Fingerprints
Murder and the Race to Uncover the Science of Identity
COLIN BEAVAN

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

400 A.D. | Anglo-Saxons conjure “evidence” of criminal guilt during supernatural ordeals.
1215 A.D. | Pope Innocent III forbids clergy from taking part in ordeals. System of investigating juries begins in England.
1504 A.D. | Henry VII ratifies first law calling for eyewitness testimony. The word “evidence” is introduced into English law.
1764 A.D. | In Italy, Cesare Beccaria publishes Dei deletti e delle pene (Crimes and Punishment), heralding the rationalization of law and the burgeoning of prisons.
1812 A.D. | In France, François-Eugène Vidocq establishes Europe’s first official detective branch and pioneers the use of physical evidence.
1816 A.D. | Britain opens first national penitentiary at Millbank.
1842 A.D. | Vidocq-style detective force established in Britain.
1858 A.D. | William Herschel begins privately experimenting with fingerprints in India.
1863 A.D. | Garroting epidemic scares public that hordes of criminals, once dispatched by the hangman or deportation, now roam the streets of London.
1869 A.D. | Habitual Criminals Act in England provides longer sentences for hardened criminals with previous convictions. Need to identify prior offenders first arises in Britain.
1870 A.D. | “The Claimant” sues for the title of Baronet of Tichborne, falsely identifying himself as the true heir, who was lost at sea fifteen years earlier. This case eventually sparks fingerprint concept in Dr. Henry Faulds’s mind.
1877 A.D. | Herschel, still in India, begins year-long use of fingerprints as signatures on land titles and jailers’ warrants.
1878 A.D. | Faulds, a Scottish missionary working in Japan, discovers fingerprints on ancient pottery and begins extensive experiments.
1880 A.D. | Faulds becomes first person to publicly suggest fingerprints as a method of criminal identification in a letter published in Nature.
1883 A.D. | Alphonse Bertillon, in Paris, identifies his first habitual criminal using his newly installed anthropometric system of measurements.
1886 A.D. | Henry Faulds begins trying to convince Scotland Yard to adopt fingerprints.
1888 A.D. | Francis Galton begins experimenting with fingerprints as a means of determining physical and intellectual prowess.
1892 A.D. | In Argentina, fingerprint evidence leverages a confession from a mother who murdered her two children, though news of the case does not reach Europe for many years.
1893 A.D. | Edward Henry, chief of police in Bengal, India, adds thumbprints to the anthropometric records he began taking the previous year.
1894 A.D. | Britain adopts an identification system which is a hybrid of anthropometry and fingerprints.
1896 A.D. | Adolf Beck, an innocent man, is jailed for five years after being wrongly recognized as a known con artist by police and a witness. Fingerprints would have shown he was the wrong man.
1897 A.D. | Henry’s assistant Azizul Haque comes up with a comprehensive system for classifying fingerprints, making practical their use without measurements.
1901 A.D. | Britain adopts the fingerprint classification system developed largely by Haque, but which has come to be known as the “Henry classification system.”
1902 A.D. | Harry Jackson found guilty of burglary on evidence of fingerprints. First time fingerprints used to prove guilt in a British courtroom.
1904 A.D. | United States Bureau of Identification establishes fingerprint collection.
1905 A.D. | The Stratton brothers are tried and hanged on fingerprint evidence for the vicious murder of Thomas and Ann Farrow. Henry Faulds takes their side against police.
1911 A.D. | Thomas Jennings is the first to be convicted of murder in the United States on the basis of fingerprint evidence.
1911 A.D. | Galton dies.
1913 A.D. | Bertillon dies.
1918 A.D. | Herschel dies.
1930 A.D. | Faulds dies.
1938 A.D. | Scottish judge George Wilton begins campaign for Faulds’s recognition as a fingerprint pioneer.
1987 A.D. | American fingerprint experts restore Faulds’s grave.
1999 A.D. | Federal Bureau of Investigation installs massive fingerprint computer capable of storing the fingerprints of 65 million individuals.

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.

It is not the ridges’ function that makes them of interest to the identification expert, however. What fascinates him instead is the fact that the intricate ridge patterns are unique to each finger. A fingerprint expert can tell apart the marks of two digits more easily than he can differentiate two people’s faces. The facial features of identical twins, for example, can be mistaken, but their fingerprints can never be confused by a trained expert. A person’s fingerprint set is therefore a permanent and unmistakable record of his identity. It is like a biological seal which, once impressed, can never be denied. Eighty thousand such biological seals of convicted criminals crowded the pigeonholes in Scotland Yard’s fingerprint branch.

This massive collection of fingerprints, however, had never before been used to collar a murderer. Sleuthing was not the fingerprint expert’s primary function. Instead, Collins and his colleagues passed their days filing fingerprints taken from recent convicts and using the previously filed fingerprints to doublecheck the identities of the newly arrested. Their main goal was to identify “recidivist” or “habitual” offenders who pretended to be first-timers, adopting pseudonyms in hopes of hiding their previous convictions and getting lighter sentences.

The practice of correlating a criminal’s sentence with the number of his prior convictions began in the nineteenth century, when jail cells and prison guards first took the place of gallows and their hangmen. To the essentially honest man who fell on hard times and stole to feed his family, the new prison system prescribed a short stay behind bars, just enough unpleasantness to deter further crime. It was believed that the habitual offender, on the other hand, could not so easily have his criminal bent punished out of him. Long-term removal from society was thought to be the only way to prevent his misdeeds. There was one problem with this two-pronged penal approach: How do you tell the hardened criminals from the first-timers?

The first suggested use of fingerprints as a method of criminal identification came in an October 1880 issue of the prestigious scientific journal Nature. An article, penned by an unknown Scottish medical missionary working in Japan named Henry Faulds, proposed many of the elements of the fingerprint system as it eventually came to be used. Faulds, having studied thousands of fingerprints, would spend the next ten years trying to convince Scotland Yard to adopt the ideas in his article. The Yard dismissed Faulds as a crank, and cruelly, when it finally did adopt fingerprinting, denied that Faulds had any part in the system’s conception.

A month after the publication of Faulds’s article, a second article on fingerprints appeared, also in Nature. William Herschel, a British magistrate based in Bengal, replying to Faulds, wrote that he had used fingerprints officially as “sign-manuals,” or signatures, sanctioning the idea’s practicality. Still, the British establishment paid no attention to fingerprinting until, in 1888, the interest of the well-known scientist Francis Galton gave it credibility. A cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton’s passion was the improvement of the human race by artificial selection. He took to fingerprints, thinking their intricate ridge patterns might somehow reveal their owners’ physical and mental capacities—their worth as breeding stock.

Galton’s published work sparked the interest of the Inspector-General of Police in Bengal, India, Edward Henry, who made the leap from theory to practice and applied fingerprints to police work. Henry and his assistant, Azizul Hague, developed a classification system that allowed fingerprint sets to be logically filed according to the form of their ridge patterns. Without the system, an inspector searching for a particular fingerprint set would have to rummage through the entire collection. With it, he easily went straight to the place where the set was filed. What came to be known as the Henry classification system made possible the use of fingerprint registers numbering in the many thousands, a prerequisite for practical use in criminal identification.

