In the 19th century, rising crime rates led police forces around the world to consider how they could be most successful in detecting criminals and how they could bring them to justice as easily as possible. But even in the middle of this century, they had little chance of success. They only started to do better when they started to systematically organise criminal records and discovered that every person in the world has unique fingerprints.
Like every pioneering period, it was marked by unique personalities, full of dreams and realism, celebrated and ridiculed, happy and unhappy. Two of them stand out as having made an important mark on the development of criminology: Eugéne François Vidocq, a representative of the old school, and Alphonse Bertillon, the father of modern criminology.
When Alphonse Bertillon, an auxiliary of the First Prefecture of Police in Paris, entered the field of criminology in 1879, he was 26 years old, and the French Criminal Police Sureté was around 60. The Sureté was then considered the oldest and most experienced police force in the world, with its roots in Napoleonic times, and its first chief and founder was Eugène François Vidocq.
When the Sureté later remembered Vidocq, they always felt a little uncomfortable, because Vidocq was not a classic policeman. He was convinced that “crime can only be fought with the help of criminals”. He chose prisoners as his collaborators, paid them from the black fund and led them with an iron hand. In a single year, he arrested 812 murderers, thieves, burglars and swindlers, and cleared some of Paris’s districts of criminal gangs where no police inspector had dared to set foot.
With the help of his disguised colleagues, who had secret hiding places at their disposal and whom he managed to get into the dungeons, and after the mission was completed, he provided them with a second identity by declaring them dead, Vidocq ensured himself a constant flow of information. With his knowledge of the world of criminals, their habits and methods, and with his photographic memory and archive, which recorded everything he knew about the criminals he knew, he was able to lay the foundations of the criminology of the time.
Vidocq resigned in 1833 because the new Prefect of Police, Gisquet, could not bear the fact that the entire criminal police force in Paris was made up of ex-convicts. After that, he ran a private detective agency, was a writer and a highly skilled businessman, and lived a quiet life until his death in 1857.
After his departure, the Parisian Criminal Police operated under various inspectors until it was taken over by Gustave Macé in 1879, and the criminal officers with a prison record were replaced by hundreds of respectable bourgeois. But in reality, none of the police chiefs stopped working according to the principles established by Vidocq, and so people who had been in pre-trial proceedings were still hired to act as informers. The Sûreté also used agents provocateurs and sent them to prisons to gain the trust of criminals.
The Vidocq archives have become a huge bureaucratic apparatus and mountains of papers have accumulated in the Prefecture’s offices. Each criminal had a special file which, in addition to his name, listed his offence, his punishment and his appearance. Soon there were five million files in the collection. After a Brussels prison in the 1940s made the first use of a recently invented photograph to preserve a criminal’s face, this new method of registering and identifying criminals was also used in Paris. This resulted in the accumulation of 80 000 additional photographs in the Prefecture. Nevertheless, in 1879 the Sureté was in a deep crisis.
Alphonse Bertillon, the son of a well-known physician, statistician and anthropologist, had a mild, gaunt and haggard face, slow movements and an expressionless voice. He was not in good health, had digestive problems, nosebleeds and migraine attacks. He was suspicious, often sarcastic and maddeningly pedantic. His workplace was in the corner of a large hall full of files, and he was the one who had to enter the new information that the police officers obtained during arrests.
But everything that passed through his hands only proved the depth of the crisis in which Sureté found itself. Since Vidocq’s great success, when his methods were developed, the world has changed radically and so has the crime market. The changes have been almost imperceptible and few individuals have attempted to shed light on and explain the sociological, biological and psychological background to crime.
For example, the Belgian statistician Adolfe Quételet wanted to calculate the percentage of criminals in the world’s population. The Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso tried to explain the psychology of criminals in his own way. He measured the skulls of criminals in the prisons of Pavia and came to the conclusion that criminals could be identified by physical features that put them in proximity to animals more than to other people. The criminal, in his view, was an atavistic phenomenon and was, so to speak, a return to the initial stage of human evolution.
Vidocq had a phenomenal memory for recognising the faces of criminals, but now even a hundred Vidocqs would not be enough to recognise the many faces of criminals who changed names and appearances. Nor was it possible to catch criminals by the tricks and tricks that inspectors used to use. And if the file was only a kind of aid to Vidocq’s memory, it now became the main means of identification for others.
But it quickly became opaque. It did not make sense to sort them by name, as the criminals changed their names frequently. With 80,000 photographs, it was also impossible to compare those of the newly arrested with those who had already been punished. In urgent cases, inspectors spent days going through photographs to find a single person who had already been punished.
The criminal’s body measurements
As Bertillon was entering the information in the four thousandth file on a sweltering July summer day in 1879, a thought struck him. It was the result of anger at the pointlessness and tediousness of his work. Why, he wondered, were we wasting time and money on increasingly unsuccessful attempts to collect information on the identity of criminals, when science had discovered the mark of Cain which unerringly distinguishes one man from another – namely, his physical measurements.
Bertillon did not know that 19 years earlier, the director of Louvain prison had suggested in vain to those in charge that adult criminals should have their head circumference, ear and leg length, height and chest circumference measured. He was convinced that this could be used to obtain data that could not be altered by any disguise, name change or physical deformity. After much pleading, he was only allowed to collect this data and, although they laughed at him at the same time, for a few weeks he was only concerned with measuring criminals. He was convinced that some of the measurements of different people could coincide, but never all five.
