WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN?

Phillip E. O'SHAUGHNESSY 6

"WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN" A Look at Identity

by

READERS' SERVICES ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 900 Webster Street P.O. Box 2270 Fort Wayne, IN 46801 WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN? - A LOOKVATNIDENXITY

On June 19, 1985, a partially-clad body was found in a field on the Southwest side of Fort Wayne. The victim's face and hands were so decomposed that a visual identification was not possible, nor was it felt that fingerprints could be obtained. When the news of the discovery was released to the media, a mother called the Fort Wayne Police Department and stated that she thought it might be her daughter who was missing since May 20, 1985; almost a month prior. Because of the decomposition, dental records were obtained in an attempt to make a comparison. Unfortunately, the dental records were of primary teeth and the victim's mouth had only permanent teeth. There were no recent dental records. A person's age can be obtained during the maturing years by comparing radiographs of the wrist bones with those of a known age. Radiographs were made and an age of fifteen years was estimated. This corresponded well with the missing girl who was almost fourteen. The radiologist stated that if radiographs of the missing girl's arm existed, the bones could be compared, and an identification might be made. Ironically, the missing girl had sprained her wrist just a couple of weeks prior to her disappearance and radiographs were made. They were obtained and compared by a group of radiologists who were certain the deceased and the missing girl were one and the same. The mother was notified and the media released the news that the girl had been identified. Less than an hour later, a couple called-the police and said that they had just seen the missing girl at a Dairy Queen. They were quite positive. Obviously, there was immediate confusion. Back to the morgue. The skin on the fingerprints was almost gone except for one finger that had been partially buried in the dirt. The skin was carefully lifted from the*finger, chemically softened, and an inked impression made. The missing girl had participated in a school fingerprint program designed to help locate missing children. These were compared with the deceased's single fingerprint and an exact match was obtained. No one knows who the couple saw, but they did not see the deceased--she had'been dead for several weeks. So much for visual identification. Identification of any individual is based on one- fact and one requirement. It is a fact that every individual is unique. Unique in his body chemistry, his physical characteristics, man-made alterations, i.e., dental restorations, scars, tattoos, etc. The requirement is that some type of record exists verifying that uniqueness. If a physical characteristic, for example a fingerprint, of an unidentified individual is compared to a fingerprint of a known individual and a match is noted, an identification is made. If it were only that simple. Physical characteristics change, height, weight, teeth are removed, finger tips are destroyed by fire, trauma, or decomposition. Records of uniqueness do not exist, were lost, or may have been altered. Although cases of identifying deceased individuals by matching with antemortem characteristics have been reported in early history, the corner­ stones of modern identification were laid in 1879 by Alphonse Bertillon, a twenty-six year old clerk in the Paris Police Department. But before we meet Alphonse, we must back up and look at the most i. modern police department in the world in 1879. In 1799, a petty criminal named Eugene Francois Vidocq escaped from jail for the third time. For ten years he lived as an old clothes dealer in Paris. But throughout these years, he lived in fear that his former fellow convicts would betray him; which is exactly what a few had threatened. Finally, in disgust and frustration, he went to the police - - headquarters and offered to provide the police with all of the knowledge and expertise of the criminal world he had acquired over the years. All he asked for in return was to be freed of the threat of imprisonment. At first glance, it seems ridiculous that a police department would hire a notorious criminal to work as chief of the criminal police. How­ ever, even today it is common for detectives to have one or more of the criminal element on an unofficial payroll to provide "tips or leads for criminal investigation. In 1810, the streets of Paris were a lucrative territory for hordes of underworld characters, as the effects of the Napoleonic Wars loosened the bonds of society. The small Paris Police Department was being over­ whelmed and was eager to obtain help from any source. Vidocq chose his own assistants based on the theory that only criminals can fight crime. He employed twenty former convicts whom he paid from a secret fund. In a single year, he and his men arrested 812 murderers, thieves, burglars, and cleaned out dens of criminals into which no inspector would ever have dared to enter. Within a short time, the Vidocq organization, which he dubbed "Surete'" (Security) developed into the germ of the modern French criminal police. At regular intervals the inspectors visited the prison yards and had old and new convicts march in circles around them. They were following the example of Vidocq, imprinting the faces of criminals in their memories. In addition, Vidocq established enormous archives maintained by an army of clerks. A file had been established for every known criminal; his name and his aliases, his crime and sentence, and appearance carefully described. The archives grew until they contained five million items. Added to this enormous collection were photographs which were first used in a Brussels jail. Soon there were over eighty thousand photographs. Obviously, a crisis was rapidly approaching. It is time we met Alphonse Bertillon. Bertillon, who was destined to meet this crisis and inaugurate a new era in ciminology, was indeed, a strange person. Bertillon began his duties March 15, 1879, A more unlikely candidate to found a new science would be hard to find. A young man with a thin, pale dismal face, slow movements and an expressionless voice that tended to become garbled when excited. He was so unsociable that most people found him repellant. He had a suspicious nature and a strong tendency to sarcasm. He was noted for his short temper and most "people went out of their way to avoid him. He was a poor student and had been expelled from several of the best schools in France. In fact,the only reason he was hired was because he was a member of one of the most prominent families in Paris.

