Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (10 page)

Through intensive detective work and a lot of questions asked, the victim’s identity was finally revealed: a recluse named Desiré Bodasse. Macé also learned that a tailor named Pierre Voirbo had visited the household that used the well, bringing work to a woman in an apartment upstairs. He then determined that Voirbo had known the murdered man and during a search he found some of the victim’s items among Voirbo’s possessions. Macé interrogated Voirbo to learn more about their association. It turned out that recently they had quarreled over money and that Voirbo had cashed in some of Bodasse’s Italian stocks. He had also collected newspaper articles about the mystery of the legs found in the well. Macé noticed that Voirbo’s former lodgings had been cleaned (and the cleaning woman said that Voirbo had done this himself), which meant that evidence was destroyed, but then he realized that the floors were tiled, with alleys between the tiles. Having a flash of inspiration, he poured water on the floor to see where it ran. He then lifted the tiles in that area, under a bed. Beneath them was enough blood to indicate that something of a violent nature had occurred in that room. Voirbo, who was forced to observe this innovative demonstration, broke down and confessed to bludgeoning Bodasse and carving up his body. He blamed his father, who had often threatened him, for his impulse to commit murder. Before Voirbo went to trial, he committed suicide with a razor smuggled into the prison.

Macé had demonstrated how a systematic, logical approach to investigating crime got results, and he grew famous for the way his analytical thinking brought murderers to justice against all odds. He was one of the investigators featured in papers that contributed to the popularity of the brilliant mind as a detective’s trusty tool. Macé went on to become head of the detective division, and among his practices was to require photographs of all criminals.

Odontology came into a case in America when a woman was found dead in Ohio in 1870, with five distinct bite-mark bruises on her arm. Since she had been the mistress to a man named A. I. Robinson, he became a suspect, but there was no evidence against him aside from innuendo, and there was also another suspect. An examining dentist who hoped to identify the culprit via matching the bruises on the body to Robinson’s teeth actually bit the dead woman’s arm himself to show the difference between the mark he’d left and the suspect’s. Then he had Robinson bite
his
arm for making the comparison. Another dentist, Dr. Jonathan Taft, cast Robinson’s teeth, using this to show the spot where one was missing, which made his mouth fit perfectly into the wound pattern.

However, the defense attorney raised issues about how similar teeth are and how difficult it is to tell what a skin bruise means, so Robinson was acquitted.

Yet forensic botany got a boost in 1873 when pathologist Alfred Swaine Taylor examined microscopic plant life in the lungs of a drowning victim to indicate that the person had drowned in a body of water apart from the one in which the corpse had been found. Thus, it was a case of murder, proven with diatoms.

The following year, London investigations advanced. The Prisoners Property Act of 1869 had given authority for police to retain certain items of prisoners’ property for instructional purposes, and by 1874, the Central Prisoners Property Store had enough items at Scotland Yard for an Inspector Neame to devise the idea of a crime museum for the purpose of giving practical instruction to police officers. It opened in 1875 and two years later, thanks to a reporter barred from entry, acquired the name “The Black Museum.” It later moved with the Metropolitan Police Office to New Scotland Yard.

CRIMINAL TYPES

In 1876, members of the Society of Mutual Autopsy, many of them the leading anthropologists of Paris, pledged to donate their brains after death to science. Since they regarded themselves as members of an elite race, they were confident that a study of their brains would advance the science of man significantly, particularly in light of Broca’s discovery that a specific part of the brain was responsible for such a sophisticated activity as speech. Once again, they defied the church’s teachings about the sanctity of the body. In fact, many did not believe in the soul’s immortality and they viewed the body after death as valuable only for scientific study.

The freethinking anthropologists gained sufficient political power in France to remove some of the religious iconography from public works, and they renamed a few streets. They hoped for the gradual evolution of other cultures to their level. Among the members was a statistician and demographer named Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, who had been quite excited by the earlier work of Quételet. He believed in “social physics,” which hypothesized a way to use numbers and calculations to understand human beings. He was among the thinkers to establish the School of Anthropology, and his two sons, Jacques and Alphonse, would follow in his footsteps. While Jacques became a statistician as well, Alphonse took the ideas much further. He set to work on creating an interesting invention, the
portrait parlé,
which was a full description of a criminal, including hundreds of pieces of information from eye color to scars to a person’s posture. The task required a good eye and a great deal of patience, but it would not really be used until after the young, introverted Bertillon had established himself in another way.

Before that happened, another man was already stealing the show. Even as the anthropologists in Paris were pledging their brains, Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, a former army surgeon and a professor at the University of Turin in Italy who owned the world’s largest collection of skulls, published
L’uomo delinquente.
Experienced in the methods of phrenology and influenced by Broca’s ideas about racial types, Lombroso believed that human behavior could be classified via objective tests. He had made numerous measurements of both lunatics and criminal offenders, dead and alive, and studied even more photographs of them.

Lombroso’s data convinced him that there were anatomic differences between normal people, lunatics, and criminals. That is, certain people were born criminals and they were identifiable by specific physical traits, such as bulging brows, close-set eyes, protruding jaws, disproportionately long arms, and apelike noses. In other words, delinquency was a physiological abnormality that could be observed in someone’s simian appearance. As well, they tended to acquire tattoos, speak in slang, lack foresight, act impulsively, experience violent emotions, and prefer idleness and play.

He believed there was such a thing as a “born criminal” who was irresistibly compelled toward a life of crime, and that this criminal was an atavistic being—a throwback to earlier hedonistic races. Others could become criminals through weak natures or “vicious training.” The born criminal had peculiar sensory responses, a diminished sensibility to pain, no sense of right and wrong, and no remorse. Also, it seemed, only criminals bore tattoos, which Lombroso considered a reversion to ancient tribal rites, primitive races, and the craving to torture, mutilate, and kill. It was suggested by those who reported this work that the police could make arrests more accurately if they trained themselves to spot the right traits. And the public could better protect itself from a stranger who had an obvious criminal appearance.

