by Bridget Heos
5
Fingerprints Are Forever: Early Fingerprint Evidence
Of the many types of evidence at a crime scene, one of the most personal is the fingerprint. Or at least, that was true before DNA testing. Fingerprints remain the same throughout a person’s life. To avoid being identified, criminals have tried obliterating their fingerprints. But even mutilated fingerprints can be used to identify a suspect. John Dillinger, a bank robber, escaped convict, and cop killer, succeeded somewhat in burning his fingerprints off with acid, but this only made them more unique to him because of the scarring. And when Dillinger was shot and killed by FBI agents, his fingerprint patterns could still be seen around the edges of his fingertips. To this day, some criminals still have skin grafted onto their fingertips. Though this eliminates the need to wear gloves to a crime scene, it’s hardly helpful during an arrest. The absence of fingerprints is fishy to say the least.
Before fingerprints were discovered, the police had a hard time keeping track of known criminals. They needed a way of identifying repeat offenders so that they could receive harsher sentences. A name wasn’t enough. The criminal could give a fake one. At first, police turned to photography, a process invented in the 1820s and 30s. But there were limits to that. Two people could look an awful lot alike, and a person’s appearance could change over time, or be altered by growing a beard, for instance.
Eventually, a forensic scientist for the Sûreté, Alphonse Bertillon, developed a more precise method. Bertillon came from a family of scientists, and his grandfather often said that no two humans have the same physical measurements. Working on that belief, Bertillon created an identification system that was unique to each criminal. It involved measuring the convict’s height, left arm from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger, head circumference, ear length, and more. With so many measurements, the odds were one in 286 million that any two people would have the same measurements. In its first year, his system, called Bertillonage, identified three hundred repeat offenders the police would have otherwise missed. The method spread to crime bureaus throughout the world.
Bertillon measurement being taken
At the same time, a new method of identification was slowly taking shape. People in ancient China and Japan understood that fingerprints were unique to each person. In China, important documents were sealed with clay, upon which the author impressed a fingerprint to show authenticity. As early as 221 BCE a crime scene handbook told how handprints could be used to solve a crime. The importance of fingerprints came to be known much later in the West. Much has been made about who was the father of fingerprints in the West. That’s because several people working independently of each other made discoveries in this area.
Illustrated instructions for Bertillon measurements
William Herschel was an Englishman working in India in the mid-1800s when he began collecting and studying the fingerprints of family, friends, and colleagues. When he was appointed to a government position, he used fingerprints to identify people in the criminal courts, prisons, and pension office. He would go on to study fingerprints throughout his life and was able to show that a person’s fingerprints remained constant over time. In America, scientist Thomas Taylor gave a lecture on how fingerprints found at crime scenes could be matched to suspects. It was published in an 1877 issue of the American Journal of Microscopy and Popular Science.
Around the same time, Dr. Henry Faulds, a Scotsman working as a missionary doctor in Japan, became interested in fingerprints when he saw that Japanese potters used fingerprints as signatures on their work. In 1880, he wrote a letter to the journal Nature describing “the skin-furrows of the hand” and telling how to take fingerprints and how they might be used to identify criminals.1 In fact, he wrote that he himself had used fingerprints to discover a thief in his own hospital. Someone had stolen surgical alcohol from a bottle and left their greasy fingerprints behind. He was able to match the prints on the bottle to an employee. Despite Faulds’s advances, Herschel would become a bigger name in the burgeoning field of fingerprints, a fact that would infuriate Faulds for many years.
In the 1880s, prominent British scientist—and cousin to Charles Darwin—Sir Francis Galton, contacted Herschel about collaborating on a study of fingerprints. Galton, too, had been collecting fingerprints, and together they had the largest collection in the world. Galton studied whether fingerprints really were unchanging, unique to individuals, and classifiable, so that they could be matched to their owners. Through his research, he found the answer to all these questions to be yes, and he reported this in many books and articles.
After reading Galton’s work, Argentinian police official Juan Vucetich began fingerprinting prisoners and filing the prints under his own classification system—the first of its kind in the world. He was also the first to solve a murder in modern times using fingerprints. In 1892, two children were found murdered in the coastal town of Necochea. Their mother, Francesca Rojas, had a throat wound. When questioned, she accused a man named Velasquez of attacking the children and her. But even during a brutal interrogation that included being tied to the corpses overnight, Velasquez maintained his innocence. Officer Eduardo Alvarez inspected the crime scene and found a bloody thumbprint on the door. He called in Vucetich, who matched the fingerprint to Francesca. Upon seeing the evidence, she confessed to killing her own children.
Elsewhere, fingerprints didn’t replace Bertillonage right away as a method for identifying criminals. In America, the shift was made after the case of the two Will Wests. In 1903, a man named Will West was admitted to Leavenworth Penitentiary. His Bertillon measurements were taken, and they matched those of a man already in prison, William West. Had he escaped? Nope, he was safe in bed. Now the prison had a case of two men with matching Bertillon measurements. The men claimed they were not related, though they looked alike and had the same name. Their fingerprints, on the other hand, were different. Because of this, fingerprint advocates said that a switch to the fingerprint system was needed. Fingerprinting overtook Bertillonage the following year, and a fingerprint registry of all federal prison inmates was established in Leavenworth.