His father, Louis Adolphe Bertillon, was a prominent physician, statistician, and Vice-President of the Anthropological Society of Paris. His grandfather was a well-known Naturalist and mathematician. In the spring of 1879, Bertillon was assigned the task of completing file cards with the description of prisoners. It soon became clear to Bertillon that the cards with remarks such as "Stature: tall or average, Face: ordinary, no special marks" were essentially useless. Anyone of thousands could fit the same description, Not only were the remarks so general as to be meaningless, there was no adequate cataloging system, and one had to look through literally hundreds and hundreds of file cards in a search for a suspect. The archives, which had been only a prop for a man with a memory like Vidocq, had inevitably become a major instrument for identifying criminals. This was the situation that Alphonse Bertillon found when he began in March of 1879. Even though Bertillon was perceived as somewhat slow-witted and obnoxious, he was far from an ordinary clerk. He was raised in a home where science was a ruling passion. For years, his father and grandfather had been taking measurements on hundreds of skeletons in an attempt to prove that no two persons had identical measurements. The painstaking methods of his father and other anthropologists had left a deep impression on his mind. The germ of an idea grew out of the hours of dreariness and senseless­ ness of his work. Why, he asked himself, was time, money, and energy being wasted on such a crude and outdated system? Finally, he asked permission to measure certain~physical characteris­ tics of prisoners. Although his supervisors didn't take him seriously, they acquiesced. Bertillon's taking measurements became the department's joke. For weeks he took measurements; the circumference and length of their heads, length of arms and fingers, and of feet and toes. He became convinced that although individual measurements may be identical, never three or four. In August of 1879, he wrote a report setting forth his method of identifying criminals without any possibility of mistake. He sent his report to the Prefect of Parish, Louis Andrieux. He received no reply. In October, after collecting additional data, he sent a second report to Andrieux. In his report, he stated that the probability of any two persons having the same height was one in four. If only one more measurement were added, the chances decreased to 16. If eleven measure­ ments were taken, the chances decreased to 4,191,304 to 1. He further stated the measurement of bones remained the same size throughout adult life. He also developed a catalogue system for the cards by which it would take only a few minutes to determine if a newly-arrested criminal corresponded to a person already on file. The catalogue system was based on his father's system of dividing each measurement into three categories: large, medium, or small. For example, a collection of 90,000 cards would be subdivided into these categories, making three groups of 30,000. If a second measurement was also divided into these three groups, there would now be nine subdivisions of 10,000 cards. If all eleven measurements were used, there would only be 23 cards in each subdivision. Although the logic of the system would appear to be self-evident, Bertillon's report was nevertheless, confusing. Because of his lack of education, he did not express himself clearly, and he tended to use words needlessly. He waited for two weeks; finally he was summoned to Andrieux's office. His proposal had been turned down. Andrieux was a politician, not a scientist. He knew nothing of mathematics and even less about police work. Most policemen of that day disdained scientific methods, relying proudly on their "deductive reasoning." When Andrieux asked some of his assistant administrators to review the report, they turned up their noses at the report and the brash young clerk with less than a year of police work. Bertillon was crushed. Andrieux was so offended by the report that he contacted Bertillon's father and suggest­ ed that he advise his son to stick to his assigned task and leave police work to more experienced investigators. Indeed Louis Bertillon did send for his son and asked what had happened. Alphonse showed him the report; and rather than being upset, the elder Bertillon was astounded. The method proposed by Alphonse was sound, and he was indeed, delighted. Louis Bertillon contacted Andrieux and informed the Prefect that he had made a mistake, and that he should again review the report. Politicians of that day are like those of our day. It is difficult to state publicly that they had made an error. He refused to budge, and all Alphonse could do was wait until a new Prefect was appointed. As so often happens in the field of scientific discovery, two or three investigators in different parts of the world reach the same conclusion at approximately the same time. In 1877, in the distant capital of Houghly, India, a relatively unknown British administrator, William Herschel, grandson of the famed astronomer, suffering from amoebic dysentery, dictated a letter to the Inspector General of the prisons in Bengal, India. It read, and I quote: "My Dear Friend, I enclose a paper which looks unusual, but which I hope has some value. It exhibits a method of identification of persons, which with ordinary care in execution, and with judicial care in scrutin­ izing, is, for all practical purposes, far more infallible than photography It consists in taking a seal-like impression, in common seal ink, of the marking on the skin of the two forefingers of the right hand (these two being taken for convenience only)." "The process of taking the impression is hardly more difficult than that of making a stamp of an official seal. I have been trying it in the jail and in the Registry Office and among pensioners here for some months past." "Every person who now registers a document at Houghly has to sign his 'sign-manual.' None has offered the smallest objection, and I believe that the practice, if generally adopted, will put an end to all attempts at personation." "I have taken thousands now in the course of the last twenty years, and I am prepared to answer for the identity of every person whose 'sign- manual' I can now produce if I am confronted with him." This was true. Herschel had first encountered the handprints in glass, wood, and paper when he was a very young secretary in Houghly. He noted the lines, loops and whorls. Sometime in the early years, he realized that no two prints were exactly alike. He was the first to use the term "papillary lines" to describe this characteristic. It was his job to pay allowances to the increasing number of pensioned Indian soldiers. With western eyes, these pensioners all looked alike and many" bore the same names and most couldn't write. Quite frequently, after receiving their pensions, they turned up in his office a second time and collected again. Since he knew no other way to differentiate between them, he required them to make a "sign-manual," i.e., an inked impression of their two forefingers. He was then able to distinguish genuine pensioners from fake pensioners and the swindling ceased abruptly. He also noted that in addition to the fact that ^each individual's papillary ridges were unique, they were also unchanged even after 19 or 20 years. Ten days after he dispatched his letter, he received a reply from the Inspector General. Although the letter was courteous, it was obvious that the Inspector General regarded his proposals as products of Herschel's illness and delirium. Herschel was crushed, and in 1879, he left India and returned to England. Ironically, during these same years, a Scottish physician named Henry Faulds was working at a hospital in Tokyo, Japan. Faulds had never met Herschel and knew nothing of his work or writings. In 1880, Faulds wrote an article for Nature, a popular science weekly published in London. "In looking over some specimens of prehistoric pottery found in Japan," he wrote, "I was led, about a year ago, to give some attention to the character of certain finger-marks which had been made on them while the clay was still soft. Unfortunately, all those which happened to come into my possession were too vague and ill-defined to be of much use, but a comparison of such finger-tip impressions made in recent pottery led me to observe the character of the skin furrows in human fingers...." he began his article. He wrote of an incident in which a thief had climbed over a newly whitewashed wall not far from where Fauld lived. Neighbors, knowing of Fauld's work, informed him of the sooty fingerprints left on the wall.

