The Massey Murder by Charlotte Gray Read Free Book Online

the Paris Police Department. As police forces in Europe and North America expanded and became more professional in the nineteenth century, they found themselves hampered by their inability to track offenders. Hardened criminals were often sentenced as first offenders because there was no accurate way to identify recidivists or escapees. Bertillon, a self-important, obsessive little man with a thrusting beard and deep voice, was exasperated by this haphazard approach to identification. His father, an anthropologist and statistician, had spent his career researching the unique variations in physical characteristics in every human being, and Bertillon built on this research to develop a criminal identification scheme. He used his father’s measuring techniques on arrestees and convicts, carefully recording physical features (eye colour, shape and angles of the ear, brow, and nose) that no disguise could hide. He accumulated a vast amount of data on cards, which were then categorized and cross-indexed.
    In the late nineteenth century, when innovations like photography, the telephone, and the gramophone were taking off like wildfire, Bertillon’s system won instant popularity. No wonder—as the first use in history of scientific detection to catch a criminal, it combined two obsessions of the time: science and crime. Adopted in 1882 by the Paris police, “Bertillonage” became all the rage in France after it successfully identified 241 multiple offenders. In 1887, the warden of the Illinois State Penitentiary introduced it into the United States, and its use quickly spread across the continent. By the mid-1890s, Alphonse Bertillon was an international celebrity. Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective, showed “enthusiastic admiration ofthe French savant ,” and in Conan Doyle’s 1901 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles , another character described Holmes and Bertillon as being the two best detectives in Europe.
    However, there were flaws in both the system and its author. Pumped by success, Bertillon also claimed to be a handwriting expert. In the 1890s he had testified for the prosecution in the explosive Dreyfus affair, when a Jewish officer in the French army was wrongly accused of being a German spy. Bertillon’s rambling evidence helped condemn the innocent Captain Alfred Dreyfus to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Moreover, Bertillonage was fallible: different officers could make their measurement in different ways, while two individuals with the same measurements could be confused. In 1903, two men—one named Will West and the second William West—were convicted in Kansas for different crimes, yet were found to possess the same Bertillon measurements.
    The decline in Bertillon’s credibility was as rapid as his rise, after another set of unchanging human characteristics, fingerprints, was shown to be more reliable. By the early 1900s, police departments in Britain and the United States were switching over to a fingerprint classification system developed by Commissioner Edward Henry of Scotland Yard. Fingerprinting offered odds of 67 billion to one of any two individuals having identical prints. Alphonse Bertillon died in 1914, a year before Carrie faced the calipers. By then, the Toronto Police Department was one of the few forces still laboriously measuring lobes, noses, and feet. Judging by the skimpy records in its leather-bound Bertillon Register, it did so with dwindling conviction of its usefulness.
    Toronto’s police department was old-fashioned and struggled to keep up with its British equivalent, the Metropolitan Police Force in London’s Scotland Yard. The man in charge of Toronto’s police, Colonel Henry Grasett, was a contemporary of Colonel Denison’s who shared the Beak’s militaristic pretensions and patrician attitudes. Thetwo men saw each other regularly at the Toronto Club. A militia officer born into a prominent Toronto family (his father was rector of St.