In August, he already sent a report on his work to the Prefect of Police of Paris, stressing that this is the way to solve the problem of unmistakable characteristics in criminals. He never received a reply. Nevertheless, he was convinced that he could develop a system whereby the files containing the measurements of criminals could be arranged in such a way that it would be possible to find out within a few minutes whether the measurements of a newly-arrested criminal already existed in the previous files. This would help to find out who he actually is.
In doing so, he distinguished between three groups of subjects; large, medium and small. He took the size of the criminal’s head as the first criterion and described it as large, medium or small. This resulted in only three groups of 30,000 files each. If he took the height of the body as the second criterion and described it as large, medium or small, nine groups of 10,000 files were created. This has already significantly reduced the search time.
Taking into account further measurements and eliminating non-existent characteristics, he was left with less than twenty files, with a high probability of finding a criminal with a file that had pretty much the same characteristics as the newly brought in criminal.
Finally, the Prefect of Police of Paris referred Bertillon’s report to the head of the Sûreté, Gustave Macé, and said to Betillon: “You are a clerk in the twentieth hierarchical grade, and you have only been with us for eight months, and you already have your own ideas. Your report is ridiculous.” Macé had a lot of police experience, but he hated theorists and theories. But Bertillon’s father, a keen statistician, when he read his son’s report, said to his son, “You will be the one to bring science into the police. You are going to teach the French police how to work scientifically.”
Fingerprints are different
At the time, he did not know that on the other side of the world, two men were working on a similar problem of identifying criminals and that they had similar ideas to Betillon. Philosophers used to claim that the light of knowledge came from the East. Were they right?
On 5 August 1877, in Hoogly, the capital of the district of the same name in India, British colonial official William J. Herschel sat in his study and dictated a letter. He was only 24 years old, but he was debilitated by dysentery and febrile seizures. He was anxious to make the letter he was writing as clear and convincing as possible. It was addressed to the Inspector General of Prisons in Bengal.
It started like this: “I am sending you a description of a method of personal identification consisting of the right forefinger and middle finger impression. The ink for the stamps is sufficient to produce such an impression. I have already tried this procedure on prisoners and Indian officials in the payment of salaries and pensions and there has been no difficulty. If this procedure were introduced everywhere, identity theft would be avoided. I have produced thousands of fingerprint sheets over the last twenty years and have always been able to identify people on this basis.”
Indeed, it is now twenty years since he first encountered the imprints left on wood, glass and paper by the dirty hands and fingers of Indian workers and soldiers. They were prints full of arbitrary lines, arcs, twists and swirls. He could not tell later why they were so etched in his memory. Perhaps it was the Chinese traders who came to Bengal and certified their business on paper with a blackened thumbprint. In 1858, for the first time, he gave his Indian building contractor a contract to sign and the Indian had to stamp his right hand and fingers, smeared with stamping paint, on it as a confirmation.
On Herschel’s desk was a large notebook with Fingerprints written on it. It contained the fingerprints of many Indians he had collected over the years. It soon became clear to him that one person’s fingerprint is never exactly the same as another person’s. In particular, the lines on the fingertips always ran differently. Over time, he memorised many of these patterns and was able to distinguish people on the basis of their fingerprints.
He called the lines papillary lines and knew they would never change. They stayed the same five, ten or twenty years later. About fifteen years ago, he was faced with the problem of paying pensions to a growing number of Indian soldiers. In the eyes of a European, these soldiers were like an egg to an egg; they had the same colour eyes, the same hairstyles and even the same names. It happened that the same people queued up twice to get their pensions paid, or sent friends to have their pensions raised again in their name.
Herschel saw no other solution than to order that every pension recipient should have his or her fingerprint stamped on the list of pension recipients, and again when each pension is paid. Even in the local prison, he had fingerprints of all prisoners to prevent confusion and abuse.
But his thoughts were already in England. Could any criminal change his name so that it would be impossible to tell whether he had been punished before or not, he wondered. Even photographs of faces sometimes proved deceptive. Almost everyone was familiar with the plot of Lord James Tischborn’s million-dollar legacy. From 1866 to 1894, all England held its breath. Why?
Thanks to an impostor posing as Roger, the only son who disappeared in 1854, and thus Lord Tischborn’s only heir. Someone called Castro from Waga-Waga in Australia managed to convince a half-blind mother, relatives, lawyers and doctors that he was the missing son. Huge amounts of money were spent on the trial, there were countless witnesses and counter-witnesses, and yet, on the basis of a fingerprint, it could have been immediately established that Castro was an impostor.
In his letter to the Director General of Prisons in Bengal, Herschel, with relevant evidence as an annex, proposed the introduction of a fingerprint list throughout the sub-continent. His reply was soon received that his suggestion was the result of his feverish illnesses and fantasies. He was extremely depressed by this, wanted to return to England to be cured, and at the end of 1879 he did indeed set off on his journey.