When widespread use of fingerprint identification proved successful in India, Henry was in 1901 recalled to London, made Assistant Commissioner of the CID, and charged with establishing Scotland Yard’s new Fingerprint Branch. The branch had immediate success, cracking the pseudonyms of 632 repeat offenders in its first year. In 1905, Henry was promoted to Commissioner of Scotland Yard. He left the Fingerprint Branch in the hands of Detective-Inspector Charles Steadman and his deputy, Detective-Inspector Collins, the officer to whom Macnaghten delivered the Farrow murder cash box.

At his workbench, Collins examined the cash-box tray under his magnifying glass. Fingerprints can be impressed in anything from paint to blood, but this one, like most found at crime scenes, had been left in sweat. On the gripping surfaces of the hands and feet, 3,000 sweat glands per square inch crowd together more densely than anywhere else on the body. Keeping the skin lubricated so it does not crack, the glands also make each finger like a self-inking rubber stamp, leaving calling cards on every surface it touches.

Because of this, since most human action involves touching, fingerprints invisibly populate the world’s surfaces. Taken together, these fingerprints are like pages from the Recording Angel’s book of deeds, and Charles Collins, with his magnifying glass, could read them. If a fingerprint he found on an object matched a fingerprint in his cabinet, Collins could deduce the name of the person who touched the object. This is how Collins hoped to discover Farrow’s murderer.

The impression on the cash-box tray followed an arch pattern and came from a right thumb. Collins could tell that it was a thumb because the impression was too large to come from other fingers. He could tell right or left by the slope of the ridges. Ridge slope on a right thumb impression is more steep on its right side, and vice versa for a left thumb.

Collins’s next job was to search through his files, paying special attention to the prints of housebreakers who had an arch on the right thumb. He fingered his cabinet’s cards slowly and meticulously, for he knew that public acceptance of fingerprint evidence could be won through their successful use in this case. But no luck. On Tuesday morning, the day after the murder, he reluctantly reported to Macnaghten that the print on the cash-box tray did not match any prints on file.

The news was not all bad, however. Collins had compared the cash-box tray print to those of Mr. and Mrs. Farrow and of Sergeant Atkinson, who had mistakenly touched the tray. The print belonged to none of them. That meant that it probably belonged to one of the murderers. If so, Macnaghten and Collins thought they could use it to win both their case and their much desired public respect for fingerprints. But first a suspect had to be found.

The investigation’s first lucky break came when Chief Inspector Fox encountered Henry Jennings, a milkman, and Edward Russell, his eleven-year-old helper. During their rounds, about 7:15 on the morning of the murder, Jennings and Russell saw two men coming out of Chapman’s. One had a dark mustache and wore a blue suit, black boots, and a bowler hat. The other was clad in a dark brown suit, gray cap, and brown boots. Jennings shouted to them, “You have left the door open.” The mustached man turned around and said, “Oh! It is all right; it don’t matter,” and left the door ajar.

Fox now had descriptions of two suspects. But if the milkmen had last seen the door open at 7:15, and William Jones arrived at 8:30 to find it locked tight, who closed the door? Was there, Chief Inspector Fox wondered, a third robber who came out after the other two, closing the door behind him?

The fact that three masks had been found in the shop seemed to confirm this theory. Also, three men, two of them answering the descriptions given by the milkmen made a twenty-minute visit to Deptford’s Duke of Cambridge Pub at 6:00 A.M. on the morning of the murder. Could the third man in the pub have been the door-closer? The police took his description from the bartender and began searching for the third man, too.

Then police found another witness, Alfred Purfield, a painter. On the morning of the murder, he had waited for a colleague across the street from Chapman’s and watched the door being shut. It was “an old gentleman,” he told police. “He had blood on his face, shirt and hands. He stayed at the door for a short time and then closed it.” The door had been shut by Farrow himself. He had obviously regained consciousness one last time and, too dazed to call for help, simply closed the door before expiring in the parlor. This destroyed the third-man theory. Chief Inspector Fox was not happy. It was three days since the murder and he’d run out of leads.

Enter Fox’s second lucky break, a witness who took her time coming forward because she didn’t think what she saw was important. Ellen Stanton was on her way to catch the 7:20 train to London on the morning of the murder when she saw two men running from the High Street. What were they wearing? Fox asked. Stanton said one wore a dark suit and a dark cap and the other wore a bowler. Fox’s heart skipped a beat. Stanton was wrong about the importance of what she’d seen. Her description matched perfectly with the milkmen’s. Did you recognize them? Fox asked. “I recognize [sic] one of the men as Alfred Stratton. …” Stanton said. “I don’t know the man who was with him. …”

Suddenly, Fox had one suspect for sure and guessed he had another. Twenty-two-year-old Alfred Stratton’s younger brother Albert, twenty, was his constant cohort and he had a mustache to boot, matching the milkmen’s descriptions. The brothers had no criminal records, but they were known by the local police to be living off prostitutes. Fox reported all this to Macnaghten. The Strattons, Fox believed, were the culprits, but he lacked ironclad evidence. Macnaghten nevertheless ordered him to arrest the brothers. Once the Strattons were captured, Macnaghten reasoned, one of their thumbprints would provide all the evidence that was needed.

On Sunday night, six days after the murder, Alfred was arrested at the King of Prussia Pub in Deptford. The next morning, Albert was collared on a Deptford streetcorner. But at the police station, things took a nasty turn for Fox and Macnaghten when neither Jennings, the milkman, nor Russell, his helper, could pick the Stratton brothers out of a crowd of prisoners in the exercise yard. There would be no question, either, of identification by Mrs. Farrow; she had succumbed to her injuries and died. The Strattons, watching the police case fall apart, were so giddy with excitement that they joked that Detective-Inspector Collins tickled them when he took their fingerprints.

With no eyewitnesses linking the Strattons to Chapman’s, Macnaghten had to virtually beg the magistrate at Tower Bridge Police Court to remand the brothers into custody. He needed time, he explained, for Collins to compare their prints with the smudge on the cash box. The counsel from the public prosecutor’s office warned Macnaghten that the evidence in hand was insufficient for a prosecution. If the prints didn’t match, the brothers would go free.

Back in his office, Macnaghten waited impatiently for the results of Collins’s examination. Two tense hours passed as he pondered the press-lashing the Yard might take for another unsolved murder. Then Charles Collins rushed through his door, ecstatic. “Good God, sir,” he exclaimed, “I have found that the mark on the cash-box tray is in exact correspondence with the print of the right thumb of the elder prisoner.”

The Yard had its murderers. But knowing who committed a murder is a far cry from convicting him for it, especially in a tricky case like this one. No English jury had ever been asked to send men to the gallows on the basis of what was, after all, only a smudge of sweat. Prosecution was a gamble. If the case was lost, the Yard stood to take a considerable public hammering. On the other hand, winning could lead to public acceptance of the greatest crime-fighting tool of its time. Macnaghten deferred to Scotland Yard Commissioner Edward Henry to weigh the odds.

To its credit, fingerprinting had its four-year record of success in identifying habitual offenders. But the Fingerprint Branch had its detractors. Ten fingerprints may identify a man, believed a number of distinguished scientists and doctors, but they highly distrusted the use of a single fingerprint, especially when a hanging was at stake. So strong was their distrust that they would be willing to pit their reputations against Scotland Yard in any upcoming trial.