8 While he was examining the prints , the police arrested a man they thought was the thief. Fauld asked the police for permission to take the alleged thief's fingerprints. When he compared the prints, he announced that they did not match. A few days later, another man was arrested, and once again Fauld obtained fingerprints. This time they matched perfectly. This was the first recorded case in which fingerprints were used to place a person at the scene of a crime. The police were so impressed that when a second theft occurred, the 4 police immediately sought the help of Fauld. He discovered prints on a mug. On this occasion, he noted that the fingers did not have to be sooty to leave prints. The sweat glands on the fingertip produced an oily secretion which also left marks of the finger ridges. He asked to take impressions of all the house servants in the area. He was able to match a set and the real thief confessed when confronted. He concluded his article by stating, "There can be no doubt as to the advantage of having a naturercopy of the forever-unchangeable finger furrows of important criminals." Nature printed Fauld's article in its October 28, 1880 issue. A few days later, William Herschel, who had returned to England, read the article. He immediately wrote Nature and stated that he had taken fingerprints twenty years before Fauld and had used them for identification, but only his illness and the attitude of his superiors had kept him from communica­ ting this earlier. We can all imagine the frustration that Herschel must have felt in the knowledge that another man had taken credit for a system of identification that he had worked on for over twenty years. Fauld was not to be refuted. He wrote to many of the leading scientists of the world acquainting them with his "discovery." He returned to England to lay claim to it. Meanwhile, in Paris, Louis Andrieux had been replaced with a new Prefect, Jean Camecasse, who proved more receptive to Bertillon's ideas. Although Bertillon called his system anthropometry, the Paris newspaper spoke of it as "Bertillonage." In 1892, Bertillon successfully identified an anarchist and murderer. Since anarchy was especially prevalent throughout Europe, the case made for international news. After such a victory, Bertillon's system became the standard practice in many police systems throughout the world. Enter Sir Francis Galton. Galton was a son of a~ prosperous manufac­ turer and trained to be a physician; although he never practiced medicine. Being financially independent, he devoted himself entirely to scientific interests. Blessed with a superb intellect, and the time and money to use it, he soon became known as one of the best scientific minds of the 19th century. He had an absorbing interest in anthropology. He traveled around the world studying mankind of different lands and cultures. Stimulated by his cousin Charles Darwin, Galton began to study problems of heredity. To properly study human heredity, he needed to collect physical data on large groups of people, preferably over several generations. Year after year, he collected data. In the spring of 1888, Bertillon had been appointed head of the police identification bureau. The Royal Institute of England, of which Galton was a prominent and respected member, took an interest in anthropometry. They appointed Galton to discuss the topic. Galton was not one to present a paper without proper investigation and preparation. He visited Bertillon at his Paris Bureau. Although Galton was impressed with Bertillon and his assitants, he developed a few qualms about the system. He stated that the problem with the theory is that, while Bertillon treated each measurement as an independent variable, they were not. For example, a tall man is more likely to have a long arm. However, he found the system ingenious and interesting. The visit to Paris stimulated Galton's mind. How could one identify an individual using a system that could measure or record one uniqueness?

10 Galton remembered reading an article in the publication Nature some years ago (actually it was eight). He wrote the editors and asked for information of the articles and their authors. History takes many stange turns. For some unexplained reason, the editors sent Herschel's address and did not mention Fauld, who actually wrote the article which Herschel only responded to.--Such is history. Galton visited Herschel and was made familiar with the theory and the system of fingerprinting. It is interesting to note that with Galton's background and interest in anthropology, one would assume that he would have taken anthropometry under his arm and promoted it throughout the civilized world. But such is the greatness of Galton, that once he viewed the documentation that Herschel presented, he realized that fingerprinting had much more to offer and would be much more dependable than physical measurements. In his lecture to the Royal Institute on May 25, 1888, he discussed anthropometry at length. Although he was not yet prepared to state that fingerprinting would prove to be a better method of identification, he did mention it to this very astute group. After his lecture, in typical Galton style, he plunged into an investigation of the merits of fingerprinting. Within three years, he had a larger collection than Herschel. Galton had worked out the mathematical probabilities of identical matches. He figured that the chances of a single fingerprint being identical with that of a single fingerprint of another individual was 1 in 4. Actually, today we know that it is much higher than that. However, if all ten fingerprints were used, the chances rose to a phenomenal 64,000,000,000 to 1. However, it was apparent that this extremely large figure posed a tremendous problem. How does one catalog such an exceedingly large number of possible fingerprints. Actually, to his surprise, he found that he was not the first to face this dilemma. In 1823, Johann Purkinje, a

11 „ worid-renown anatomist, wrote a paper on this very subject, Commentatio de examine physiologico organi visus et systematis cutanei. Purkinje had worked out a system of cataloging the cutaneous configuration of the fingertips. Galton found the Purkinje system burdensome and confusing. He worked out his own system based on his observation that there were only four basic types. We know now that there are eight basic types with many subgroupings. With all ten fingerprints, he figured "that there would be 1,048,570 different groups. Galton wrote an article for Nature in 1891 in which he spoke glowingly, not only of the method, but also of his debt to William Herschel. This infuriated Henry Fauld, who was not even mentioned in the article. Fauld wrote protesting that he, not Herschel, had discovered fingerprinting for the purpose of identification. Galton, a true scientist, had no interest in priority and ignored Fauld's declarations. In 1892, Galton wrote a book entitled Fingerprints which was to exert a profound influence on those interested in identification. While the Surete had a rich and honorable history in France, England had no counterpart. In 1829, the first police commissioner of London moved into some old buildings that had formerly been part of Whitehall Palace. The buildings had been used to house the Kings of Scotland when they visited London--hence the name Scotland Yard, a name retained to this day. In 1884, a man by the name of John Munro was appointed head of the criminal investigation division of Scotland Yard. Unlike the Surete of Paris, Scotland Yard did not enjoy the high regard of England's citizenry. Between August 6, and November 9, 1888, a series of brutal murders occurred in London. Six prostitutes were murdered by a man the press labeled "Jack the Ripper." These unsolved crimes created an international furor which exist to this very day. These crimes and subsequent investigations are exceedingly interesting and, perhaps have the makings for another Quest Paper in the future.