In the same year that Herschel was trying in vain to convince the prison governor in Bengal of the usefulness of fingerprints, a Scottish doctor, Dr Henry Faulds, was working at Tsukiji Hospital in Tokyo, teaching physiology to Japanese students. He was a hard-working Presbyterian, full of fantasy, but choleric, stubborn and egocentric. He had never met Herschel and knew nothing of his experiments in India. But in 1880 he wrote to the British journal Nature:
“In 1879, I was looking at some prehistoric clay tablets found in Japan and noticed some fingerprints that must have been made when the clay was still soft. By comparison, I became convinced that the lines on the prints do not change over a lifetime and can therefore serve much better for personal identification than photographs.”
Fingerprints on Japanese documents were common. The earliest one was found in a temple in Kyoto, where the fingerprint of Emperor Goshiva can be seen on clay. Until the 1860s, mail in Japan was often handed to the recipient against a receipt bearing a thumbprint.
By the 1880s, Faulds had collected many fingerprints, studied the papillary lines and tried to find out whether they differed from one people to another. Later, he studied the inheritance of papillary lines. Then an event set him on a trail that he followed throughout his life. A thief climbed over a wall painted white and left a sooty fingerprint. He was soon arrested by the police, and Faulds asked the Japanese police if he could take the thief’s fingerprint. He compared the two prints and found that they were different. He concluded that the arrested man was not the thief who had scaled the wall. A few days later, the real thief was arrested and Faulds, comparing the fingerprints, found that they were identical.
He began to wonder what would happen if the first thing we always did at a crime scene was to look for the fingerprints of those involved? That way, the thieves and murderers could be found the fastest. The Japanese then called him again for help, because they found a handprint on the jar. Faulds found that the palm did not need to be blackened at all, because the sweat glands on the fingertips secrete an oily secretion that leaves an imprint just like paint.
When he compared the fingerprint on the jar with the prints in his collection, he was surprised to find that the servant in the house where the crime took place had an identical fingerprint. Although he was not a policeman, he described his findings in Nature magazine. Herschel, who had since returned from India, also read this report in the magazine. He too wrote a letter to the magazine, pointing out that he had warned and invented the fingerprint matching process twenty years earlier, but that it was not taken seriously in England.
He was thought to be a fraud, so he sent a letter to the French police, who had just got a new police prefect, Jean Camecasse. He thus opened the way for the success of someone else he did not even know existed; Alphonse Bertillon.
A difficult task
The new police prefect was a politician who had never worked in the police before. But he decided, because Bertillon’s father had asked him to, to give the young Alphonse two assistants and three months to test his method of identifying criminals.
It was a difficult task. In just three months, a criminal was to be arrested, charged, convicted, released and re-arrested for another crime. Bertillon had no luck with his two new assistants either. They laughed and lazed around behind his back, while he worked like a man possessed, measuring, supervising and taking notes, going every evening to his small apartment, which belonged to Amelia Notar, an Austrian whom he later married.
By 15 February 1883, he had managed to complete 1600 files and was convinced that the registration system was working. But what did this mean? The police had not yet brought anyone in to compare that data with the data in their register. He was getting irritable and migraines, nosebleeds and a stomach ache.
On 20 February, he himself measured a prisoner who claimed to be Dupont. This was the sixth prisoner in the last two days to say he was Dupont. All criminals are called Dupont, Bertillon fumed, and measured tirelessly; head length 157 mm, head width 156 mm, middle finger 114, little finger 89 mm …
In recent days, he often had the feeling that he recognised in a prisoner a man whose measurements he already had in his register. He would compare, leaf through the register and then, always disappointed, give up. But the Dupont he was now measuring fell into the category of ‘medium measurements’, the measurements of the head reducing the number of files to be checked to nine, the size of the middle finger to just three, and the little finger to just one. And when Bertillon looked at this file, there were only fifty names in it.
A few minutes later, he was holding one card in his shaking hand. The information matched, Dupont was not Dupont, his name was Martin and he was arrested for theft on 15 December 1882. “You are Martin, arrested on 15 December,” Bertillon said to the prisoner, who nodded in embarrassment. “Yes, it will be true,” he said.
Bertillon sat at his desk and wrote a report to the prefect, while the other policemen just looked on dumbly. Then he locked his office and did something he had never done before. He hired a carriage and drove to Amelia Notar’s and then to his father’s.
On 21 February 1883, the Paris newspapers published a report of the event, but it did not attract any attention. But the Prefect of Police summoned him to his office and told him to continue his work. He was given a bigger office and another colleague, but otherwise nothing had changed. Nevertheless, by the end of the year, Bertillon had identified 26 more prisoners through his register, and by the end of the year there were 7336 names in it.
Bertieonage
But his success was still an internal matter for the Paris police. As an institution, the Sûreté was still imbued with the old-school practices represented by Vidocq. Inspectors ridiculed Bertillon, accusing him of planting decomposing corpses and asking him to identify them. They only shut up when he succeeded in identifying one of the corpses. He has never forgotten this mockery.
He was obsessed with another idea. He wanted to have an identification system that would allow a wanted criminal to be traced and arrested on the basis of a special measurement card. So he wanted to improve his system with better photographs, so that every policeman would have an accurate picture of the criminal in front of his eyes in the shortest possible time and could arrest him on the basis of that picture. Only then would he be able to ascertain the correctness of his arrest from the measurements in the file.
