Bodies of Evidence

Brian Innes

• Publisher: Amber Books Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781908273925
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Scienza forense

Bodies of Evidence is an informative examination of the science of criminal investigation. It is packed with intriguing case histories involving a variety of forensic evidence and chronicles the role of those who have made the most significant contributions to the fields of toxicology, serology, fingerprinting, forensic ballistics and psychological profiling.

The Finger of Suspicion

THE REALIZATION THAT AN INDIVIDUAL’S FINGERPRINTS – as well as prints of the whole hand and the sole of the foot – are unique, and so could be used as a means of positive identification, took a long time to develop. Centuries ago, Chinese and Japanese potters impressed their work with a “signature” thumbprint, and practitioners of palmistry predicted an individual’s future from the lines of the hand – perhaps they were blinded to the fact that every hand was different by the knowledge that the fate of most people took one of only a few directions.

The surface of the skin on the inner surface of the hands, and on the soles of the feet, differs markedly from that of the rest of the body. From the tips of the fingers to the wrist, the hand is covered with a hornier type of skin that is characterized by a system of papillary ridges. Although these run generally parallel to one another, they occasionally change direction to form clearly defined patterns on various parts of the hand and foot.

The papillary ridges, and the characteristic patterns caused by their change of direction, begin to form during the third and fourth months of the development of the foetus, and after birth no changes occur in their configuration: the only change is in size, the growth of the ridges following the growth of the hands and feet. So far as is known, no two individuals – not even identical twins – have patterns that are exactly alike.

The first steps in the modern use of finger and hand prints for identification purposes were taken during the latter half of the 19th century by two British officials in two far-distant lands.

William Herschel, the grandson of the famous English astronomer, went to India in 1853, at the age of 20. In 1858 he first thought of using a handprint as a signature on a contract, and then began to experiment with fingerprints. He rose through the ranks of the Indian Civil Service and in 1877 was appointed magistrate at Hooghly, near Calcutta, where one of his duties was paying government pensions.

To make sure that pensioners who had died were not being impersonated by others, he began taking prints of the right first and middle fingers on receipts. Soon he had made this the official local policy for all legal documents, and then wrote to the Inspector of Jails and the Registrar-General in Bengal, suggesting that the system should be generally adopted. He stated confidently that the prints did not change with age, and might be valuable in the keeping of criminal records.

A Scottish doctor, Henry Faulds, was working at the same time in Tsukiji Hospital, Tokyo. He noted that documents in the remoter districts of Japan were often “signed” by illiterates with their hand prints in black or red.

He wondered whether the patterns of prints varied from race to race, and began to collect specimens. In the summer of 1879, a thief who climbed over the whitewashed garden wall of a house in Tokyo left a sooty hand print behind. When Faulds learnt that the police had already arrested a suspect, he asked to be allowed to compare the two hands, and then announced that the suspect was not the thief. And when another man was arrested, and confessed to the crime, Faulds was able to show that his hand print was identical to that on the wall.

When the police asked Faulds to apply his expertise in a second case, he realized that his observations could have criminological importance, and wrote a letter to the English scientific magazine Nature, outlining his theory of what he called “dactylography”. He concluded: “There can be no doubt as to the advantage of having, besides their photographs, a nature-copy of the forever unchangeable finger furrows of important criminals.”

William Herschel retired from the Indian Civil Service in 1879, and returned to England with the notebooks containing his research. He was mortified to discover that Faulds had pre-empted his discoveries, but he too wrote to Nature, and provoked a small amount of controversial correspondence. Further developments in the subject, however, did not take place for some time.

In France, a very different method of criminal identification, making use of body measurements, had been developed by Alphonse Bertillon (see “The Guilty Party”). The English physician and anthropologist, Sir Francis Galton, was unimpressed with “bertillonage”, and in 1888 he remembered the Faulds-Herschel correspondence. He contacted Herschel, who sent him his papers, and began to study a way of classifying fingerprints.

Galton discovered that a Polish pathologist named Johann Purkinje had published a paper in the 1830s, in which he described the various patterns in the skin of the fingertips. There were, however, dozens of variables, which would make identifying and comparing prints very time-consuming, and Galton sought for something simpler. Eventually, he hit upon the fact that nearly every print in his collection contained a small triangular area where lines ran together. Galton called this a “delta”, and distinguished four basic types: prints with no delta, prints with a delta to the left, prints with a delta to the right, and prints with several deltas. This meant that, if all 10 fingerprints were taken, they could be divided into more than 60,000 classes. In 1892, Galton published his book Finger Prints, which detailed his research.

BEGINNINGS OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION

A policeman in Argentina named Juan Vucetich was the first person to put Galton’s system into practice. Vucetich had his first success in June 1892, in the case of a mother who murdered her two small children. By 1894, the Argentinian police force had become the first in the world to adopt fingerprints as the principal means of criminal identification. Vucetich described his methods at the Second Scientific Congress of South America in 1901, and within a few years every country in South America had adopted his system.

