Silent Witnesses by Nigel McCrery Page A

surprising—and to his credit—that Bertillon readily accepted its value. Indeed, since 1900 he had been adding fingerprints to his own files, which proved to be invaluable. On October 17, 1902, Bertillon was asked to attend the scene of a murder at the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The victim was a valet by the name of Joseph Reibel. He was discovered sitting in a chair. His shirttails were pulled out of his trousers and his legs were outstretched. The murderer had strangled him by hand. The room was a mess with overturned furniture, suggesting that a struggle had taken place. This, combined with the discovery that some drawers and a cabinet had been forced open, suggested that the motive was robbery. Bertillon, however, wasn’t convinced; the amount of money thathad been stolen was hardly enough to justify murdering a man.
    A glass panel in the cabinet had been smashed and there was blood on the glass, suggesting that the culprit might have been injured. One of the police inspectors went to pick up one of the shards, but Bertillon stopped him; he had spotted a fingerprint. In fact, it transpired that the killer had left an almost perfect set of fingerprints in blood. With great care, Bertillon had the glass taken back to his laboratory and photographed. From this he produced a first-class image of three fingerprints and a thumbprint.
    Of course, Bertillon now wanted to make a match, but the only chance of that was if the killer already had a record. Initial results were discouraging, but Bertillon kept searching and eventually, in a moment of great elation similar to the one he’d experienced during the Dupont case, he discovered a match for the fingerprints. The card belonged to a well-known twenty-five-year-old swindler called Henri-Léon Scheffer. Scheffer was tracked down to Marseilles, but before the police had time to arrest him, he turned himself in and confessed to the murder, explaining that he and Reibel had been lovers and had fought and that he had stolen the money to try to cover his tracks. Once again fingerprints had triumphed. Bertillon could now add to his long list of successes being the first man in Europe to solve a murder by way of fingerprints. Even so, he still did not adopt fingerprints as his primary means of criminal identification, refusing to give up his own system of body measurements. To have accepted that fingerprints alone could operate as well as, or better than, his own system, rather than simply being a helpful addition to it, would have meant admitting that his life’s work no longer had a useful application.
    It was also around the turn of the century that fingerprints at last began to show their worth in Great Britain. On Derby Day 1902, Scotland Yard deployed a number of fingerprint experts to the horse race. Since its beginnings in 1780, the Derby had become a well-known target for pickpockets and other criminals, who would flock there from across the country. All day long the fingerprint experts inked the fingers of arrested suspects. When, at the end of the day, they came to cross-check the fingerprints against those on file, they discovered that twenty-nine out of the fifty-four men from whom they had obtained prints had previous convictions. When the suspects were put before the magistrate the following day, these records were produced. With such strong evidence of their previous convictions, they were all sent to prison for at least twice as long as a first-time offender would have been.
    But it wasn’t until 1905 that fingerprints were first used to solve a murder case in Britain. The case in question was that of the infamous Deptford murders.
    At 8:30 AM on Monday, March 27, 1905, one William Jones arrived at his place of work, Chapman’s Oil and Color Shop on the High Street in Deptford, just southeast of London. He found it still closed, which immediately concerned him, as it would normally be opened up by the owner, seventy-one-year-old Thomas