^sifiipii.w^^ 1^1 , J I.e. Hi/ A/6/ Cornell University Law Library THE GIFT OF Profesaor Clyde W. Mason CJhemic'ai &' Metailurgiba'l'E^ Cornell UniverMty* I tl^^ N. Y. Dat^arch 14, 1958 Cornell University Library HV 8073.M68 Science and the criml^^^^^^ DATE DUE PHJNTED IN U.SA Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924024887212 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL UNIFORM WITH THIS BOOK HYPNOTISM AND SUGGESTION By Bernard Hollander, M.D. " It is the work of a man of estab- lished leputation, who has devoted himself for years to the subject, and whose aim it is to tell what Hypnotism really is, what it can do, and to what conclusions it seems to point." — Globe. ( //(/?f//r/i/o/'''//i€^y/(M^'/aiin'j ruyM//^/-. TRIAL OF CAROLINE RUDD Frontispiece SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL BY C. AINSWORTH MITCHELL BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY igii '^9'rs77 \v .,-^ To Mark Hanbury Beaufoy, Esq., J. P. AS A Mark of Regard and Esteem PREFACE In the loUowing pages I have endeavoured to give some accov^nt of the ways in which scientific discovery has been u\ilised in the struggle between society and the criming, I have tried to describe the principles upon which different kinds of scientific evidence are based, and at the same time to bring human interest into what would otherwise tend to be dry detail by giving an outline of trials in which such evidence has been given. It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to mention that in many of these illustrative trials the accused persons were proved innocent of the charges brought against them, and that although their cases were tried in the criminal courts the title of the book in no way applies to them. For the accounts of the older trials I have drawn freely upon Cobbett's State Trials, Paris and Fon- blanque's Medical Jurisprudence, and the first edition of Taylor's Medical Jurisprudence, while I must also acknowledge my indebtedness to the Circumstantial Evidence of Mr. Justice Wills and the recent excellent lectures on Forensic Chemistry, by Mr. Jago. In the later cases I have mainly relied upon con- temporary accounts and upon my own impressions of some of the trials at which I have been present. VUl PREFACE My best thanks are due to all those who have given me valuable and ungrudging assistance. In particular I would mention Major Richardson, who has kindly given me a photograph of one of his trained blood- hounds and has allowed me to quote the description of an actual man hunt with bloodhounds, from his book. War, Police, and Watch Dogs ; and Mademoiselle Arlette Clary (and the Daily Mirror) who have supplied me with a photograph of a Paris police dog. I am further indebted to the late Sir Francis Galton and his pubhshers, Messrs. MacmiUan & Co., who gave me permission to reproduce illustrations from his book on Finger Prints ; and to Mr. Thome Baker and the Daily Mirror for photographs illustrating the use of telegraphy in transmitting portraits. The excellent drawings of the hairs of different animals were made by my friend Mr. R. M. Prideaux, and are reproduced here by the kind permission of Messrs. Scott Greenwood & Co. Finally, I would thank the proprietors of Knowledge and the Editor, Mr. Wilfred Mark Webb, for the loan of various blocks and for permitting me to make use of material from several articles of mine on handwriting, which have appeared in that journal. C. A. M. White Cottage, Amerskam Common, Buckinghamshire. CONTENTS CHAPTER I Introduction PAGE Conflict between the Law-maker and the Law-breaker — Illustrations of Deductive Reasoning in Criminal Cases — Scientific Evidence — Scientific Assistance for the Accused — Instances of Advantages of Conflict of Scientific Evidence — Scientific Partisanship. ...... 1 CHAPTER II Detection and Capture of the Criminal Contrasts between Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries — ^Margaret Catchpole — Tawell — Crippen — Por- traits and the Press — Charlesworth Case — Bloodhounds — Police Dogs — Circumstantial Detection .... 22 CHAPTER III Personal Identification McKeever's Experiment on FalUbility of Eye-witnesses — Gorse Hall Murder — Cases of Mistaken Identity — Gun- flash Recognition — Self-deception — Tichbome Case. . 37 CHAPTER IV Systems of Identification Photography — Anthropometry — Finger-prints and their Uses 48 CHAPTER V Identification and Handwriting Heredity — Emotional Influences — Effects of Disease on Handwriting ........ 70 X CONTENTS CHAPTER VI Evidence as to Handwriting FAOB Illustrative Cases — Handwriting Experts ... 85 CHAPTER VII Forged Documents Use of Microscope — Erasures — Photographic Methods — ^Type- written Matter — Examinations of Charred Fragments — Forgery of Bank Notes. ....•• 93 CHAPTER VIII Distinguishing Inks in Handwriting Elizabethan Ink — ^Milton's Bible — ^Age of Inks — Carbon Inks— Herculaneum MSS. — Forgery of Ancient Documents 105 CHAPTER IX Two Notable Trials Trial of Brinkley— Trial of Robert Wood . . . .116 CHAPTER X Sympathetic Inks . . .130 CHAPTER XI Remarkable Forgery Trials Trials — ^William Hale — ^The Perreaus-— Caroline Rudd — Dr. Dodd— Whalley Will Case— Richer, etc. . . .135 CHAPTER XII Identification of Human Blood and Human Hair Structure of Blood — Human Blood — Blood of Animals — Blood Crystals— Libellers of Sir E. Godfrey— Trial of Nation in 1857 — Physiological Tests — Precipitines — First Trial in France — Gorse Hall Trials — Human Hair — Hairs of Animals ......... 154 CONTENTS XI CHAPTER XIII Early Poisoning Trials PAGE Murder of Sir T. Overbury — ^Mary Blandy — Katharine Nairn, etc. 171 CHAPTER XIV Notable Poisoning Trials Use of Poisons — Arsenic and Antimony — Chapman Case — Strychnine in Palmer Trial — Physiological Tests — Case of Freeman — Error from Quantitative Deductions — Poisonous Food Given to Animals — ^Mary Higgins — ^Negative Result of Physiological Tests-^Hyoscyamus Poisons — Crippen Case — Experiment on Cats — Time Limit for Action of Arsenic — French Case . . . . . . . 190 CHAPTER XV The Maybrick Case . . .206 CHAPTER XVI Adulteration of Food National Loss from Adulteration — " Adulterated " Elec- tricity — The Beer Conner — Conflict of Evidence — The Notice Dodge — Preservatives — Standards for Food — Court of Reference — ^Administration of the Law .214 Index 239 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS TRIAL OF CAROLINE RUDD WAR PLAN SENT BY WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY PHOTO SENT BY TELEGRAPHY FROM PARIS . PORTRAIT SENT BY " WIRELESS " MAJOR RICHARDSON'S MAN-TRACKER " PATHAN " FRENCH POLICE DOG .... PURKENJE's STANDARD FINGER-PRINTS TYPES OF FINGER-PRINTS .... HEREDITY IN HANDWRITING INFLUENCE OF TRAINING ON HANDWRITING SIGNATURES OF NAPOLEON AT DIFFERENT PERIODS CAREER ...... PAGE Frontispiece 24 26 28 30 32 64 66 71 74 WRITERS CRAMP ..... SPECIMEN OF AGRAPHIA .... WRITING OF LENAU, BEFORE AND DURING INSANITY WRITING OF HOLDERLIN, BEFORE AND DURING INSANITY MIRROR WRITING IN PARALYSIS . HYPNOTIC HANDWRITING .... garibaldi's SIGNATURE .... DETECTION OF FORGERY BY MEANS OF CAMERA AND MICROSCOPE xiii 77 78 78 79 79 80 82 83 100 XIV LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS further specimens of detection of forgery, and tests to distinguish old from new inks elizabethan domestic recipe for ink the tintometer ...... goat's and cow's hair ..... kangaroo's and human hair, and the hair OF A CAT AND A DOG ....... fibres of CHINESE SILK .... rabbit's and HORSE-HAIR .... wool fibres from different breeds OF SHEEP COTTON AND FLAX FIBRES .... ANNE TURNER ....... 102 107 109 162 164 164 166 168 170 172 Science and the Criminal CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Conflict between the Law-maker and the Law-breaker — Illustrations of Deductive Reasoning in Criminal Cases — Scientific Evidence — Scientific Assistance for the Accused — Instances of Advantages of Conflict of Scientific Evidence — Scientific Partisanship. In the constant state of warfare between the law- maker and the law-breaker, which began when man- kind first organised itself into communities and has existed ever since, every new invention or practical application of scientific discovery has supplied each side with new weapons frequently of much greater precision. The advantage thus conferred tends to be on the side of the law-maker but not invariably so ; for in spite of all the facilities of investigation now available it is surprising how many crimes remain undetected, or how frequently in suspicious cases it is impossible to discover the truth. The law-breaker's primitive weapon of natural cunning has thus often proved more than a match for aU the weapons at the disposal of his opponent. There is much to be said, therefore, for the sugges- tion which has recently been put forward on many 1 I— <«Sl) 2 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL sides that a department specially trained for the work of criminal investigation should be created. Under the present conditions the rank and file of the detective force, recruited as it is from the best of the uniformed policemen, contains many men of acute intellect and reasoning capacity, but it cannot be doubted but that in many cases their efficiency would have been enormously increased by a scientific training. The present system somewhat recalls that under which doctors acquired their knowledge of medicine in the early part of last century. Their mistakes taught them what not to do, but in the meantime the patient sometimes died. Methods of scientific reasoning so as to draw deduc- tions from observed facts cannot be acquired by solitary night watches upon a " beat," nor does the facility for breaking up a tangle in traffic which the constable acquires as the outcome of his daily duties, necessarily render him more capable of extricating from a mass of confused details the essential facts upon which stress should be laid. In some of the unsolved mysteries that have occurred during the last few years the presence of a highly trained intellect at the first hour of the investigation might conceivably have led to the detection of the criminal. As a rule, it is only after the first examina- tion is over and the case appears likely to be a difficult one, that the best brains of the department are brought to bear upon the facts, and it may then be too late for effective action. It should be made possible for a man who possesses INTRODUCTION 3 a facility for this type of work to join the criminal investigation department without having to go through the routine work of a pohce constable, which wiU probably add nothing to his powers of following up a clue ; but, on the other hand, this period of probation should be occupied by practical training in scientific methods of working. The present conditions both of payment and of status are not of the kind that will attract the highest type of brain to the work of criminal investigation, and yet there is no reason why it should not be made to offer the advantages of other branches of professional work. An apt illustration of the use of acute observation and deduction in solving a mystery is afforded by the strange story of a shooting accident, that, according to a writer in one of the leading morning papers, took place many years ago. A country gentleman was found lying dead upon a sofa, with the whole of the charge of a sporting gun in his body. The discharged gun was hanging in its ugual place upon the wall, and there were no indica- tions of any struggle having taken place. All the circumstances apparently pointed to the man having been murdered in his sleep, for it was impossible for him to have shot himself and have then replaced the gun upon the wall, and strong suspicion fell upon one of the servants in the house. This man was arrested, and would probably have been convicted had it not been for the detective noticing that the dead man's watch, which had been smashed by some of the shot, had been stopped early 4 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL in the afternoon, and that at exactly the same moment the sun was focussed through a bottle of water that was standing upon the table in such a way that the ray fell upon the nipple of the gun upon the wall. Accordingly he loaded the gun again, hung it in the same spot, and placed a dummy figure upon the sofa, and as soon as the sun's rays passed through this unintended burning-glass and were focussed upon the gun, an explosion occurred and the contents were discharged into the figure. The writer has been unable to trace the date of this occurrence, but even if it is not founded upon fact it is not impossible, for there are undoubtedly cases where papers have been set on fire by the rays of the sun being concentrated upon them, through a bottle of water. An instance of the way in which one small fact may give conclusive proof that a crime has been com- mitted is afforded by the trial of Swan and Jefferies in the early part of last century. The prisoners, who were indoor servants, had com- mitted a murder and then raised an alarm with the object of throwing the suspicion upon burglars, who they alleged had broken into the house. But an examination of the grass outside the house showed that although dew had fallen heavily through the night there were no indications of its having been disturbed by footsteps. This piece of circumstantial evidence led to their arrest, and they were subsequently convicted and executed. Equally convincing were the clues that led to the arrest of Courvoisier in 1840, for the murder of Lord INTRODUCTION 5 William Russell, who was then seventy-five years of age. The prisoner had only been in the service of the murdered man for a short time. He stated that on the night before the murder he had left his master reading in bed, as was his frequent custom, and a fact in support of this was that the candle had burned down to the socket. Early in the morning the housemaid found the silver plate scattered about the room, and various articles of value tied up in bundles, as though burglars had broken into the house and had been interrupted in their work. She called Courvoisier, and he appeared almost immediately, fuUy dressed, and going into the room of Lord Wilham Russell found him with his throat cut. On a door were marks which indicated that it had been broken in by the supposed burglars, but closer examination showed that the damage had been done from the inside. In addition to this, any burglars entering the house through this door must have passed over a wall, and this was found to be thickly coated with dust which had not been disturbed. For a long time no trace of the missing valuables were discovered, but finally after a thorough search of the premises, some of the money was found hidden behind the skirting in the pantry of the accused, while later on the stolen plate was discovered in the keeping of a man with whom Courvoisier had formerly hved. Mainly on the circumstantial evidence of these facts 6 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL the prisoner was convicted ; afterwards he made a full confession of the crime. Clever deductive reasoning was also shown in the following case, in which the author of a shooting outrage that occurred in 1831 at Ayr was discovered in a singular manner. Someone had maliciously fired a gun into a church, and had hoped to escape detection. It was noticed, however, that some of the bullets, after having passed through the windows, had left a mark upon the wall opposite. By drawing a straight line between these marks and the holes in the windows, and extending the hne outside the church, the other end was found in a window on the other side of the street. Subsequently other proof was obtained that the gun had been fired from this window. Numerous cases might also be quoted where the trained observation of a doctor has called attention to some slight point which would otherwise have been overlooked, but which has furnished the clue to the detection of a crime. In the year 1806 a man named Blight was shot with a pistol at Deptford by someone unknown, and died from the wound. Sir Astley Cooper, who was called in to attend to the victim, carefully noted the relation- ship of the body to other objects in the room, and from the position of the wound concluded that the shot had been fired by a left-handed person. This inference drew suspicion upon a gentleman named Patch who was the only left-handed person who had been seen with Mr. Blight. He was a close personal friend of the latter, and no one had dreamed of suspecting him of the crime. The results of