Criminal Identification, Old School by Karla Stover

 

                                             

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR: 

   Available through BWL Books

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     In the late 19th and very early 20th centuries, law enforcement practiced the Bertillon method of criminal identification which claimed that the body parts of individuals had unique combinations of measurements and that comparing these measurements could be used to distinguish individuals.

     Alphonse Bertillon was a French criminologist who developed this anthropometric system of physical measurements focusing on the head and face, to produce a detailed description of an individual. This system, invented in 1879, became known as the Bertillon system, gained wide acceptance as a reliable, scientific method of criminal investigation. In 1884, French police used Bertillon’s system to capture 241 repeat offenders, helping establish the system’s effectiveness. Gradually, law enforcement agencies began to create archives of the stats of known criminals, which contained his or her anthropometric measurements such as height, head breadth, arm span, sitting height, left middle finger length, left little finger length and left foot length as well as full-face and profile photographs of the perpetrator (now commonly known as "mugshots.") 

    The Bertillon system was introduced in the U.S. in 1887 by R.W. McClaughry, Warden of the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet. McClaughry translated Bertillon’s 1885 edition of Signaletic Instructions Including the Theory and Practice of Anthropometrical Identification from French to English, and its use in the States became quickly and widely accepted.   

     In 1904 the government decided that all Chinese who failed to qualify for residence in the United Stated would be deported and that photographs, records of their appearance, and Bertillion measurements would be kept on file

      It's December 1906, and Deputy Sheriff Thomas Maxey of Kittitas County in Washington State, has been asked to come to Tacoma to see if he can assist in identifying Louis Hemeter as the murder of Elsie Milhuff in Renton the previous summer using Bertillon and fingerprinting identification of which he was an expert. Hemeter was a traveling watch repairer and, at the time of his arrest, said his name was John Doe. Maxey, went to Renton and found two well-defined fingerprints on the girl’s clothing which the local authorities had missed. He took copies of the prints and came to Tacoma to compare them to that of Hemeter.

     Hemeter was found guilty and sent to the prison in Walla Walla where he was held on a ward for the insane. 

    Fingerprints aside, in 1906, a Tacoma city councilman named Wilkeson began campaigning for the city to adopt the Bertillion method to help with future identifications. The police department was interested; however it took five years for the city to approve the request. 

     On December 27, 1911, the Tacoma Times headline was “City Salary List Boosted Sky High.” Nine thousand dollars was added to the city’s payroll and 7 new jobs were created, among them a Bertillon superintendent, interesting because by then Bertillon identification was on the decline. The decline began in 1903 when a man named Will West was committed to the penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was photographed and measured. His measurements were found to be almost identical to a criminal at the same penitentiary named William West, who had been committed for murder two years earlier and was serving a life sentence. In addition, their photographs showed that the two men, thought not related, bore a close physical resemblance. Confusion surrounding the true identities of the two men ensued and it was their their fingerprints which identified them. Thus began the decline and fall of the Bertillon system. It never quite recovered its exclusive status as the preferred criminal identification system. Nevertheless, Harry Smith, Tacoma's new employee, spent 6 weeks learning the system and then a department was set up for him in the squad room.

       Not long after this he was called to testify in the trail of Joe Parrot accused of murdering Fred Weiss. What was interesting about this trial is that Weiss had specially made shoes to accommodate an overly long toe on one foot and the need for a built up heel on the other. Weiss’s daughter and the man who made the shoes both testified that these were shoes taken from Parrot. However, it wasn’t until Smith took the stand that Parrot got nervous. Smith said, “He was the most nervous man I ever measured”

     Then farmers got on the band wagon and began taking nose prints of their cattle which they claimed were all different.

    Alphonse Bertillon is referenced in the Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles when one of Holmes's clients refers to Holmes as the "second highest expert in Europe" after Bertillon.

    As late as 1921, when actor Fatty Arbuckle was accused of the murder of Virginia Rappe, his Bertillion measurements were taken.

       However, by the 1920s, Bertillion was on the way out. The measurements were often inaccurate; it was difficult to apply to children; and women's hair made exact measurements virtually impossible, as showed in the William / Willie west episode, some people just resembled each other, and it took a lot of file space to keep all the records. Then there was the Parisian police's inability to discover the theft of the Mona Lisa. The thief left finger prints on the frame and he had been their "guest" on a previous occasion. However, their records were "Bertillon" rather than fingerprints.

    In 1924, the FBI took over America's fingerprint cataloguing but some elements of Bertillon, i.e. unusual features, scars and tattoos were kept.