12 The Home Office sent a team of men to Paris to study Bertillon's system. The team returned to London exceedingly impressed. They wrote a glowing report and recommended that the system be adopted in England. They presented the report to Herbert Asquith, the Home Secretary In 1893. Asquith was Impressed with the report, but one of those historical coinci­ dences took place: a member of the Royal Society personally handed a copy of Galton's book to Asquith and interestingly, Asquith read it. He decided to appoint a committee to examine both methods and recommend the better of the two. The committee visited Galton's laboratory several times. They were

• leaning toward fingerprinting as the better of the two systems, when Galton dropped his bombshell. He realized that the fingerprinting systems had a major flaw. If the four basic types were equally distributed among mankind, there would be no difficulty in arranging 100,000 cards bearing ten finger­ prints in such a way that a given set could easily be found. But Galton discovered that there was no even distribution. When Galton arranged a catalogue of 2,645 cards, it turned out that one compartment had 164 cards and another compartment contained only one. Galton, ever a scientist, was sure that he could devise a better cataloging system; but until he could, he would not recommend the system to the committee. The committee pressed him for a deadline, but Galton would only say that it might take a year and possibly as long as three. The committee was in a quandry. They couldn't afford to wait three years. On the other hand, it would be embarrassing to recommend Bertillon's system, only to learn that Galton had solved the problem. How to solve the problem. In a typical committee decision, they handed the Home Secretary a voluminous report in which they recommended a dual system. They recommended that Scotland Yard introduce anthropometry using only five of the eleven measurements Bertillon recommended. They also recommended that along with the five measurements, ten fingerprints of every

13 convict be preserved on filing cards. Bertillon felt England was bastardizing his system and refused to have anything to do with it. He could afford to be aloof. Criminal investiga­ tors from all over Europe were flocking to his doorstep to learn his new and brilliant system. Little did these experts know that in far-away Buenos Aires, work was in progress that would make Bertillon's system obsolete. In 1891, Juan Vicetich of the provincial police in Buenos Aires was called into the office of the Chief of Police. The Chief, Guillermo Nunez had been hearing a great deal about a new system of identification being used in Paris. He handed Vicetich a few technical journals and aked him to study them and possibly set up such a system in Buenos Aires. As Vicetich headed for the door, Nunez called him back and stated, "Here is something else you might look at" and gave him a magazine with an article by Galton describing fingerprinting. Vicetich had only been in Argentina for seven years. He was born in Croatia and had a very meager education, having gone no further tha grammar school. However, he had a natural talent for mathematics and a flair for anything new. Vicetich had no trouble setting up Bertillon's system. He had the system up and working within two weeks. However, Vicetich was particularly impressed with Galton's article. He began taking fingerprints of all his prisoners. He became obsessed with the idea of identifying people by their fingerprints. Unaware of Galton's quest to catagorize fingerprints, Vicetich in six weeks produced a workable solution to catagorize the system. Indepen­ dently of Galton,. he also recognized four basic types of fingerprints. He indicated the ba^ic type of the thumb by using a letter A, B, C, or D and indicated the basic type of each finger with the number I,: 2, 3, 4. A formula for a hand might be A, 3, 2, 2, 1; or for both hands, A, 3, 2, 2, 1, C, 2, 3, 3, 4. Since there were four basic types and ten fingers, there were 1,048,576 different formulas. 14 Because Vicetich had a rather small collection of fingerprints, this system worked very well initially, but as his collection grew, he encoun­ tered the same difficulty Galton had. He searched for characteristic details that would allow him to subclassify each basic type. Among other things, he hit on the idea of counting papillary lines. The police chief Nunez was a little disturbed that Vicetich spent so much time fingerprinting and so little time using Bertillon's system. Vindication came on July 8, 1892, when two small children were found murdered in a small village on the coast of Argentina. The mother of the two illegitimate children ran from her hut on the evening of June 29 screaming, "He killed them, he killed my children, Valasquez killed my children." The neighbor later reported to the police that indeed Valasquez had pressured the children's mother, Francisca Rojas, to marry him. When she refused, he threatened to hurt the children. Immediately the local police inspector arrested the rather slow-witted Valasquez. "Yes," he confessed, he "had threatened Francisca," but he "didn't kill the children." "It was just a threat." The police chief beat the unfortunate Valasquez, but he refused to confess. While he continued to deny any involvement, the police chief had him bound and laid beside the corpses of the two children all night. Still, he denied any involvement. A neighbor reported to the chief that Francisca had a lover who would not marry her because of the two children. If the two children were not there, there would be no impediment to their marriage. The chief suddenly turned his attention to Francisca as the possible murderer. One night he went to her hut, knocked on her windows and called out in a soft voice that he was the avenging spirits of the children and that they had come to punish their murderer. Unfortunately, this had no effect on Francisca, who acted as if she had heard nothing--and maybe she hadn't. On June 8th, the local police chief sent for Inspector Alvarez from

15 LaPlata. Fortunately, Alvarez was one of the few persons who was knowledg- able of Vicetich's fingerprint work. When Alvarez arrived, he quickly absolved Valasquez of the crime. Valasquez was nowhere near the crime when it occurred, and he had many witnesses to verify this. Unfortunately, the slow-witted Valasquez never thought to tell the local police chief this. Alvarez went to the house where the murder occurred. He spent hours looking for a clue. It is an adage in crime investigation that no one can visit a crime scene without leaving a trace of his presence there: a hair, a bit of saliva, fiber, fingerprints, etc. After many hours, just when Alvarez was ready to give up--alas, he found a bloody thumbprint on the door sill. According to Francisca Rojas' testimony, she had not touched the murdered children. Alvarez cut the print away from the door sill. He rushed to the local police station and asked the chief for an inkpad. While the police chief looked in amazement, Alvarez made Francisca make an impres­ sion of her thumb on a piece of paper. He then took a magnifying glass and compared the prints. They matched. He made Francisca compare the prints and when she saw that they were identical, she broke down and confessed. The Francisca Rojas case was the first murder case which was solved by the use of a fingerprint. When Vicetich heard of the murder and the way it was solved, he was ecstatic. Not only could fingerprints identify a person, it could also place a person at the scene of a crime. He knew now that he was on the verge of a scientific breakthrough. Shortly after the Rojas case, Vicetich was able to identify an unknown suicide victim. After taking fingerprints of the corpse, he found an identical set in his file within five minutes. A few weeks later, another murder was solved when a set of fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime. At his own expense, and he was not a rich man, he wrote and published a textbook entitled, "General Introduction to the Procedures of Anthropometry and Fingerprinting." The book pointed out the superiority of fingerprinting

