[MUSIC] Nowadays in forensic science, if we want to identify someone absolutely, then of course we think of the modern method of using DNA. But there's a method as individualized as DNA, which is now more than 100 years old and still essential in police work, and that is fingerprinting. Fingerprints have probably been used to identify people for a very long time. It's probable that in ancient China they were used as signatures. A man called William Herschel who was a British official in Bengal in India in the late 19th century used them so that illiterate people could sign documents, signing with their thumbprint. The idea of using fingerprints to identify people from crime scenes comes from a man called Henry Faulds. So in about 1880, Faulds, who was working as a medical missionary in Japan, began to study fingerprints, and he realised they were different from person to person. And he came up with the idea, after publishing several papers in the journal Nature, that fingerprints could be used to identify criminals. However, this idea was not at the time picked up by any of the world's police forces. Well even though the idea wasn't picked up by the police, it was picked up by the writers of crime fiction. But one author who used fingerprints as a centre, central to the plot of one of his books was the American Author Mark Twain, and the book is "Pudd'nhead Wilson". And in fact what the key protagonist in the book says really sums up very well 25
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what fingerprinting is about. Twain wrote, "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 cannot be counterfeited, nor can he disguise it or hide it in any way, nor can it become illegible by the wear and mutations of time." Twain, of course, was referring to the fingerprint. 36
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In the following decade, officials and the police started to take notice. One person who pushed fingerprinting forward was an Englishman called Francis Galton. And in the 1890s, he worked out a method for classifying the different marks present in fingerprints. Juan Vucetich, who we'll meet again in a moment, also produced a method for classification. Edward Henry in the late 1890s was a great proponent of fingerprints, and as we'll see, he was involved in one of the earliest cases. The first use of fingerprinting in the U.K. appears to be in 1901, and then a couple of years later, in the United States of America. But one of the first cases is certainly from Juan Vucetich. He was living in Argentina, he wasn't born an Argentine, he actually came from what is now Croatia but had emigrated to Argentina. The case involves a lady called Francesca Rojas, and one day Francesca Rojas' children were found brutally murdered, and the blame was put on her neighbour, a man called Velasquez. Well, Señor Velasquez was interrogated by the Argentine police, and I don't suspect that was a very gentle procedure, but throughout it, he insisted he was innocent. And eventually the police began to feel that maybe he was innocent. Suspicion turned to Rojas, the mother, and yet there was no evidence that would place Rojas at the crime scene. Well, Vucetich, who was working at a police institute in the nearby city of La Plata, was called in to help. So when he inspected the crime scene, he found a bloody fingerprint on a door post, and that fingerprint matched the fingerprints of the mother, Francesca Rojas. Based upon that, she was convicted of the murder. It turned out she was having an affair with another man and that man didn't like children, so she had got rid of her children. Well, this was a great achievement. Without that fingerprint, the crime would not have been solved and Vucetich thought that what was needed was a national database of fingerprints - everybody in Argentina would be fingerprinted. Well this was not a popular idea, and there were even riots against it and the whole concept was dropped. But what Vucetich tried to do there and the controversy that that caused of course parallels the discussions and the controversy these days about DNA databases. The case of the Stratton brothers from Deptford in East London in 1905 is important in the history of fingerprinting. This is the first capital case in the United Kingdom using fingerprinting. Walter and Ann Farrow were an elderly couple who kept a shop in Deptford High Street, and one morning it was found they had been beaten to death. So the police inquired, and of course, what they do is try to find possible witnesses. And one of the witnesses they found was a man called Henry Alfred Jennings. So Jennings came to the trial of the suspects, Alfred and Albert Stratton, as a witness for the prosecution. Now, Jennings had seen two people coming out of the Farrows' shop that morning, but this is the testimony that he gave in court. He said, "I am a milk carrier," what we would now call a milk man, who would deliver the milk to each house in the morning. And he continued, looking at the prisoners now, "I'm unable to say one way or the other whether these are the men I saw in High Street, Deptford." We have said that the prosecution must prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. And what Jennings has done is hand to the defense here, absolutely reasonable doubt, there's, he cannot say for sure that the people he saw were the Stratton Brothers. However, in 1905, Edward Henry, one of the proponents of fingerprinting, was Commissioner of Police in London, and he made sure that the crime scene was checked for fingerprints. Now, underneath the old couple's bed, they found a cash-box. The cash-box was empty when it should have contained the princely sum of nine pounds, so here's your motive for the murder. On the cash-box they found one thumbprint. Now if you have an object that belongs to someone, any fingerprints or thumbprints on that object are most likely to belong to the owner. So first of all, they had to fingerprint the two deceased persons, and the thumbprint didn't match either of them. Then, they had to check the police officers who found the cash box. If one of them had handled the cash box, maybe the thumbprint belongs to a police officer, but it didn't. That left the two suspects. The Stratton brothers were both fingerprinted, and the thumb print was an excellent match for Alfred Stratton. But this was the first capital case involving fingerprinting, so the prosecution not only had to show that the thumbprint belonged to Alfred Stratton, they also had to demonstrate that this technique was reliable, because that is what the defense attacked. The defense attacked the reliability of fingerprint evidence. And this was resolved, and the court was convinced of the reliability of fingerprinting, because the prosecution demonstrated it by fingerprinting a member of the jury. The Stratton brothers were found guilty and they were sent to hang, and apparently on their way to the gallows, they would blame each other for the predicament they were in. Well, in our first lecture we mentioned Edmond Locard. And of course, Locard was involved in fingerprints too. Locard, of course, as we've said, was based in the French city of Lyon. Apparently in the 1920s, there was a series of mysterious burglaries in Lyon where the burglar gained access to someone's room by climbing through a high up window. And sometimes this burglar would steal valuable objects, and sometimes trivial objects of no particular value, and it was a quite baffling case. Locard knew that fingerprints are not unique to human beings. Other animals such as monkeys also have fingerprints. And Locard realized that the way these burglaries were being done were much more characteristic of a monkey than a human. So in a place like Lyon in France, where do you find a monkey? And the answer is with an organ grinder. An organ grinder was a man with a barrel organ, who would walk around the streets playing his barrel organ to be given money by the crowds. And traditionally, each organ grinder would have a monkey, and the monkey would be trained to take a hat around the crowd to collect the coins. So Locard had all the organ grinders and their monkeys rounded up; fingerprinted the monkeys. The fingerprints of one of those monkeys matched fingerprints found at one of these burglary crime scenes. The organ grinder, the owner of the monkey, was sent to prison, and the monkey was sent to the zoo. 157 00:12:16,150 --> 00:12:18,629 [BLANK_AUDIO]