Most damaging among their mingled grumblings rang the voice of Henry Faulds, the man who first suggested fingerprints to identify criminals. Faulds had compared many thousands of fingerprint sets to satisfy himself that no ten fingerprints could be duplicated on two different people. He complained publicly that no one, including the Yard, had made a similar comparative study to prove that each single fingerprint was unique. Until this was done, he insisted, no man should be sent to the jailer or the hangman on the basis of a single fingerprint, particularly one identified by the Yard’s Fingerprint Branch. Ever since the Branch had denied Faulds’s part in the fingerprint conception, Faulds had bitterly questioned its integrity. It didn’t help the Yard’s case that Faulds delivered his arguments with the force of a man who had been scorned.

It didn’t help, either, that science didn’t have the foothold in the courtrooms that it does today. For most of history, the only evidence allowed at trial was the testimony of eyewitnesses. The use of physical evidence to reconstruct events had been considered too vulnerable to manipulation. The legal process had since been dragged slowly forward, but juries were still more used to hearing what people had seen with their own eyes than what experts said they could deduce by other means. Unlike the rest of society during the industrial revolution, the judiciary had not yet been won over by science. When he decided to take the gamble and prosecute the Stratton brothers for the murders of Thomas and Ann Farrow, Edward Henry knew that this trial could change all that. But the big question remained: Had thirteen hundred years of British legal history prepared the courts for one of their greatest-ever leaps into the future?

Two To Catch a Crook

In the commons of a sixth century village of what is now France, peasants crowded around a large cooking pot as if expecting a feast. Only boiling water filled the pot, though, and the only thing to feast upon would be a spectacle. Two arguing clergymen intended to plunge their unprotected arms elbow-deep into the scalding water. The idea was to settle a debate they’d had by conjuring supernatural “evidence” of God’s judgment. Presumably, the man with God on his side would be protected from the burning temperature.

The argument between the clergymen, a Catholic deacon and an Arian priest, was over the hierarchy of the Holy Trinity. The Catholic said that Christ and God were the same. The Arian insisted that the Son was inferior to the Father. This philosophical difference had caused the separation of their churches two centuries earlier, so in their hotheaded debate over this tired issue, neither clergyman was willing to budge from his original position. Finally, the Catholic deacon challenged the Arian priest to settle the issue in an “ordeal by boiling water.”

The priest and the deacon each spent a sleepless night on their knees in prayer, trying to curry God’s favor. The next day, they joined the crowd of curious peasants by the side of the cauldron. The flames beneath the pot leaping high, a ring was tossed through the clouding steam and into bubbling water. Each clergyman would take a turn fishing out the ring, and victory would go to whomever emerged from the trial least injured.

The Catholic deacon, feigning politeness, gestured his adversary forward for the first attempt. The Arian shook his head. The “privilege” of going first, he said, belonged with the challenger. Tentatively, the deacon stepped forward. He looked into the pot, hesitating. The ring whirled around violently. Catching it would be like trying to grab a piece of straw in a tornado. The Catholic slowly rolled up his sleeve, but his arm, the Arian immediately saw, was smeared with oil. Outraged, the Arian accused the Catholic of cheating. He declared the challenge void.

The Catholic deacon resigned from the ordeal, presumably with heartfelt relief. But the Arian was not off the hook. Another Catholic priest had stepped out of the crowd, insistent on taking the disgraced deacon’s place. The Arian’s back was against the wall. To refuse the new challenge, he would have to concede the issues of faith that had begun the fracas. Reluctantly, he examined the priest’s arm and, finding nothing to complain about, signaled him to proceed. The priest plunged his arm into the cauldron.

According to legend, the Catholic kept his arm submerged in the vigorously boiling water for two hours as he grasped for the ring. At last, he snatched it, raised it high above his head, and announced to onlookers that the water felt cold at the bottom and comfortably warm at the top. His hand and arm were miraculously uninjured. Emboldened by his adversary’s success, the Arian brazenly tossed the ring back into the water and thrust his own arm in after it. Within a moment, his flesh was boiled off the bone to his elbow. God apparently sided with the Catholic.

This kind of “non-rational evidence,” as historians would call it, settled every kind of community squabble in the Germanic tribes that overran Europe at that time. Even the fate of criminal suspects was at the mercy of the “trial by ordeal” in the Dark Ages. This judicial use of the ordeal was the great-grandfather of modern criminal proceedings. It was the first chapter in the history of the law of evidence, which would lead, more than a millennium later, to the use of fingerprints. But for now the law had no use for earthly clues. God knew who stole or killed, so gathering facts was irrelevant. Conjuring God’s judgment was the trial’s only goal.

In Saxon England, a frightened suspect often desperately tried to avoid the trial by ordeal by recruiting community members to swear to his good character, in the hope of convincing a judge to let the suspect off the hook. But since fire and brimstone would rain on compurgators who swore falsely, even the slightest scent of doubt in a suspect’s innocence meant his friends and acquaintances turned their backs on him. He’d have to admit guilt or submit to the ordeal, turning his fate over to what was, in essence, an elaborate coin toss.

The ordeal required prolonged contact of the accused criminal’s bare flesh with either boiling water or, just as commonly, a lump of red-hot iron. The worse the alleged crime, the deeper the judges made him plunge his hand into the boiling water, or the heavier the lump of red-hot iron they made him carry. The singed flesh was then sealed away in bandages. Three days later, judges examined the wounds and divined the evidence of God’s judgment. Healing meant innocence, release, and not so much as a muttered apology for the now crippled limb. The stench of infection indicated guilt and execution.

The ordeal was cruel and arbitrary, but it was better than the mass bloodshed that came with its alternative, vigilante justice. Then, a theft might lead to a fight, which ended in a killing, which was in turn avenged by a murder, which then sparked a clan war. The ordeal, at least, had the virtue of resolving conflict, in a procedure agreed by the community, before it devolved into blood feud. One innocent life might be sacrificed, but tens or hundreds were saved.

But ordeals and their ruthlessness long outlived the dangerous Dark Ages clan wars they were designed to prevent. One form of ordeal, the wager of battle, in which the accused and accuser, or their champions, pummeled each other with wooden staffs, remained common in England into the fifteenth century. If a defendant kept up the good fight from sunrise to sunset, he was innocent. Defeat once again fated him to the hanging tree. Even after this judicial jousting faded from practice, it lingered in the law books until it was resurrected for the last time, amazingly, in 1817.

On the morning of May 27 of that year, in Tyburn, near Birmingham, the dead body of a young woman named Mary Ashford was found at the bottom of a pit near her home. Abraham Thornton, a bricklayer and the son of a respectable builder, was arrested and tried for the murder. The jury found him not guilty. An archaic British law, however, allowed the appeal of a not guilty verdict in cases of murder, and Mary Ashford’s brother, wracked with grief over the death of his sister, instituted such an appeal. Thornton was again arrested.

If Mary Ashford’s brother could cite archaic law to bring this frivolous second trial against Thornton, his lawyers reasoned, then they could also invoke an obsolete statute. In court, they insisted that Abraham Thornton, a large and strong man, be allowed to answer the charges against him in a duel against his less physically robust accuser. The wager of battle, they maintained, had never been expunged from British law. After much quibbling between the lawyers, the judges came down on the side of Thornton. They ruled that if the trial were to continue, the brother would have to fight. Scared for his life, the brother withdrew his appeal, Thornton got his freedom, and both appeal of murder and wager of battle were struck, finally, from the English law books.