further inquiries INTRODUCTION 7 proved that this man had fired the shot, and after his conviction he confessed that he had been guilty of the murder. The fact that a weapon is tightly held in the hand of a person who has been shot is strong presumptive evidence that it is a case of suicide, since it is improb- able that the hand of a dead man could subsequently be made to grasp a pistol. There is a remarkable case on record, however, in which the fact that a pistol was found clenched in the hand of a dead man was at first regarded as evidence of a murder. A son of the deceased, who had slept in the same room was accused of having killed him and of then placing the discharged pistol in his hand to give the suggestion of suicide. Experiments were made in which the hand holding the pistol was lifted into the position in which it must have been held if it had been a case of suicide, and in each instance the hand, when allowed to fall, did not retain the pistol. For the defence medical evidence was given that the spasmodic contraction of the muscles after death would account for the pistol being still clenched in the hand, while the inability of the hand to grasp it afterwards did not prove anything. Evidence as to the presence of a motive was given, but the scientific evidence was regarded as decisive and the prisoner was discharged. The question whether a person who has apparently committed suicide could possibly have made use of the degree of force to which circumstances pointed has frequently arisen. The most notable instance of the kind was in 8 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL reference to the Earl of Essex who was found dead in the Tower in July, 1683, his throat having been cut. A razor was lying by his side with its blade notched, and public opinion was strongly divided as to whether he had committed suicide or had been murdered. The medical men who supported the former view explained the notches upon the razor blade as the result of its having been drawn backwards and forwards across the neck bone, although for a suicide to have done this would have been an impossibility. Occasions have arisen where a chemical expert has been asked to state whether a gun or pistol found lying near a body has or has not been recently discharged. Even in the case of firearms that had been loaded with black powder no very definite answer can usually be given to this question. Taylor suggested that the presence of potassium sulphide (formed from the powder) adhering to the barrel would indicate that the gun had recently been fired, whereas after a short time this sulphide would become oxidised, and no longer give the reactions of a sulphide. After a longer time traces of iron oxide formed from the iron of the barrel might be expected. It would not be safe to lay stress upon conclusions based upon such data as these, and at best they could only afford corroborative evidence. An amusing instance within the present writer's experience affords another example of the way in which a trifling point being overlooked may be strong presumptive evidence of attempted fraud. A family of the name of, say, Abendessig, effected an insurance INTRODUCTION 9 again^^ burglary with a company which may be describfefi as the Safeguard Assurance Co. It waX not long before they were the unhappy victims oi a burglary in which Miss Abendessig lost several valuable pieces of jewellery including a watch, a diamond ring, and several brooches. In proof of her claim she produced receipts from the jeweller from whom she stated she had bought these articles, the total value of which was given at £150. There were three receipts in all, dated at intervals of two or three months, the first being made out to Miss Abendessig and the last to Mrs. Lab, she having been married in the interval, and the second to her father, Simeon Abendessig. . The Safeguard Assurance Co. had a suspicion that the jeweller, who had an address but no shop, was in league with the Abendessigs, and that the first and third receipts had been written at the same time. The present writer was therefore asked to examine these documents to see whether any evidence of the date of writing could be obtained. They were both written in blue ink upon common billheads, but the fact that the ink and paper were of the same kind was no proof that they were not genuine receipts. When, however, the receipt stamps were examined under the microscope it was obvious that the right- hand side of one stamp corresponded with the left- hand side of the other stamp. That is to say, the httle projections of paper left when two stamps are torn apart across the perforation exactly coincided in every 10 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL instance, a long projection on one being matched by a short projection on the other, and so on. The exact coincidence of seventeen points could not have been the result of chance, and the stamps on the two receipts must therefore originally have been attached to one another in the sheet. The further inference was that the jeweller must either have torn them apart and put one on the earlier receipt and the other on the later one at the same time, or he must have had the second stamp put aside for three months and then af&xed it to the later receipt. A much more obvious slip than this was made some years ago in a bogus claim upon a fire insurance com- pany, the story of which is related in Lord Brampton's " Reminiscences." The fire broke out on the premises of a firm of tailors, and it was claimed by them that the whole of their stock, including many hundred pairs of trousers, had been destroyed. The insurance company, after examining the burnt- out building, instructed a number of their agents to sift carefuUy the whole of the ashes. At the hearing of the case the counsel for the com- pany remarked that it was strange that in a fire in which so many pairs of trousers had been burned the metal buttons upon them should not have been found. On the next day the tailors appeared with a whole bucketful of buttons, but their production was too late to be convincing, for the ashes had been thor- oughly sifted before the claimants attempted to make good their oversight, and only a very few trouser buttons had been discovered. On the other hand, the danger of jumping to a INTRODUCTION 11 sudden conclusion from circumstances has been fre- quently demonstrated. Thus, a very extraordinary case in which some facts that clearly pointed to the guilt of a prisoner were found to have misled many wit- nesses, was tried in 1813 at the assizes at Bury St. Edmunds. A farmer who owned upwards of 1,200 acres was accused of burglary, and as evidence against him it was positively stated that certain articles in his possession had been stolen from the house. The witnesses swore that they had identified some sheets by stains upon them and a cask by the fact of its being marked with the letters P.C. 84 in a circle. For the defence, witnesses stated that the prisoner was in possession of sheets stained in exactly the same way, and that the cask was one of those in which he had received cranberries from Norwich, all of which casks were marked in the same manner. The prisoner was acquitted. Scientific testimony is another form of the so-called " circumstantial evidence," and as such is sometimes looked upon with suspicion. Yet in how few cases is it possible to produce the man who can say, " I saw the deed done," and even in such cases, what errors of identification may' occur ! In far the greater number of crimes the proof must depend to a large extent upon the evidence of circumstances. But these must be so convincing that it is impossible in reason to draw any other conclusion from them. In this country it is the duty of the prosecution to prove the guilt, and unless that is done in such a way as to leave no shadow of doubt in the minds of the jury, a prisoner is entitled to be acquitted. 12 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL There must be no speculation upon a man's guilt. A man is regarded as innocent so long as it is impos- sible to connect to him the last link in a long chain of circumstantial evidence. In the brief accounts of various celebrated trials in the following pages an attempt has been made to give an outUne of the scientific circumstantial evidence that has led to the conviction or acquittal of the prisoners. In some of these trials proof of guilt has been overwhelming, although the testimony of an eye-witness has been lacking, but in others the Scotch verdict of " Not proven " (a curious equivalent of which, however, was once given in the trial of Mrs. Rudd) would be a more fitting deduction from the evidence, than the alternative of " Guilty " or " Not guilty," which is aU that is allowed by the English law. A good illustration of the value of scientific proof was seen, in 1884, at the trial of a woman named Gibbons on the charge of having shot her husband. For the defence it was urged that the man had committed suicide. There were four bullet wounds from a revolver in the body, and the medical evidence went to prove that although any one of the wounds might have been inflicted by the man himself, it was extremely improbable that all of them had been. Moreover, some of them were in such a position that they could only have been self-inflicted if the revolver had been held in the left hand, whereas witnesses testified that the deceased was not left-handed. The prisoner was found guilty. Attempts have frequently been made by defending INTRODUCTION 13 counsel to obtain permission for a scientific man to be present on behalf of a prisoner at any examination made before a trial, but all such requests are invariably refused. It is quite a common occurrence, however, for the evidence given by scientific witnesses for the prosecu- tion to be controverted by scientific witnesses for the defence, and the most recent instance of the kind at the trial of Crippen wiU be fresh in the memory of everyone. Where there is any possibility of doubt it should be possible for every prisoner to obtain scientific assistance. An accused person who lacks the means to procure legal assistance in his defence has assigned to him by the Court a barrister who wiU represent his interests and see that they do not suffer from ignorance of legal technicalities. This principle might well be extended so as to cover the ground of scientific evidence. Under the present conditions the prosecution has unlimited facilities for appl5dng every description of test, but it has not always been easy for the representatives of the accused person to obtain scientific help in criticising the nature of this evidence. Scientific evidence should be, and usually is, quite impartial, but the everyday conflict of honest opinion in civil actions illustrates the possibiUty of mistakes' occurring or of certain points that would tell in favour of the accused being overlooked. For instance, suppose a stain on the clothes of a person accused of murder were examined by a chemist for the prosecution and found to consist of blood. 14 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL The fact would teU against the accused, even though the witness (as in a recent case) could express no opinion whether it was human blood, or the blood of an animal. Assuming in this hypothetical trial that the blood stain was really due to rabbit's blood, another chemist representing the prisoner might be acquainted with the comparatively recent physiological methods of distinguishing between the blood of different animals, and thus be able to prove the real nature of the blood stain and break one of the links in the chain of evidence. In most of the important criminal trials the scien- tific evidence is given by more than one witness, and the possibility of mistake is thus greatly reduced, but this is not invariably the rule. Scientific criticism derived from a first-hand exam- ination of the material would be of much more value than the criticism of the statement of the results, and might have considerable weight upon the conclusions of the jury. A defending counsel cross-examining a scientific witness is usually dealing with an unfamiliar subject, and lacks the specialised knowledge that would enable him to point out the weak points in the evidence. When a wealthy person is on trial, however, the counsel has the advantage of getting the best expert advice upon the scientific matters put forward in evidence, and is thus able to lay stress on all that wiU help his client, but a poor prisoner lacks this advantage, and therefore rims a greater chance of being convicted. An early trial in which the prisoner owed his acquittal to a conflict of scientific evidence was that INTRODUCTION 15 of Spencer Cowper, the grandfather of Cowper, the poet, who was tried at the Hertford Assizes in 1699 for the murder of a young gentlewoman named Sarah Stout. With Cowper were also tried several of his friends, whose remarks having been overheard had suggested that they were aware of what had happened to the girl. Cowper, who was a barrister, defended himself and incidentally his companions. The story told by the prosecution was that at the previous Assizes the prisoner had stayed for a night at the house of Mrs. Stout, the mother of Sarah Stout. The servant-maid stated that she had been told to prepare Mr. Cowper's bed, and that when she came downstairs again, it then being about eleven o'clock in the evening, he had gone out, presumably with Sarah Stout, who was never again seen alive. The next day her dead body was found floating upon the river. The condition of the body was, it was asserted, con- clusive proof that she had been strangled and then thrown into the water ; for, to quote the words of the counsel for the prosecution, " when her body came to be viewed it was very much wondered at ; for in the first place it is contrary to nature that any persons that drown themselves should float upon the water. We have sufiicient evidence that it is a thing that never was ; if persons come alive into the water, then they sink ; if dead, then they swim. At first it was thought that such an accident might happen though they could not imagine any cause for this woman to do so, who had so great prosperity, had so good an 16 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL estate, and had no occasion to do an action upon herself so wicked and so barbarous. Upon view of the body, it did appear there had been violence used to the woman ; there was a crease round her neck, she was bruised about her ear ; so that it did seem as if she had been strangled either by hands or a rope." The evidence brought forward to support the theory that Sarah Stout had been kiUed, before being thrown into the water, included that of several local doctors who had examined the body, and also that of several London doctors who were called in as expert witnesses. These all gave as their opinion that the body of a person who had been drowned must contain water in the thorax, and that since no water was present in the body, death must have been caused in some other way. Two seamen of the Royal Navy were also put into the box, and both were emphatic in their opinion that the body of a person who had been drowned would sink, while a dead body thrown into the water would float. Spencer Cowper, who, as has been stated, conducted his own defence, cross-examined the medical witnesses and made them admit that they had no knowledge of the way in which the body of a person who had drowned himself would behave. He entered a strong protest against the body having been examined after the coroner's inquest (at which a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind had been found) by medical men acting in the interests of the relations of the dead woman, with the intention of becoming prosecutors. " If," said he, " they intended to have prosecuted me or any other gentleman upon INTRODUCTION 17 this evidence, they ought to have given us notice, that we might have had some surgeons among them to superintend their proceeding. My Lord, with sub- mission, this ought not to be given in evidence." The judge overruled this objection, sa5dng that supposing an ill thing had been done in taking up the body without some order, that was no reason why the evidence should not be heard. In further cross-examination Mr. Cowper succeeded in throwing doubt upon the statements of witnesses, who alleged that they had seen marks of strangling, and produced witnesses to prove that any marks upon the body had been the result of contact with stakes in the bed of the river. Then he brought forward his own expert medical evidence, which was given by ten of the leading doctors of the day, including Sir Hans Sloane and the celebrated surgeon WiUiam Cowper. These held a different view from that of the doctors called for the prosecution, and gave their reasons for concluding that the appearance of the body was quite consistent with death by drowning. Some described experiments they had made upon animals, which proved that when killed and thrown into the water the body sank at first and then rose to the surface, and also that drowning could take place without much water being swallowed. As proof of the dead woman having been of a melancholy disposition and not of sound mind, letters of hers were read to the jury, but these her mother and brother would not admit were in her handwriting, since, they asserted, it did not suit her character. (See p. 85.) 