16 over Bertillon's system. Unfortunately, the police administration had a love affair with anything French. They were slow to acknowledge Vicetich's work. He wrote a second book, Sistema de Filacion (System of Recognition.) He was threatened with dismissal, but fortunately, a new Police Chief was appointed He read both books and openly acknowledged the superiority of fingerprinting Through his efforts, the Deputies of the Province of "Buenos Aires, on June 22, 1894 voted a special fund of 5,000 gold pesos to compensate Vicetich for his personal expenditures incurred in the development of fingerprinting. Argentina became the first country in the world to base its system of police identification solely upon fingerprinting. Vicetich introduced his system at the South American Police Congress in 1905 and soon the system was adopted throughout the South American Continent. Unfortunately, word of Vicetich's works not only failed to cross the Atlantic, it didn't even travel north into the United States. In 1896, the Inspector General of Bengal, India, Edward Henry, instituted Bertillon's system of identification into the Bengal Police Department as recommended by the Home Office in England in 18 95. As you recall, the committee recommended that both a modified Bertillon system and fingerprinting be instituted in England and its colonies. Although Bertillon's system was certainly superior to that used previously, Henry was soon to become disenchanted with it. Sources of error became apparent soon after the system was introduced in Bengal. The drawing up of each card file took nearly an hour. To provide a system of checks, each measurement was made three times. Two millimeters was accepted as an admissable margin of error. Unfortunately, two millimeters was often the margin used to differentiate between two individuals. Therefore, it was necessary to look over a considerable number of cards in order to not miss any that fell within this margin of error. It often took over an hour just to search the cards.

17 Just as Henry was disenchanted with the Bertillon system, he was becoming more and more impressed with fingerprinting as a source of identification. As he read Galton's book on fingerprinting, he began to ponder the question of cataloging that Galton had posed. Shortly after he instituted the Committee's recommendations, he returned to England on a short furlough. While there, he visited Galton's laboratory. Galton was now over seventy years old, and he welcomed Henry and brought him up to date with his own experiments with fingerprinting. On his return trip to India, Henry suddenly hit upon a solution. Henry established five basic patterns. There were plain arches, tented arches, radial loops, ulnar loops, and whorls. Henry assigned each pattern with a letter, A, T, R, U, and W. He followed this with a system of subclassifi- cations. These depended upon variations in the small triangle which Galton called the delta. This triangle came about by the forking of a single papillary line, i.e., a bifurcation with each line of the fork running in the same direction. Henry esta'blished specific end points of each line which he called outer terminuses of the delta. Within the loop, he estab- lished specific points which he called inner terminuses. A straight line could be drawn between the outer and inner terminuses and the ridges intersected by this line counted. The resulting numbers, along with letters of the basic pattern establish a specific formula for that individual fingerprint. Although the system may initially sound complex and difficult, it is easily learned and the only equipment needed is a magnifying glass and a needle or instrument to count ridges. In January, 1897, he proposed to the Governor General of India that a committee be formed to compare Bertillon's system with fingerprinting. The report of the committee was so conclusive that six months later, July 12, 1897, the Governor General issued an order that anthropometry, i.e. Bertillon's system be discontinued and dactyloscopy, i.e. fingerprinting, be used exclusively throughout India.

18 In 1898 in India, a thumbprint was found at the scene of a homicide which led to an indictment of an Indian servant for the murder of his employer. Since the man denied his guilt, the resulting trial hinged upon fingerprints as being the chief evidence in the case. For the first time, the English Court system allowed fingerprints to be used as evidence. However, although the man was found guilty of robbery, the court could not bring itself to impose the death penalty for the murder. After all, fingerprinting was too new, too revolutionary for the people who, up to that time, based verdicts solely on the evidence of human witnesses. Edward Henry wrote a book shortly after the trial, Classification and Uses of Fingerprints. He also began work on a new system of cataloging based on single prints. Fingerprinting had a tremendous superior aspect over that of Bertillon's system. It allowed one to not only correctly identify a person, but it also could be used to place that person at the scene of a crime if he or she were unfortunate to leave even a single fingerprint. As news of Henry's work and the court case drifted to England, England was ripe for a new system of identification. A case of mistaken identity made news throughout England just prior to Henry's success. On December 16, 1896, a respectable middle-aged gentleman was walking down the streets of London in the evening when he was accosted by a middle- aged female. She screamed, "I know you. I want my two watches and the rings'." The man turned away from her but she followed him screaming that he was a thief. The man soptted a policeman and ran to him stating that the woman was bothering him. The woman shouted that he was a thief and had her watches and rings. The befuddled policeman took them both to the Rochester Row Police Station. The man gave his name as Adolph Beck. The woman said she was Ottilie Meissonier, a maiden lady and a teacher of languages. She stated that some three weeks ago, she met Beck at a flower show. He appeared to be a gentleman, and they engaged in a long