While the administration of justice relied on divining verdicts from God, methods as sophisticated as fingerprinting, and indeed any form of factual evidence, were a long way off. Developments were slow in coming. The old Saxon judicial system remained in use until in 1215 when Pope Innocent III forbade the clergy from participating in ordeals. Walking out on the procedure, the clergy effectively took God with them. And an ordeal without God was like a courtroom with no judge.

So-called investigating juries filled the judicial void. The juries were community recruits—mayors, sheriffs, and tradesmen—who lacked any notion of legal objectivity. Their investigations often amounted to nothing more than knocking on doors to gather local gossip. Suspects were allowed only to listen mutely, unable to say a single word in their own defense, as the juries recounted their hodgepodge of hearsay before a judge, so an indictment, even if it was based on rumor, was a fast track to the gallows. The fact that evidence still was not examined directly in the courtroom tipped the scales of justice heavily toward the prosecution.

Not until 1504 did English legislation call for witnesses to present their own evidence before a judge, the way they would today. An Act of Henry VII, the first to use the word “evidence,” urged anyone who witnessed the crossbow shooting of a king’s deer to testify openly at court. The Act’s promise of a ten-shilling reward blurred the line between a witness’s imagination and his memory, but the Act still led the march toward judicial examination of evidence, and a number of other acts calling for eyewitness testimony soon followed.

There were back steps, however, and a new injustice sneaked into the courtroom on the heels of the new evidence: Only the prosecution could call for testimony. Though the defendant could question witnesses rallied against him, he couldn’t call his own witnesses or speak in his own behalf. The accused, if he were allowed on the stand, the rationale went, would lie to save his skin. He would then be condemned to hell for breaking the oath of the witness. Refusing the defendant his day in court, therefore, was a supposedly compassionate means of saving his soul.

With no way to answer charges, the accused was left vulnerable to exaggeration and outright lies. As a safeguard, in serious cases like treason or murder, a judge could not consider the yammerings of a prosecution witness unless another witness confirmed them—if only one witness for the prosecution came forward, then the defendant went free. The bad news for the person in the dock was that if the prosecution could find two witnesses telling the same story, his conviction was automatic, regardless of the judge’s personal opinion.

Since incredible weight rested on a witness’s testimony, the penalties for perjury were steep—if a liar got caught. But the defendant’s only protection from the clever perjurer was the oath of the witness. Breaking it condemned the witness’s soul to hell-fire. A sixteenth-century English legal handbook, The Country Justice, advised judges that the way to squeeze the truth out of witnesses was to frighten them with threats of damnation.

But fear of damnation had no power over some witnesses, particularly if, for example, they were religious zealots championing their faith. After Henry VIII separated the English church from Rome, the struggle between the Catholic and Protestant powers often erupted in plots and scandals that ended in the courtroom. Witnesses in this struggle didn’t give a second thought to their oath to tell the truth. In their religious fervor, some, such as the Anglican priest Titus Oates, didn’t even mind if their outlandish courtroom lies ended with the death of innocents.

By the time he was twenty-five, Oates, a Baptist preacher’s son, had been imprisoned for perjury and dismissed from his post as a navy chaplain. In 1677, under the influence of a fanatically anti-Catholic acquaintance named Israel Tonge, he made a false conversion to Catholicism and became a spy against the Roman church. After being expelled from seminaries in both France and Spain, the following year, he rejoined Tonge in London, where the pair used what Oates had learned to concoct a false account of a vast Jesuit conspiracy to overthrow King Charles II.

Oates swore out the fabricated details of the plot before a prominent London magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. The thirty-nine eldest Jesuits, Oates told Godfrey, had secretly met in London in April 1678 to coordinate their plan to assassinate the King and bring to power his Roman Catholic brother, the Duke of York (later King James II). Their plan, according to Oates, included the rising up of Catholics, the general massacre of Protestants, the burning of London, the invasion of Ireland by the French army, and an uprising against the Prince of Orange in Holland.

After the magistrate Godfrey publicized the story, Oates was granted an audience before the King and his council to recount his allegations. They considered his story preposterous. Not long after, Godfrey was found dead with a short sword piercing his heart. Had he, like his father before him, committed suicide, or had he been murdered by Catholics to silence him? History has never solved the mystery, but the investigating coroner decided murder, and Oates’s incredible Popish Plot suddenly had a killing to give it substance.

The capital and the nation went mad with hatred and fear. Justices everywhere searched house by house for papers confirming the plot. The jails swelled with papists. Oates was hailed as the country’s savior. In November 1678, he began testifying in court, coldly pointing a finger of death at the Catholics he accused of treason. Eventually, the furor died down, Oates’s prevarications were exposed, and he was convicted of perjury. He was pilloried, flogged, and imprisoned. But by that point, purely on the strength of his word, thirty-five innocent men had already gone to the gallows.

Two things missing from the judicial system allowed this incredible miscarriage of justice. One was the right of defendants to call their own witnesses to contradict the testimony against them. The other was what is now called physical or objective evidence—physical objects related to a case—that today often serves to confirm or contradict witness testimony. If they had been known, one type of physical evidence, fingerprints, could have been taken from the hilt of Godrey’s short sword. This might have put an end to Oates’s lies. But the importance of any kind of physical evidence would not be fully recognized until the appearance of full-time professional police detectives.

When the world’s first official detective force finally opened its doors in Paris in 1812, only a criminal could get a job there. It took a crook to catch a crook, believed François-Eugéne Vidocq, the vivacious founder of the Brigade de la Sûreté (Security Brigade), and he had the experience to prove it. A former outlaw himself, Vidocq rose to chief of the Sûreté because he’d already helped the police snare countless criminals with his underworld know-how. The fox could hunt better than the hounds.

Vidocq’s first case followed the theft of an emerald necklace given by Napoleon to the Empress Josephine. She discovered the necklace missing, in October 1809, from the small estate outside Paris where she had lived since her estrangement from Napoleon. The Emperor, incensed by the theft, worried that his enemies would accuse him of arranging it. He ordered Police Director Joseph Fouché to find the necklace, even if it meant his whole force combing the back streets of Paris. But Fouché was stumped. The main concern of his 300 undercover police spies had always been sniffing out political enemies of the revolutionary government. They had little experience tracking criminals, and even less idea where to search for the Empress’s necklace. Their need for help was Vidocq’s door of opportunity.

The son of a baker in the town of Arras, the strong-willed Vidocq, by age fifteen, had already killed his fencing instructor, amazingly, in a sword fight. Their duel was the first in a long string of tussles Vidocq fought over women. Five years later, his jealous rage, after yet another fight, landed him a few weeks in prison. He befriended a peasant there, whose only crime was stealing grain for his starving family, and was moved by pity for him. He helped fake a formal pardon that led to the peasant’s release.

The scheme was discovered, and Vidocq’s various skirmishes with the law for the first time turned serious. His initial arrest for fighting transformed suddenly into a charge of forgery. At age twenty-two, he faced eight years of forced labor. This time, Vidocq had dug himself a hole he couldn’t easily climb out of. Though he quickly escaped from prison by stealing a file, sawing through his leg irons, and slipping away in a sailor’s stolen uniform, he now had to live the rest of his life with the mark of an escaped convict. And there were many who would happily turn him in for the price on his head.