He was looking for a way of photographing that would emphasise those features of the face that remain unchanged in each person. He came to the conclusion that this is what facial profile photography is all about. Thus, in 1884, he was able to identify 300 previously convicted criminals who had managed to slip through the net of the old method of identification.
It was clear to everyone in the Paris police that his anthropometric system, now called Bertillonage, was working, and Bertillon began to receive visits from foreign police and interest in his system. Edmund Spearman, an Englishman who had excellent connections with the British Home Office, visited him, and the French prison governor, Hebert, declared that he would introduce Bertillon’s system in all French prisons. Bertillon soon afterwards became Director of the Police Identification System.
“Bertjonaissance, built on the measurements of certain fixed parts of the body, is a great and ingenious discovery and a revolution in police work,” said the newspapers. The once-mocked Bertillon was now the director of a police department, and he took revenge for his former ridicule by making those who wanted to speak to him wait for hours in the hallway of his office.
He won a police photographer’s studio within his department, although the photographers resisted when he demanded that two photographs be taken immediately of each arrestee, in profile and “en face”, always from the same distance and with the same head tilt and exposure. He also conceived of a special chair on which the arrestees had to sit, so that any error in taking the photograph was ruled out. All the photographs were immediately attached to the file.
In early 1889, something else happened that would finally etch Bertillon’s fame in the French consciousness. On 11 March 1892, a powerful explosion shook the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris. Clouds of smoke billowed through the shattered windows of No 136. At first everyone thought it was a gas explosion, but the remains of a bomb were found in the ruins of the second floor.
Among the inhabitants of the house was President Benoit, who convicted several anarchists in a high-profile trial in May 1891. The explosion was therefore attributed by all to the anarchist movement. From 1878 onwards, anarchism spread fear throughout Europe. Anarchists shot at Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany, attacks on the Spanish and Italian kings followed, and Paris developed into the centre of the anarchist movement. Paul Brousse and the Russian Prince Kropotkin lectured there, spreading their ideas of a state to be destroyed.
The investigation into the explosion on the Boulevard Saint-Germain was initially inconclusive, but then a police spy told him that the wife of Professor Chaumartin, who was a lecturer at the Paris School of Engineering, had told him that the assassination had been planned by the professor and carried out by a Léon Léger, whose real name was Ravachol. The professor was known for his anarchist ideas, but he was considered harmless. He was arrested and, disgraced, confessed to the attack.
They searched for Ravachol, but could not find him. The description of the assassin was as vague as all similar descriptions; thin, 160 centimetres tall, with a pale face and a dark beard. The police were monitoring all the streets leading out of the city, all the roundabouts and all the trains. But there was no sign of Ravachol.
The police asked Bertillon to help her. Enquiries at police stations outside Paris yielded some results. In Saint-Etienne, they knew a man who went around under the name Ravachol, but his real name was Francois Koenigstein. He was a well-known beater and thief and was suspected of several murders. That was good information, but the decisive thing was that in 1889, in Saint-Etienne, they also introduced berthionage, and Ravachol-Koenigstein, who was suspected of having been involved in some grand larceny, was arrested and measured at that time.
But on 27 March, at 8 a.m., another bomb exploded at 39 Rue de Clichy, where Attorney-General Bulot, who was appearing as a prosecutor in the trial against the anarchists, was staying. There was no doubt – the anarchists had struck again. Then someone called the editor of the socialist newspaper Le Gaulois, introduced himself as Ravachol and said: ‘They don’t like us. But they must know that we want nothing but the happiness of humanity. The path of revolution is bloody. I will tell you what we want. We want to terrorize the judges.”
The French police reacted quickly and expelled all anarchists from the country. In Rome, London, Berlin and St Petersburg, they talked of nothing but Ravachol. On 30 March, the owner of a restaurant on Magenta Boulevard called the police to say that he had been accosted by a thirty-year-old who was talking to the waiter about anarchism. Four police agents went to the restaurant and arrested the man, who pulled out a revolver, resisted vigorously and shouted, “Long live anarchy, long live dynamite!”
He was brought to Bertillon, who measured him. He was Ravachol-Koenigstein and the murderer of Saint-Etienne. Was this true, given that on 27 April another bomb exploded outside the restaurant on the Boulevard Magenta where Ravachol was arrested? But the measurements taken by Bertillon did not lie, because they corresponded to those taken by the police in Saint-Etienne in 1889. Ravachol confessed to everything, both the assassinations and the murders. When he was taken to the morgue, he added: “Sows, long live the revolution.”
Now, in London, Berlin and other capitals, they are also paying attention to bertijonage.
The World Exhibition in London in 1884 was a great success. At the entrance, visitors were checked for tickets and then had to enter an intermediate room with a long table where a young man stood. He measured their arm span, size, torso length, weight, muscle strength and lung capacity, eye colour and hearing. At the end, the visitors were given the results of their measurements, written down on a piece of paper.
Sir Francis Galton watched the proceedings from the background. He was interested in anthropology, but above all he wanted to know how physical and mental traits are inherited. And he needed statistics for several generations of people.
Four years later, news arrived in London from Paris that Alphonse Bertillon had been appointed head of the Paris police identification department. Galton immediately travelled to Paris to learn more about Bertillonage.
