Murder Maps. Drew Gray
léonce
manouvrier, c. 1900.—————Opposite.alphonse bertillon’s tableau synoptic des traits physionomiques (synoptic table of physiognomic features). it was designed to help police clerks apply his classification system of the human face, known
as
bertillonage
.
published his major work – Criminal Man – in which he set out the concept of the ‘born criminal’ and the case for the study of criminal anthropology. Like Bertillon, Lombroso was fascinated by the physicality of the criminals he studied. He recorded the physical features of prisoners and the bodies of executed felons, and allied particular features with specific sorts of criminal activity. He noted that ‘habitual murderers have a cold, glassy stare and eyes that are sometimes bloodshot and filmy’. Their noses were ‘always large’ and their ‘beards are scanty’. By contrast, rapists had ‘sparkling eyes, delicate features, and swollen lips and eyelids’. He viewed crime as a ‘natural’ activity (i.e. inevitable for some people) rather than an individual choice. Crime would always exist, he argued, and so evolving better methods of detecting it was paramount.
For contemporaries who were familiar with Charles Darwin’s (1809–82) theory of evolution, Lombroso’s thesis of criminal atavism (that some individuals had not developed as quickly or as far as others) sounded rational. Moreover, Lombroso’s scientific approach to criminology chimed with the dominant philosophy of the period, which was scientific positivism.
Cesare Lombroso publishes Criminal Man, a work detailing his theory of criminal typolo.
Francis Galton layers photographs of criminals to establish the ‘average’
criminal face. The first police callboinstalled in New York City.
x is
The London Metropolitan Police introduces the Criminal InvestigaDepartment (CID) with 200 de
tion tectives. American detective Thomas F. Byrnes solves the ManhaSavings Bank robbery.
ttan Alphons
e Bertillon develops the portrait parlé (speaking portrait) identification system. Dr Henr
y Faulds predicts the usefulness of fingerprint analysis to criminolo.
Hermann Reinhard conduct
s a systematic study of insect species inside corpses.
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INTRODUCTION.
11
The Daily Telegraph publishes an artist’s impression of the ‘British Railway Murderer’. The police whistle replaces
the police rattle in the London Metropolitan Police. Moses Shapira presents his
‘Shapira Strips’, later exposed as forgeries of ancient scrolls. Raffaele Garofalo coins the term ‘criminolo’ in a sociological
study on the subject.
Mary Ann Nichols is murdered in the first of the so-called ‘Whitechapel Murders’. Dr Thomas Bond’s report on Jack the Ripper is the first criminal profile.
Alphonse Bertillon introduces rigorous regulations to the taking of mug shots.
Alexandre Lacassagne lays the groundwork for the forensic science of ballistics.
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SENSATIONALIZED MURDER & THE RISE OF THE DETECTIVE.
12
In 1893, an Austrian jurist and magistrate named Hans Gross (1847–1915) published Criminal Investigation: A Practical Handbook for Magistrates, Police Officers and Lawyers. One of the founding fathers of criminal profiling, Gross, together with French criminologist Edmond Locard (1877–1966), was a pioneer in crime scene investigation (CSI). Gross set out three essential principles for CSI:
a) The hermetic isolation of the crime scene.b) Its ‘systematic excavation for material evidence’.c) The establishment of a system for ensuring that all evidence was carefully logged, retained and kept intact on its journeythrough the criminal justice system.
Gross was adamant that one person – the investigating officer (IO) – should be in charge of any crime scene and take responsibility for it. He had to be an observant and persistent person. ‘He will examine little pieces of paper that have been thrown away,’ wrote Gross. ‘Everything will afford an opportunity for drawing conclusions and explaining what must have previously taken place.’ He warned against holding preconceptions and taking things at face value, which he considered were rooted in human instinct and culture. We tend to see what we expect to see, and a good IO had to acknowledge and transcend this trait to see beyond the obvious. One of Gross’s innovations was the use of the microscope, which allowed investigators to examine particles of dust invisible to the naked eye. Locard built on Gross’s initial observation that dust retained all manner of information that could help identify criminals and explain exactly what had happened at the scene of the crime. Locard also took inspiration from the greatest fictional detective of the late 19th century, Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1859–1930) Sherlock Holmes. The exploits of the Baker Street private detective captivated late Victorian readers and did much to establish a positive image of
Above. crime scene photographs from alphonse bertillon’s album of paris crime scenes (1901–08). having developed the use of photography to capture ‘mug shots’ of career criminals, bertillon later used forensic photography to preserve the crime scene
and thus aid detection.
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Pauline Tarnowsky, the first female criminologist, publishes an anthro-pometric study of female criminals. Juan Vucetich establishes the first method of recording individualsfingerprints on file. In Argentina fingerprints are
’ used to convict Francisca Rojas of murdering her sons. Francis Galt
on outlines a statistical model of fingerprint analysis.
F
ounding father of criminal profiling Hans Gross formalizes the science of criminolo. Alphonse Bertillon testifies on
the authorship of a document during the Dreyfus Affair. Jean Pierre Mégnin
publishes his rwork on insects in cadav
evolutionary er Ink analysis identifies forged
s. documents in the trial of James Reavis.
C.
B.
A.
INTRODUCTION.
13
detection in the minds of the British public, who previously had perceived plain-clothed police as spies.
Locard’s work was taken up and developed by French criminologist Dr Jean Alexandre Eugène Lacassagne (1843–1924), head of the Department of Legal Medicine at the University of Lyon, and a close friend of the Parisian forensic specialist. Lacassagne devised a system for matching a bullet found at a crime scene to the gun that fired it, and was able to calculate the length of time a body had been putrefying, enabling detectives to determine time of death more accurately. In 1886, he founded the journal Archives danthropologie criminelle, which showcased innovations in criminal investigation from around