Vidocq became a pirate, ransacking English ships, and then traveled France, leading a colorful life as a criminal. Often recaptured and always escaping, Vidocq eventually tired of his renegade life and tried to settle down. Hoping to keep his criminal past a secret from the police, he opened a dry goods store in Paris, but he was often blackmailed by those who knew his true identity. He was in constant danger of being betrayed. He wished for an end to the constant running that began when he forged the poor peasant’s pardon. And that was the carrot the police dangled before him in return for the recovery of Josephine’s necklace.

Vidocq wound his way through the criminal haunts of Paris, scavenging for information about the necklace. In only three days he discovered the identity of the thief and the location of the jewels. Napoleon, delighted, demanded to meet the strange rogue who found his ex-wife’s treasure. In a gesture of gratitude, he ordered that the thirty-four-year-old Vidocq be appointed to a police position worthy of his talents, and the now-transformed Vidocq began his crime-fighting career as an underworld spy. Continuing to pose as a fugitive, he pretended to play an active role in the planning of crimes, but secretly tipped off the police before they were perpetrated. Vidocq’s crime-fighting tactics were so successful that, three years later, the police prefect Comte Jean Dubois signed an order establishing the Sûreté with Vidocq at its helm.

Vidocq hired eight assistants, who, in line with his philosophy on criminals catching criminals, were all former convicts with vast underworld knowledge. Their work earned Vidocq rapid acclaim. By 1814, he was made a deputy prefect, and in the year 1817 alone, Vidocq and his expanded force of thirty detectives arrested 812 murderers, thieves, burglars, robbers, and embezzlers.

In his years as chief of the Sûreté, Vidocq singlehandedly launched police procedure out of the Middle Ages and into the nineteenth century. He developed the “undercover” technique, planting in the criminal world agents who kept him one step ahead of his quarry. He instituted an early system of criminal identification, recording the descriptions of each criminal’s appearance and method of work. Using plaster casts of crime-scene boot prints, he sent thieves to jail by identifying the tread of their boots. In 1822, before ballistic science began, Vidocq solved the case of a murdered Comtesse with the bullet he removed from her head. He proved that it was too big to have been fired from her husband’s gun, but just the right size to have come from her lover’s.

Vidocq never hesitated to brag about these exploits, especially while drinking in the watering holes of Paris’s most famous writers. Hugo, Balzac, Dumas, and Sue all hungrily feasted on his tales, recounting them in their newspaper columns and novels. Victor Hugo, for example, based both Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert, characters in Les Misérables, on the detective. The exposure made Vidocq a celebrity, and his sleuthing methods were studied by police officers around the world. Vidocq’s fame gave a kick start to professional police detection, and stories of his use of physical evidence and nascent forensic techniques softened the ground for the eventual introduction of fingerprinting.

Yet the detective force that would introduce fingerprinting, a Sûreté-style branch of London’s Metropolitan Police, had not yet been started. Governments throughout Europe envied France’s Sûreté, but the British felt that a secret detective force was uncomfortably reminiscent of a police state. Then, in 1842, two London murders caused a public outcry that changed their minds.

One of the murders occurred when a suspect chased by police constables turned and shot two of them, one fatally. That a criminal possessed a gun was virtually unheard of in those times; that he would actually use it against policemen demonstrated a disregard for human life that disgusted even most outlaws. The shooter could only have come from the most depraved of criminal backgrounds. Why was he not known to the police?

It emerged that Thomas Cooper, the shooter, was indeed known to be extremely dangerous, at least at the Scotland Yard, London’s police headquarters. He belonged to a violent London gang and had a long criminal record. Local police had no idea that such a dangerous felon was holed up in their neighborhood, however, and they walked right into his loaded gun. This outraged the citizens of London. The Yard might as well have let children swim in shark-infested water. And this was the second example of headline-grabbing police ineptitude in only a month.

One evening a few weeks before, a shoplifter left a tailor’s shop followed by two salesmen, staying a few steps behind. They’d seen him surreptitiously slip a pair of trousers under his coat. On the street, they quickly related their tale to a passing police constable, and the three followed the thief to the stables where he worked. They confronted the shoplifter, but he denied the theft, so the constable and the salesmen searched the stables for the trousers. Under the hay, the constable uncovered what at first he thought was a plucked goose. Suddenly, the shoplifter rushed out of the stable, closed and locked the door, and imprisoned his pursuers long enough for him to make his escape.

At first, the constable did not understand why his discovery in the hay had scared the shoplifter away. But when he dug the object from the straw, a terrible realization dawned on him. What he had found was not a goose at all but the headless torso of a woman. Later, a noxious odor in the stable’s harness room led investigators to the fireplace, where they found the charred remains of her head and limbs. They also discovered the ax, covered with traces of blood, that had been used to dismember her. The man the constable thought was only a shoplifter had apparently killed a woman and tried to cremate her body, piece by piece. Now he was at large.

The shoplifter’s name was Daniel Good. A convicted criminal with a two-year prison record, Good had a reputation for temper and violence, and in a fit of rage, he had once torn the tongue from a horse’s mouth. These facts were plainly written in the dusty files of Scotland Yard, yet, again, no one had alerted the local police. The result was that the constable on the scene, with all the dimwitted sluggishness that had lately tainted the reputation of the Metropolitan Police, had been given the slip by a criminal much more dangerous than a petty thief.

The public was furious. Nor did the force redeem itself in the search that followed. More than once, when a tiptoe approach was needed, the clodhopper police alerted Good to their impending approach, sending him back into hiding. Eventually Good was apprehended, tried, and hanged for the murder of his common-law wife, but the Yard was lambasted in the press for its inability to undertake the simplest forms of criminal detection.

After the poor handling of the Cooper and Good cases, the reputation of the Metropolitan Police hit an all-time low. So, on June 20, 1842, the government, under pressure from the police commissioners and spurred by the need to repair a red-faced image, finally gave permission for the experimental establishment of a “Detective Force.” It began with twelve policemen, transferred from their normal duties, who taught themselves the work of detectives out of three small rooms in Scotland Yard.

The eventual parent to fingerprinting was finally born. But there would be growing pains. The work of the new detectives was at first unsophisticated. They watched and followed suspicious characters, hoping to collar them in criminal acts. They frequented the haunts of known criminals, sometimes in disguise, drinking and carousing and collecting gossip. They searched and questioned pawnbrokers in hopes of finding stolen goods that would lead them to the thieves.

This was all to the good, but a mature detective force would also have a talent for solving crimes from disparate clues, fitting them together like jigsaw puzzle pieces that, when assembled, revealed a picture of the murderer. Twenty years would pass before British detectives first demonstrated such Vidocq-style sophistication. When they finally did, they received a huge fanfare of press acclaim for their solution of the sensational and difficult case of Britain’s first murder on a train.

The victim, seventy-year-old Thomas Briggs, was still alive when he was found between the tracks near the railway bridge at London’s Victoria Station on a Saturday night in 1864. He died a few hours later of a fractured skull. Briggs had been riding the train from London to Hackney, where he lived. The empty first-class carriage he had occupied pulled into the station, stained with blood, bearing the marks of a fierce struggle, and containing a hat, a walking stick, and a bag.

Briggs’s son informed Detective-Inspector Dick Tanner, who investigated the case, that Briggs’s gold watch, chain, and eyeglasses were missing from his personal effects. The bag and the stick found in the carriage belonged to Briggs, the son reported, but the low-crowned black beaver hat did not. Briggs habitually wore tall hats. Tanner presumed the beaver hat to belong to the murderer and it was his only clue.

