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Fiber of Suspicion – The Telltale Mark that We Carry to the Grave

 

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Early in July 1892 Inspector Alvarez of the police force in La Plata, Argentina, arrived in nearby Necochea to help investigate a particularly unpleasant murder. Two children had been found battered to death in bed in the shack where they lived with their mother, 26 year-old Francisca Rojas. Although suspicion had fallen on Francisca herself, the police had failed to extract a confession from her.

A Bloody Thumb

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Alvarez searched the shack for clues and on the door found the print of a bloody thumb. Removing that piece of the door with a saw, he took it to the police station, then sent for Francisca and had her fingerprinted. When she learned that the print on the door matched that of her own right thumb, she broke down and confessed to the crime.

 

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With Francisca’s confession the case was closed, and Inspector Alvarez became the first detective in history to solve a murder by finding a fingerprint at the scene of the crime.

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Alvarez had studied the work of his colleague Juan Vucetich, head of the bureau of statistics for the La Plata police. Vucetich had discovered a method of analyzing and classifying fingerprints that made them easy both to file and, equally vital, to retrieve. Until then, the police authorities had largely ignored his work. But because of the Rojas case and subsequent successes, Argentina adopted fingerprinting as its sole method of identifying criminals – the first country in the world to do so.

 

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The use of fingerprinting in detective work had actually begun more than 30 years earlier. In 1858 William Herschel, a British civil servant working in India, had impressed an illiterate local builder with the importance of a contract by making him sign it with the print of his entire palm. As he was examining the contract later, Herschel noticed the print’s characteristic lines.

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He was fascinated by his observation and began collecting fingerprints from everyone he knew. He soon realized that each print was unique. After years of collecting, Herschel made another crucial discovery: fingerprints remain the same throughout a person’s lifetime.

Independent Inquiry

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When Herschel returned to London in 1880, he read an account in the Journal Nature by Dr. Henry Faulds that detailed his own work on fingerprints. A Scottish missionary working in Japan, Faulds had observed that for centuries local people had been using fingerprints as signatures. He also had established the individuality of fingerprints and discovered that the sweat from the pores on the tips of the fingers leaves a print as clear as any left by a bloodstained or inked palm. In his article, Faulds suggested that the police search for fingerprints at the scene of every crime.

 

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Although Herschel wrote to Nature to describe his own work, very little notice was taken of his discoveries or those of Fauld’s until 1888. Then, while investigating methods of identifying criminals, the eminent British scientist Sir Francis Galton remembered the claims of the two men and soon became an ardent proponent of fingerprinting. But he made it clear that a simple system of classifying prints was vital if the technique was to be of any practical use to the police.

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In 1896 Edward Henry, then inspector general of the Bengal police in India, solved the problem. By 1901 his classification method – which he insisted be called the Galton-Henry system in recognition of Galton’s contribution – had been adopted by Scotland Yard.

Fingering the Crime

 

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Henry divided fingerprint patterns into five basic types: plain arches, ulnar loops (which slope towards the little finger), radial loops (which slope toward the thumb), and whorls. These he coded A, T, U, R, and W. By also counting the number of lines in a print and mapping the position of the triangles that formed where the lines divided, he produced a system of identification that not only was easy to learn but also made filing and retrieving a rapid process. Any print could be located in minutes.

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So successful was the system that during the new few years police forces throughout Europe and North America followed Britain’s lead and took up fingerprinting. It was not until the 1920’s, however, after J. Edgar Hoover took charge of the FBI that a nationally effective operated in the United States.

 

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Today the files of the FBI contain more than 140 million sets if fingerprints. Not all are the prints of criminals: every government employee and serviceman is routinely fingerprinted. Scotland Yard’s pioneering files are now computerized and contain 3.6 million sets – all belonging to convicted persons. With the exception of China and South America, where the system developed by Vucetich is still used, police forces throughout the world file their prints by the Galton-Henry method. In those files are countless prints that bear nature’s own unique, unchanging, ineradicable calling card.