faulds (1843–1930), was working in Japan, teaching physiology to medical students at the Tsukiji Hospital in Tokyo. During his time there he happened to notice the marks of fingerprints visible on some Japanese pottery. He became interested in the various differences between them and began to study the distinctive “whorls” on the fingerprints (also known as papillary lines). Several years later, this purely academic work was to have a very worthwhile applicati
on. In 1879, while investigating a burglary in Tokyo, the Japanese police recovered a set of grubby fingerprints on a whitewashed wall. A man was later arrested on suspicion of the crime but vehemently protested his innocence. The police had heard of Faulds and his interest in fingerprints, so they approached him for help. Faulds took the suspect’s fingerprints and compared them with those discovered at the scene. It was quickly apparent that the two sets of prints were entirely different and as a result the man was released. A few days later another suspect was arrested; this time the prints did match and the culprit quickly confessed to the crime.

  Faulds published his first paper on the subject of fingerprints in the scientific journal Nature. In it he discussed their usefulness in establishing identity and proposed the method of recording them in ink. When Herschel returned from India and heard about Faulds’s work, he was convinced that “his” discovery had been stolen. Strong letters were exchanged through Nature. In reality both men independently did their part to advance fingerprinting (or dactyloscopy, to give it its proper name) as a method of identification.

  When Faulds later returned to the United Kingdom from Japan in 1886, he explained his ideas to the Metropolitan Police. They were dismissed. He then wrote to just about anyone he thought would listen, including Charles Darwin. Although Darwin was interested, he felt he was too old and ill to get involved in the matter himself. Instead, he passed the information to his cousin, Francis Galton, who was interested in anthropology. Galton was a sportsman, explorer, meteorologist, and psychologist. He was also a believer in Bertillon’s system of identification. Not only had he given a lecture on bertillonage to the Royal Institution, but he had also visited Bertillon himself in Paris. Although Bertillon’s system impressed him, he found it too complicated. He saw the potential of fingerprints as an easier method of identification, but did not yet properly involve himself in the emerging field—he simply forwarded Faulds’s communication to the Anthropological Society of London. When he returned to the topic some years later, Galton, having heard of William Herschel’s reputation in the field, made contact with him rather than Faulds. Galton and Herschel got on well, as a result of which Herschel handed over all his material to Galton, who set about establishing fingerprints as the major system of identification in forensic terms.

  He needed to develop a proper system of classification. He knew that it was essential for any such system to be simple—previous attempts at clarification had been very complicated and this was certainly one of the reasons that the authorities remained dubious about putting fingerprinting into practice. Galton began to observe recurring shapes and configurations of lines and that most fingerprints are centered around a “triangle” where the ridges run together. These triangles are called deltas and fall into four basic patterns: no triangle, triangle on the left, triangle on the right, more than one triangle. In 1891, Galton published a paper discussing his findings on fingerprints in Nature. In it, much to Faulds’s fury, he acknowledged his debt to Herschel but made no mention of Faulds. The following year he published his first book on the subject, Finger Prints. In it he demonstrated that the chance of a “false positive” (two different individuals having the same fingerprints) was about 1 in 64 billion. It was an extraordinary piece of work and influenced the then home secretary (later prime minister) Herbert Asquith, who was at the time considering introducing the bertillonage system to Britain.

  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.