Fingerprints: Murder and the Race to Uncover the Science of Identity

Dedication

To my Mom and Dad

Epigraph

Every human being carries with him from his cradle to his grave certain physical marks which do not change their character, and by which he can always be identified—and that without shade of doubt or question. These marks are his signature, his physiological autograph, so to speak, and this autograph can not be counterfeited, nor can he disguise it or hide it away, nor can it become illegible by the wear and mutations of time. This signature is not his face—age can change that beyond recognition; it is not his hair, for that can fall out; it is not his height, for duplicates of that exist; it is not his form, for duplicates of that exist also, whereas this signature is this man’s very own—there is no duplicate of it among the swarming populations of the globe … This autograph consists of the delicate lines or corrugations with which Nature marks the insides of the hands and the soles of the feet.

—Samuel Clemens, writing as

Mark Twain, in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chronology of Fingerprints

One: The Shocking Tragedy at Deptford

Two: To Catch a Crook

Three: Like Rats with No Rat-Catcher

Four: Marks on a Cocktail Glass

Five: In a Criminal’s Bones

Six: A Biological Coat of Arms

Seven: Britain’s Identity Crisis

Eight: The Case of the Little Blue Notebook

Nine: An Innocent in Jail

Ten: The Stratton Trial

Eleven: Verdicts

Epilogue

Source Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chronology of Fingerprints

One The Shocking Tragedy at Deptford

Most mornings, young William Jones burst through the unlocked door of Chapman’s Oil and Colour Shop, heard the tinkle of the bell, and breathed in the sharp-smelling air, heavy with the odor of paint. But today the entrance off the High Street of Deptford, near London, was locked. The sixteen-year-old pressed his shoulder against the door and shoved. No use. It wouldn’t budge.

William had never known his boss, Thomas Farrow, to open the shop later than 7:30 A.M. In 1902, Farrow had been promoted to manager and moved into the shop’s upstairs apartment with his wife. In the three years since, he’d never failed to throw open the shop-front shutters when the first early-bird customer knocked, often at sunup. But this morning’s knocks had gone unanswered. The house painters who regularly visited the Chapmans had to cope without their supplies.

By the time William arrived, the fast-walking commuters were gone and the High Street was quiet again. Only stragglers still hurried past: red-eyed butchers rushing to Deptford’s slaughterhouses, unshaven sailors running to their ships moored on the south side of the Thames. The morning rush hour was over. It was 8:35. Still, the shop door was closed. William banged at the door. Over the clip-clop of passing horse-drawn carriages, he shouted at the upstairs windows. No reply. Something was wrong.

At first, William thought the Farrows were ill. At seventy-one and sixty-five, Thomas and Ann were getting frail. But then a niggling thought reminded William that today, Monday, was banking day, the one time when Mr. Farrow’s cash box swelled with a whole week’s earnings. When William looked through the letter box in the door, he saw that at the far end of the shop, in the Farrows’ small parlor, a large lounge chair lay tipped on its side—a bad sign. William sprinted to George Chapman’s other shop in Greenwich, recruited the help of Louis Kidman, Chapman’s assistant, and both ran back to Deptford. They would have to break their way in.

The boys burst through a shop adjoining Chapman’s. Out back, they scaled a dividing wall and dropped into the Farrows’ yard. They found the scullery door open, walked through it, and were immediately horrified by what they saw. Under the overturned lounge chair, Thomas Farrow’s body lay face down, crumpled in a grotesque, bloody pile. His bald head, resting on a metal fender surrounding the fireplace hearth, had been smashed open. A pool of dark blood filled the hearth and ran into the cold ashes. The whole grisly scene shocked William so badly that he never stopped to consider that, elsewhere in the building, Mrs. Farrow might be desperately in need of help.

Chapman’s Oil and Colour Shop stood squat and two-story on the High Street, lined up shoulder to shoulder in a long row of stores. At the southern foot of the High Street the railway ended, the terminus for the commuter line that carried the region’s clerks and laborers to the centre of London, away from the ugly town of Deptford, which for hundreds of years had been burdened with the stinking, disease-ridden industries that the capital turned away.

In the early seventeenth century, the filth-producing slaughterhouses, exiled by the capital’s city fathers, had moved here. When in 1897, the world’s largest proposed electricity-generating plant was refused a home in London, it too landed in Deptford, along with the smoke and dirt it belched from its chimney. Only the poorest and most desperate people wound up living among this filth. Some Deptford neighborhoods were so dangerous that policemen refused to patrol them alone.

Cold-blooded murder, however, was an uncommon spectacle. That was why, when Sergeant Albert Atkinson arrived at the scene of what the papers would call “The Shocking Tragedy at Deptford,” he was greeted by a rabble of curious onlookers. Inside, the sergeant, with Louis Kidman behind him, stealthily mounted the stairs to the second floor, looking for intruders who might still be hiding. What they found instead was the unconscious Mrs. Farrow. Her head was so badly smashed that both men assumed she was dead. Her moans shocked them into the realization that she still clung to life. Sergeant Atkinson hurriedly rang for the police surgeon.