19 conversation. • She invited him to tea the following day. They spent a delightful afternoon in which Beck told her he was Lord Salisbury and had an income of 180,000 pounds per year. Before the afternoon was over, he had invited her to take a trip to the Riviera on his yacht. However, he insisted that she must allow him to provide her with a more elegant wardrobe for the trip. Ottilie consented. Her visitor wrote a list of-clothing she must have for the trip and wrote a check for forty pounds to purchase them. He then examined her wristwatch and rings, and asked if he might borrow them for measurements so that he could purchase more expensive ones. After Beck-Salisbury left, she stated that she found another wristwatch missing. She became suspicious and hurried to the bank to cash the check. Obviously, the check was worthless. She swore that the man calling himself Beck was the swindler. The case was sent to Scotland Yard and assigned to Inspector Waldock. He already had reports from twenty-two women who had been swindled in the same way. One after another, the women viewed Beck in a police lineup. They all were absolutely sure that Beck was the man who swindled them out of their personal jewelry. Beck swore that he had never seen any of the women. Two days after his arrest, on December 18th, Scotland Yard received a letter stating that a man named John Smith had been sentenced in 18 77 for the same type of swindles. The physical description of Smith fit Adolph Beck. Smith had been released in 1881 and had since vanished. It was obvious that Beck and Smith were the same man. Two policemen who had worked on the Smith case were called in and swore that Beck was indeed John Smith, although nineteen years had passed since they last saw Smith. Beck clapped his hands over his face and cried that he was in South America in 1877 and could not be Smith. He swore that the women and the

20 policemen were-mistaken. Even though the description of Smith stated that he had brown eyes and Beck had blue eyes, the state decided to prosecute Beck as a repeat offender. Ten of the women testified at the trial, including Ottilie Meissonier, who testified that he had a scar on the right side of his neck. However, when asked to point out the scar, she had to admit that she couldn't find it now. On March 5th, the jury found Beck guilty and he sas sentenced to seven years at hard labor. Once more, Beck cried, "I am innocent, absolutely innocent." While he was imprisoned, his lawyer finally was able to inspect the file on John Smith and found that Smith was circumcized--Beck was not. All to no avail. Beck was released from prison on parole in July, 1901. He spent the remainder of his small fortune trying to prove his innocence. On April 15, 1904, a woman ran up to Beck on the street and accused him of swindling her out of her jewelry. Beck reared back in horror and started to run. However he was caught and taken to the Paddington Police station. The woman's story was the same as before. When the newspaper reported the story, four more women showed up. They all swore that Beck was their swindler. Once again, Beck was found guilty. Before sentencing however, Beck's fortune at last_changed. On July 7, 1904, Detective Kane was visiting the Tottenham Court Police Station when he was informed that they had just arrested a man trying to sell two rings that he had swindled from a pair of unemployed actresses. Kane, who was familiar with the Beck case, asked for more information. The story was exactly what Beck had been accused of. Only this time, Beck couldn't have been the swindler--he was in jail. Kane went to the man's cell. He gasped. There sat a man who looked

21 remarkably like Adolph Beck. Although the man gave his name as William Thomas, Kane was sure that he was looking at John Smith. He quickly notified Scotland Yard. The five women who had previously identified Beck now agreed that they had been mistaken. William Thomas was the man who had swindled them. Thomas had the scar on his neck, he had brown eyes, and he was circumcized. At last, William Thomas broke down and "confessed. The Home Office hastened to free Beck. On July 19, 1904, he was unconditionally pardoned and received 5,000 pounds in compensation. The country was indeed, ripe for a new and more dependable system of identification. Early in the morning of March 27, 1905, a brutal murder occurred in Deptford, England, a suburb of South London. While the murder was certainly unfortunate for the victims, it would mark a giant step forward in the annals of fingerprinting. At 7:15 a.m., a milkman saw two young men rush out of a small paint shop at 34 High Street. They were in such a hurry that they failed to close the street behind them. Ten minutes later, a little girl was walking down High Street. She was startled when, a man covered with blood, stuck his head out of the door at 34 High and then, immediately ducked back in, closed and locked the door. At 7:30 a.m., a young boy, employed by Mr. Farrow who owned and lived at the paint shop, was surprised to find the door locked. His employer, Mr. Farrow, a kind old man of seventy, almost always was up and working when the boy arrived. When no one answered his knocking, he climbed over the wall into the courtyard. As he peered through the window, he was shocked to see the bloody body of Mr. Farrow. Detective Inspector Fox, accompanied by several of his policemen, arrived within twenty minutes. As they entered the small shop, they were greeted with a picture of total devastation. Furniture was overturned,

2 2 drawers emptied, paint spilled. The bloody body of Mr. Farrow was lying near the fireplace, his face so badly beaten that it was hardly recog­ nizable as human. Fox concluded from the track of blood that Mr. Farrow must have come downstairs to serve what he must have assumed was an early customer. He had been knocked down, gotten up near the stairs in an attempt to keep the attacker from hurting his wife, who was in bed upstairs. He was knocked down a second time. Amazingly, he got up a third time, apparently after the attacker or attackers had left, went to the door in a state of shock, closed and locked it in an attempt to keep the attackers from returning. He was attempting to return to the staircase when he died. When Fox discovered two masks made out of women's hose, he realized that there were two murders, not one. Upstairs he found Mrs. Farrow, a feeble eighty-year old lady in bed with her head bashed in. Incredibly, although she was unconscious, she was still alive. Unfortunately, she died four days later, unable to shed any light on the killers. Fox searched the house for clues; and, at first, it seemed none existed, or at least, none were obvious. Just when the search appeared futile, a small money box was found under Mrs. Farrow's bed. It had been broken open and had been emptied of its cash. As Fox examined the box, he noticed a slight smudge on the inside of the lid. He asked whether anyone in the search team had touched the box. A young sergeant stated somewhat embarassingly that, "yes" he had pushed the box under the bed to get it out ot the way when they removed Mrs. Farrow from the bed. The box was taken to Chief Inspector Collins, one of the Department's fingerprints experts. The fingerprints of the young detective, the young employee, Mrs. Farrow and Mr. Farrow were taken. This was probably the first time in England that a corpse had been fingerprinted. The next morning. Fox received the report that the fingerprint did not belong to anyone in the search team, nor Mr. or Mrs. Farrow. Not