Tanner circulated to every jeweler and pawnbroker a description of Briggs’s missing jewelry, in the hope that they might lead to the murderer. He also visited the manufacturers of the hat—J. H. Walker of Marylebone—but they did not know to whom they’d sold it. The already meager trail of clues had narrowed to nothing. Then a jeweler named Death contacted the Yard in response to the circular.

Two days after the murder, Mr. Death recalled, a thin, sallow-faced man, a German, had exchanged a gold chain matching the description on the circular for a ring and another chain bearing a different pattern. In a second stroke of luck, a cabman named Mathews, hearing the case details discussed in a pub, remembered that he had seen a jeweler’s box bearing the name Death in the room of his former lodger, a German by the name of Franz Muller. Mathews identified the hat found in the carriage as Muller’s, and gave Tanner a photograph of the suspect along with the news that he had embarked on a sailing ship headed for New York.

Muller’s ship, the sailing vessel Victoria, would not reach port for six weeks. Muller had five days’ start, but there was ample time to overtake him by steamship. Tanner took the train to Liverpool, embarked, and landed in New York long before the sailing ship was due. On the appointed day, Tanner and a New York City policeman rowed out to the Victoria in a small boat as it came into New York harbor. They searched Muller’s cabin and found Briggs’s watch and hat. Muller was brought back to London and tried.

Only physical evidence—the jewelry and the hat—connected Muller to the dead man. A hundred and fifty years earlier, with no eyewitnesses, a prosecution would have been impossible. But the law had evolved. The judge at Muller’s trial explained the use of modern evidence to the jury: “One may describe circumstantial evidence as a network of facts cast around the accused man. … It may be strong in parts, but leave great gaps and rents through which the accused is entitled to pass with safety. It may be so close, so stringent, so coherent in its texture, that no efforts on the part of the accused could break it.”

In Muller’s case, the jury decided that the network of facts was unbreakable, and they sent him to the gallows. The law of evidence had evolved far from the early days of the ordeal. Physical and early forensic evidence now had a role in the courts of law. With detective policing and the law of evidence marching towards the twentieth century, it would be just a matter of decades before police solved cases, like the Farrow murders, using evidence left behind by the ridges that had been on the ends of man’s fingers since he first evolved.

Thirty thousand years ago, Paleolithic artists painted pictures of their hands over and over on the walls of the prehistoric Gargas cave in southern France. On the dusty rock and clay surfaces, in red and black paint, more than 150 impressions and stenciled outlines of their ancient palms and fingers survive. Among them, the outline of one artist’s hand is repeated again and again. Missing two fingers, probably due to frostbite, the image conjures the feel of his ghostly presence. What did he look like? How did he spend his days? By making an impression—not a stylized representation, but a true record of his warm hand pressing against the cold rock—the stone-age artist left behind, with the same force as old bones in a grave, a vibrant record of his existence.

Not only in Ice Age France, but throughout prehistoric Europe, Africa, Australia, and America, the hand was the subject of some of the world’s earliest paintings. To prehistoric people, it symbolized the physical manifestation of the innermost self. Hungry, and they watched their hands rummage for berries and roots. Angry, and in their hands they felt the weight of a fighting club. Through action, their hands gave outward expression to their inner thoughts. Through the sense of touch, they gave inner experience to outward existence. The hand stood as gatekeeper between self and other. Its symbolic representation, the handprint, acquired deep meaning.

Sealing promises with the gods, asserting dominion over territory, signaling their maker’s existence—these were the probable functions of prehistoric handprints. Twenty-nine thousand years later, hand prints still did the same jobs. During the ninth-century Mayan Empire, the soon-to-be victims of ritual human sacrifice left bloody handprints on the temple walls to make a last record of their lives. Ottoman sultans, in the same period, ratified treaties with handprints made in sheep’s blood, a royal seal signifying intent to keep a promise.

In Europe, the more convenient, less messy alternative to the handprint—the finger mark—appeared only occasionally, and not until the last several hundred years. In 1691, 225 citizens living near Londonderry, Northern Ireland, sent two ambassadors to petition Protestant King William III for compensation for losses they’d suffered during his battle with Catholic James II. The citizens promised to pay their ambassadors, if their negotiations were successful, one-sixth of the amount granted by King William. They signed a covenant to this effect with the marks of their fingers. Though this rare European use of finger marks was reminiscent of the more sophisticated fingerprints that came later, its significance, like the handprint’s, was entirely symbolic. The lineations left in the marks by the finger ridges went unnoticed.

In fact, not until the seventeenth century’s invention of the first crude microscope, the optic tube, did modern western science make mention of the ridges that run across the gripping surfaces of the hands and feet. One of the first microscopists, Dr. Nehemiah Grew, a physician born in Warwickshire, England, in 1641, whiled his hours away dissecting plants and scrutinizing their magnified innards. A member of both the College of Physicians and the Royal Society by the age of twenty-five, Grew founded the field of plant anatomy and was the first to identify flowers as the sexual organs of plants. He also stumbled upon the ridge detail on the ends of his fingers. He published his findings in 1684, making himself the first scientist known to have observed the fingertip patterns that would later be impressed to make fingerprints.

In 1788, another scientist, J. C. A. Mayers, became the first to observe the facet of finger ridges most essential to their use in identification—their uniqueness. He wrote in his illustrated textbook Anatomical Copper-plates with Appropriate Explanations that “the arrangement of skin ridges is never duplicated in two persons.” In 1823, a professor at the University of Breslau, Poland, Jan Evangelista Purkyne, in his thesis on the skin, noticed that finger ridge patterns fell into distinct categories, the second most important element of fingerprint identification. The categorization of fingerprints would eventually allow them, once filed away, to be easily referenced again, like dictionary entries classified by letter.

Although Grew, Mayers, and Purkyne anticipated the fundamentals of the fingerprint system of identification, their interest was in the advancement of pure science, not its practical application. They had not realized that their discoveries could be used to identify criminals or as evidence in trials, and fingerprints fell into obscurity for the next fifty years. When they reemerged, it would be thanks to a group of illiterate Chinese workers in a region of India governed by one of the first fingerprint pioneers.

Three Like Rats with No Rat-Catcher

In July 1858, William James Herschel was promoted and given charge of a rural subdivision in Bengal, India. At the young age of twenty-five, after five years as someone else’s gofer, he was suddenly the final authority on everything from his district’s tax collection to its road building. He was mayor, sheriff, and judge all wrapped into one, except he didn’t get his position because he was popular and he hadn’t won an election. He had been imposed on the local people by the British Lieutenant-Governor. And the ambitious young Herschel intended to make a splash, a particular challenge because of the period’s civil unrest.

At the time, Indian citizens would do anything to make things difficult for the much-hated British administration. They didn’t show up for their jobs. They stopped cultivating the British landowners’ farms. The didn’t pay the rent. Frustrations were great for accomplishment-minded young officers like Herschel. Many of their orders were deliberately disobeyed, and much of the rest had no one to carry them out.

Undeterred, Herschel decided, within weeks of his new appointment, to construct a new road. He negotiated the necessary contracts in the sticky heat at his new headquarters at Jungipoor, up the Hooghly River from Calcutta. One of the deals he struck was with Raj Konai, a contractor, for the supply of road-making materials. Herschel was proud of their arrangement. The terms were favorable to the government. But contractors, no less subversive than the rest of the population, had lately made a habit of breaking their contracts. Herschel worried that Konai might deny his obligations.

