Silent Witnesses

by Nigel McCrery

  Fingerprints stored in modern police records, illustrating a “whorl” fingerprint. The Henry system described three basic fingerprint patterns—loop, whorl, and arch—which together constitute the majority of fingerprint variations.

  Considering that fingerprinting stood to supplant his own system, it is perhaps surprising—and to his credit—that Bertillon readily accepted its value. Indeed, since 1900 he had been adding fingerprints to his own files, which proved to be invaluable. On October 17, 1902, Bertillon was asked to attend the scene of a murder at the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The victim was a valet by the name of Joseph Reibel. He was discovered sitting in a chair. His shirttails were pulled out of his trousers and his legs were outstretched. The murderer had strangled him by hand. The room was a mess with overturned furniture, suggesting that a struggle had taken place. This, combined with the discovery that some drawers and a cabinet had been forced open, suggested that the motive was robbery. Bertillon, however, wasn’t convinced; the amount of money that had been stolen was hardly enough to justify murdering a man.

  A glass panel in the cabinet had been smashed and there was blood on the glass, suggesting that the culprit might have been injured. One of the police inspectors went to pick up one of the shards, but Bertillon stopped him; he had spotted a fingerprint. In fact, it transpired that the killer had left an almost perfect set of fingerprints in blood. With great care, Bertillon had the glass taken back to his laboratory and photographed. From this he produced a first-class image of three fingerprints and a thumbprint.

  Of course, Bertillon now wanted to make a match, but the only chance of that was if the killer already had a record. Initial results were discouraging, but Bertillon kept searching and eventually, in a moment of great elation similar to the one he’d experienced during the Dupont case, he discovered a match for the fingerprints. The card belonged to a well-known twenty-five-year-old swindler called Henri-Léon Scheffer. Scheffer was tracked down to Marseilles, but before the police had time to arrest him, he turned himself in and confessed to the murder, explaining that he and Reibel had been lovers and had fought and that he had stolen the money to try to cover his tracks. Once again fingerprints had triumphed. Bertillon could now add to his long list of successes being the first man in Europe to solve a murder by way of fingerprints. Even so, he still did not adopt fingerprints as his primary means of criminal identification, refusing to give up his own system of body measurements. To have accepted that fingerprints alone could operate as well as, or better than, his own system, rather than simply being a helpful addition to it, would have meant admitting that his life’s work no longer had a useful application.

  It was also around the turn of the century that fingerprints at last began to show their worth in Great Britain. On Derby Day 1902, Scotland Yard deployed a number of fingerprint experts to the horse race. Since its beginnings in 1780, the Derby had become a well-known target for pickpockets and other criminals, who would flock there from across the country. All day long the fingerprint experts inked the fingers of arrested suspects. When, at the end of the day, they came to cross-check the fingerprints against those on file, they discovered that twenty-nine out of the fifty-four men from whom they had obtained prints had previous convictions. When the suspects were put before the magistrate the following day, these records were produced. With such strong evidence of their previous convictions, they were all sent to prison for at least twice as long as a first-time offender would have been.

  But it wasn’t until 1905 that fingerprints were first used to solve a murder case in Britain. The case in question was that of the infamous Deptford murders.

  At 8:30 AM on Monday, March 27, 1905, one William Jones arrived at his place of work, Chapman’s Oil and Color Shop on the High Street in Deptford, just southeast of London. He found it still closed, which immediately concerned him, as it would normally be opened up by the owner, seventy-one-year-old Thomas Farrow who lived in the small flat above it with his wife, Ann, aged sixty-five. Jones tried knocking but received no response. Becoming even more concerned, he peered through a window and saw that several chairs had been overturned.

  Now seriously worried, he ran to a local store where he found employee Louis Kidman; Jones asked him to come back with him to force an entry. Once inside, they discovered Mr. Farrow lying on his back in the downstairs parlor. He was dead. They then discovered Mrs. Farrow in bed in the upstairs flat, still alive but badly injured. Both showed signs of a serious and sustained beating. The police and a doctor were summoned, and Mrs. Farrow was rushed to the hospital.

  An empty cash box was found on the floor, which would usually have contained the weekly earnings. Jones explained that Mr. Farrow would normally deposit these in the bank on a Monday morning. Trying to be helpful and clear the scene, Sergeant Albert Atkinson pushed the cash box aside with his bare hands. When they became aware of this, Chief Inspector Frederick Fox and Assistant Commissioner Melville Mac-Naghten (head of the Criminal Investigation Department) decided to take over the case and preserve any remaining evidence.