18 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL The judge, Sir Henry Hatsell, in summing up confessed that he was very much puzzled, and that he perceived that " doctors do differ in their notions about these things." The conclusion of his remarks is worthy of quotation : " I am sensible I have omitted many things ; but I am a little faint, and cannot remember any more of the evidence." It is not surprising that, soon after Queen Anne came to the throne, he was removed from the bench. The jury beheved the medical witnesses for the defence, and after a short discussion found Spencer Cowper and the other prisoners " Not guilty." To come to more modem times, the advantage of a conflict of scientific opinion to the accused was seen in the celebrated Maybrick poisoning case. At the trial evidence was given by Professor Tidy to the effect that the symptoms and appearances were not those of arsenical poisoning and that the amounts of arsenic found in the body were not greater than those present in cases where arsenical medicines had been taken months before death, and where there was no sus- picion of poisoning. Although the prisoner was convicted and sentenced to death, there can be Httle doubt but that this evidence had an important influ- ence in determining the subsequent alteration of the sentence to penal servitude. There is no necessity for such scientific assistance given to the defence to degenerate into partisanship, such as was shown at the trial of Palmer for poisoning in 1856. That case was characterised by many re- markable features, the suspected person, for instance, INTRODUCTION 19 being allowed access to the bottle in which had been placed the material taken from the body for analysis, and also being given the opportunity of attempting to destroy it. Prior to the trial, Taylor, the chemist who was to give evidence as to the presence of poison in the body, communicated with the papers, while Herapath, one of the witnesses called for the defence, pubUcly accused Taylor of incompetence. So acrid were the statements of the scientific wit- nesses for the defence at the trial that the judge commented in vigorous terms upon their evidence as having been given with the object of obtaining an acquittal at all costs. " It is indispensable," he said, " to the administration of justice that a witness should not be turned into an advocate, nor an advocate into a witness." In another poisoning trial which took place three years later, the chemical evidence brought forward by the defence resulted in the prisoner being set free, after having been sentenced to death. In this case a doctor named Smethurst was accused of poisoning a young woman named Isabella Banks. Dr. Taylor, who was the chief chemical witness called for the prosecution, had found arsenic in material from the body, although he could not detect any remaining in the tissues. On the other hand, Dr. B. W. Richardson, who was called as a witness for the defence, stated that arsenic was a cumulative poison, and that if it had been given for a long period, as alleged, traces must inevitably have been present. Hence in his opinion the absence of arsenic in the 20 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL tissues was conclusive proof that death was not the result of slow arsenical poisoning. The medical evidence called by the defence, also left room for some doubt as to whether death might not have been the result of dysentery, the symptoms and appearance, it was alleged, being as consistent with that cause as with arsenical poisoning. The scientific witnesses for the defence did not succeed in convincing the jury, but after sentence of death had been passed the judge forwarded the papers to the Home Secretary, and advised that the opinion of an independent scientific authority should be taken. Accordingly the whole of the chemical and medical evidence was studied by Sir B. Brodie, whose report was that there were six reasons which led to the conclusion that Smethurst was guilty, and eight reasons which pointed in the opposite direction ; and that, therefore, the impression left upon his mind, was that the proof of Smethurst's guilt was not absolutely convincing. The Home Secretary, on receiving this statement of opinion from his scientific referee, immediately granted a free pardon. In this case, but for the conflict of scientific opinion upon the medical and chemical evidence the prisoner would have been hanged. Instances such as these might be largely multiphed, but the above are sufficient to show that a scientific defence may succeed in breaking down the scientific evidence brought by the prosecution in criminal cases ; or, faiUng that, may (as in the Maybrick case) help to bring about a commutation of the sentence. INTRODUCTION 21 There is thus abundant justification for the plea that the poor prisoner should have the same advan- tages as regards scientific assistance as he now possesses in legal matters, and thus be placed on an equality, with a wealthy prisoner. It ought not to be a difficult matter to draw up a list of men of recognised standing in chemistry and medicine, who would be wiUing to serve in this capacity when selected by the judge in a trial. CHAPTER II DETECTION AND CAPTURE OF THE CRIMINAL Contrasts between Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries — Margaxet Catchpole — Tawell — Crippea — Por- traits and the Press — Charlesworth Case — Bloodhounds — PoUce Dogs — Circumstantial Detection. In the days of the stage-coach a fugitive had a better chance of escaping than in the present age of steam power on land and sea. For then, slow as were the ways of escape, the ways of advertising the crime were slower stiU, and once on board a ship a runaway was comparatively safe from arrest. The story of Margaret Catchpole, which has now become almost classic, may be cited as a good illus- tration of the way in which the pursuers were handicapped, when the fugitive had had a few hours' start. It was in 1797 that Margaret Catchpole, a servant- maid at Ipswich, stole a horse from the stable of her master, in order to join her lover, and disguised as a lad rode all the way to London in eight and a half hours, with only a single stop at Marks Tey, in Essex. A few hours later the horse was missed, and handbills describing it and offering a reward for the capture of the thief were hurriedly printed and sent out of Ipswich by every vehicle that left the town. Two men were also despatched in pursuit along the London road, but being falsely directed were about to turn off in the direction of Maldon, when they 22 DETECTION AND CAPTURE 23 chanced to meet a man who had seen Margaret riding to London. But for this chance meeting Margaret would probably have escaped capture. As it was, the pursuers reached London the following day and Margaret was arrested just as she had concluded a sale of the horse with a dealer. She was tried at the Bury Assizes and sentenced to death, but through the influence of her former master the sentence was commuted to a term of imprisonment. Three years later her lover. Laud, who was a smug- gler, assisted her to escape from Ipswich gaol, and agayi handbills for her arrest were issued. She was captured on the beach while in the act of embarking in Laud's boat, and Laud himself was killed in the fight. For the second time she was sentenced to death, and was once more reprieved, her sentence now being transportation to Botany Bay. There she married, and died many years later. The introduction of the railway did not materially change the relative position of pursuer and pursued ; for although the fugitive could travel more rapidly than before, and thus when chance favoured him could get to the coast and on board a ship about to sail, he had against him the more speedy notification of the crime in aU directions, which was also rendered possible by the railway. It was not until a means of communication infinitely more rapid than the steam engine had been discovered, that the balance turned decisively against the man endeavouring to elude the grasp of the law. It is strange to reflect that it was not until it had been employed in the capture of a criminal that it was 24 SCIENC^^AND THE CRIMINAL recognised in how many directions the electric telegraph might be of service to mankind. Prior to that time the invention had been little better than a failure from a commercial point of view , for, although the railway companies had some time before this reahsed the advantages of the new system of communication, the Government had refused to have anything to say to it. It was thus little short of a revelation to the pubhc when, in 1845, the news was made known that a sus- pected murderer had been arrested through the agency of the telegraph. A woman had been brutally murdered not far from Slough, and a neighbour, who had heard her screams, rushed to the spot with a lighted candle in her hand just in time to see a man in Quaker garb hunting away. This man, John Tawell by name, a former member of the Society of Friends, succeeded in escaping un- challenged to the station and in catching a train to London, and had it been two years earlier would probably have managed to get out of England ; for news still travelled slowly in those times, and the train service to London was very infrequent. But the police bethought them of the telegraph, which had not long been established on the Great Western Railway, and a description of the wanted man was sent over the wires to London. Although Tawell had had a good start, the message arrived long before him, and detectives were awaiting the arrival of the train at Paddington. He was followed from the station to the Bank, and from there to an ^v I"' 1' « t \ / \ ■ ^..-''' ;..r; / ■to , ^ 1 A "'I -/'%.. iX ^.^ s/ /^ 1^ <; « w w H en W W « C/) ^ C3 « < imVM>«M a^v^Awft^ DETECTION AND CAPTURE 25 eating-house, where he had a meal, and finally to a lodging-house in Cannon Street, where he meant to pass the night. Here, much to his amazement, he was quietly arrested. His trial followed in due course, and he was convicted and executed. There were several points of scientific interest in his trial, which are described on another page. Last year, sixty-five years after the sensational capture of TaweU, the attention of the whole world was rivetted upon an Atlantic steamer on its way from Antwerp to Canada. It had on board a man and a woman, who disguised as a Quebec merchant and his son, were expecting to reach Canada withouti detection. For a week pre- viously searc^lj: had been made for them in every comer of Europe, and once on board a ship sailing from a foreign port they might reasonably have anticipated that they were safe. But their portraits had been so widely circulated by the newspapers that their faces were famihar wherever EngMsh papers were read, and the ship was only a few miles on its journey when their disguise was penetrated by the captain. The vessel was fitted with a wireless installation, and now for the first time since its invention wireless telegraphy played the leading part in the capture of fugitives from the land. The police in London were thus immediately acquainted with the whereabouts of the wanted pair, and an officer was sent off by a swifter steamer to greet them on their reaching Canada. Day by day, with almost feverish excitement, the progress of the Monirose DETECTION AND CAPTURE 27 installations for the transmission of simple pictures or diagrams, and by its means it would be easy for a ship at sea to send or receive portraits of an individual under suspicion. The accompanying illustrations, which are repro- duced here by the permission of Mr. Thome Baker and the Daily Mirror, show a portrait of King Edward VII and an outline war map which were thus transmitted by " wireless " telegraphy. Mr. Thome Baker states that the use of his instrument renders " tapping " impossible, since by merely making a slight alteration in the speed of running the machines, in accordance with a signal arranged beforehand, the pictures would be so distorted as to be unrecognisable. As an early instance of the use made by the police of a portrait in identifying a suspected individual the case of Arden, who was executed for murder at the beginning of last century, may be mentioned. Arden had given a drawing of himself to a youth, and this was handed to the pohce who were thus able to identify the accused in London a month later. The general use of photography in the press has frequently come to the aid of the police, and instances of photographs of a wanted individual being employed for this purpose will occur to everyone. At any poUce station may now be seen reproductions of photo- graphs of missing individuals, and these being circu- lated all over the world, reduce to a small compass the limits within which a suspect may go without detection. Reference may be made to two recent cases by way 28 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL of illustration. A nurse had kidnapped a child and aU traces of her whereabouts were lost for some days. Her portrait was published in all the leading papers, and being seen by the proprietor of an hotel in the Midlands was recognised as that of one of his guests. Acting on this information a police inspector suddenly accosted the suspected woman and addressed her in her real name, and she, taken off her guard, answered his remarks naturally, and was at once arrested. In January of 1908, Miss Violet Charlesworth succeeded in filling pages of every Enghsh paper by suddenly vanishing from her creditors, under circum- stances intended to suggest that she had been kiUed. She arranged a motor-car " accident " upon the cUfEs at Penmaenbach, and ostensibly was flung through the glass screen of the car into the sea. As no trace of the body could be found it was soon suspected that there had been no accident, and that before long the victim would come to life again. Her portraits were published in hundreds of papers, and were posted at poUce stations all over the United Kingdom, and amateur detectives by the score endeavoured to discover her whereabouts. She was recognised from the portraits in half a dozen parts of the country at the same time, but it was not until a fortnight later that she was positively identified at Oban. The anti-cUmax of the farce was reached, when, a few days later, she paid a visit to the London ofi&ce of her solicitor, and was attended from the station \ '\ ':.'■■ • V'..V- ■^.... :■ PORTRAIT SENT BY WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY Bv kind pcnnission of My. Thoiuc-Bakfi- and " The Daily Mirror " DETECTION AND CAPTURE 29 by a string of motor-cars each containing the special representative of a London paper. Two years later she was found guilty of having defrauded a poor landlady of a large sum of money at the time when everyone had accepted her great "expectations" at her own valuation. There have been frequent failures in the use of bloodhounds to detect a criminal, but this must be attributed, in part at all events, to the circumstance that the dogs have often not been employed until every other means has failed. In the Luard case, for instance, in 1908, bloodhounds were set upon the track of the supposed assailant of the murdered woman, but the trial was not made immediately after the discovery of the crime. The scent had become faint, and it was therefore not surprising that the dogs, after starting hotly upon the trail, soon lost it again. The writer is indebted to Major Richardson for the accompanying photograph of his trained bloodhound, " Pathan," and for his kind permission to quote the graphic description of actual man hunts from his fascinating book upon the subject. ^ " On one occasion, when searching for the body of a woman, I used two collies and a bloodhound. It was summer, and the police, after patrolling the entire countryside, had narrowed the search down to a mountain covered with a dense wood and under- growth of rhododendron bushes. It happened in mid- summer, and the day was very hot. The coUies 1 War, Police, and Watch Dogs, by Major E. Richardson (Blackwood and Sons). 