Portraits of the two Will Wests
With the odds being one in 286 million that two people would have the same Bertillon measurements, and the world population at the time being about 1.6 billion, it was possible for two people to coincidentally match up. In this case, the “coincidence” was more like the joke about the Irish brothers. They’re in a bar, comparing the remarkable similarities in their lives—they went to the same school! They graduated the same year! They even grew up on the same street! And in the same house! Then the bartender remarks that the O’Malley twins are drunk again. It turns out the two Will Wests had twin Bertillon measurements because they were twins. A fellow prisoner testified that they were; and correspondence logs showed that the two men wrote to the same brother, five sisters, and an Uncle George. This problem probably wouldn’t have come up much, as identical twins, and certainly identical twin criminals, are rare. And so whether this case actually was the impetus for the switch from Bertillonage to fingerprinting is debatable. The fact is, Bertillonage’s drawbacks were becoming all too clear. It was time-consuming. And people didn’t leave their measurements at crime scenes. They did leave their fingerprints.
By 1894, all criminals in England and Bengal (then under British domain) were fingerprinted. Bengali police inspector Sir Edward Richard Henry worked with Galton to classify the fingerprints of criminals, and it was here that fingerprint evidence was first used to convict a criminal in court. The manager of a tea garden was found in bed with his throat cut, the victim of a robbery. The suspects were a veritable cast of Clue characters. It could have been any of the garden employees, for the man was said to be a mean boss; an ex-employee who had recently been released from jail; the cook, who had bloodstains on his clothes; the relatives of a woman with whom the man was having an affair; or a gang of criminals that had been hanging around the neighborhood.
The cook explained that it was pigeon blood on his clothing—dinner that night. By now, there was a blood test to differentiate between human and animal blood, and it proved that the cook was telling the truth. Likewise, the woman’s relatives and the gang of criminals were cleared. Police turned their attention to the ex-employee/ex-convict. They found a calendar among the man’s items that had been rifled through, and on it, human blood and fingerprints. The fingerprints matched those of the ex-employee, Kangali Charan. Charan was convicted of theft, but not murder, as the judge ruled that only the first had been proven.
In England, fingerprint evidence was first used to solve a murder in 1905. An elderly couple, Thomas and Ann Farrow, lived above their paint shop in Deptford, just outside of London. On March 27, 1905, one of their workers arrived to find Thomas lying in the shop and Ann, upstairs in the apartment, both beaten and bloody. Thomas was dead. Ann was unconscious and would die four days later without regaining consciousness. Could forensic science tell the couple’s tragic story?
The motive was clear: robbery. The shop’s cashbox had been emptied. Scotland Yard found on the box a thumbprint, matching neither the victims’ nor any fingerprints on file. Police pounded the pavement in search of witnesses. A milkman said he’d seen two young men leaving the shop the day of the murder. He’d told them they’d left the door open, but the men said there was another person coming behind them. Another eyewitness, Ellen Stanton, said she’d seen two men running at around the time of the murders. She knew one of them to be Alfred Stratton. He and his brother Albert were now suspects. The milkman was unable to identify them, but Albert’s thumbprint matched the one found at the scene.
Interestingly, Henry Faulds—the man who had written Nature about his discovery of fingerprints—testified for the defense. He said that a single smudged print left behind at a crime scene was difficult to match to a complete print. He did not think that such evidence was reliable enough to convict someone of murder (a matter that is still being debated today). The judge himself said that the men shouldn’t be found guilty based on the fingerprint alone, and yet guilty the verdict was.
Jurors came to accept fingerprint evidence more and more. In America, the effectiveness of fingerprint analysis was proven in dramatic fashion during the 1911 burglary trial of Charles Crispi. Expert witness Joseph Faurot said that a fingerprint left on a glass door at the crime scene belonged to Charles. Fingerprint evidence was new, so Faurot wanted to show jurors that he knew his stuff. He took the jurors’ fingerprints and then left the room while they pressed their fingers onto glass. When Faurot came back into the courtroom, he was able to match each print on the glass to the correct juror. He then walked the jury through his methods of fingerprint matching. After the demonstration, Crispi changed his plea to guilty.
As news of fingerprint evidence spread, criminals became savvier, wearing gloves or wiping down surfaces they touched. But nobody is perfect. In 1963, fifteen men robbed a British mail train, in an Ocean’s 11–style heist known as the Great Train Robbery. They made away with £2.6 million in cash ($4 million then, about $31 million today). Afterward, they hid out in a farmhouse, passing the time playing Monopoly with real money. By the time police arrived, the men had gotten away—and they’d had the good sense to wipe off any fingerprints. Or so they thought. Police found fingerprints on the Monopoly board, which led to the arrest of the fifteen, although two later escaped from prison.
