Listening  (Page 3/4)

9. Years of study in dactyloscopy followed the reports of Faulds and Herschel. But before their pioneer work led to widespread use of fingerprints as clues and evidence, an American writer had used them in a detective story.

10. A chapter in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, written in 1883, told the story of a search for a murderer. A man had killed Karl Ritter’s wife and daughter. Karl had the bloody prints of the man’s right-hand thumb and fingers. From an old prison keeper Karl had learned of the fingerprint method of identifying an individual. He knew that the murderer was a soldier in a certain company of cavalry. Pretending to tell fortunes, Karl took fingerprints of the cavalrymen until he found the prints that matched his clue.

11. The problem for police was often more difficult than that in Mark Twain’s story. Unlike Karl Ritter, police did not always know the group to which a criminal belonged. They therefore had to have a collection of prints that they could depend upon. But a search through a collection for matching prints could be time-consuming; records had to be scientifically sorted and arranged. Science had to find a proper method of describing prints by their patterns of lines and ridges.

12. The search for a method went on through the 1880s. Faulds himself tried to find the way to make his suggestion useful. But two police officials finally solved the problem. Their solutions gave law forces everywhere a new and mighty weapon in the fight against crime.

13. The first man to devise a way of utilising this new weapon was Juan Vucetich, of Argentina. By 1891 he had worked out a system, using ten prints, to describe and group the patterns. He began the first collection of prints for police use. The next year his department proved that bloody finger marks on a doorpost were exactly matched by the prints of a woman who had accused a neighbour of murdering her two sons. Her trial for murder was the first of many cases settled by fingerprint evidence alone.

14. The second man to devise a system for classifying prints was Edward Henry, inspector-general of police in Bengal. His system worked so well that in 1899 India allowed for fingerprint evidence by written law – the first country to do so. Two years later, when Henry went to New Scotland Yard, his method had been approved in England. The fingerprint branch of Scotland Yard was the first of its kind in Britain.

15. Year by year during the 20th century, Vucetich’s and Henry’s systems spread. The radio network of Interpol, the international police force with some eighty member nations, has developed methods of classifying that have made it easier to find matching prints in large collections. Machines as well as men work at searching for the prints.

16. Dactyloscopy has many uses today, but it has had its hardest impact as an aid to law forces. From the moment he commits a crime, a criminal must fear this modern science. Police are experts in finding and getting prints from the scene of the crime. Searchers in the filing systems can find any prints ever recorded. And at his trial, the criminal will see the law’s respect for the evidence of an unwritten signature.