30 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL worked industriously for almost two hours, keeping well ahead, but after that time they began to flag, and soon refused to leave my heel. The bloodhound, on the contrary, continued persistently to search ahead of me all through the hottest part of the day, until the woman's body was found on the top of the mountain. " As further illustrating the persistency of the blood- hound when on the trail, I may mention the case of a murder to which I was called in to assist the police in Scotland. As I and my hounds were in England at the time, it was seventeen hours after the murder when we reached the scene. Not only this, but severe frost had intervened during the night, rendering the ground very unfavourable for scenting purposes. The murder had taken place in a town, but evidences were found that the criminal had been at a certain spot outside the town on the cliffs where he had discarded certain belongings. " I took my hounds to this spot and laid them on the trail, first giving them the scent from the discarded articles. They went clear away for some distance, and leaving the main road crossed some fields through a wood to a cottage. Here they seemed to be at fault, and ran about whimpering. On inquiry at the cottage it appeared that a man had shortly after the murder called there for some water. " Feeling the hounds were right so far I cast them round about in hopes of their picking up the trail again. After working persistently for a little time one of them, ' Solferino,' opened to a line beyond the wood, and went off at a steady rate followed by the z < W O H o in O « u O -3 DETECTION AND CAPTURE 31 other hound, 'Waterloo,' who also found the line himself. They held to this for a while until checked by a main road. " The murderer had evidently walked along the road some distance, until, perhaps, scared by a pedestrian or vehicle, and he then evidently took to the fields again. " Although checked by the road, where the trail became obhterated, the hounds, nothing daunted, kept steadily onwards, casting all the time on each side, until they found it again in the fields. By steadily working in this manner they led us for four miles, partly across country, and partly on the road, to a populous town, and to the vicinity of a railway station. Here the trail was completely obliterated, and it was evident that by this time the murderer had got clear away, probably by train, and was not hiding in the neighbourhood. " The chief constable testified to the excellent work of the hounds on this occasion, and there is not the slightest doubt, that had this town been supplied with a bloodhound which could have been put on the trail immediately on the discovery of the murder, the murderer would have been quite easily run to earth." In Moscow a bloodhound is systematically used by the police to discover stolen property, and some of his " finds " have been recorded in aU the European papers. In the early part of March of last year this pohce dog, " Tref," recovered a number of bank-notes and a quantity of silver plate that had been taken from the house of a Moscow gentleman. " Tref," having been put upon the scent, followed the 32 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL trail through several streets until he came to a night- shelter. Here he made for a coat that belonged to a house-painter, and in the pockets of this were found the missing notes. He then left the shelter and followed the trail to the shop of a dealer in old silver, and here the stolen plate was discovered. In addition to their occasional use as detectives, dogs are now being systematically employed as scouts to accompany the police on their rounds and to aid in the capture of evil-doers. The Paris dogs, which are specially trained for the police by Mademoiselle Arlette Clary, are cross-bred hbunds described as " wolf-shepherd hounds," and " brindled mastiff bulls." They are powerful beasts weighing upwards of twelve stone, and can easily overthrow and master a man. When attacking, they at once make for the right arm, so as to guard against a pistol bullet, and they are also trained to refuse food except from the hands of those they know, so as to safeguard them against poisoning. As a proof of their efficiency, MadenioiseUe Clary informed the writer that one of her police dogs had captured nine apaches in one night. Last year a demonstration was given in London before the most eminent representatives of the Metro- politan police force, the apache being represented by a man thickly padded to protect him from the teeth of the dogs. When the man attempted to escape over a screen representing a wall the great hound, " Max," promptly caught him and dragged him down again, as is shown in the accompanying photograph which is here reproduced by permission of Mdlle. FRENCH POLICE DOG By kind permission 0/ Mdlle. Clary and " The Daily Mirror' DETECTION AND CAPTURE 33 Clary and the Daily Mirror. The dog also easily- cleared this wall, which was 8 ft. 10 in. high, in one bound, and captured a " padded apache " as he climbed down on the other side. Police dogs trained on these lines have for some time past been used to assist the police in Glasgow, and within the last few months Nottingham has strengthened its police force by the addition of dogs. The dogs used in this country are powerful cross- bred animals of the Airedale terrier- t5^e, specially reared and trained by Major Richardson. The first dog used for the purpose in this country was given to the Berkshire Constabulary, and its duties are to accompany a policeman on his rounds at Windsor, to protect him from attack, and, if necessary, to capture escaping criminals. From two to three months are required to train the dogs for this purpose. In what may be described as circumstantial detec- tion a very faint clue has sometimes resulted in the discovery of a criminal. One of the most striking examples of the kind was seen in 1864, when a gentle- man named Briggs was murdered on the North London railway, for the sake of his watch and money. The murderer succeeded in escaping without ha-ving been noticed by anyone, and the crime would probably have made another in the long list of unsolved mys- teries, but for several sUps that were made by him. He had changed hats with his -victim and his soft felt hat, which was found upon Mr. Briggs, was one of the chief factors in his subsequent identification. Hats of this particular shape, by the way, were 3— (ar*i) 34 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL for many years afterwards popularly known as " MiiUers." The watch and chain of the murdgred man were soon traced to the shop of a London jeweller, who stated that he had given another watch and chain in exchange for them. He remembered the man and was able to give a description of his appearance, although he had no knowledge of his name or whereabouts. At this point aU further signs of the trail were lost, for aU efforts to discover the jeweller's customer proved fruitless. Some time afterwards, however, a man called at Scotland Yard with a jeweller's smaU cardboard box, which, he said, a man who had recently been lodgmg at his house had given to his httle girl. On this box was stamped the jeweller's name, which, ominously enough, was "Death," and this man was the very jeweller to whom Mr. Briggs' watch had been taken. Thanks to this clue MiiUer was tracked first to Liverpool and then to New York, where he was arrested and extradited. At the trial the changed hat found upon the victim helped to prove his identity with the murderer, and he was convicted arid hanged at Newgate. No more extraordinary instance of a single circum- stance leading to the detection of a criminal can be offered than in what was known as the "Yarmouth Murder." On September 23rd, 1900, a woman was found lying dead upon the beach at Yarmouth, and from the DETECTION AND CAPTURE 35 appearance of the body she had evidently been stran- gled. On her fingers were some rings, but with the exception of the laundry mark upon her clothes, there was no clue by which she could possibly be identified. She had been staying for some days in lodgings in the town, and was known to her landlady as Mrs. Hood. While she was there letters bearing a Woolwich postmark had come addressed to her by that name. Only a day or two before her death she had had her photograph taken upon the beach. All investigation to discover who the woman really was or to trace her murderer proved unavailing, and at the coroner's inquest a verdict was brought in of wilful murder against some person unknown. Subsequently it was discovered that the laundry mark upon the dead woman's clothes, 599, was that put by a laundry upon the clothes sent to them from a particular house in Bexley Heath. Further inquiry showed that a woman named Bennett had formerly lived there, and she was identified as the original of the photograph that had been taken at Yarmouth. This led, early in November, to the arrest of the dead woman's husband, Bennett, who was a workman in Woolwich Arsenal, and he was committed for trial on the charge of murder. He denied all knowledge of the crime, and asserted that he had never been to Yarmouth. This was disproved, however, by col- lateral evidence, and many facts were brought forward connecting the prisoner with the murder. The motive alleged for the crime was that Bennett might be free to marry another woman. The date 36 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL of the wedding had been fixed, and it was shown that his behaviour after the night of the murder pointed to his having a knowledge of his wife's death. So convincing was the whole of the circumstantial evi- dence, that after a short deliberation the jury brought in a verdict of " Guilty," and Bennett was executed. CHAPTER III PERSONAL IDENTIFICATION McKeever's Experiment on Fallibility of Eye-witnesses — Gorse Hall Murder — Cases of Mistaken Identity — Gun-flash Recognition — Self-deception — ^Tichborne Case. The untrustworthiness of the eye-witness as to detail was recently demonstrated by Professor McKeever at the Kansas State College in the following manner. ^ He asked twenty-five students at the college to witness a short drama, and immediately afterwards to write a detailed description of the characters and incidents. This httle drama, which was supposed to take place in one of the class-rooms, ran as follows : — Jones, a tall man, wearing a hat and a black mask over his eyes> nose and mouth, and dressed in a grey rain-coat rushed in carr5nng a salt bag half full of nails in his left hand and a small wfench in his right hand. Across his left cheek was a streak of red paint. When just inside the door he turned and pointing the wrench at some pursuers, shouted "Stand back, or I'll shoot." He then ran across the room, fell on his knees, and dropped the bag, saying, " There it is, take it " ; after which he got up and rushed from the room. Smith dashed into the room after Jones, crying " Give it up, you scoundrel," and picked up the bag which Jones had dropped. White, short and * Daily Mirror report. 37 38 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL stout, dressed in a blue serge coat and cap, and carr5dng a revolver with its cylinder removed, came in last. He called out to Smith, " Take it from Eddie, he won't hurt you ! " He then went out after Jones but before Smith. The professor pretending to be alarmed jumped up from his chair and exclaimed, " Men, what are you up to here ? " These were the actual facts, and the manner in which the accounts of the twenty-five witnesses disagreed may be shown by a few examples of the different particulars described : — Jones' appearance : (1) Black coat, hght mask. (2) Red mask; cheeks painted red. (3) Black coat, moiith painted red. (4) Carried pistol. (5) Cheeks more than natural redness ; club in his hand ; dark suit. (6) Dark suit. (7) Black clothes. (8) Red mask on ; black clothes. (9) Hatless. Smith's appearance : (1) Wore a grey suit. (2) Six-footer. (3) Dark grey suit. (4) Bareheaded. (5) Blue suit. White's appearance : (1) Dark suit and raincoat. (2) Bareheaded. (3) Hardly noticed him (nearly everyone said this). Smith's conduct : (1) Carried pistol and snapped it several times. (2) Came in last ; went out second ; said " Get out of here." (3) Carried pistol, snapped it several times, and cried " Stop or I'll shoot," aiming at Jones. (4) Dropped umbrella on floor. (5) Came in last, stayed behind ; yelled " Catch that man ! " PERSONAL IDENTIFICATION 39 Professor's conduct: (1) Said: "What's all this ? " (2) Said : " What does all this mean ? " (3) Said : " Here." (4) Said : " Hullo, what's going on here " ? (5) Said : " Who are these men ? " These discrepancies illustrate how difficult it is for the eye and ear to record accurately the impressions received in a rapid succession of events, one of which may focus the attention to such an extent that events simultaneously occurring are only imperfectly or partially observed. The faUibihty of identification by eye-witnesses was strikingly demonstrated at the trial of Benjamin Bates and John Green at the Old Bailey in 1776, on the charge of burglary. The house of James Penleage had been broken into, and plate to the value of four or five hundred pounds had been stolen. Mrs. Penleage swore that four men had entered her bedroom, one of whom carried a dark lantern ; that two of these men came, one on each side of the bed, and held pistols to her head, and that of these men of whom she had a perfect view, she recognised one as Green and the other as Bates. Her husband testified as to the house having been entered, and as to his loss, but stated that as he was near-sighted he would not swear to the men, though he believed Bates had presented a pistol to his head. Evidence was also given by a servant and by another woman, and notwithstanding the good character given to the prisoners by a number of witnesses, the jury brought in a verdict of " Guilty." The newspapers of the day called attention to the- 40 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL inconclusive evidence of identification, and as a result the prisoners were respited from month to month. At last another man, who was executed in the country, confessed that he had also been the author of this burglary at the house of Penleage, and that the two men who had been convicted had had nothing to do with it: In consequence of this Bates and Green received a free pardon, but not until they had been in prison for many months. A contemporary comment upon this trial richly warrants quotation : — " On this occasion Britons have cause to triumph in the Liberty of the Press. If newspapers had not been printed in this country, the lives of two honest men would have been sacrificed to the rigour of the laws, yet no party concerned have been the least to blame. The ways of Providence are mysterious ; casual circumstances frequently produce great effects ; and a Ufe may be saved or lost by an accident apparently beneath the notice of a common observer." Another very curious instance of mistaken identity was that brought out in a trial for robbery in 1784. A barrister had been attacked and robbed in broad dayHght, and he positively swore that he had recog- nised two men named Wood and Brown as his assail- ants. Fortunately for them the prisoners were able to prove an alibi, which showed beyond all doubt that they were far from the spot at the time, and they were accordingly acquitted. Subsequently the real robbers were discovered and found in possession of the missing property. In this case there was a man of. trained PERSONAL IDENTIFICATION 41 observation, being absolutely certain of the identity of two men, who had ne/er been near the place. The case of the Perreaus, related in a subsequent page, was another example of the kind. The two brothers, who were twins, were so exactly alike that a money scrivener who had drawn up bonds by order of one or the other of them hesitated to fix upon either. At last, when pressed to make a positive declaration, he fixed upon Daniel as the brother who had come to him in connection with the forged bond. In 1797 a mistake as to