The letters that Dr Faulds and William Herschel sent to Nature many years ago have long been forgotten. Faulds, meanwhile, had become a country doctor in England, having found that his attempts to attract attention with fingerprint theory were not working with the English police. But Francis Galton, in a corner of his brain, did vaguely remember the publication of Faulds’ and Herschel’s paper in Nature and asked for copies.
He was so intrigued that he decided to see how many fingerprints would be enough to identify people, and came to the conclusion that two fingerprints would be enough. He decided to write a book on the subject, which he entitled Fingerprints; it was published in 1893 and secured him a place in the history of criminal investigation.
Scotland Yard
At the time Galton’s book was published, a complex of tower blocks had been built on the banks of the Thames to house Scotland Yard, the main centre of the London police force. Scotland Yard did not have as long a tradition as the French Sûreté because the British had their own understanding of personal liberty and saw any police action as a threat to hard-won bourgeois freedoms. Thus, in the 1830s, London descended into a quagmire of violence, crime and lawlessness. The rule that everyone should protect himself and his property was long gone.
England had no one like Vidocq, so the townspeople themselves hired so-called informers, who in turn received a commission from the city for every thief and murderer they caught. Virtually anyone could take up this profession. In the beginning, these people did not even have uniforms, only later could they wear a red waistcoat and tuck a gun into their belt.
The decision that London needed an effective police force met with strong resistance in the British House of Commons, but by 7 December 1829, a thousand policemen in plain clothes and with a black cylinder on their heads were already patrolling the streets. They kept order, but failed to prevent many thefts and murders because criminals were operating under the radar. London needed a new police force that would also operate undercover.
But things only moved on after the horrific murder. Twelve police officers took off their uniforms and became real detectives, but they had much less power than the French police and the public still opposed them. Inspector Whicher himself was the victim of public opposition when, in July 1860, he was sent to investigate the murder of the three-year-old youngest son of a factory inspector, Kent, who lived in the house with his second wife and his two children from his first and second marriages. The child was found with his throat slit in the garden toilet.
Superintendent Fowley, who led the investigation, made a series of mistakes. First, he failed to seize a blood-stained nightdress, which disappeared, and then he wiped a bloody handprint from a shotgun so as not to frighten the rest of the family. Unable to do anything else, he arrested the kindergarten teacher, but she was released a few days later because she had no motive for the murder.
Detective Inspector Whicher, who had joined him, was received with extreme hostility, but after a few days he realised that the murderer was in fact Constance, the Inspector’s daughter from his first marriage, and arrested her. A storm of public indignation arose. Arresting an innocent girl is, after all, a scandal of the first kind. Whicher was immediately sacked by the London police, so as not to further antagonise the public. Four years later, Constance confessed to murdering her half-brother because she was jealous of him.
Superintendent Williamson has brought some order to the detective department. Fifty years have passed since the English courts stopped sending criminals to the colonies. Now they were free after serving their sentences, and most of them were back to theft, burglary and murder. It was not until 1871 that Parliament introduced the registration of repeat offenders by means of photographs and personal descriptions. But all attempts were watered down in the bureaucratic wheel.
Williamson stuck to his way of doing things and when the system finally became operational after eight years, Scotland Yard (the name given to the detective division because it was housed in a building formerly occupied by Scottish noblemen) was dealt a near devastating blow. It emerged that three of Williamson’s closest associates had been bribed. They were replaced, and the new head of Scotland Yard, the lawyer Howard Vincent, immediately rushed to Paris, visited Surette and took over from the French those measures of bertoinage that could be enforced in England.
Instead of a loosely linked Detective Branch, an Investigations Branch was created, which would go on to have a significant impact on the development of English criminology. First, the surveillance of criminals was organised. Their photographs were still being collected, and a team of detectives went to Halloway Prison every three weeks to see if there were any familiar faces among the new prisoners. Despite this, Scotland Yard was still a little-regarded organisation.
From 6 August to 9 November 1888, England was rocked by horrific murders in the London suburb of Whitechapel. Several prostitutes were horrifically murdered, their throats slit and all their internal organs cut out. It was all done in such a way as to suggest that the killer had surgical skills. The murders always took place between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. Despite the increased surveillance on the streets, Jack the Ripper was never caught.
Then, suddenly, there were no more murders, but anger at the police’s helplessness and incompetence peaked. The French were convinced that Jack the Ripper would have stood no chance in Paris for such a bloody orgy. In England, one could still choose one’s own name at will, there was no residence registration, and there was no real control over who came into the country. At the time when London was busy with the Jack the Ripper murders, Francis Galton was still collecting fingerprints and writing a book in his laboratory.
Since his first visit to Alphonse Bertillon in 1887, Edmund Spearman has not ceased to draw the British Home Secretary’s attention to the successes of the Bertillonage and the failures of the London police. The Home Office’s annual lists of career criminals and released convicts arrived in police hands nine months late and were therefore completely out of date.
The descriptions of the criminals were also very superficial. There were also 150,000 photographs, but the police failed to organise them into a useful system. Scotland Yard staff searched for days before they found the person they were looking for in so many photographs. It was all a complete waste of time. Although the British were increasingly visiting Alphonse Bertillon, the British Home Office eventually decided to let a group of experts decide which identification system was better; the one offered by Bertillon or the one based on fingerprinting, as described by Galton in his book.
