Silent Witnesses (5 page)

Alphonse Bertillon, whose method of identifying criminals using anthropometric measurements revolutionized criminal detection.

Over the next few months, Bertillon continued to successfully identify further suspects. It was clear that his system worked. Eventually even Gustave Mace had to admit that Bertillon had single-handedly brought about the greatest advance in law enforcement of the nineteenth century. Within a few years the word
bertillonage
had passed not only into the French language, but also into many others.

Bertillon went on to apply his technique to identify the dead as well as the living. An inspector asked Bertillon to identify the body of a person who had been shot and dumped in the river. The body had been in the water for at least two months before being recovered and was consequently in extremely poor condition, with no remaining features on the face by which it might have been identified. The inspector considered that Bertillon was his last hope, but felt that in this case even his chances of success were slim. However, Bertillon went through his normal procedures, taking measurements from the corpse and referring to his card index. He managed to match at least five measurements and, to the inspector's amazement, discovered that the man had been convicted of a violent assault a year earlier. With the identity of the body established, the inspector was able to pick up the trail of the murderer and made an arrest soon afterwards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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