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