The Commission, which began its work in October 1893, was enthusiastic about Galton’s system, but this enthusiasm was premature. Galton was also aware of the weaknesses of his system. Arches, loops left and right, and fingerprint bends, evenly spaced, would have made the work easy. But this uniformity was absent, since the arches were already sparser than the other patterns. On certain fingerprints, the same basic patterns were often repeated. It would have taken Galton a year or two to solve this problem, but the commission was pressed for time and decided to visit Bartillon, as his system was, on the face of it, more useful.
Louis Lépine, who became the most famous policeman of the century, took over the Paris police prefecture and set himself the goal of making the police popular with the French. Lépine introduced the British to things they had never heard of. For example, a camera on a high tripod that made it possible to record a crime scene accurately. On it was a metric scale, which was then transferred to the photographs. This made it possible to measure things precisely, such as the distance of the body from the door, the wall, the table and other things. The tedious sketching of the scene was done away with.
Bertillon, who was aware of the importance of the British visit, was also very friendly and accompanied the delegation on prison visits. The British nodded, but were not entirely convinced. The Commission sought and found a compromise in February 1894. It proposed to introduce only some elements of berthionage, together with the prisoner’s ten fingerprints.
When Bertillon found out that the British had removed some elements of his system that were important to him, he was deeply hurt. But then events began to overtake each other. During this time, police prefects from almost all over Europe gathered in Paris; among them from St Petersburg, Moscow, Lüttich and Berlin, Spain and Italy, Portugal, Denmark and Holland. This was the triumph of the Bertijonaise, which thus began its triumphal march across Europe. Of course, the police chiefs did not even know about fingerprint identification, which was being developed by the British.
In 1896, anthropometry was introduced in all the countries of the German Empire. When the introduction of bertjonage started in Dresden, they also did not know that eight years earlier, in 1888, Dr Wilhelm Eber, a Berlin zoologist, had sent a letter to the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. This letter is one of the most interesting documents in the history of the fingerprint identification system. If its recipients had used a little imagination, the Prussian police would have had the honour of being early discoverers of dactyloscopy.
Not unlike Dr Faulds, but starting from different premises, Eber discovered the usefulness of fingerprints. In a Berlin slaughterhouse, he observed the bloody handprints of butchers and animal doctors on towels and became attentive to the composition of the papillary lines of fingers and hands. Like Faulds, he came up with the idea that these prints could be used to identify the perpetrators at the scene of the crime, using iodine vapour to extract the fingerprints.
The letter was left in a drawer somewhere in the Prussian Interior Ministry. With Germany’s decision to opt for Bertillonization, Bertillon had his greatest success, as the Austro-Hungarian monarchy immediately followed suit. But none of the police chiefs of the European countries had any idea that thousands of kilometres away from Europe, things were happening that would shake the faith in Bertillonage. Who in Europe at that time thought of South America and who thought of Argentina when they talked about advances in criminology.
Vučetić succeeded
Juan Vucetich, a deputy in the Buenos Aires Police Department, was summoned by the head of the La Plata Police Department, Nunez, who told him that he had learned that Paris had a very successful system for identifying criminals. He instructed him to set up an “anthropometric measuring bureau”, gave him some technical literature he had obtained from Paris and wished him every success. “One more thing!” he called after him as he was leaving, “yesterday a visitor left me a newspaper, the Revue Sciéntifique, which describes the experiments of an Englishman, Galton, who is working on fingerprints. Maybe we could start with that.”
Vučetič came to Argentina from the Dalmatian village of Lesina only in 1884. But he was young, bright and able to think mathematically and statistically, and he progressed rapidly. Within eight days of being given the assignment, he had already organised an anthropometry office, where offenders of all kinds were measured and registered.
But his creative spirit did not forget the article in the Revue Sciéntifique in Paris. As soon as he had some free time, he built himself a primitive fingerprinting device. He spent many nights in the morgue and even in the museum, where he studied the fingerprints of mummies. The discovery that the papillary lines on mummies’ fingers had remained unchanged for millennia fuelled his zeal.
By the first of September 1892, he had already worked out a practical procedure for classifying and registering fingerprints. Quite independently and separately from Galton, he defined four basic types of fingerprints; those consisting of arches, those with a triangle on the right side, those with a triangle on the left side and those with triangles on both sides.
It also identified four different types of prints for thumbs, and by combining these different options with the help of its registration system, it was able to correctly identify whether an existing fingerprint in the register was the same as the fingerprint of a criminal who had just been arrested by the police.
His collection of prints was very small to begin with, no more than sixty prints, but as it grew, he, like Galton, began to be confronted with an overload of data. Finally, he decided to count the papillary lines and thus managed to increase the availability of his system considerably. His boss, Nunez, watched his innovation with suspicion.
But on 8 July 1892, news arrived in La Plata of a double murder in the small seaside town of Necochea on the Atlantic coast. The crime had taken place in a poor suburb on the edge of the settlement. The victims were the illegitimate children of twenty-six-year-old Francesca Rojas. On the twenty-ninth of June, Francesca ran into a nearby house, her face desperate and her hair dishevelled, and sobbed excitedly: “My two children, Velasques killed my two children.”