Dr. Dudley Burnie arrived half an hour later, around 9:45, together with detectives from the nearby Blackheath Road police station. By that time, a large group of constables were needed to wrestle back a horde of onlookers who had been helping themselves to macabre souvenirs from inside the shop. Burnie and the policemen had to force their way through.

Burnie rushed upstairs and was in the middle of dressing the gaping, bloody wounds on Mrs. Farrow’s head, when she suddenly gained consciousness and struggled violently against him, “evidently being in the state of very great fright,” he later said. Ambulance men arrived and heaved Mrs. Farrow onto a stretcher to carry her down the stairs. Thomas Farrow’s empty cash box lay on the floor threatening to trip them. Sergeant Atkinson picked it up and shoved it under the bed. He used his bare hands.

Dr. Burnie followed the ambulance men down the stairs and began his examination of Mr. Farrow’s body. The time of death, he determined, had been between one and one and a half hours earlier. One large wound gaped open over Farrow’s right eyebrow and another on the right side of his nose. The old man had also sustained two gashes above the left ear and one above the right. Later, during the autopsy, the doctor would discover that Farrow’s skull had been shattered into several pieces in the region of the temple and that the right cheekbone was fractured. All in all, the police surgeon believed, Thomas Farrow had received six blows to the head, probably with a crowbar.

Scotland Yard’s crack homicide detective, Chief Inspector Frederick Fox, joined the local police at the Oil and Colour Shop around 11:30 A.M. His two crime scene photographers immediately began setting up their bulky boxes and tripods. With Fox also came his boss, Scotland Yard’s Assistant Commissioner Melville Macnaghten. A short, mustached man whose fastidious grooming and upright stature gave him the air of a landed gentleman, Macnaghten was in charge of the entire Criminal Investigation Department (the CID). From now on, he would call the shots in the investigation of this high-profile case.

What little his subordinates had pieced together was based on the lack of any signs of forced entry, the fact that Farrow was found still dressed in a nightshirt, and the placement of two puddles of blood. The criminals, the investigators surmised, knocked early in the morning, waking the unsuspecting old man, and telling him through the latched door that they needed painting supplies. Once inside, as Farrow busied himself with attending to their supposed requirements, they clobbered the back of his head, accounting for the puddle of blood behind the counter.

The robbers searched the shop and back parlor for the cash box but, finding nothing, started up the stairs. Farrow, back on his feet, threw himself at the invaders, desperately fighting to keep them off the second floor where his wife lay unprotected in bed. The robbers’ further bone-crushing blows to Farrow’s head left him bleeding at the foot of the stairs—the location of the second pool of blood. Upstairs, a few merciless swipes silenced Mrs. Farrow’s screaming and, searching the bedroom, the robbers found and emptied the cash box.

Descending, they were confronted again by Mr. Farrow, miraculously revived a second time. They scuffled, overturning the furniture in the parlor, until Farrow was again struck down. The burglars rinsed Farrow’s blood from their hands in a basin the police later found filled with pinkish water. They cut holes in stockings to make masks, but abandoned them when they realized they would merely attract attention. Instead, the criminals slipped out of the shop and into the rush-hour crowd, as though they were merely customers. They left behind two mortally wounded people—all for the sake of less than ten pounds.

Police found no eyewitnesses and no murder weapons. The lack of forced entry meant there was no way to identify the criminals from knowledge of their methods. Not even the stocking masks, found in the shop, offered any helpful clues. If the robbers had brought the masks with them, a visit to the neighborhood stocking shop might have developed a promising lead, but the thieves had cut them from Mrs. Farrow’s own hose.

To make matters worse, the burglars, interested only in the shopkeeper’s cash, had stolen no trinkets of value. No piece of stolen jewelry or silverware would link them to the case. Visits to pawnshops and known receivers, standard procedure after such a crime, would turn up nothing. The only hope was that Mrs. Farrow might recover consciousness and identify her attackers to the constable who waited beside her hospital bed. But the longer she remained unconscious, the greater the risk that she would succumb to a fatal bout of pneumonia.

Macnaghten saw that the case was troublesome and it brought back bad memories. Only three days after he first joined the Yard in 1889, two telegrams arrived reporting that the body parts of a woman had been found on the banks of the Thames. Macnaghten and a group of detectives slipped and slid their way along the muddy riverbank, picking over debris in search of the rest of the torso. Because the head was never found, it took a scar on the wrist to identify the body as belonging to a woman who had been reported missing from her lodging house in Chelsea. There the trail went cold. Macnaghten’s first case, known as the Thames Mystery, was never solved.

This was just one year after Jack the Ripper’s seven brutal murders had gone unsolved and Macnaghten had then experienced firsthand the public’s anger toward the police when they did their job badly. “Jack” had made police investigators look foolish by delivering, right under their noses, signed notes to newspapers. On Macnaghten’s first day, his new boss, the CID’s then Chief Constable, commenting on the public’s angry response, said, “Well, my boy, you are coming into a funny place. They’ll blame you if you do your duty, and they’ll blame you if you don’t.”