Interpol notice for Ronnie Biggs, one of the Great Train Robbers
In one case, a criminal needed to conceal not his own fingerprints but those of another man. Charles Henry Schwartz was a California inventor who seemed to be doing well. He owned his own company—one of the first to create a formula for artificial silk. Then, on July 30, 1925, his lab exploded with him in it. Or so it seemed. The inventor’s wife identified the body as belonging to her husband. And famous crime scene investigator Edward Oscar Heinrich matched the corpse’s missing teeth to Charles’s dental records.
Then Heinrich made some strange discoveries: the victim had been killed with a blunt instrument prior to being burned. In addition, the eyes had been gouged out and the fingerprints doused in acid. At the scene, police found a Bible belonging to Gilbert Barbe, a traveling missionary. They now believed the dead body to be Gilbert’s and not Charles’s. Heinrich sought a photo of Charles from his wife. She gave him the only one she could find (the rest had disappeared). When the photo ran in the newspaper, Charles’s luck ran out.
Police stand guard outside a hideout used by the Great Train Robbers
Charles had been living a double life as Harold Warren, a ladies’ man and party guy. Under that name, he’d befriended the Haywards, who owned a boardinghouse. Recently, he’d come to them saying he’d been in an accident and couldn’t call police because there was liquor in his car (this was during Prohibition). He needed a place to rest and recuperate. “Harold” must not have been feeling too badly, however, because he was the life of the party while at the Haywards’.
Mr. Hayward later described how Harold had behaved at a surprise party for the Haywards’ daughter: “He joked, laughed and mixed freely with the guests. He mixed punch, invented new games, and even led the ‘grand march,’ stalking along gaily at the head of the group.”2
But the party would soon be over for Fun Harold. At a dinner party with other friends, Mr. Hayward mentioned that one of his lodgers was hiding out after being in an accident that involved whiskey. The subject of Charles Schwartz, who was also hiding out, as reported by all the newspapers, came up. Mr. Hayward said he had no idea what the wanted man looked like, and someone showed him the picture. It was Harold! Mr. Hayward alerted police that Charles Schwartz was staying at the boardinghouse.
Police surrounded the house, but before they could arrest Charles, he shot himself. In his pocket was a letter to his wife. He claimed that he’d killed Gilbert Barbe in self-defense, after the traveling preacher demanded money. He explained that he had come home afterward and taken his photos and other belongings. “Now I wish to tell you, my dear little girl. I do not know the man, never looked how he was dressed, never touched him after that. The only thing I did was, I tried to burn him, to wipe him out and go—go, I do not know where.”3
But he hadn’t “only” burned the body. He’d also poured acid on the fingertips, gouged out the eyes, and pulled one of the teeth, and then gone home for the family photos, all extremely odd things to do after killing someone in self-defense. Schwartz had really faked his own death to collect his life insurance, which included double-indemnity clauses, meaning an accident would double the payout of the claim. In all, the policies totaled more than $100,000, which would have come in handy, because, as it turned out, the artificial silk business wasn’t going so hot. Though Charles obliterated Gilbert’s identifying features, he failed to do much about his own appearance (other than grow a mustache). And that’s what got him in the end.
In 1924, the fingerprints from Leavenworth and other US law agencies were combined under the newly formed Identification Division of the US Bureau of Investigation. J. Edgar Hoover led this division and would go on to become the longtime director of the bureau, which was renamed the FBI in 1935. It’s common for a convict to break the law again, and if that happened, the FBI would be able to link a fingerprint found at the crime scene to the past offender. During Hoover’s tenure, the FBI’s Fingerprint Bureau collected 200 million prints. In those days, detectives had to search for fingerprints through an elaborate filing system. Now, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies can search by computer—usually. A fingerprint led to the arrest of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in 1990—but investigators had to search for the match the old-fashioned way.
Aileen wasn’t the first female serial killer. But she was unique in that her victims were strangers and her weapon of choice was a gun. Blaming psychopathic behavior on a bad childhood may be cliché, but in Aileen’s case, it fits the bill. Aileen’s mother abandoned her, and
her father, a convicted child molester, hanged himself in prison. Aileen went to live with her grandparents. She said that while in their care, she was abused by her grandfather. She became pregnant at age thirteen—the result of rape—and the baby was placed for adoption. By age sixteen, she was supporting herself as a highway prostitute and showing signs of psychosis. Her tragic childhood gave way to an aggressive adulthood. By the time she was investigated for murder, her record included armed robbery, grand theft auto, resisting arrest, assault and battery, and firing a pistol from a moving car. Her crimes would only get worse.
On December 13, 1989, two men scavenging for scrap metal spotted a buzzard and smelled something rotten. As one of the men said in a note for investigators: “Trompeding [tromping] through the woods we smelled stink! I was off troming [roaming?] through the Palms when my friend yelled for me and sed look! I saw a tarp [tarpaulin] with a hand hanging out of It!”4