Velasques was an older worker from a nearby ranch whom the children knew. People said that Velasques had forced Francesca to marry him, but she had refused. One day, as she was returning home, he allegedly came out of her house and told her that he had killed the one thing she loved most. The two children were lying in their bed with their heads smashed in.
The Police Commissioner arrested Velasquez the same night, claiming he had done nothing wrong to the children. He was first beaten and then imprisoned overnight, but he continued to deny any wrongdoing during his interrogation over the next eight days.
The police found out that Francesca had a lover who had repeatedly told her that he would marry her if she didn’t have children, and she became a suspect. On 8 July, Commissioner Alvarez, one of the few who had taken an interest in Vucic’s fingerprints, came from La Plata to Necochea. He went to the crime scene and started looking for evidence. Just as he was about to give up, a ray of sunlight fell through the window on the half-open door to the bedroom where the crime had taken place. The Commissioner noticed a brownish stain on it – the imprint of a bloody human thumb.
He found a saw, cut out the door and rushed to the police station in Necocha. He asked the police commissioner for a stamp pad, demanded that Francesca be brought and made her fingerprint on a piece of paper. Although he had little experience in comparing fingerprints, he saw that the bloody print on the door was the same as Francesca’s. In shock, the woman confessed that she had killed her children in order to marry her lover.
When Alvarez returned to La Plata, his report attracted a lot of attention. Other cases soon followed. In just five minutes, Vucetić was able to establish from a fingerprint comparison that a murderer had been punished before, because his fingerprints had been taken at the time. In the following months, he used fingerprints to identify as many as 23 repeat offenders whose bertjonage had failed.
Now all that was needed was to convince the presuppositionalists that his method was better than Bertijonage. But in Argentina, it was still considered that everything that came out of Paris was the best. Vucetich wrote and published, at his own expense, a book called The Person Recognition System, in which he once again described his method in detail. This angered the police authorities, who threatened to sack him.
Vučetič was only able to convince the new police chief of the benefits of his system. Thus, in 1896, Argentina became the first country in the world to use fingerprints as the basis for police identification. Other South American countries followed suit. But Vucetić did not have the opportunity to present his system to the rest of the world, especially Europe.
The decline of bertijonage
In 1893, 23 of the new arrestees in Bengal had previous convictions, and by 1895, there were already 207 such identifications. By this time, the Calcutta measurement file had grown to 100,000. But at the same time, the number of false identifications increased enormously. Edward Henry, Inspector General of Bengal, happened to get his hands on Galton’s book Fingerprints. On a holiday in England, he met the septuagenarian author and was fascinated by the mysterious world of capillary patterns.
He returned to Bengal with a suitcase full of fingerprint samples and thought about how they could be sorted into a system that would allow successful identification without wasting time. Henry never denied that he owed a great deal to Galton, but also to Herschel and Faulds. Fingerprint identification may look like a complicated system at first sight, but it is actually very simple and saves a lot of time.
In 1896, Henry issued an order to the Bengal police to take an inventory of those arrested, including the prints of all ten fingers. At that time, no one elsewhere in the British Empire knew what a revolutionary innovation had been introduced in India. The journey from India to London was long and fraught with bureaucratic hurdles. Of course, the Bertijonage was not completely bankrupt, and it could have had some successes, but the number of criminals in the London metropolis was increasing exponentially.
The turbulent war in South Africa, rising unemployment, social unrest and poor living conditions have made London’s streets unsafe. Slowly, word from India filtered down and in 1900, bertie-mongering was abandoned, fingerprinting was introduced and Henry became head of Scotland Yard’s Bureau of Investigation. The real victory that demonstrated the unreliability of berthionage, however, came as a result of a crime that had taken place four years earlier, on 16 December 1896.
It was dusk that day when a woman approached an elderly man with a bicycle, spoke to him and demanded that he return her two watches and rings. The man pushed her away, but the woman followed him, repeating her demand, so he walked up to a policeman and told him that the woman was harassing him. The woman persisted. The policeman took them both to the police station, where the single woman, a language teacher, told her story.
A man claiming to be Adolf Beck courted her and introduced himself as the wealthy Lord Salisbury. He invited her to his yacht. When he saw her rings and watches, he suggested that she give them to him to take to a jeweller for cleaning. Then he disappeared. Scotland Yard found that in the last few days about 20 women had come forward who had become acquainted with an elderly man, Lord, who had ended up deceiving them in various ways.
The police decided to confront the victims. Fifteen men were lined up, and all but one of the deceived women recognised Beck as the one who had deceived them. Beck, however, claimed not to know any of them. Shortly afterwards, the police received an anonymous letter informing them that in 1877 a man named John Smith, who had deceived several women in the same way, had been sentenced to five years in prison for his deeds.
Beck claimed that he was travelling in South America at the time and that he did not know who Smith was. But in vain, he was sentenced to seven years in prison and paroled in 1901. But he had no idea what was in store for him. On 15 April 1904, when he stepped out of his apartment, he was again approached by a woman who accused him of having taken her jewellery by deception. He tried to flee, but was stopped by a policeman who was nearby and taken to the police station. The police were convinced that he had returned as a repeat offender. The jury found him guilty and the judge was later to impose a prison sentence.