Throughout the rest of his career, Macnaghten kept on his desk gruesome photographs of the Ripper’s victims, each goading him to let no other cases go unsolved. He’d experienced failure and he couldn’t bear to experience it again. But because of the lack of clues turned up by his subordinates in the Farrow case, he might have no choice. This wasn’t going to look good for the police.

Farrow had been killed in his own store, on the busy High Street, while commuters rushed past outside, and no policeman had seen or noticed anything suspicious. “Certain members of the police force are lacking in discernment and intelligence,” the Kentish Mercury said of the Farrow murder. Recently, another shopkeeper’s murder in Brixton had gone unsolved. Together, the crimes suggested a trend, and crime trends were what Macnaghten’s CID was supposed to prevent.

Macnaghten marched purposefully past the shop counter and mounted the stairs, determined to search for clues of his own. He surveyed the bloodied chaos in the bedroom, where his eyes fell upon the cash box and its tray, jutting out from under Mrs. Farrow’s bed. He carefully picked them up, but not before taking his handkerchief from his pocket to prevent his bare fingers from touching their surfaces.

For some time, a small group of officers in Macnaghten’s department had been developing a technique that they claimed could identify a man from a surface that he had touched. Macnaghten and his senior colleagues envisioned a system with assembly-line efficiency, spitting out proofs of the presence of suspects at crime scenes, and closing cases that might otherwise go the way of the Ripper and Thames Mystery murders.

But the use of forensics was uncommon in these times when the boundary between science and quackery was blurry. Acceptance of the new technique depended on convincing the police ranks that it was practical and the judiciary and the public that it was just. Macnaghten had been hoping for some time for a headline-grabbing case that might prove these points. He thought the Farrow case might be the one.

The Assistant Commissioner turned the cash box and tray over in his hands, scrutinizing the surfaces for the clue he needed. Suddenly he looked up. “Have all the men assemble up here,” he told a nearby constable. Once the men had hauled themselves up the steep, narrow stairs, Macnaghten eyed them as a group. “Has anyone touched this cash box or its tray?” No one stepped forward. Macnaghten’s tone and demeanor suggested that he might not be pleased with any man who answered yes. He told them to think carefully. This was important.

The officers shuffled nervously. If one had touched it and sought to hide his unintended misdeed, would Macnaghten later hear of the fact from another officer? Better to own up now than get caught in a lie. Sergeant Atkinson stepped forward. He had pushed it a little ways under the bed, he said, to ensure that the stretcher bearers didn’t trip on it when they took Mrs. Farrow away. Macnaghten nodded. Again with his handkerchief, he picked up the tray of the cash box, turning its underside toward the men. On the shiny, enameled surface they saw a dull, oval smudge, such as their children’s greasy fingers might leave behind after draining a glass of milk. Some understood its import, others did not.

Macnaghten handed the tray along with his handkerchief to one of his officers. Wrap it carefully in paper and make sure no one else touches it, he said. Then Macnaghten turned to Sergeant Atkinson, who was still standing in front of the assembly. Macnaghten could see that the young sergeant was embarrassed. No harm done, Macnaghten said. But he ordered the sergeant to report to Detective-Inspector Charles Collins at the Yard so he could be sure the mark on the tray hadn’t come from his fingers.

When Macnaghten left the room, those officers who understood the significance of the smudge carped among themselves. The old guard were highly suspicious of this new “scientific palmistry” that so intrigued the boss. Use of these newfangled fingerprints in such a high-profile murder investigation could bring ridicule on the Yard. Only once before had a crime-scene fingerprint been accepted in a British court, and that was just for burglary. This was murder. What jury would be willing to send a man to the gallows on the evidence of a gob of sweat smeared on a piece of metal?

Thomas Farrow’s body was barely cold when Detective-Inspector Collins received the cash-box tray later that day. Collins was second in command of the new fingerprint branch, a part of Macnaghten’s CID. Before the 1901 formation of the branch, Collins had, for many years, been forced to use old-fashoned methods of criminal identification, based on measuring bodies, photographing faces, and writing down distinguishing features. These methods were far from reliable. Now, for the first time in his career, Collins had encountered an identification system that actually worked, and he was obsessed with it. He would ultimately dedicate more than twenty-five years of his life to improving and applying the fingerprint technique.

In his office loomed a huge wooden cabinet with 1,024 pigeonholes accommodating each of the classifications into which an individual’s set of ten fingerprints could fall. A handful of fingerprint experts bustled back and forth between their workbenches and the cabinet’s cataloged fingertip impressions. Examined closely, a fingertip reveals a pattern of parallel ridges interspersed with furrows, as though of a diminutive farm field. The furrows are like gutters into which moisture flows so that it is not trapped in a slippery film between the fingertip and whatever it is trying to grip.