identity resulted in the death of two men. Martin Church, a bookseller, and James Mackley, a printer, were tried that year at the Old Bailey on the charge of murdering Sydney Fryer, at the back of Islington workhouse. Miss Anne Fryer, who was with her cousin at the time he was attacked, swore positively that the two prisoners were the assailants. Some years later Burton Wood, who was executed at Kennington Common, and Timmins, who was hanged at Reading, confessed separately that they had done the deed for which the other men had suffered. In modem times the case of Adolph Beck, who was twice wrongfully convicted through his unfortunate resemblance to another man is notorious, and has been the subject of a special report. The most recent and strangest instances of wrong identification arose out of the mysterious crime which became known as the " Gorse Hall " murder. In November, 1909, Mr. Storrs, a wealthy mill- owner, who lived at Gorse Hall, in a lonely district in Cheshire, was attacked by a man who had forced 42 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL his way into the house. A desperate struggle followed, in the course of which Mr. Storrs was repeatedly stabbed with a knife and fatally wounded. His assailant also attempted to shoot Wm with a revolver, but this was snatched from him by Mrs. Storrs. A relation of Mr. Storrs, named Howard, who was an ex-soldier, was arrested and charged with the murder. At the trial that took place at the Chester Assizes in March, 1910, he was positively identified by the widow of the murdered man, who swore that she recognised him by " the look in his eyes." He was also identified by some of the servants at the Hall as the assailant of Mr. Storrs. Fortunately Howard was able at prove conclu- sively that he was somewhere else at the time of the murder. Some time later, another ex-soldier named Mark Wilde was arrested upon the same charge, and once more evidence of identification was given by the same witnesses as in the previous trial, though they were now less positive in their assertions. The two men, Howard and Wilde, bore a singular resemblance to each other, and evidence was given that at the time of the murder Wilde was dressed in dark clothes, dark cap and muffler, which was the descrip- tion of the clothes of Mr. Storrs' assailant given by witnesses at the first trial. Stains upon the prisoner's clothing were identified as human blood by the serum test. The revolver which Mrs. Storrs had snatched from the murderer was also identified as having belonged to Wilde, for it was recognised by two ex-soldiers who had, they PERSONAL IDENTIFICATION 43 alleged, frequently seen it in his hands, by its broken spring and marks upon its barrel. For the defence, however, witnesses were called to prove that the revolver taken from the murderer was not identical with that of Wilde, and that the blood upon his clothes was the result of a fight he had had upon the night of the crime. No motive could be alleged, and the jury distrusting the evidence of identification, found the prisoner "Not guilty." The murder was thus unique in the fact that two innocent men were in succession identified as the assailant and acquitted. With regard to the amount of light needed for the recognition of a person, curious scientific evidence has been given in trials, and several cases are on record where witnesses have claimed to identify a person by a momentary flash. A notable instance of this kind was seen at the trial of Joseph Brook for burglary at the York Assizes in 1813. The prisoner, it was alleged, had broken into the house of a farmer named Strickland at Kirk Heaton. Anne Armitage, a niece of the farmer, deposed that he had struck upon the stone floor with something she took for a sword to intimidate her, that it pro- duced a flash, and gave a light by which she could see his face. She swore that she had seen enough by the momentary flash to recognise him again. She had also heard his voice, and knew it again when she heard it later, and thought she could undertake to say that it was the voice of the accused man. The prisoner set up an ahbi, and the jury, although 44 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL as they stated subsequently, not believing in this alibi, returned a verdict of " Not guilty." The question of the possibility of a person firing a gun or pistol being identified by the light of the flash was submitted to a committee of scientific men in Paris, in 1809, and their conclusion was that such identification was not possible. On the other hand, the evidence in a case that was tried shortly afterwards in France indicated that under favourable conditions the face of the person who had fired a gun might be recognised. A man had fired at another at night, and a woman who was near at the time, swore at the trial that the flash had plainly shown her the face of the assailant. Similar evidence was also given by the man who had been wounded. Experiments to determine this point were made by Desgranges, at Lyons, and from the resiilts of these he concluded that there was a possibility of such identi- fication at a short distance from the flash of the gun, provided that the night was very dark and that there was no other source of light to interfere with the gun- flash ; but that if the flash was very pronounced, or much smoke was produced it was not possible to recognise the person firing the gun. Juries have always been reluctant to convict a prisoner upon evidence of this kind. For instance, at the trial of a man named White at Croydon in 1839, the prisoner was accused of firing at a gentleman while he was driving home in an open trap, and his intended victim, who was shot in the elbow, swore positively that the flash of the gun showed so clearly the features PERSONAL IDENTIFICATION 45 of his assailant that he was absolutely certain that he was the prisoner. The defendant denied the charge and, notwithstanding the positive statement of the principal witness, was acquitted. There are other instances, however, where con- victions have resulted from such momentary ghmpses. Thus, at the trial of some highwaymen in 1799, which is quoted by Paris and Fonblanque (1823), it was stated by a Bow Street officer that he, together with some of his companions, had been fired at by the prisoners upon a dark night, upon Hounslow Heath. He swore that the flash of the pistol enabled him to see that one of the assailants, a man named Haines, who had come up to the side of the coach, was riding upon a dark brown horse which had certain peculiarities about its head and shoulders, and that the rider was wearing a rough brown coat. Afterwards, said the witness, he had seen the same horse in a stable in Long Acre, in London, and had recognised it as the one upon which the man was riding by its curious square head and thick shoulders. The jury beHeved the evidence of this witness, and the prisoner was convicted. A case within the experience of a former Recorder of Birmingham (Hill) is mentioned in Wills' Circum- stantial Evidence. A man was committed for trial at the Assizes at Derby, in 1840, on the charge of shooting at a young woman. She was prepared to swear that she had recognised him by the momentary flash of the gun. Experiments were made to determine to what extent reliance could be placed upon such identification, 46 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL and the conclusion drawn from these was that " all stories of recognition from the flash of a gun or pistol must be founded on a fallacy." In addition to these, several instances, collected from different sources, are referred to in Taylor's Medical Jurisprudence, where the general conclusion is drawn that occasionally it may be possible to identify an assailant in this way. From the same source comes the amusing story of a man who swore that he recognised an assailant who attacked him in the dark, by the flash produced by a blow upon his eye ! The absurdity of the claim is self-evident, for the " flashes " due to a blow do not emit light, and can therefore never cause any external object to be visible. A curious factor influencing the value of evidence of personal identification is the readiness with which credulous humanity will accept any story however improbable. But for this the notorious Tichborne case, which dragged on for years, would have been settled in a few days. It is difficult now, recaUing the facts, to understand how anyone could have believed in the identity of the butcher, Arthur Orton, with the missing heir to the estates, Roger Tichborne. The latter was of a slim build, while the claimant was a couple of inches taller and weighed twenty-five stones. The real Roger had had the education of a gentleman, while the claimant could neither write nor speak correctly. Yet, notwithstanding the enormous dissimilarity in appearance and manners of the two men, the mother of Roger Tichborne recognised Orton as the son whom PERSONAL IDENTIFICATION 47 she and everyone else had believed to have been drowned when the ship was wrecked. When he came to England to see her he had thought it prudent to feign iUness. Lady Tichbome, therefore, went to see him, and he got on the bed, and turned his face to the waU. His adopted mother, however, recognised him by his " ears so like his uncle's." This must have been an instance of self-deception, for there was evidence that the lobes of the ears of the two men were absolutely different. It was this recognition, however, that encouraged Orton to persevere with his claim to the estates, and assisted in aiding the recollection of other people, who swore that he was Roger. CHAPTER IV SYSTEMS OF IDENTIFICATION Photography — ^Anthropometry — Finger-prints and their Uses. The discovery of photography was welcomed by the pohce authorities of civilised countries as affording a certain means of registering criminals for subsequent identification. But the promise that the photo- graphic method held out was not fulfilled ; for with the accumulation of photographs there was a corresponding increase in the difficulties and imcertainties attending the identification of the originals. Apart from difficulties due to the effects of the changes produced by time or by intentional disguise, it was no light task to search through many thousands of prints to see whether a particular individual had been photographed ten years previously, and physical weariness of the searchers must frequently have set an obstacle in the way of the identification. On the other hand, it is a matter of common know- ledge, that two photographs of the same person, taken under different conditions of lighting or with different lenses may readily be thought to be the por- traits of two distinct individuals, or that a photograph of one person may unduly emphasise a momentary expression differing from the normal one, with the result that the portrait may be mistaken for a likeness of someone else. These considerations fully explain the numerous instances of mistaken identification, 48 SYSTEMS OF IDENTIFICATION 49 some of which are cited below, where the police based their recognition upon old photographs. Prior to the introduction of the anthropometric and finger-print systems, the insufficiency of the photo- graphic records kept by the police in this country for the identification of criminals was repeatedly proved. The advisability of introducing the French anthro- pometric system into England was raised in Parlia- ment on several occasions in 1887 and 1888, but each time the Home Secretary defended the system of photographic registration as being sufficiently satisfactory, while he considered it doubtful whether the French system would be any better. A sufficient answer to this official defence was afforded by the number of cases of mistaken recog- nition from photographs, that shortly afterwards were brought before both Houses of Parliament. In 1888, the Lord Chief Justice (Coleridge) men- tioned an instance that had come under his ijotice at the Gloucester Assizes. After a man had been convicted of some small offence poUce evidence was given that the prisoner was a man who had been convicted before. This was subsequently proved to be a mistake. Again, in July, 1889, after the conviction of a prisoner, evidence was given by a warder that the man was one who had been sentenced to seven years' penal servitude and seven years' police supervision. It was found afterwards, however, that this man had been previously convicted in 1882 and therefore could not possibly have been the person alleged. The remarkable feature about this mistake was that both 4 — ai2i) 50 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL men had been under the poUce control at the same time. The failure to identify a criminal from the photo- graphic records had a tragic result in 1888, when a man named Jackson was given a Mght sentence as a first offender. Although he had been previously convicted of numerous crimes, and was at the time " wanted " by the poMce for housebreaking and other offences he escaped recognition, and was able to take advantage of the lenient treatment he received by murdering a warder in the prison at Manchester. In 1894 a Special Committee was appointed to examine and report upon the different systems of identifying criminals, and they recommended that the anthropometric system was the most satisfactory for preMminary classification, but that for further grouping the finger-print method gave the best results. Accord- ingly a system including both methods was adopted in this country and was in use until 1901, when, as is mentioned below, the present system of finger-print identification was introduced. The success of M. Bertillon's system in France speedily led to its adoption in other countries. Early in 1892 it was introduced into India, and within six years upwards of a quarter of a million of classified cards had been collected. The chief difficulty was found to lie in the classifica- tion of the measurements for reference, and a committee was accordingly appointed by the Indian Government to report upon the system. Their report stated that the finger-print method was preferable to the anthro- pometric system in simpUcity, rapidity and certainty. SYSTEMS OF IDENTIFICATION 51 Since that time (June, 1897) the finger-print method has been in use in India for the identification of criminals. The system of identification by bodily measure- ments, which has now come to be known as bertillonage, was first introduced as a method of pohce registration in Paris in 1882. During the first year of its employ- ment it detected forty-nine criminals giving false names, while in the following year the number rose to 241. In 1889 M. Bertillon stated that there had not been a single case of mistaken identity since the system had been introduced, and that in the previous year 31,849 prisoners had been measured in Paris, 615 of whom were in this way recognised as former convicts, while fourteen were subsequently recognised in prison. Of the latter, ten had never previously been examined, so that the failures were only four in 32,000, or one in 8,000. The system, as described by M. Bertillon himself in a pamphlet on The Identification of the Criminal Classes, consists in taking the measurements of the body structure of each individual. Although such measurements might be indefinitely extended, the number is usually restricted to twelve, including the height, length and width of the head, length of the middle finger, of the foot, etc. These measurements are rapidly taken with standard instruments by a special staff, and are recorded upon a card upon which are pasted fuU face and profile photographs of the prisoner. The data obtained enable the photographs to be classified into different groups of short, medium, 52 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL and taU men, and these, again, may be subdivided into groups of short, medium, and long heads, while further subdivisions are affordfed by the width of the head, width of the arms outstretched at an angle of the body and so on. The colour of the eyes affords the means for a further subdivision, while special birth- marks or peculiarities differentiate the individuals stiU further. In this way alone, M. Bertillon claims that 100,000 persons can be classified into groups of ten each, the portraits in which would offer no difficulty in examination. M. Bertillon undoubtedly puts the position too favourably here, in assuming division into equal groups ; for out of his h5rpothetical 100,000 individuals, seventy-five per cent, might conceivably be tall men, and