In July 1904, Police Inspector Kane made a routine visit to a neighbouring police station and learned that an elderly man had been arrested for allegedly stealing two rings from an unemployed actress. To the Inspector’s surprise, the incident was exactly similar to the one for which Beck was convicted. He looked at the man arrested and found that he did indeed look very similar to Beck, but claimed that his name was William Thomas and that he was innocent.
The inspector decided to confront me. He brought the five women who had identified Beck to the police station and confronted them with Thomas. All of them recognised Beck. But there cannot be two Becks in the world. Thomas had the same personal characteristics as Beck and Thomas was John Smith, who was convicted in 1877.
The desperate Beck was, of course, immediately released and was awarded £7000 in compensation. Scotland Yard was criticised and the question of how to avoid future mistakes caused by visual recognition of offenders became a public issue on everyone’s mind. The answer was dactyloscopy, which, via Great Britain, was also being used in the British dominions and colonies.
Where is the Mona Lisa
It is undoubtedly a human tragedy when an inventor whose system has conquered the world in a short space of time is overtaken by a new discovery and his work is consigned to oblivion. This is what happened to Alphonse Bertillon at the very moment when dactyloscopy was gaining ground in London. Who else could have had the greatness to hail a new discovery, but Bertillon did not have that power. Yet he had already secured his place in the history of criminology.
He was a pioneer of criminal identification and photography, but lacked understanding and greatness. In his eyes, his system of measurement and photography had lost the position they had once gained in the triumphal march. Already “apostate” South America had been won over by it, and then other European countries had turned away from Bertheionage.
After England, another important country – Germany – has given it up. In France, at a time when nationalism gripped almost all European countries, the collapse of the Bertijonge was seen as a national humiliation. Naturally, there was considerable resistance to the introduction of dactyloscopy. Some were of the opinion that criminals would undoubtedly find ways of altering the papillary lines on their hands. Only practical experiments have proved that this is not possible.
For Bertillon, fingerprints were just an ancillary and annoying accessory of the measuring system, until the crisis of 1911 convinced everyone but him. On the twenty-second of August 1911, a series of articles appeared in the Paris newspapers that amounted to a national catastrophe. The previous day, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, had disappeared from the Louvre. The entire French police force was alerted, and surveillance was stepped up at the borders and in the ports. The painting on wood was taken from its frame by thieves who dumped it on the side steps.
Hundreds of suspicious people were questioned, and it was even suspected that Pablo Picasso was involved in the theft. Then, the news that Alphonse Bertillon had found the trail came as a surprise. He found a human fingerprint on the glass of a display case. But hope soon faded. It turned out that a number of suspicious persons had been fingerprinted and compared with what had been found, but without result.
On 2 December 1913, more than two years after the event, Alfredo Gheri, a Florentine picture dealer, was offered the Mona Lisa for sale by a stranger. When he brought the painting to the dealer, he was arrested. A scandal broke out which finally undermined the confidence of the French people in the Bertieonnaise.
The name of the thief of the Mona Lisa was Vicenzo Peruggia. On the day of the theft, the museum was closed, but Peruggia, who occasionally worked there, was let in. When no one was around, he took the painting out of its frame, hid it under his canvas and left quietly. He hid the painting under the bed of his modest room. It was a scandal that the police did not arrest him immediately. A work-refusing psychopath, he had already been written up by the police several times in the years before the Mona Lisa was stolen, most recently in 1909, when he tried to steal a prostitute’s purse.
In 1894, he was measured and even fingerprinted according to the rules of bertjonage, but this was only considered as circumstantial evidence. However, in 1911, because the number of fingerprints on the criminal records, which were full of measurement data, was so large and because each fingerprint had to be examined individually, the Bertillon system was unable to compare Peruggia’s fingerprints with the print on the glass in the Louvre. The theft, which could have been solved in a few hours, remained a mystery for more than two years.
Lépine, the Prefect of Police, decided to reorganise the Sûreté radially, but he did not want to tear down the national shrine – Bertillon – because he knew he did not have much life left. He decided to wait until after his death. In 1913, in addition to intestinal and stomach problems, Bertillon began to show signs of fatigue and hypothermia. He was constantly cold. The stove in his room always had to be burning, even in summer, even though he was covered up to the neck with blankets.
Shortly before his death, his secretary brought him a note from a stranger who wanted to visit him. He was from La Plata and his name was Juan Vucetic. Bertillon turned pale. What did the man who had caused the fall of Bertillon want with him? He kept him waiting as long as it was still decent. Then he went to the door, opened it and Vucetich held out his hand in greeting. But Bertillon scolded him and said, “My lord, you have tried to do me a great deal of harm.” Then he turned and slammed the door behind him.
Before visiting Paris, Vučetič visited India, Japan and China, making sure that even in China his name and the basics of dactyloscopy were known. All these trips were paid for out of his own pocket, as he had retired early to devote his time to dactyloscopy. He too was ill and died of tuberculosis in poverty in July 1925.
Bertillon just kept on walking after Vucicevic’s visit. He died on 13 February 1914. To the end of his life, he was convinced that his system of identification was the best.