  The motive, then, had been robbery. The police were able to deduce several other details. From where they had been found and from the evidence of the scene, it was clear that Mr. and Mrs. Farrow had been attacked separately. Both were still in their nightwear, and there was no sign of a forced entry, so it was likely that Mr. Farrow had opened the door to his attackers before being beaten unconscious. The assailants must then have gone upstairs to the flat and attacked Mrs. Farrow, before finding the cash box and stealing the cash. From the blood trails at the scene, it looked as if Mr. Farrow had then somehow managed to get up again, only to be beaten once more, this time to death. The discovery of two black stocking masks pointed to the likely involvement of two perpetrators, who had coolly washed their hands in the sink after killing the shopkeeper.

  MacNaghten looked closely at the empty cash box and saw what appeared to be a fingerprint on the inside tray. As a member of the Belper Committee established to assess methods of identification, which had recommended the use of fingerprints five years previously, he wondered whether this might be a good opportunity to test the new technique. He used a handkerchief to carefully pick the cash box up, before having it wrapped in paper and taken to the fledgling Fingerprinting Bureau at Scotland Yard.

  The bureau was headed by Detective Inspector Charles Stockley Collins, who was by then regarded as the foremost English fingerprint expert of his time. Despite the earlier successes of the method, especially in identifying previously convicted criminals who tried to pass themselves off under pseudonyms, the technique was still considered unwieldy. The police knew that they were risking public ridicule if it failed now, due to the intense scrutiny that a murder case would generate. Furthermore, even if they succeeded in identifying the owner of the fingerprint and charging him, they would still need to convince a jury to convict on the basis of this unfamiliar form of evidence.

  Collins examined the print thoroughly and determined that it was made through perspiration and appeared to have been left by the thumb, probably from the right hand. He compared it with those of the Farrows and of Detective Sergeant Atkinson and was satisfied that it did not belong to either of them. Although the Bureau had some 80–90,000 sets of prints on file, there was unfortunately no match among them. This left the police with the daunting prospect of having to find a suspect to compare the print with. Initially they hoped that Mrs. Farrow would be able to give a description of her assailants when she regained consciousness. However, tragically, she died in the hospital on March 31 without saying a word—a serious setback to the investigation.

  The police then had to resort to the usual practice of interviewing potential witnesses. Fortunately there was no shortage of them. Several had seen two men running from the scene of the murder at about 7:30 AM. One of them was described as being dressed in a dark brown suit and cap, the other in a dark blue serge suit and bowler hat. Two of these witnesses, a professional boxer named Henry
John Littlefield and a local girl named Ellen Stanton, positively identified the man in the dark brown suit as one Alfred Stratton.

  Although he did not have a criminal record, Alfred Stratton was familiar to the police as a “vagabond” and was known to have contacts in the criminal underworld. His brother Albert was also known to them, and the description of the man in the bowler hat matched him. The identification of Alfred was apparently confirmed when his girlfriend, Annie Cromarty, told the police that he had disposed of his dark brown coat and changed his shoes the day after the murder; she also recalled him asking for a pair of old stockings. A tip from Cromarty also led police to recover £4 that was buried near a local waterworks. Based on Cromarty’s information, warrants for the arrest of both the brothers were issued. They were taken into custody on April 2 and, while being held, had their fingerprints taken. When Detective Inspector Collins received the two sets, he compared them to the print on the cash box. He concluded that the print matched Alfred Stratton’s right thumbprint. The brothers were charged with murder and the trial was set for May 5 at the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales.

  MacNaghten, Collins, and Richard Muir, the prosecutor for the Crown, knew that they would face an uphill battle. Since the fingerprint was the only tangible evidence that they had, the case would stand or fall on whether it convinced the jury, and the defense would try their best to undermine it. Even fingerprinting pioneer Henry Faulds was a vocal detractor, because he had the mistaken notion that a single fingerprint match was unreliable. The defense therefore retained him as a witness. Also set to testify for the defense was Dr. John George Garson, who advocated anthropometry (the English term for bertillonage) over fingerprinting as a means of identification. Both men were professional rivals of Edward Henry, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police who had established the Fingerprint Bureau and who was responsible for the acceptance of fingerprinting into the British legal system. Henry himself was also in attendance.

  The prosecution called more than forty witnesses to the stand, since Muir and his team wanted to place the two defendants at the scene of the crime. Despite Muir’s inherent distrust of eyewitness testimony, he was counting on the consistency of these witnesses to reinforce the evidence of the fingerprint. Although some of them, such as Henry Alfred Jennings, a local milkman, were not able to make a definite identification of the defendants (but were consistent in describing their general appearance), others, such as Henry Littlefield and Ellen Stanton, were positive in their identification of Alfred Stratton. The Home Office pathologist who did the postmortem on the Farrows told the court that the injuries on the couple were consistent with being inflicted by weapons similar to the tools that the brothers had in their possession.

  Kate Wade, Albert Stratton’s girlfriend, testified that Albert was not with her on the night of the murder and that he usually stayed with her. Annie Cromarty testified that Alfred had come home on the morning of March 27 with a large amount of money, without explaining where he had obtained it. She added that he threw out the clothes that he had been wearing that day when he saw the newspaper accounts of the murder and that he asked her to tell the police, or anyone else who asked, that he was with her on the night of the murder.