seventy-five per cent, of these, again have long heads, so that the final groups would in some cases have no representatives, while in the other groups there might be 1,000 individuals. In recording the colour of the eyes a special table is used, the scale of which is based upon the intensity of the pigment of the iris. A number corresponding to one of the following groups is then assigned : — (1) Iris, azure blue, with areola pale but free from yellow pigment ; (2) Iris blue or slate, with light yellow areola; (3) Same shade, with larger areola approaching orange ; (4) Iris, greenish reflection ; hazel areola ; (5) Same shade with dark hazel areola ; (6) Hazel distributed over surface of iris ; (7) Eye entirely hazel. When first the system was introduced into Paris SYSTEMS OF IDENTIFICATION 53 it was a common practice for the old offenders to change their names and try to escape identification, but, according to M. Bertillon, after a few years this was only done by those who had been away from Paris for a long period, or had some very special reason for attempting to slip through the examination unrecognised. A similar method is employed in the United States Army for recognising deserters. Each man on joining is measured, and an outline figure card showing the measurements of the front and back surfaces, which' are divided into areas by means of dotted lines, is filed in the Medical Department of the War Office. When a man deserts or is dismissed his card is placed in a separate file, and the new cards of recruits are compared with those in this particular file. A special register, ruled into colunms corresponding to the areas on the cards, and giving the measurements and any peculiarities such as scars, tattoo marks, etc., is used to facilitate the search, and when, on reference to this, there appears to be a probabiUty of a recruit being identical with a deserter, the original card is used for the comparison. During the first five months after the system was instituted (1891) sixty-two men were suspected of concealing their identity, and in sixty-one of these cases the suspicion was justified and the identity acknowledged. A drawback of the Bertillon system of identifica- tion is that much depends upon the accuracy of the person who takes the measurements, and that, there- fore, a permissible error must be admitted. In the 54 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL United States Army an error of one inch in either direction is allowed, for the recorded height. In addition to this, some degree of natural variation will take place in the course of years, and due allow- ance must also be made for this influence upon the measurements. Striking as has been the success of M. Bertillon's system of anthropometrical measurements as a means of identification, it has been altogether surpassed in certainty by the methods of recording the impressions of the fingers. From time to time in the past use has been made of a finger or thumb impression as a seal or to give a personal mark of authenticity to a docu- ment. One of the earliest examples extant of the use of the manual seal is to be seen on one of the Assyrian clay tablets in the British Museum. This is imprinted in cuneiform characters, and contains a notice of the sale of a field, which concludes with the imprint of a finger nail, and the statement that this had been made by the seller of the field as his nail mark. Similar imprints of nails are to be seen upon Chinese coins, as has been pointed out by Sir Francis Galton, and a tradition has it that they were first put there as a compliment to an early Chinese Empress who had accidentally pressed her finger nail into the wax model of a coin that had been submitted for her approval. The ancient Egyptians caused criminals to seal their confessions with finger nails. There are also numerous instances in which impres- sions of finger-tips are found upon documents, but these do not seem to have been put there with any SYSTEMS OF IDENTIFICATION 55 idea of identification, but rather to have been of the nature of a ceremonial observance comparable with the legal survival of putting a finger upon the seal of a document, and delivering it as " my act and deed." The first attempt by Europeans to make use of the characteristic ridges of the fingers to record the identity of individuals appears to have been that of Sir William Herschel, who introduced a method officially into Bengal. His system arose out of the difficulty of checking forgeries by the natives in India, and his having made two of them record their finger impressions upon contracts, so that he might be able to frighten them should they subsequently deny their signatures. This was in 1858, and the device proved so unex- pectedly successful that for several years Sir WilUam Herschel made a study of the use of finger-prints in identification, and finally found them so satisfactory that, in 1877, he gave instructions for their systematic use in the Hooghly. A description of the advantages that were thereby reaped is given in Nature (1880, Vol. XXIII, 23). The frequent attempts previously made by the natives to deny their own signatures were completely frustrated, and documents thus stamped with a finger-print could not afterwards be disputed. The use of finger-prints was also invaluable as a means of preventing the fraudulent claims of pensions by persons who were not entitled to them. Then as the system was found to work so well in these cases it was introduced into the prisons, each new-comer being made to sign the register with the 56 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL finger. The official visitors had thus the means of satisfying themselves as to the identity of each inmate of the prison. Although Sir William Herschel tried to obtain permission to extend the use of the finger-print identi- fication stiU further, his attempts did not meet with success. About the same time that Sir William Herschel pubhshed the account of his system a suggestion was made to register the Chinese in California by a similar process, but nothing was done in the matter. There have also been occasional applications of the method to prevent forgery, as, for instance, in 1882 in the payment orders signed by Mr. Thomson of the American Geological Survey, upon which; as a safeguard, he made the imprint of his own finger. It is to Sir WiUiam Herschel, however, that the credit is due of having established the first modem systematic process of registration of individuals by means of finger impressions. According to Dr. Faulds, the Chinese from time immemorial have caused their convicted criminals to make impressions of their finger-tips as a record, but he gives no details of their system of classifying the prints, if such exists. The curious markings upon which are based these systems of identification are not confined to the human race, but are also shown by monkeys and to a less pronounced extent by other animals. The pattern upon the surface of the skin upon the palms of the hand and soles of the feet is formed by the arrangement of what is known as the papillary SYSTEMS OF IDENTIFICATION 57 ridges. It is readily recorded by carefully coating the finger-tips with a fine layer of printing or ordinary ink and pressing them upon paper so as to leave an imprint of the markings upon the finger. The uses of these ridges is to assist the delicacy of touch, and also to excrete perspiration through the minute pores with which they are covered. The effect of rough work upon the ridges is to increase their height, and eventually they may become covered up by the homy accretions known as callos- ities. On the other hand, the ridges upon the palms of people who do very httle manual labour are much less apparent, and when the skin is thin are very low. Hence, in the hands of bedridden invalids there is only a slight development of the ridges. Several circumstances may lead to a temporary obUteration of the ridges, such as, for instance, the constant puncturing of the skin by the head of a needle in sewing, and the imprint of the forefinger of a taUor will therefore often present a very characteristic mottled appearance. More permanent alterations are produced by cuts or by wounds that have healed and left a white scar. An instance of this is seen in D in the plate (p. 66), which represents a print of the left-hand thumb of the present writer. Running across the ridges, and breaking their continuity is a line which marks the place where twenty years ago the slip of a knife nearly severed a piece from the thumb. The effect of this cut has been to add a fresh feature of identity to those furnished by the original ridges, without interfering with the identification of the latter. 58 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL In the case of jagged cuts or of scars formed in the heaUng of an ulcer the ridges may be so distorted as to be practically indistinguishable in that place, or they may even be entirely obliterated. Old age has also an obliterating effect upon the ridges, so much so that the finger-prints of an old man frequently exhibit transverse white markings, indicating signs of the surface disintegration of the skin. A most important point in the application of finger- prints to the identification of the individual is the persistence of the main details throughout life, since otherwise much of the value of the method would be lost. The observations made by Sir WiUiam Herschel in India showed that after the lapse of twenty years there was so little change in the finger-prints of a large number of persons that they could stiU readily be identified in this way. Sir Francis Galton has also proved the persistence of the general peculiarities in the prints for periods of over thirty years. He points out that an exact correspondence as to the minutiae is not always to be expected, since what appears to be a ridge in one print may be really the result of imperfect printing of an enclosure. Apart from possible imperfections in the method, there is also a possibiUty of variation due to the effect of age rendering the ridges less continuous. In one of the examples given by him finger-prints were taken of a child of two and a half in 1877, and again thirteen years later. Between two of the prints there were forty-two points of resemblance and only one point of difference. This was a small forked SYSTEMS OF IDENTIFICATION 59 ridge which appeared in the print of the baby, but had been filled up in the print from the boy. This instance is mentioned as unique, for in every other case examined by Sir Francis Galton, comparing prints of the boy with the man, and the man with the old man there was perfect correspondence between the selected points. He therefore concludes that " we are justified in inferring that between birth and death there is absolutely no change in, say, 699 out of 700 of the numerous characteristics in the markings of the same person such as can be impressed by them whenever it is desirable to do so." An interesting series of photographs was recently exhibited by the Chief Commissioner of the Police. These included the portraits of three men who so closely resembled one another that they would readily have been mistaken for one another in photographs. Their finger-prints, however, were quite distinct. So persistent are these distinctive markings that they last as long as the skin itself, and may be clearly seen upon the fingers of Egyptian mummies. However much the general dimensions of the pattern of the prints may be changed by the advance of age or the effect of disease, the number of the pattern will stiU remain. To use the apt illustration of Sir Francis Galton, the changes to be expected are com- parable with those seen in a piece of lace. The material may be stretched in one or the other direction or shrunken to half its former dimensions, but the individual loops and knots may be identified with those in the original fabric. As is the case with all the other measurements 60 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL of the human body alterations will occur in the size of the markings ; for the pattern as a whole increases with the growth of the finger, but this growth does not affect the arrangement of the loops and ridges that make up the markings upon the skin. In no other way than a study of the finger-prints is it possible to find over a thousand points of com- parison upon which to estabhsh the identity of an individual. In estimating the value of finger-prints as evidence of identity, Sir Francis Galton found that out of 1,000 thumb-prints the collection could be classified into 100 groups each containing prints with a more or less close resemblance to one another. He further found that on the average it was impossible to put great reliance upon the general resemblance between two given prints as a proof that they were produced by the same finger, though obvious difference was a proof that they were produced by different fingers. But on studying the minutiae of the patterns, and calculating the chances that the print of a single finger should agree in all particulars with the print of another finger, he concluded that it was as one is to about sixty-four millions ; so that the chance of two persons giving simUar prints from a single finger would be less than one in four. If the comparisons were extended to two fingers the improbability of agreement in aU details would be squared, " reach- ing a figure altogether beyond the range of imagination." The general conclusion drawn from these numerical results was that even after making all allowance for SYSTEMS OF IDENTIFICATION 61 ambiguities and for possible alterations caused by accident or disease, a complete, or nearly complete, agreement between two prints of one finger and infinitely more so between two or more fingers, afforded evidence, which did not stand in need of corroboration, that the prints were derived from the fingers of one and the same person. In finger-prints, therefore, we have the only means of proving the identity of an individual beyond aU question. In the prehistoric flint-holes at Brandon, in Suffolk, there was found some years ago a pick made from the horn of an extinct elk. This had been used by some flint-digger of the stone age to hew out of the chalk the rough flints which were subsequently made into scrapers and arrow-heads. Upon the dark handle of this instrument were the finger-prints in chalk of the workman, who, thousands of years ago, flung it down for the last time. It is strange to reflect that in these perishable impressions he had left a far more permanent record of his identity than he could have done by any other conceivable means. A striking feature in the scriptural account of the death of Jezebel is that her body was devoured by the dogs, which left nothing but the skull and the palms of her hands and soles of her feet, so that no man might say " this is Jezebel." Yet, as Sir Francis Galton pointed out, it was upon those parts that the dogs had spared that Jezebel carried the only certain proofs of her identity. The question of heredity in finger-prints is not 62 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL only interesting but might also conceivably be a point of some importance in a criminal trial. Dr. Faulds concluded that heredity played a great part in the particular form of the markings. " The dominancy of heredity in these patterns is sometimes very striking. I have found unique patterns in a parent repeated with marvellous accuracy in his child." He suggested that there might thus possibly be an Orton type of pattern and a Tichbome type, to one or other of which experts might have referred the finger impressions of the claimant in the celebrated case. While there is unquestionably a general tendency for a particular type of finger-prints to be inherited just as any other bodily peculiarities are liable to be passed on from the parents to the children, there is by no means that definite relationship that Dr. Faulds hoped to establish. The observations made by Sir Francis Galton upon this point, and the mathematical considerations based upon them render it impossible to doubt that the average resemblance between the finger-prints of two brothers or of a brother and sister is greater than in those of two persons selected at random. The general similarities in the finger-prints in rows A and B in the plate (p. 66), which are those of two sisters, are obvious. The case of twins is particularly interesting, for it is well known that when of the same sex they fre- quently show remarkable physical and