This edition does not include illustrations.A fascinating exploration into the history of science and crime. In the tradition of ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’, FINGERPRINTS is the story of the race to discover the secrets trapped in the whorls and arches found on the palm of one’s hand.In 1905 an elderly couple were found murdered in their shop in Deptford, London. The only evidence at the scene of the crime was a sweaty fingerprint on a cashbox. Was it possible that a single fingerprint could be enough to lead to a conviction? Could the pattern of these tracks hold the secrets of the science of identification?Through the story of three brilliant men: William Herschel, a colonial administrator in Indian, Henry Faulds, a missionary in Japan and Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, the extraordinary story of the history of fingerprinting is revealed.It is a story of intellectual skulduggery and scientific brilliance. Packed with an extraordinary cast of individuals whose scientific breakthroughs helped solve one of the most brutal murders in English history and shape our understanding of identity forever.
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Colin Beavan. Fingerprints: Murder and the Race to Uncover the Science of Identity
Fingerprints. Murder and the Race to Uncover the Science of Identity. COLIN BEAVAN
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Chronology of Fingerprints
One The Shocking Tragedy at Deptford
Two To Catch a Crook
Three Like Rats with No Rat-Catcher
Four Marks on a Cocktail Glass
Five In a Criminal’s Bones
Six A Biological Coat of Arms
Seven Britain’s Identity Crisis
Eight The Case of the Little Blue Notebook
Nine An Innocent in Jail
Ten The Stratton Trial
Eleven Verdicts
Epilogue
Source Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
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To my Mom and Dad
—Samuel Clemens, writing as
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In his office loomed a huge wooden cabinet with 1,024 pigeonholes accommodating each of the classifications into which an individual’s set of ten fingerprints could fall. A handful of fingerprint experts bustled back and forth between their workbenches and the cabinet’s cataloged fingertip impressions. Examined closely, a fingertip reveals a pattern of parallel ridges interspersed with furrows, as though of a diminutive farm field. The furrows are like gutters into which moisture flows so that it is not trapped in a slippery film between the fingertip and whatever it is trying to grip.
It is not the ridges’ function that makes them of interest to the identification expert, however. What fascinates him instead is the fact that the intricate ridge patterns are unique to each finger. A fingerprint expert can tell apart the marks of two digits more easily than he can differentiate two people’s faces. The facial features of identical twins, for example, can be mistaken, but their fingerprints can never be confused by a trained expert. A person’s fingerprint set is therefore a permanent and unmistakable record of his identity. It is like a biological seal which, once impressed, can never be denied. Eighty thousand such biological seals of convicted criminals crowded the pigeonholes in Scotland Yard’s fingerprint branch.
