Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [82]
Perhaps it was the humiliation he suffered when he ventured beyond strictly scientific matters that led to Bertillon’s other great failure — his refusal to recognize the importance of fingerprinting. It was particularly poignant, for had he reacted differently, he could have turned this failure into his greatest success.
From antiquity, it has been known that the patterns on the tips of fingers could be used as identification; ancient Chinese documents were sometimes signed with thumbprints. Mark Twain mentions thumbprint identification of a criminal in Life on the Mississippi, written in 1883. But the modern use of fingerprints is said to date from a letter written by Henry Faulds, an English physician working in Japan, to the journal Nature in October 1880. Faulds based his observations on his examination of Japanese pottery, where the makers had left fingerprints in the clay. He suggested that the prints never changed throughout a person’s life, and he also took the first step toward the classification of fingerprints by describing the three categories of whorls, loops, and arches. This suggestion prompted a response from Sir William Herschel, a British official in India, who since 1858 had been using fingerprints affixed to paper as a means of identification for the residents of Bengal, the territory where he served. Sir Francis Galton, a British anthropologist, took notice of Herschel’s work and began to investigate further; his books and articles, published in the early 1890s, popularized the subject of fingerprint identification. Galton — an adherent of bertillonage — realized that fingerprints could be important as an identification tool, but he failed to grasp their real significance: that they could connect a criminal to the scene of the crime.
The first country in which fingerprints would be used to solve a crime was Argentina, owing to the influence of Juan Vucetich. Born in Croatia, Vucetich had immigrated to Argentina in 1881. He went to work at the Central Police Department in La Plata, where he impressed his superiors with his intelligence and hard work. Two years later he became head of the Statistical Bureau and was given the responsibility of organizing the Department of Identity. The country had been using the anthropometric system since 1889, so Vucetich had to apply bertillonage to the prisoners and suspects. When Vucetich read about fingerprinting, he immediately saw that it would revolutionize police work. Fingerprints, he realized, were easier to obtain and more accurate than Bertillon measurements — but his superior told him to stick to anthropometry.
Pursuing a dual track, Vucetich developed his own system of fingerprint classification while he was filling out anthropometry cards. He identified four common fingerprint traits: arches, prints with a triangle pattern on the right side, prints with a triangle pattern on the left side, and prints with triangles on both sides. Vucetich represented these patterns with the first four letters of the alphabet. He called the system dactiloscopia. 42
In 1892, a sordid murder case gave Vucetich the opportunity to show the worth of his system. In Necochea, a coastal town two hundred and fifty miles south of La Plata, Francisca Rojas informed the police that a man named Valásquez had killed her two children in a frenzy of jealousy. Taken into custody, Valásquez admitted that he loved Francisca, even that he had threatened her, but denied that he had killed her children. Even when police tried to beat a confession out of him, he did not change his story. The local authorities had Valásquez tied up and laid next to