23 only that, it did not match any of the 85,000 individuals that were then on record in the bureau. Fox had received a tip that two brothers, Alfred and Albert Stratton, might be involved. He was told that Alfred had a mistress named Hannah Crommarty. He found the girl living in a one-room shack. When he questioned her, it was apparent that she had been recently beaten. She stated that Alfred had physically abused her, and she was ready to squeal on him. On the night before the murder, Alfred was visiting her. After he had been sexually intimate with her, he left. She fell asleep and when she awoke the next morning, she saw him crawling in through the window. He told her that if asked, she should say that he was with her all night. After this, Fox visited Albert's room located in a nearby lodging house. As he searched the room, he found a couple of masks made from women's hose. Orders were issued for the arrest of the two brothers, although the evidence, at best, was certainly flimsy. As the men were fingerprinted, they had no idea of the significance of what was going on. The thumbprint on the cashbox matched the right print of Albert Stratton. The prosecutor, Richard Muir, was contacted and presented with the evidence. Muir realized that the only conclusive evidence to convince the judge and jury would be the fingerprint, and fingerprints were yet to be fully understood by the judge, much less the average juror. The Stratton's lawyer let it be known that if the case were brought to trial, he would call two experts to the witness stand to prove that Henry's fingerprint system, Dactyloscopy, was undependable. He did not give the names of the experts. Muir racked his brain. After all, how many persons in England had the faintest idea about fingerprinting? When the trial began, Muir looked over to the defense table. There sat Dr. J. G. Garson who had long ago advocated that the Home Office

24 institute Bertillon's system. He felt slighted by the government that chose fingerprinting over the system he advocated. Next to him sat Dr. Henry Faulds. By happenstance, the name of this man, who had first solved a crime by means of fingerprints found at a scene, had been overshadowed by Herschel, Galton and Henry. Had he meant to bring down the very system he discovered as an act of vengeance? Muir called as his last witness Chief Inspector Collins, the Bureau's fingerprint expert. Collins brilliantly presented the fingerprint evidence in a most convincing manner. The defense lawyers, in cross-examination, pointed out discrepancies between the.thumbprint on the cash box and that of Alfred Stratton after being prompted by Garson and Faulds. However, Collins rose to the challenge and pointed out that these small differences occurred because it is impossible always to roll the fingers over the paper with the same pressure. He then made a dramatic demonstration. Collins took the thumbprints of several members of the jury several times in succession. He then showed the jury that the prints contained the same discrepancies without inval­ idating the basic fingerprint pattern. In a desperation move, the defense called Dr. Garson to the stand. His testimony was essentially worthless, but it gave the prosecution the chance it was waiting for. On cross-examination, Muir produced a letter that Garson had written him before the trial, offering to testify for the prosecution as to the validity of the fingerprints. The judge was so shocked that he called Garson "a completely unworthy witness," and ordered him from the witness stand. In his instructions to the jury, the judge cautiously observed that the fingerprint should certainly be regarded as valid evidence. The jury retired for two hours and then returned a verdict of guilty. Alfred and Albert Stratton were condemned to death by hanging. The Stratton trial was a first milestone to full legal recognition

25 of dactyloscropy. The system spread throughout Great Britain, Scotland, Ireland, and all the British Dominion and colonies. It also began to replace Bertillon's system in continental Europe. It was obviously a bitter pill for Bertillon to swallow. Just when his system had been accepted throughout Europe, it had been superseded by a superior method. Although anthropometry would continue to be used by many police departments for some years, it was slowly being replaced by fingerprinting. In 1902, Hungary officially adopted it; Denmark, the same year; Spain, Germany and Russia quickly followed suit. Bertillon proposed the argument that criminals would find ways to change the papillary lines on their fingers. But practical experiments proved that even after severe burns, cauterizing, or excessive wear, the papillary lines would reappear. So bitter was Bertillon that when Juan Vicetich of LaPlata, Argentina, visited him in the autumn of 1913, he blurted out, "Son, you have tried to do me a great deal of harm" and he slammed the door in his face. Vicetich returned to Buenos Aires, shocked and disillusioned. He meant to pay homage to the man who put personal identification on a scientific basis. Vicetich had hoped to finish his life's work with a crowning achievement, the fingerprinting of the entire population of Buenos Aires. Both houses of the provincial government accepted his plan and voted to put them into effect. However, voices were heard speaking against the proposal. They summed up their argument in a single question: "Do you want to be fingerprinted like criminals?"--a civil rights question still being used today in the form of drug testing. In 1917, the Federal government stepped in. The law of general registration was canceled. Vicetich was ordered to turn over all his files and equipment to the Federal Government and officially retired. He died a broken man July 28, 1925. Bertillon's prestige was to suffer a staggering blow in the later

26 years of his life during the case of the French Army captain, Alfred Dreyfus. An essential document, produced by the government to prove Dreyfus's alleged treasonable dealing with Germany had been declared by Bertillon, who had no hand-writing expertise, to be the writing of Dreyfus. Later it was found to have been written by another. Alphonse Bertillon died at the age of 61, blind, alone, and dis­ illusioned. He started the search for a perfect identification system, but unfortunately, lived long enough to see the one he proposed, replaced with a superior system. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, the United States had no centralized police authority. The closest thing to a national police department was the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Alan Pinkerton was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1819. He came to Wisconsin as a cooper. He moved to Chicago and formed his agency with nine men. He was as close to an incorruptable policeman that existed in the New World. The police departments in the large cities of the United States were almost all corrupted, riddled with policemen taking bribes to look the other way. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency had as their motto, "We never sleep." When Alan Pinkerton died in 1884, his organi­ zation stood out as a rock of reliability amid the chaos of American police forces. An episode of literary intervention interrupts our story. Samuel Clemens, writing under the pen name Mark Twain, wrote two stories which hinged on fingerprints. The first is from his Life on the Mississippi. It is a story of a man named Ritter, whose wife and child were killed by a soldier during the Civil War. Ritter finds the murderer by matching a thumbprint left at the scene with that of the killer. It was written in 1883. The second story is from his book Pudd'nhead Wilson. This fictional story of an eccentric country lawyer nicknamed "Pudd'nhead Wilson" first