Striking a social chord, Lombroso’s ideas spread across Europe and America, supported by the new evolutionary thinking. The theory of the born criminal inspired widespread prejudices that made those without these traits feel smugly superior, and it often victimized innocent people. But the theory dug in and remained a compelling idea for several decades.

Yet in 1875, sociologist Richard L. Dugdale announced in the annual report of the Prison Association of New York that he was making a study of an American family whom he called the “Jukes.” Dugdale had inspected thirteen county jails around New York State and asked a number of prisoners the same set of questions about the environment and families in which they had been raised. In one county, he located six persons who were blood relations and who were all being held on some criminal charge. He discovered that this family had a long lineage, so he set about to study them in the interest of seeing if heredity, coupled with a certain environment, influenced—perhaps even caused—criminality.

Dugdale’s report was published as a book in 1877. He claimed to have examined several generations of this family, and out of some 540 descendents of six original sisters, the Jukes showed a higher than average percentage of syphilitics, prostitutes, thieves, and murderers (about 140 offenders). This degenerate tribe was compared against another family of good Puritan stock, out of which had emerged mostly upstanding citizens, and even some presidents. While it seemed a good argument for heredity, and Lombroso was an enthusiastic supporter of this work, Dugdale indicated, contrary to Lombroso, that environment could be a factor as well (although Lombroso later accepted this idea). Eventually, Dugdale’s work was discredited, since the Jukes were not all from the same family.

WHAT THE BODY REVEALS

While science was improving methods of investigation and prosecution, as well as trying to advance the understanding of criminal behavior, it was clear that a more definitive approach was needed to process and identify repeat criminals—and there were many, since police were only just appearing in major cities. The science of identification took two directions. Some men continued to focus on human anatomy as a whole and others on only a specific area of the body: fingerprints. The history of identification methods can thus be likened to several independent vines intertwining, as these men crossed one another’s paths, sometimes helping, sometimes thwarting others who were making similar discoveries.

In 1877 in the United States (the year that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts replaced its coroner system with a medical examiner), Thomas Taylor proposed that skin-ridge patterns on palms and fingertips be used for identification, although he did not take it any further. That same year William Herschel, a former civil servant in India, brought fingerprinting methods to the attention of the inspector-general of the Bengal prison system. Herschel had already used fingerprints to seal contracts and then, as a magistrate, had identified men attempting to collect their pensions twice. The official ignored him.

In 1880, Scottish physician Henry Faulds, who had developed a way to make “fingermarks” visible with powders, thanks to perspiration, successfully eliminated a suspect and helped to convict the true offender in a burglary. He had already written about fingerprints left on Japanese pottery and while he was developing a thesis about racial identification, the crime occurred. The thief left sooty prints on a white wall, making the ridge patterns nicely delineated. Faulds made a match to the thief and even managed to intimidate him into a confession. He then published “On the Skin-Furrows of the Hand” in the prominent scientific journal
Nature
.

Yet there was little movement initially to get widespread acceptance of this method. Faulds had penned a letter to the editor of
Nature
about his ideas, which was published. Herschel read it and responded with a letter of his own, claiming to have used fingerprints for identification as far back as 1858. Apparently this enraged Faulds, a jealous and competitive man, so he traveled to England to assert himself as the discoverer. He acquired a position as a police surgeon and then importuned Scotland Yard to take him seriously. But his personality got in the way; he became bitter and angry when things failed to go smoothly. Thus, no one was willing to further his claims or open doors.

One man who attempted to reach Faulds was Francis Galton, cousin to Charles Darwin, who was enamored of the statistical approach to identifying humans. He had made comparisons between body measurements and sensory acuteness, and he had noticed the differences in fingerprints. He was working to make his own contribution to the enterprise.

Fingerprinting methods were clearly in the air, because in 1883, Mark Twain published
Life on the Mississippi.
In one chapter of this novel, a man describes how he relied on a bloodstained thumbprint to track down the murderer of his wife and child. He mentions that a prison warden had told him that thumbprints never change and that no two men have the same patterns. The man uses the print to identify two culprits, one of whom he executes. However, before the system of fingerprints would come into its own, another development detoured criminal identification on to a different track, and this approach, too, relied on the scientific method.

Alphonse Bertillon, a petulant file clerk for the French police and the son of the anthropologist Louis-Adolphe Bertillon mentioned earlier, had grown frustrated during the late 1870s over the enormous and chaotic collection of photos in the police bureau. As well, he had to deal with more than five million imprecise files, thanks largely to the system that Vidocq had devised half a century earlier. He had read Quételet’s publication
Anthropometry, or the Measurement of Different Faculties in Man,
published in 1871, and he firmly believed that he could develop a systematic way to measure and categorize the criminals who were arrested. Like the men who’d been colleagues of his father, the younger Bertillon believed that human measurements fell into specific statistical groupings, but there would still be defining differences from one individual to another. He calculated that if fourteen different measurements of a person’s body were taken, the odds of finding two with the exact same measurements of every feature were 286,435,456 to one.

Bertillon decided to experiment. For each person arrested, he took between eleven and fourteen key measurements, from the length of the foot to the width of the jaw, from the width and length of the head to the length of the forearm, classifying each person and recording the measurements on cards. His system derived from another assumption derived from anthropology, that adult human bone structure does not change, and it involved three steps: the body measurements, which had to be taken under controlled conditions in a precise manner; a description of the body’s shape and movements; and a description of identifying marks, such as moles, tattoos, deformed limbs, or scars.