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

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.