Silent Witnesses by Nigel McCrery Read Free Book Online Page B

system’s simplicity, they were also concerned that Galton had still not managed to distill everything he had observed into a fast and accurate practical system. The committee also traveled to Paris and were entertained by Bertillon, whose system they were convinced by, butfound complicated. They couldn’t make up their minds, and as they pondered, other countries were already deciding the same question for themselves. Austria, under the guidance of the father of criminology, Hans Gross, went for Bertillon’s system, as did Germany. Eventually the committee decided to introduce both
bertillonage
and fingerprinting.
    Meanwhile, in Argentina, a police officer named Juan Vucetich from Dalmatia (a region of Croatia) was to be responsible for a first in the history of forensics. Vucetich was an energetic man and, in 1891, having resided in Argentina for seven years, was made head of the Statistical Bureau of the La Plata Police. He and his team were ordered to introduce the
bertillonage
system and so set about measuring people and recording their statistics. During this time, however, Vucetich read about Galton’s work on fingerprints in the
Revue Scientifique.
The article, written by H. de Varigny, praised the concept of fingerprint identification, but also pointed out that—despite Galton’s success—he had still not fully solved the problem of classification.
    Vucetich was intrigued by this idea and decided to take up the challenge. He, too, quickly understood that the essential features of fingerprints were their triangles, or deltas, and that there were four basic types. He numbered the fingers one, two, three, and four and assigned the letters A, B, C, and D to the thumbs. So, for example, a suspect might now have her fingerprints recorded as: B, three, three, four, two. The system was easy to store and arrange, making it simple to cross-check for matches.
    In an echo of Bertillon’s situation years before, Vucetich unfortunately found that his bosses did not share his enthusiasm for fingerprints. But once again the fates were to intervene. InJune 1892 a double murder was committed in the small coastal town of Necochea, not far from Buenos Aires. The victims of the crime were two young children, a girl of four and a boy of six. They had been bludgeoned to death. Their mother, a twenty-six-year-old unmarried woman by the name of Francisca Rojas, had not only discovered the bodies but also claimed to have seen a man running from the scene of the crime. The man, she stated, was her lover, a farm worker called Velásquez. She said he had become a nuisance, making threats against her and her children in order to force her to marry him. When she came home, he had apparently run past her and out of the house, after which she found her children dead in a bloodstained bed.
    Velásquez was arrested and interviewed at length. This almost certainly involved some degree of torture. However, in spite of this, he continued to protest his innocence. Other “medieval” tricks were played on him, such as tying him up and leaving him on the bed with the murdered children all night. He still denied any involvement. Given all Velásquez had endured, some doubts began to be expressed about his guilt at this stage, but it was decided to try torture for another week. Even after suffering serious injuries, though, he continued to proclaim his innocence.
    Suspicion returned to the children’s mother, Francisca Rojas. It was discovered that she had a young lover who had allegedly said that he would not marry her because of her “illegitimate brats.” Alvarez, an investigating officer, now arrested her and tried similar rather questionable techniques to those he had used on Velásquez. Hoping to terrify her into confession, he had her tied up and left outside her own front door so that the spirits of the two children could take their revenge. He evenhad men make angry noises outside to try to