27 opened the eye's of many Americans to the importance of fingerprints as a means of identification. Pudd'nhead played an important role in overcoming skepticism in this country. This story was written in 1894, fully six years before the system had been accepted in England. Twain had read extensively about the pioneering work of Herschel and Faulds and was deeply interested in what they had done In his book, Twain has his Missouri lawyer Wilson, tell a jury, "Every human being carries with him from the cradle to the grave, certain physical marks which do not change their character and by which he can always be identified--and that without a shadow of a doubt." "These marks are his signature" he went on, "his physical autograph so to speak, and this autograph cannot be counterfeited nor can he disguise it or hide it away, nor can it become illegible by wear or the mutations of time." "This signature is every man's own; there is no duplicate of it among the swarming populations of the globe." Considering when these stories were written and by whom, I think it is quite a remarkable piece of literature. Whether Twain wrote these to make his fellow countrymen aware of this bold new system or whether he just thought they would be interesting stories, we'll never know. It did have an effect on the general populace, however. In the United States a remarkable incident occurred in 1903 which began America's turn from the anthropometry to fingerprinting. In 1903, Will West, a Negro, was committed to the U.S. penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was measured and photographed according to Bertillon's system. During his physical examination, the clerks who were measuring him said that he looked familiar, and asked if he had not been confined there before. At the end of the examination, he was assigned prison number 3426 and taken to the chief record clerk. "West," said the chief clerk, "you've been here before; there is

28 no use denying it; we have your photograph and description here in our file of the Bertillon records." West denied ever having been there before. The clerk pulled a card from his file bearing the name of a prisoner "William West"--prison number 2626. He showed the case to Will West who agreed that the photograph looked like, him, but he still denied ever having been there before. The prisoner William West was being confined in~the same prison. He was sent for. When William West, prisoner 2626 stood next to Will West, prisoner 3426, the guards were astounded. Not only did they look alike, their Bertillon measurements were virtually identical. Fingerprint identification was not officially adopted at the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas until November 2, 1904, but in the meantime, the left index fingers of the two Negro prisoners were inked and recorded. It was found that Will West--#3426 had a whorl-type fingerprint and that of William West--#2626, had a loop pattern with a ridge count of 18. Thus, where photographs and body measurement had failed, fingerprints had succeeded. In 1904, the St. Louis, Missouri Police Department officially adopted the system of fingerprinting, becoming the first police department in the United Stated to do so. In 1911, a dramatic courtroom scene occurred. The particulars of the case are not important, except for the fact that it hinged on whether fingerprints could be admitted as evidence. A New York City detective and fingerprint expert Joseph A. Faurote, was testifying for the State. The judge was quite skeptical of the system and staged a demonstration to test its validity. He asked fifteen courtroom spectators and court personnel to press their index finger on a window in the courtroom and then had one of the fifteen press his print on a glass-top desk. The participant was to carefully note where his fingerprint was on the window. Of course Faurot was not allowed in the room when this took place. When Faurot was

29 brought back into the room, the judge ordered him to show which of the prints on the window corresponded to the print on the desktop. Within four minutes, using only a magnifying glass, Faurot arrived at the right answer. The entire courtroom was stunned. The judge accepted fingerprints as legitimate evidence. Here was a historic moment and a genuine sensation. For the first time, an American judge had accepted fingerprints as evidence. The newspapers spread the story over the whole country until the police chiefs of even the smallest towns had heard of it. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt, who was a one-time Police Commissioner of New York, took the first step to create a central authority which would concern itself with violations of Federal laws. This was to be the beginning of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For nearly a decade the Bureau was somewhat of a joke. Men immune to corruption were hard to find in Washington. However, in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge appointed an incorruptible New Englander Harlan Fiske Stone (later to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court)./. Attorney General Stone appointed a twenty-nine year old lawyer as chief of the F.B.I. His name was, of course, J. Edgar Hoover. Stone gave Hoover full authority to clean house which was exactly what Hoover did. Considering the corruption in the F.B.I, and Washington when he took over the F.B.I. , Hoover achieved a near-miracle in a very short time. He was well aware of jealously guarded jurisdictions of state and local police departments. He was patient and slowly, the local departments turned to the F.B.I, for guidance and help. J. Edgar Hoover's first important measure after his appointment dealt with the identification of criminals. He was going to overcome the major obstacle to identification: the scattering of fingerprint collections throughout the country. First, the files of all federal penitentiaries were transferred to Washington. Of course, this was relatively easy. Finally in 1930, Congress empowered Hoover to set up a bureau of identifi-

30 cation which would cover the whole country. There are now, over 200 million prints on file at the F.B.I. As our story comes to a close, we realize that we are just beginning to understand the uniqueness of man. It is now possible to identify people by their saliva, blood, semen, teeth, bony architecture, and many other physical variables. However, back to the beginning--"Who was that masked man?"--only Tonto knows for sure, and he's dead!!I

31 1. The Century of the Detective by Jurgen Thorwald Harcourt, Brace § World, Inc. N. W. 1964

2. Fingerprinting-A Manual of Identification by Charles Edward Chapel 1941 Coward McCann, Inc. New York 3. Fingerprint Science by Clarence Gerald Collins 1985 Custom Publishing Company Costa Mesa, Calif. 4. Fingerprinting: Magic Weapon Against Crime 1969 by Eugene B. Bluck David McKay Company, Inc. New York 5. Classification and Uses of Finger Prints 1922 by Sir E. R. Henry His Majesty's Stationery Office, London 6. Fingerprint Technician 1965 Arco Editorial Board Arco Publishing Company, New York 7. Fingerprints: Fifty Years of Scientific Crime Detection by Douglas G. Browne and Alan Bruck 1954 E. P. Dutton § Co., Inc. New York