mental resem- blances or the reverse. Here, too, it was found by SYSTEMS OF IDENTIFICATION 63 Sir Francis Galton that the finger-prints exhibited a strong tendency to similarity, although in no case were the resemblances so close that the prints of one twin could be mistaken for those of the other. For instance ,^ the resemblance may lie in the pattern being made up of loops or whorls in both, but the smaller details, such as the number of the ridges or their minute pecuharities (e.g., dividing and then reuniting to form a small island), wiU not be shared. The results of other observations tended to show that the influence of the mother upon the type of finger-print is more pronounced than that of the father. The existence of racial peculiarities in finger-prints, which Dr. Faulds believed that he had discovered in the case of the Japanese, has not been borne out by the experience of others. The observations of Sir Francis Galton upon numbers of prints representative of pure English, pure Welsh, Hebrew and Negro proved unquestionably that there was no pattern peculiar to any of these races. The only suggestion of any difference was that the Avidth of the ridges appeared to be more uniform and their direction more parallel in the finger-prints of negroes than in those of the other races. The same conclusions were drawn from the observa- tions upon the finger-prints of different classes of individuals, those of art students being compared with those of science students, of field labourers, and of idiots. In each instance it was possible to match the type of patterns in one class with those in any of the others. The patterns of the finger-impression 64 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL of a statesman, for instance, could be matched by those of an idiot. The first attempt to classify the various patterns formed by the ridges was that of Purkenje, a doctor of medicine who, in 1823, dehvered a thesis upon the subject at the University of Breslau. He concluded that all the varieties of curves might be grouped under nine main heads or standard types, which he described as follows :- - (1) Transverse curves. (2) Central longitudinal stria. (3) Oblique stria. (4) Oblique sinus. (5) Almond. (6) Spiral. (7) Ellipse or elliptical whorl. (8) Circle or circular whorl ; and (9) Double whori. The differences between these different types are best shown by diagrams, and the accompanjdng figure, reproduced by permission of Sir Francis Galton, represents the cores of the nine standard patterns. This classification, resting as it does upon merely superficial appearances, does not afford a certain means of separating the types, since factors, such as the depth 0% printing, the size of the patterns, and the prominence of secondary details may have an undue influence in the placing of a particular print in one or the other group. After numerous futile attempts to make use of Purkenje's system, Sir Francis Galton discarded it in favour of a system in which the triangular space or spaces found in the majority of finger impressions was made the basis of classification. Starting upon the two divergent ridges from these spaces an outline was then drawn as far as it could be traced, the course THE STANDARD PATTERNS OF PURKENJE CORES OF THE ABOVE PATTERNS 1. Transverse flexures 5. Almond 2. Central longitudinal stria 6. Spiral 3. Oblique stria 7. Ellipse 4. Oblique sinus 8. Circle 9. Double Whorl By kitul pcniiisskin of Messrs. Mactnillan & Co.. Ltd. SYSTEMS OF IDENTIFICATION 65 of each ridge being followed with minute fidelity. In this way a series of sharply-defined outline figures were obtained. The various patterns may, as a rule, be classified into the three main groups of arches, loops and whorls, while some of the transitional forms may be grouped under more than one of these heads. Other patterns, again, which are of rare occurrence, are not suitable for inclusion in any of the three groups. A system of indexing based upon this method of classification was also devised in which letters repre- sented the varieties of patterns. Thus a, a, a indicate that the outline upon the fore, middle and ring fingers consists of arches, while a, w, I indicate an arch upon the forefinger, a whorl upon the middle finger, and a loop upon the ring finger. The letters i and o are also used, the former indicating a loop with an inward slope and the latter one with an outer slope upon the forefinger. The possible variations in such a classification of the impressions of the three fingers of the right hand cannot exceed thirty-six, and a thousand prints may therefore be indexed into one of these thirty-six groups. Subdivisions of these main groups may then be based upon the characteristics of the prints of the fingers of the other hand and of the thumbs, while differences in the cores of the patterns afford a means of forming smaller divisions of the loop patterns. From observations of the 5,000 prints of 500 indi- viduals Sir Francis Galton found that arches were present in 65 per cent. ; loops in 67' 5 per cent. ; and 5— (aisi) 66 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL whorls in 26-0 per cent. Each digit and hand, how- ever, had its own peculiarities, and the variations in the percentage of arches upon different digits ranged from 1 to 17 ; that of the loops from 53 to 90 ; and that of the whorls from 13 to 45. Loops occurred with most frequency upon the little finger and then upon the middle finger, while whorls were rarely met with upon these fingers, but were of common occurrence upon the thumb and ring finger. The classification employed by the English police was devised by Sir Edward Henry and is a modifica- tion of that of Sir Francis Galton, from which it differs in making use of four types instead of three. The impressions are grouped into arches, loops, whorls, and composites. The last group includes patterns made up of combinations of the other three, or those which might be classified either as loops or whorls. There are also numerous subdivisions of the group into patterns with characteristics in common such as " central pockets " and " accidentals," and further differentiation is effected by counting the number of ridges between two fixed points in the patterns. Examples of these four groups are shown in the plate facing p. 66. Dr. Faulds, who, while at a hospital in Japan, made an exhaustive study of the finger impressions of the Japanese, appears to have been the first to suggest the possibihty of tracing a criminal by the imprints of his fingers upon external objects. He mentions two instances where the method had *-'^&* TYPES OF FINGER PRINTS SYSTEMS OF IDENTIFICATION 67 afforded valuable evidence, and these are worth recording as early examples of the use of the system in detective work. In one case some rectified spirit had been drunk, and the greasy marks of the fingers upon the bottle plainly showed who was the culprit, for their pattern was identical with that of an imprint in Dr. Fauld's collection. On another occasion someone had been suspected of breaking into a house, but the sooty imprints of fingers left upon the waU proved beyond all doubt that this was not the person. The finger-print system of identification was adopted by the poHce in this country in July, 1901, and the numbers of identifications made since then by the police at Scotland Yard are very remarkable. Up to the end of 1901 there were 93 identifications, which rose in the succeeding years to the following numbers : In 1902, 1,722 ; in 1903, 3,642 ; in 1904, 5,155 ; in 1905, 6,186 ; in 1906, 6,776 ; in 1907, 7,701 ; in 1908, 9,440 ; and in 1909, 9,960. There have been some very striking instances of the detection of criminals by means of their finger- prints, a few of which may be quoted by way of illustration. On March 20, 1908, a man named Chadwick was tried at the Birmingham Assizes on the charge of housebreaking and steaUng at Edgbaston. He had left finger-prints upon a champagne bottle, and when these were made clear by the application of powdered blacklead they were found to correspond exactly with the finger-prints of the prisoner. Inspector 68 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL Collins, in giving evidence on this point, stated that there were a million and a quarter classified finger- prints at Scotland Yard, and that these could all be distinguished from one another. He pointed out that there were twelve ridges which were characteristic and identical in the two prints. Similar identifications in cases of burglary have been made by means of the impressions left on a wax candle, on windows, on paper, such as a cheque, or on the metaUic surface of a cash-box, etc. On March 1 1th of last year, a labourer named George Lane was put on trial at Birmingham on the charge of breaking into the house of a bootmaker and steaUng several articles. He had left a thumb-nail mark upon a glove-box, and evidence was given as to the identity of this with his own thumb-print. For the defence it was urged that he was in Nottingham at the time, and that he could call as a witness " a tail dark man working in a bar." The judge offered to postpone the trial for the attendance of this witness, but warned the prisoner that if his statement were found to be untrue he would be prosecuted for perjury in addition to the present charge. The prisoner thereupon said he preferred the trial not to be delayed. He was found guilty, and after evidence of previous convictions had been given he was sentenced to three years' penal servitude. In April of last year an equally convincing proof was offered of the value of the finger-print system, when it proved the identity of a dead man. The scattered remains of this man were found upon the railway line near Slough, and there was no clue whatever as to his SYSTEMS OF IDENTIFICATION 69 identity. Upon the off-chance of the victim's finger- prints being known at Scotland Yard impressions from his fingers were taken by the local superintendent of the police and forwarded to headquarters, where on reference to the index of finger-prints they were immediately recognised. They were those of a man twenty-four years of age, who had been living at Deal. This was noteworthy as being the first occasioi^ upon which the method has been used to discover the identity of anyone after death. A striking proof of the value of finger-prints in the identification of an individual by the French poUce was afforded last year in Paris. A man named Lemarque, one of a notorious gang of thieves, known as Chaffeurs de la Drome, had escaped when three of his companions had been captured. They were tried at the Assize Court of the Drome Department in July, 1909, on the charges of murder and robbery and were condemned to death, while Lemarque was sentenced by default. All attempts to discover the missing man proved fruitless, until in March, 1910, a man was arrested for theft at Nimes. He gave the name of Charles Garnier, but the police suspecting that the description he gave of himself was false, took impressions of his finger- prints, and forwarded these, together with the man's description and photograph, to the Anthropometrical Department of the Prefecture of Police in Paris. The finger-prints were immediately recognised by M. Bertillon, and Charles Gamier was identified as Lemarque, the man who had so long been " wanted." CHAPTER V IDENTIFICATION AND HANDWRITING Heredity — Emotional Influences — EfEects of Disease on Handwriting. The identification of an individual solely by means of his handwriting is always hable to lead to a mis- carriage of justice, for even in the cases of the closest resemblance between two writings there can be no certainty on this point. In the following pages I have attempted to point out under what var5dng con- ditions handwriting may show alterations and thus lead to wrong conclusions. In the making of handwriting heredity plays a very important part, just as it does in the character- istic gait and the little mannerisms which are peculiar to each individual. In addition to this, the writing may be modified by the results of training and other external influences. It is obviously not possible to determine from which ancestors aJl the features in one's handwriting are inherited, just as it is impossible to trace the origin of certain obviously inherited traits of character. At the same time, instances in which close resemblances may be noticed between the handwriting of a man and that of his father and grandfather will occur to everyone. Thus a particular slope in the direction of the writing or a mode of looping the letters or of forming certain words maybe passed on from generation to generation. 70 Q iz; H Q W 72 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL A remarkable fact in this connection is that there is frequently a tendency for a son to inherit certain characteristics in the father's writing and for the daughters' writing to resemble more closely that of their mother than that of their father. The examples shown in the figure illustrate this tendency. The words were all written by members of one family, the first two lines being those of the father and the mother. The third, fifth, eighth and ninth Unes were written by their daughters, and the fourth, sixth and seventh lines by their sons. It wiU be noticed among other points of resemblance that the bold characteristic looping of the letter L in the mother's handwriting is reproduced more or less closely in the writing of all the daughters, while the sons form the same letter with a small loop, as in the word written by their father. The angles at which the different words are written also show the effect of this " parallel heredity," as it might be termed. While possessing such points of resemblance obvi- ously inherited from the parents' hg.ndwriting, the writing of each of the children also shows character- istics of its own that distinguish it from the writings of the others — characteristics partly inherited from other ancestors and partly the result of environment. So close, however, is the resemblance between the handwriting of the father and of the eldest son that on more than one occasion one has been mistaken for the other by other members of the family. The normal handwriting of every individual is affected by very many external influences, the term " normal " being used here to describe writing that is IDENTIFICATION AND HANDWRITING 73 done when the thoughts of the writer are being con- centrated upon what is being written and without a mental side-glance at the form of the writing itself. In the latter case various psychological influences cause the writing to vary more or less. For instance, the handwriting of an artist may show marked varia- tions at different periods, especially in the form of the capital letters ; for the artist usually keeps before his eye the decorative effect of his letters and words, and is constantly making experimental changes in his writing. In hke manner, handwriting is often influenced to a considerable extent by sub-conscious memories of the writing of other people, especially of those whom the writer tries to imitate in other respects. In some individuals this vmintentional imitation of other handwriting is so pronounced that they are unable to answer any letter without its characters having some effect upon their own writing. Conscious imitation is a still more frequent influ- ence upon the form of writing and some of its effects may become fixed characteristics. Instances of this are to be seen in the " good " writing of the old-fashioned writing-master, whose ideal was the copper-plate engraving of the visiting card with its thick down-stroke and thin up-stroke and absolute regularity of letter ; in the pointed Italian writing, taught generally in mid-Victorian ladies' schools ; in the Civil Service " hand " set as a standard for securing marks in examination ; and in modem commercial handwriting now rapidly giving place to the typewriter. 