In Europe and the United States, however, fingerprinting developed in a slightly different direction. Edward Henry was Inspector General of the Bengal Police when he read Galton’s book in 1893. With the collaboration of two of his officers, he adopted a system of classification that differed from that of Galton and Vucetich. He described five clearly different types of pattern in the lines of the fingertips: arches (A); “tented” arches (T); radial loops – that is, loops inclined toward the radius bone on the outside of the arm (R); ulnar loops, inclined toward the inner ulnar bone (U); and whorls (W).

After establishing to which of these main classes the print belonged, Henry made a further sub-classification by deltas. He wrote: “The deltas may be formed by either (a) the bifurcation of a single ridge, or (b) the abrupt divergence of two ridges which have hitherto run side by side.” He then established the limits of the delta – from what he named the “inner terminus” to the “outer terminus” – and counted the number of ridges that intersected the line joining these two points.

In 1896, Henry wrote to the Government of Bengal, reporting the ease with which fingerprints could be taken:

The accessories, a piece of tin and some printer’s ink, are inexpensive and procurable everywhere; the impressions are self-signatures, free from possible errors of observation and transcription; any person of ordinary intelligence can learn to take them with a little practice after a few minutes instruction… their characteristics being persistent throughout life, the finger impressions of a child could be used to identify the same person when he had reached middle or old age … and last, the evidential value of identity obtainable from the scrutiny of the prints of two or three fingers is so great that no person, capable of weighing it, would deem it necessary to seek for confirmation elsewhere.

In 1897, the office established in Calcutta by the Bengal government, on the basis of this report, became the first national fingerprint bureau in the world to employ Henry’s system. It remains the basis of fingerprint identification to this day.

In 1898, the manager of a tea plantation in northern India was found with his throat cut; his safe and despatch box had been rifled. Among the papers left in the despatch box was a calendar, and on it were two brown smudges, one certainly made by a right-hand finger. Henry had filed the fingerprints of all those convicted of imprisonable offences since he set up his system. The print was soon classified, and identified as that of the right thumb of Kangali Charan, a former servant of the plantation manager. Although he had moved several hundred miles away, he was traced, and a second impression of his right thumb taken. It matched.

Henry was recalled to England in 1901, appointed Assistant Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, and given the task of setting up Scotland Yard’s Fingerprint Branch. One of his first recruits was Detective Sergeant Charles Collins, who took his appointment very seriously, studying photography for the purpose. He soon had his first success.

CRIME FILE: THOMAS JENNINGS

In 1910, fingerprint identification was still a very recent development in crime science. US legal history was made when a burglar who shot and killed a householder was convicted on the evidence of his prints in wet paint.

Clarence Hiller lived with his wife and four children on West 104th Street, Chicago. In the early hours of September 19, 1910, he confronted an intruder on the stairs of the house; two revolver shots rang out, and Hiller died a few moments later.

By chance, police officers about to go off duty had their suspicions aroused by the movements of a man, about a mile away from the Hiller home. They questioned him and, finding a loaded revolver in his pocket, arrested him. He was identified as Thomas Jennings, only recently released from Joliet Penitentiary.

Meanwhile, other officers examined the scene of the murder. The screen on the rear kitchen window had been forced. Also, on the railing of the porch, which was newly painted, they found the clear impressions of four fingers of a left hand. The prints were quickly shown to match those of Thomas Jennings, and he was indicted for murder.

When four expert witnesses testified for the prosecution, the court accepted their evidence, and another step forward was made in the legal history of the United States. Jennings appealed, but the Supreme Court of Illinois ruled on the admissibility of fingerprints on December 21, 1911: “We are disposed to hold … that there is a scientific basis for the system of fingerprint identification, and that the courts are justified in admitting this class of evidence.”

On June 27, 1902, a thief broke into a house in Dulwich, south London, and the investigating officer noticed some dirty finger marks on the window sill. Collins photographed a thumb mark and then, with his colleagues, set about comparing the print with those of previously convicted criminals. After a long search, he was rewarded: the print was that of Harry Jackson, who was arrested a few days later.

There remained the problem of persuading a court to accept the evidence. For the prosecution of what was, admittedly, a very minor case, it was decided to retain an experienced counsel, Richard Muir. He spent hours with Collins studying the new system, and in opening the case he explained to the jury how successful the technique had proved in India. Collins then showed how fingerprints were identified, and exhibited his photographs. The jury were intrigued by his demonstration, and found the prisoner guilty – even his defence did not contest the evidence. The acceptability of fingerprints had been established in the English court.

In 1903 Henry was appointed Police Commissioner, and decided to make a sweeping test of fingerprinting in criminal identification. At the Epsom Derby race meeting in May of that year, the police arrested 60 men for a variety of offences; 27 were found to have previous convictions, and their records were available in court the next morning:

The first prisoner on this occasion gave his name as Green of Gloucester, and assured the interrogating magistrate that he had never been in trouble before … But up jumped the Chief Inspector … and begged their worships to look at the papers and photog...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Gathering the Evidence
• Suicide or Murder
• Mark of Death
• With Poison Deadly
• Skull and Bones
• Breath of Life
• Worm in the Flesh
• Finger of Suspicion
• Written in Blood
• DNA Fingerprinting
• Hanging by a Hair
• The Speeding Bullet
• Fire and Destruction
• Fragments of Evidence
• Speaking Likeness
• The Guilty Party
• The Forensic Hardware