Fingerprints: Murder and the Race to Uncover the Science of Identity. Colin Beavan
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