Herschel’s mind raced as he read over their agreement, penned by Konai in Bengali script. Even this written contract might prove useless, Herschel realized, since contractors had begun to deny their own signatures. Suddenly, it occurred to him “to try an experiment by taking the stamp of his hand … to frighten Konai out of all thought of repudiating his signature.” This spontaneous printing of Konai’s hand would later lead to Herschel’s being the first in British history to regularly use fingerprints officially.

Born on January 9, 1833, William James Herschel came from an eminent scientific family. His grandfather William Herschel, an astronomer, discovered the planet Uranus. His father, John Herschel, also an astronomer, invented the sensitized paper on which photographs are printed. As a young man, William James, too, was scientifically inclined, but his father encouraged him to strike out in a new direction, so he joined the Indian Civil Service at the age of twenty. Five years later, his promotion to Assistant Joint Magistrate and Collector came in the wake of the Sepoy Mutiny, a beginning in India’s struggle for independence and the reason for the civil unrest in Herschel’s new district.

The mutiny began after sepoys, Indian troops employed by the British, protested the recent issue of the new Enfield rifle. To load the Enfield, the ends of its cartridges, believed to be lubricated with pigs’ and cows’ lard, had to be bitten off. This clashed with both Hindu and Muslim dietary prohibitions, and in April 1857, sepoy troopers at Meerut refused to use their new rifles. When they were jailed for their refusal, their incensed comrades rose up and shot their British officers, sparking a murderous rebellion that swept the country.

The British responded with ferocious vengeance. Shipped-in reinforcements took no prisoners, bayoneting to death captured sepoys in frenzied massacres. They hanged whole villages, including women and children, for their perceived sympathy with the mutineers. Even after the revolt was suppressed in mid-1858, British soldiers lashed sepoys convicted of mutiny to the muzzles of their cannons and fired cannonballs through their chests. With their bodies blown to pieces, according to Hindu religion, the victims had no hope of entering paradise, making the punishment even more cruel.

The slaughter ended but the conclusion of what the Indians called “the Devil’s Wind” did not halt the population’s defiance of the unpopular British ruling class. Terrified of revenge for outright rebellion, they subtly engaged in various forms of civil disobedience, including the breaking of contracts with administrators like Herschel. If the administrators took them to court, the Indians simply repudiated their own handwriting. The British were in no position to insist that a signature written in Bengali had come from any particular hand, especially given the region’s volatility.

Hoping to keep his road-building project on track Herschel wanted a signature from Konai that couldn’t be so easily denied. “I dabbed his palm and fingers over with homemade oil-ink used for my official seal, and pressed the whole hand on the back of the contract,” Herschel wrote in his memoir The Origin of Fingerprinting. He made a second impression of his own hand, on a separate paper, and pointed out to Konai the distinctive differences between the two. You may think you can deny your handwriting, Herschel communicated to Konai, but you’ll never be able to deny that this outline of a hand and these lines of the palm belong to you and no one else. The scheme worked. Konai delivered the road-making materials as promised.

Herschel, impressed with his newfound ability to frighten someone into honoring a contract, experimented with handprints until he eventually hit upon printing just the fingertips, which was less messy. The Chinese and Japanese, probably the first to make widespread use of fingerprints as signatures, had used them on contracts as early as 600 A.D. Herschel, several authorities have written, likely borrowed the idea from a colony of Chinese living in Calcutta, though Herschel always insisted that the fingerprint conception had come in a sudden flash of his own inspiration.

In 1859, Herschel began collecting, as keepsakes, the fingerprints of his friends, colleagues, and family. Each impression, Herschel noted, was different, convincing him, over time, that fingerprints were unique to each individual. His notebooks included fingerprints taken from the tiny fingers of babies, from Indian nobility, and from old college friends, all dated and labeled by name the way some people collect autographs. He even took the inked impression of a dog’s nose: “a little white and black terrier at 2 months.” (Much later in history, the inked imprints of the skin patterns on the noses of cattle and horses would also be found to be individual and used to identify them as a safeguard against theft.)

In 1860, Herschel came up with another application for his fingerprint idea. In Nuddea, near Calcutta, where Herschel took a position as magistrate, the landowners had been turfing the tenant farmers off the land for non-payment of rent. The farmers, who cultivated indigo, the primary ingredient of blue dye at the time, couldn’t pay because the landowners had not discounted rents in line with an indigo market decline. Disputes between tenants and farmers erupted at first into riots and later into the courtrooms of magistrates like Herschel.

Tenants, desperately clinging to their land, insisted that landlords tried to collect much higher rents than they’d agreed on in their leases. They presented the supposed documents as evidence, but many of them turned out to be forgeries, made particularly hard to detect because they were impressed with replicas of the landlords’ seals. Herschel, frustrated by the flow of worthless paper through his courtroom, concluded that landlords should throw out their seals and instead authenticate leases with fingerprints. He set out to develop his fingerprint signature idea for widespread use.

He concerned himself first with insuring that fingerprints could not be forged like the landlords’ seals. He commissioned artists around Calcutta to copy his fingerprint, but none made even a close facsimile. In anticipation of the businessmen’s objections to the messy application of ink to their fingers, he wrote in 1862 to his much more practical brother-in-law, Alexander Hardcastle, and asked him to “devise an utterly simple device for inking the finger.”

Finally, in 1863, when the non-payment of rent had reached crisis point and land and lease litigation choked the courts, Herschel penned an official letter to his superiors suggesting his system for prevention of lease forgery. The first two fingers of both the landlord and the tenant should be impressed on each lease, he wrote, so that neither could alter it or disavow it in the future. Government higher-ups rejected Herschel’s idea, feeling that it might cause ill feeling just at the time when the indigo disturbances were quieting down. Herschel bided his time.

Fourteen years passed before a more senior Herschel, now magistrate of Hooghly, near Calcutta, was finally able to institute fingerprinting under his own authority. He introduced the system in three separate departments. For a year-long period, between 1877 to 1878, government pensioners in his region signed for their monthly payments with fingerprints. At the registry of deeds, land owners impressed fingerprints to authenticate their transactions. At the courthouse, convicts were forced to fingerprint their jail warrants so hired substitutes could not take their place at the prison. One year before he retired and moved back to England, nearly twenty years after he first came up with the idea, Herschel had finally put fingerprints to official use.

Herschel had, with a little help from the Chinese, conceived the use of fingerprints to irrefutably identify documents with their signatories. But he did not realize until much later, when it was pointed out to him, that fingerprints could be used to identify unknown criminals. Nor had he developed the fingerprint concept sufficiently to be used for that purpose.

Nowhere in his writings, for example, did Herschel mention any large-scale experiments to determine for certain that no two fingerprints were alike. Nor did he discuss what features of two fingerprints should be compared to determine if they had come from the same or different fingers. In fact, the fingerprints in the record books from the Hooghly Registry of Deeds, made in runny, water-based ink, were so faint and smeared that they were often indistinguishable. Even if Herschel understood the technical nuances of fingerprinting, it is clear that his subordinates did not. Under Herschel, fingerprints were more effectively used as a means of intimidation than for any real scientific purpose.

