The First Fingerprint Convictions: Argentina, London, Chicago

In 1892, in the Argentine town of Necochea, police inspector Eduardo Alvarez removed a section of a door because it carried a bloody thumbprint. That print solved the murder of two children. It is considered the first homicide solved by fingerprint evidence.

Before fingerprints, police identified repeat offenders with anthropometry, a system of body measurements devised by Alphonse Bertillon in Paris and first put to use in 1882. Over the next three decades, a handful of cases on three continents replaced it. Here is how the first ones happened, and what later research said about the method they established.

Using finger marks as a signature was not new. The National Institute of Justice's Fingerprint Sourcebook says friction ridge impressions were used as proof of identity in China perhaps as early as 300 B.C. and in Japan as early as A.D. 702. What was new in the late 1800s was the idea that a mark left at a crime scene could identify one person. In 1858, William Herschel, a British administrator in Bengal, had a contractor put his handprint on a contract, and he went on to use prints to prevent fraud. In 1880, Henry Faulds, a Scottish medical missionary working in Japan, published an article in the journal Nature proposing that prints left at crime scenes could identify offenders. In 1892, Francis Galton published Finger Prints, the first book on the subject, establishing that ridge patterns were unique and persistent.

Argentina, 1892

Juan Vucetich, who worked for the police in La Plata, began experimenting with fingerprints in 1891 after studying Galton's research, and he devised his own classification system. A year later his method got its first real test.

In June 1892, the two young children of Francisca Rojas, a six-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl, were found killed in their home in Necochea. Rojas had a wound to her throat. She accused a man named Velasquez, who she said was jealous because she would not marry him. According to the NIJ sourcebook, local authorities beat Velasquez trying to force a confession. He did not confess.

Inspector Alvarez, who had been trained by Vucetich, was brought in from La Plata. He found the bloody thumbprint on a door, removed that section of wood, and compared the print with Rojas's own thumbprints. They matched. Shown the match, she confessed. Argentina went on to become the first country to rely solely on fingerprints as a method of identification.

India, 1897 and 1898

The British Empire moved next. In Bengal, Edward Henry, the inspector general of police, worked with Galton and two Indian police officers, Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose, to build a classification system. In 1897 the government of India approved fingerprints as the sole means of identifying prisoners.

A year later, a Bengal court used the system in a killing. A tea garden manager was found with his throat cut and his safe rifled. A blood smudge on a calendar in his dispatch box matched the right thumb of Kangali Charan, a former servant. The court's assessors would not convict him of murder because no one had seen the killing, but he was convicted of stealing the manager's property. The NIJ sourcebook calls it the first case in which fingerprint evidence secured a conviction.

London, 1905

England adopted the Henry system after a 1900 committee recommendation, and Scotland Yard's Fingerprint Bureau was established on July 1, 1901. The case that put the method in front of a murder jury began on Monday, March 27, 1905, at Chapman's Oil and Colour Shop at 34 Deptford High Street. William Jones arrived to find the shop closed. Inside, the manager, 71-year-old Thomas Farrow, was dead. His wife, Ann, 65, was alive but unconscious. Both had been beaten. Ann Farrow died on March 31 without regaining consciousness. The cash box was empty, and two masks made from stockings had been left behind.

On the inner tray of the cash box was a greasy thumbprint. Detective Inspector Charles Stockley Collins of the Fingerprint Bureau ruled out the Farrows and Sergeant Albert Atkinson, who had moved the box with his bare hands. The print matched nothing among the 80,000 to 90,000 sets on file.

Witnesses Henry Littlefield and Ellen Stanton identified Alfred Stratton as one of two men seen leaving the shop. His girlfriend, Annie Cromarty, told police he had gotten rid of his coat. Alfred was arrested on April 2 at the King of Prussia pub, and his brother Albert the next day. Collins matched Alfred's right thumb to the print on the cash box.

The trial opened at the Old Bailey on May 5, 1905. Prosecutor Richard Muir called more than 40 witnesses. Collins took the jury through the comparison. The NIJ sourcebook puts the number of matching characteristics at 11; other accounts say 12. The defense called Dr. John George Garson, who testified that the prints did not agree. On cross-examination, Muir produced two letters Garson had written, one to each side, offering his services. The judge, Mr. Justice Channell, called him "absolutely untrustworthy."

On May 6, after about two hours of deliberation, the jury convicted both brothers. They were hanged at Wandsworth Prison on May 23, 1905. It was the first murder trial in England in which fingerprints were used as evidence.

Chicago, 1910

In the United States, Dr. Henry P. de Forest began fingerprinting New York civil service applicants in 1902, the first systematic use of fingerprints in the country. The first criminal conviction came eight years later. Just after 2 a.m. on September 19, 1910, Clarence Hiller woke to the screams of his wife and daughter at their home at 1837 West 104th Street in Chicago. He confronted an intruder, and the two men fell down the stairs. His daughter later recalled hearing three shots. Hiller died by his front door.

Police stopped Thomas Jennings about half a mile away. He had been paroled six weeks earlier and was wearing a torn, bloodied coat and carrying a revolver. At the house, investigators found fingerprints in fresh paint on a railing the intruder had used to climb through a window. They photographed the prints and cut off the railing.

Four experts testified that the prints were Jennings's, among them Mary Holland, described by the NIJ as the first American woman to teach fingerprinting. The defense questioned the new technique, and attorney W.G. Anderson challenged the experts to lift his own print from a sheet of paper he had touched. The print was clearly visible, and the demonstration backfired. The jury convicted Jennings, and he was sentenced to hang. The Decatur Herald called it "the first conviction on finger-printing evidence in the history of this country."

On December 21, 1911, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the conviction in People v. Jennings. "This method of identification is in such general and common use that the courts cannot refuse to take judicial cognizance of it," the court wrote. Jennings was hanged at the Cook County Jail on February 16, 1912. Simon Cole, a historian of fingerprinting at the University of California, Irvine, has described Jennings as the earliest published American case discussing fingerprint evidence, which made it a precedent for the whole country.

Not infallible

None of this made fingerprinting infallible, and the record since shows it. In 2004, the FBI wrongly matched a print from the Madrid train bombings to Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer in Oregon. An FBI examiner had called the match 100 percent certain, and the bureau later apologized. In 2009, a National Academy of Sciences report noted that not all fingerprint evidence is equally good, because its value depends on the quality of the latent print.

In 2016, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology concluded that latent print analysis is a foundationally valid subjective method, but with a false positive rate that is substantial and likely higher than many jurors expect. In the two properly designed studies it reviewed, that rate could be as high as 1 error in 306 in an FBI study and 1 in 18 in a Miami-Dade study.

The method that convicted Rojas, the Strattons and Jennings works much the same way today. Examiners compare ridge patterns and details, and a person makes the call. The early courts accepted that judgment largely on trust. The modern question is different. It is not whether every finger is unique. It is how often examiners get the match right.

Sources

1. The Fingerprint Sourcebook, Chapter 1: History (National Institute of Justice)
2. The First Criminal Trial That Used Fingerprints as Evidence (Smithsonian Magazine, December 5, 2018)
3. Stratton Brothers case (Wikipedia)
4. Francisca Rojas (Wikipedia)
5. Murder of Clarence Hiller (Wikipedia)
6. Forensic Science in Criminal Courts: Ensuring Scientific Validity of Feature-Comparison Methods (PCAST, September 2016)

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