  However, the defense counsels, H. G. Rooth, Curtis Bennett, and Harold Morris, were able to give plausible alternative explanations for events that cast doubt on the prosecution’s witnesses. They clearly felt they had done a good job, since they were then confident enough to have Alfred Stratton take the stand. He testified that at about 2:30 AM on March 27, he was awoken by his brother tapping on the window. When he opened it, Albert asked if he could lend him some money for a night’s lodging. He replied that he would check if he had some and then went inside to do so. When he came back, Albert was gone. He went out and found his brother some distance away, on Regent Street. It was there that several witnesses had seen them. Alfred told his brother that he had no money but offered to let him stay for the night. Albert agreed and slept on the floor, and the brothers stayed together until nine in the morning, after which Albert left. Alfred went on to explain that the £4 the police had recovered he had won boxing. He had, he said, buried it three weeks prior to the murders for safekeeping and had been intending to give it to Annie Cromarty.

  Before calling Inspector Collins to give his evidence about the thumbprint, Muir called William Gittings, who worked in the jail where the Stratton brothers had been confined while awaiting trial. Gittings explained that during a conversation with him, Albert Stratton had said, “I reckon he [Alfred] will get strung up and I shall get about ten years…. He has led me into this.” Muir hoped to impress the jury into thinking that this statement could be counted as a confession. He then called Inspector Collins to the stand.

  Muir’s plan was to first establish Collins’s credentials as an expert in the field of fingerprinting and then get him to explain, in layman’s terms, how fingerprinting worked as a means of identification. Collins was then asked to talk specifically about the fingerprint involved in the case. He showed the jury the cash box that was recovered from the scene and the fingerprint that he was able to obtain from it. He then went on to show how it matched Alfred Stratton’s right thumb, pointing out that the print had as many as twelve points of agreement. At the request of a member of the jury, Collins also demonstrated the difference in prints caused by various levels of pressure.

  After Collins had given his evidence, the defense called Dr. John Garson to the stand. They were hoping to discredit Collins’s testimony by establishing Garson’s credentials as one of Collins’s mentors, thus giving the jury the impression that he was more experienced in the study of fingerprinting. As expected, Garson testified that he could say with certainty that the print taken from the cash box and Alfred Stratton’s prints did not match.

  However, it was easy for Muir to establish that Garson was not an expert in fingerprinting but in anthropometry, its rival form of identification. Garson had, in fact, spoken out against fingerprinting to the Belper Committee. Muir then dropped a bombshell during his cross-examination of Garson. He called into evidence two letters written by Garson, one to the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the other to the lawyer for the defense. Each said that Garson would be willing to testify for either side in the trial, depending on who would pay him more. In an instant this rendered his evidence completely worthless. Annoyed by this revelation, the judge commented that Garson was an “absolutely untrustworthy witness.” Having had Dr. Garson’s credibility as a witness shattered in this way, the defense decided not to call Faulds to the stand, fearing that Muir would find some way to discredit him as well. After each side had given their summations, it took the jury just over two hours of deliberation to find the Stratton brothers guilty of murder. They were sentenced to death by hanging, and were put to death on May 23, 1905.

  The history of identification—which I will continue to allude to throughout this book—is a history of uniqueness. Proven systems of identification such as bertillonage or fingerprinting are able to work because we are all completely individual, something that is enormously useful for the purposes of criminal investigation. The techniques we have looked at in this chapter represent the first successful attempts to integrate forensic methods into justice systems. They demonstrate that police work is made far easier when suspects can be quickly and efficiently tied to (or eliminated from) an investigation. That said, such proofs of identity, however strong, are often only one part of the puzzle—a case constructed using several different forensic techniques in conjunction will build an even more comprehensive picture of events.

  2

  Ballistics

  Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

  Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” (1917)

  Police Constable George Gutteridge was born in Downham Market, Norfolk, England, in 1891. He joined Essex County Constabulary in April 1910 and served as constable 489 for eight years before resigning in Apri
l 1918 to join the army. He served in France for ten months with the Machine Gun Corps, enduring all the horrors of trench warfare. He then returned to work for Essex Constabulary. He lived with his wife, Rose, and their two children, Muriel and Alfred, in the small, pretty village of Stapleford Abbotts, working four beats for the Epping division.

  On September 26, 1927, Gutteridge was working a split shift. He returned home from duty at 6 PM and spent the evening in with his family. He then left home to resume duty at 11 PM, going to meet Constable Sydney Taylor, who was stationed in the neighboring hamlet of Lambourne End. The two met as planned at a conference point on the B175 road running from Romford to Chipping Ongar. Gutteridge departed at 3:05 AM to start the mile-long walk home. He never made it.