In his 1917 memoir, Herschel would nevertheless claim sole credit for conceiving the fingerprint method of criminal identification, even denying the contributions of the Chinese. As supposed documentary evidence, he produced what was to be known as the “Hooghly Letter,” written by him in August 1877 to Bengal’s Inspector of Jails and Registrar-General. In it, he suggested the widespread expansion of the two-digit fingerprint signatures he used in Hooghly to jailers’ warrants and deed registries throughout Bengal. His suggestion was rejected. More importantly, his letter suggested neither the use of fingerprints to identify unknown criminals in police custody nor their use as crime-scene evidence. Herschel’s letter did not suggest the fingerprint system as it is used today.

In 1878, when Herschel returned to England permanently, his successor in Hooghly did not see the value in Herschel’s fingerprint registration, and discontinued it. After only one year, Herschel’s system fell into disuse. It had not proved itself to anyone but Herschel himself. So, though it was already being quietly investigated by the obscure Scottish medical missionary Henry Faulds in Japan, fingerprinting again fell temporarily into obscurity. This time it did so right when jailers, police, and criminologists needed a system of identification more than ever before.

“… Lawrence Earl Ferrers, Viscount Tamworth, shall be hanged by the neck until he is dead and … his body will be dissected and anatomized,” said a writ of execution read out in the House of Lords in May 1760. When Earl Ferrers’s wife left him because of his bouts of drunken violence, a man named Johnson got the job of collecting her maintenance payments. The earl grew to hate Johnson and his monthly visits, and eventually shot him dead. It was for this that Ferrers was tried and condemned by the House of Lords.

At the appointed hour, the noose descended over the earl’s head, the gallows trap door swung open under his feet, and he fell until the rope jerked him to a sudden stop. His neck broke with a sickening crack. After his body hung limp and lifeless for the customary hour, undertakers carted it to Surgeon’s Hall in the City of London for dissection. Surgeons slit open the abdomen and removed his bowels. They sliced two strips of flesh from his chest and drew them open like curtains to reveal his bloody organs. His eviscerated body, then displayed in a public gallery as a warning against would-be murderers, became a cheap, gory sideshow for the public to parade past. Earl Ferrers’s memory suffered its final insult.

The gutting, a fate reserved especially for murderers in eighteenth-century Britain, numbered just one among the many ruthless provisions of the period’s criminal law, known as the “Bloody Code.” For over 200 different crimes, the Code prescribed death as easily as today’s law might call for community service. Begging, if you were a soldier or sailor, could earn you a stretch of the neck, and so could spending more than a month with gypsies. Between 1805 and 1818, a fifth of those who mounted the gallows’ steps under the Code had done nothing worse than forge bank notes.

Continental society was just as cruel to its criminals. Three years before Earl Ferrers’s gutting, France sentenced Robert-François Damiens to be burned and cut to pieces for trying to stab Louis XV. Each time red-hot pincers tore off a piece of Damiens’s flesh and opened a new wound, molten lead was poured in to stanch the flow of blood. Letting Damiens bleed to death would be far too kind. “My God, have pity on me. Jesus, help me!” Damiens moaned. When the executioner finally tethered six strong horses to Damiens’s arms and legs, his body proved too strong to be pulled apart. Only after his tendons were cut did Damiens’s limbs tear from their sockets.

Not all eighteenth-century criminals suffered such endless torture. In lower-profile cases, judges sometimes broke from the law and showed mercy. But this discretionary sentencing turned the judicial process into a sort of high-stakes crap shoot. For the same crime, depending on the judge, one lucky outlaw might be exiled to America, while another might be tortured or killed. This uneven application of the law undermined its moral authority. It was for this reason, not because of compassion for the condemned, that Europe’s great legal thinkers finally called for change.

In 1764, the Milanese statesman Cesare Beccaria published Dei deletti e delle pene (Crimes and Punishment) a seminal book on criminology. It sparked a hundred years’ worth of legal reforms, leading, eventually, to a system that could not operate without an infallible method of identification, such as fingerprinting. A twenty-six-year-old aristocrat, trained in law at the University of Pavia, Beccaria argued that, because of piecemeal development over several centuries, criminal law was an irrational mishmash. Prescribed punishments bore no relation to the seriousness of their crimes. “Whomsoever sees the same death penalty, for instance, decreed for the killing of a pheasant and for the assassination of a man … will make no distinction between the crimes,” Beccaria wrote.

Criminal law needed a massive overhaul. Beccaria called for standardized punishments that were only severe enough to make would-be criminals think twice. The certainty of a punishment, not its severity, had the greatest deterrent effect, he said. A burglar, positive of being caught and sent to jail, even for a short time, was less likely to commit a robbery than one who, if caught, might be executed.

Beccaria’s writing inspired humanitarian reformers across Europe. In England, philosopher Jeremy Bentham took up Becarria’s cause in a 1789 book of his own, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. He argued that the object of all legislation should be the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.” A punishment should not inflict any more unhappiness than the crime it was designed to deter. By this standard, executing thieves and other petty criminals was immoral.

For one of Bentham’s disciples, Samuel Romilly, the end of the death penalty became a quest. The Member of Parliament campaigned tirelessly to reform the Bloody Code and to rid the law of its overbearing cruelties. In 1808, he won a victory when he championed legislation abolishing the death penalty for pickpockets. But Romilly didn’t live to see the other fruits of his labors. Heartbroken by the death of his wife, he committed suicide in 1818 at the age of sixty-one.

Between 1832 and 1834, the English Parliament abolished the death penalty for shoplifting a value of five shillings or less, forgery of coins, returning from deportation, letter-stealing, and religious sacrilege. By 1861, only four offenses would be punishable by death: murder, treason, piracy with violence, and arson of royal dockyards. The hangman had seen his day.

Around the continent, prisons sprang up to house criminals spared by the less-often-employed gallows. England’s first national penitentiary, Millbank, in London, locked the cell door on its first prisoner in 1816. Pentonville Prison came in 1842, and by 1848, around the country, England had erected fifty-four new prisons, providing 11,000 new cells. In the previous century, prisons had housed only debtors and unfortunates awaiting their turns at trial or the gallows.

Early in the reign of the jailkeeper, in the 1820s and 1830s, crime statistics made their first appearance. They revealed the existence of a breed of hardened outlaws who, no matter how often they went to jail, always returned to their villainous ways. As a social phenomenon, the group quickly attracted the interest of science. Why would this group, in spite of the risks, return again and again to their lawbreaking? Were they bad in their very essence? Or was society somehow to blame?

One of the world’s first demographers, the Belgian Lambert Adolphe Quételet, took up these questions. Quételet analyzed three years of French crime statistics, and he published his findings in his 1835 book Sur L’homme (known in English as A Treatise on Man, and the Development of His Faculties). A third of murders, he found, occurred during barroom brawls. Young working-class men accounted for the greatest proportion of crime. Upper-class villains tended more toward personal violence than theft.

His great criminological discovery was the connection between crime rates and social conditions. When the economy dipped, law-abiding citizens suddenly started stealing. Old thieves stole more often. Crime waves and economic recessions correlated so closely that felons appeared to have no free will. It was as if, in bad times, some societal puppeteer began pulling their strings. Quételet concluded that the blame for lawbreaking belonged partly to society. The severity of a criminal’s punishment should therefore depend on the circumstances of his crime.

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