74 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL An instance which illustrates the manner in which a writing-school will turn out hundreds of pupils all writing in the same manner is shown in the accom- panying figure, for which I am indebted to Mr. W. J. Kinsley, of New York. The members of a class in Influence of training on handwriting Each of these lines was written by a different person the Packhard Business School at New York, numbering about forty young men and girls ranging from sixteen to twenty years of age, were all told to write the same IDENTIFICATION AND HANDWRITING 75 words : " This is a specimen of my writing," without any directions being given them and without knowing for what purpose it was wanted. The results obtained, some of which are here shown, were pubHshed in a paper in New York. The striking resemblance among them all is obvious at the first glance, and when these specimens first appeared a lawyer wrote to the editor complaining that an attempt had been made to pass off the handwriting of one person as having been done by several. The writing of the writing school is no more the real writing of the individual than laborious printing in capitals would be. Even when what must be regarded as the vicious style of the writing school has been so thoroughly acquired that the writer ceases to be conscious that he is cop5dng a model, the writing not infrequently reverts to a normal state and will then tend to show indications of inherited traits. Under ordinary conditions, where there has been no prolonged attention given to the form of the writing, as in conscious imitation or experimental alteration, and but httle unconscious imitation, certain distinctive features may persist for a very long period. Thus the angle at which the writing slopes may remain practically the same for years, or the form of a particular slope beneath a signature will repeat itself almost exactly time after time, and even the absence of a flourish may become a significant characteristic. Emotional influences often have an effect upon handwriting, though the alterations thus produced are frequently only slight and temporary. Thus a 76 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL man weighed down by overwhelming grief will often write in smaller characters than usual, while violent anger will find its expression in more vigorous cross strokes to the "t's," heavier dotting of the "i's," and the thickness of a flourish to a signature. On the other hand, sHght changes caused by long- continued depression may leave permanent traces upon the handwriting. A deeply interesting historical instance of this tendency of handwriting to vary with the mood of the writer is to be seen in the signatures of Napoleon at various periods of his career. Several of these written on occasions calling forth widely differing emotions are here reproduced, and it is not dif&cult to discern in some of them the effect of emotional influence. Very striking, for instance, is the differ- ence between the orderly signature written after the victory at Austerlitz and the blotted scrawl dashed off after the defeat at Leipzig. Nor will it escape notice that nearly all the signatures written at moments of depression or failure have a downward slant, whereas that of the victor of Austerlitz runs upwards. A great contrast, too, is shown between the general features of the first three signatures penned in moments of triumph or success, with that written on the retreat from Russia and the still less assertive signature of the prisoner of St. Helena. Instances of the effects of passing emotions upon writing might be multiplied indefinitely, but what has been said above is sufficient to show that this factor is of importance in drawing any conclusions as to the identity of an individual from his handwriting. 78 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL If passing emotions can have so great an influence upon handwriting, how much greater must be the effect when the centre or centres in the brain that control the writing mechanism are affected or destroyed by disease ! Among the disturbances of handwriting due to defective control of the muscles we may include the Writers' Cramp so-caUed tremor-writing, which is common in old age, and the writing of people suffering from writers' cramp, an example of which is shown in the figure. Other forms of defective writing may be the result of a paralytic stroke affecting the writing centre of the brain, which causes the patient either to form only parts of letters or endlessly to repeat the same letter ^ //// /^/^ Specimen of Agraphia under the impression that sentences are being formed, while in extreme cases there may be merely a succes- sion of meaningless strokes in place of written characters. The writing of insane people almost invariably shows the effect of mental disturbance. In some cases IDENTIFICATION AND HANDWRITING 79 the form of the letters is changed, but they are still used in their right places. An illustration of this is given in the accompanying figure, which represents the signatures of the poet Lenau before and during his insanity. ^y^-i Cc/^t-y3 Q^^ 6/rtC(yOt^ Writing of Lenau, the poet, before and during insanity In other instances there is both alteration in the form of the writing and paragraphia, or the use of the wrong letters. Thus Holderhn, the German poet, who became harmlessly insane in 1806 at the age of thirty-six, ever afterwards misspelled his name in the manner here shown. Signature of HSlderlin before and during insanity A very interesting derangement of writing, which is probably due to the writing centre in one hemis- phere of the brain becoming adapted to do the work of that in the other, is that commonly known as mirror 80 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL writing. An example of this which came under the writer's observation is shown below. This shows the ordinary handwriting of a working woman of about sixty-six, who for the last three years has been paralysed in the right arm, and since then has produced mirror writing with her left hand. The most remarkable instance of mirror writing on record is to be seen in the last manuscript of Leonardo da Vinci, known as the Codex Atlanticus, in Mirror writing in paralysis the hbrary at Milan. Various speculations have been made as to why backward writing should have been employed here, but the obvious explanation may be deduced from the letter of a monk, Antonio de Beatis, who, after visiting Leonardo in his retirement at Amboise, wrote that the artist would never paint again, as his right arm was paralysed. The manuscript was in all probability, therefore, written with the left hand, and, as frequently happens in such cases of paralysis, the other hypothetical writing centre was brought into action and mirror writing was produced. IDENTIFICATION AND HANDWRITING 81 Of all the temporary influences tending to modify handwriting none is more remarkable, or affords a better proof of the way in which written characters vary with the condition of the mind than the effect of hypnotic suggestion. The experiments of Professors Lombroso and Richet have proved that a suggested change of personality is accompanied by an appropriate style in the hand- writing of the subject. Thus, a young hysterical girl when hypnotised under the suggestion that she was a child wrote in childish characters. Still more striking were their experiments upon a young Austrian student, Chiarloni Clementino, who within httle more than an hour was mafde to assume successively the characters of a child, of Napoleon, of Garibaldi, of a clerk, and of an old man of ninety. He was made to write some words on each of his assumed characters, and the writings not only differed to a marked extent from his normal handwriting, but also had characteristics suggestive of the type of individual he was temporarily personating. The results of some of these experiments, which the present writer had the permission of the late Professor Lombroso to reproduce, are shown in the accompanying figures. The normal writing of the student is represented below, while Fig. A (p. 82) shows words written under the suggestion that he was Napoleon, Fig. B, his writing as the old man of ninety, and Fig. C that done as Garibaldi. 6— (it 41) A. As Napoleon ■^7*^' (#-^ B. As an old man C. As Garibaldi. HYPNOTIC HANDWRITING IDENTIFICATION AND HANDWRITING 83 The handwritings of the suggested Napoleon and Garibaldi were quite different from the writing of the real individuals, although it is interesting to note that there is some attempt to form the letters of Garibaldi's signature in the same manner as in the genuine signature here shown. In a private letter to the present writer Lombroso mentioned that it was quite possible for the h5rpnotised student to have been famihar with the signature of Garibaldi. Or, again, the hypnotisers may have had their thoughts upon the form of the genuine signa- ture while the student was writing the suggested version of it. It has been observed by Dr. Preyer that certain individuals, when under hypnotic influence, write in a better handwriting than when they are in their normal condition, whereas in the case of other sub- jects the letters are childish and badly formed. It is even possible to make them omit by suggestion particular letters from each word they write, " Europe," for instance, becoming " Urop," and so on, while by further suggestion they may be induced to make use again of the missing letters. The fact that handwriting may be completely altered under the influence of h3^notism is not only of great scientific interest, but may also have an important bearing on the results of legal cases in which handwriting is concerned. 84 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL It was pointed out some years ago by Dr. Bianchi that hysterical women are particularly prone to write anonymous letters, and it is weU known that such women are readily responsive to hypnotic suggestion. Facts such as these suggest how necessary it may often be to take into account the possibiUty of hypnotic influence before deciding upon the authorship of a given piece of writing. The extent to which a man should be held responsible for what has been written as the result of hypnotic suggestion from another person will obviously depend upon whether he was the dupe or the wiUing instru- ment of the hypnotiser. In any case it may not be easy to prove that the writing is his, for it will probably be very different from his ordinary handwriting. Hitherto no case of criminal libel involving such delicate questions as these appears to have come before the courts, but it is one that might conceivably occur at any time, and a jury would then have to decide upon the responsibility of the writer. CHAPTER VI EVIDENCE AS TO HANDWRITING Illustrative Cases — ^Handwriting Experts At one time the only evidence that was allowed to be given as to handwriting was that of the writer himself, or of someone who had seen the writing done, or was well acquainted with the handwriting in question. Examples of evidence of this kind are numerous and occur in many of the cases mentioned in other parts of this book, such as the trial of Spencer Cowper in 1699, or of that of the Perreaus in 1775. In the trial of Spencer Cowper (1699) an important part of the defence was that the girl had drowned herself in a fit of depression, and letters written by her were put forward to prove this view. A gentleman named Marshall produced letters that he had received from her, and a man named Beale gave evidence that he believed it to be in her hand- writing, having seen her write and holding a receipt of hers. The jury declared they were satisfied with the evi- dence, but the judge (Baron HatseU) remarked that they might ask the mother to say whether it was her daughter's handwriting. Sarah Stout's brother was also questioned. Mrs. Stout. — How should I know ! I know she was no such person ; her hand may be counterfeited. The Judge. — But if it were written in her more sober style, what would you say then ? 85 86 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL Mrs. Stout. — I shan't say it to be her hand unless I saw her write it. Mr. Stout. — It is like my sister's hand. The Judge. — ^Do you behave it to be her hand ? Mr. Stout. — No, I don't beheve it ; because it don't suit her character. The judge in his summing up remarked that if the jury beheved that the letters were in the handwriting of Sarah Stout there was evidence to show that although she was a virtuous woman a distemper might have turned her brains, and discomposed her mind. The history of the admission of expert evidence on handwriting in this country is a curious one, and shows that opinion has long been divided as to its value. In a trial that took place in 1836 a bank inspector was put in the box to give an opinion as to the genuine- ness of a signature and the judge refused to admit this as evidence. The point was carried to the Court of Appeal, but was still left unsettled, an equal number of judges being for and against the admissibihty of such evidence. Mr. Justice Wills, in his standard work on Circum- stantial Evidence, relates that Lord Denman pro- nounced that evidence as to handwriting might be regarded as an expunged chapter in the book of evidence. In spite of this dictum, however, the evidence of the handwriting expert was made legal in Civil Cases in 1854, and eleven years later it was also legaHsed in Criminal law. Long before a witness was permitted in this country to give his opinion upon writing which he had not EVIDENCE AS TO HANDWRITING 87 actually seen written, or with the author of which he was unacquainted, expert evidence of this kind was admitted in the laws of different countries in Europe and in many of the American States. Handwriting Experts A good deal has been heard of late of the short- comings of the handwriting expert, and owing to a mistake! idea as to the nature of his evidence, the view has been strongly expressed that such evidence should no longer be admissible. The present feehng against evidence on hand- writing is partly due to an exaggerated importance having frequently been attached to the conclusions of the expert, so that as soon as it could be shown that he had made a mistake, no further trust was to be placed in his opinion ; and partly to the dogmatic attitude of certain experts in the past. As Lord Brampton pointed out in his Reminiscences, the judges in mid-Victorian days were afraid to trust their own judgment in matters of handwriting, and powers almost occult were ascribed to the expert, who, after all, only uses ordinary scientific methods. The true function of the handwriting expert is to act as a sign-post to the jury. His observation has been trained to notice minute points of resemblance and difference, and he is thus in a position to point out in what respect and to what extent two hand- writings resemble one another or differ, and it is then for the jury to draw their own conclusions from the facts laid before them. 88 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL It is now no uncommon occurrence for a judge in summing up a case to the jury to emphasise the point that the evidence of the expert is only a matter of opinion, and that the real decision rests with them. In this way it is possible for the judge to correct the too decided statement of opinion which the expert is sometimes, under stress of cross-examination; forced to give. / Netherclift, who was the chief expert in ihe days when Lord Brampton was at the bar, had such faith in his methods that finally he came to believe that he could never make a mistake. This belief received an amusing check in la case in which he was under cross-examination by Lord Brampton (then Mr. Hawkins). / Netherclift had claimed that his system gave infallible results, and had further stated that his son, whom he had trained, made use of the sam^ system. "Then," said the wily advocate, "your sdn working on your system is as good as you are ? " " Yes," repUed the father with some pride in his voice, "he is." " That is to say, he, too, is infallible ? " " Yes," again rephed the witness. " Well, now, Mr. NethercUft, was there ever a case in which you and your son appeared on opposite sides ? " Netherclift tried to evade the question, which, he complained, was an unfair one, but on being pressed was forced to admit that on a certain occasion he had given evidence on one side and his son upon the other. EVIDENCE AS TO HANDWRITING 89 Swift came the unanswerable retort, " How comes it then that two infalUbles appeared on opposite sides ? " Netherclift's dogmatic manner rendered him pecu- harly hable to fall into traps like this, and many were the occasions on which he was found tripping. Readers of Lord Brampton's book will recall another amusing instance in which the expert was " put in a hole " by his opponent, who tells the story in these words : " When I rose to examine I handed to the expert six slips of paper, each of which was written in a different kind of handwriting. " NethercUft took out his large pair of spectacles, magnifiers, which he always carried. Then he began to poHsh them with a great deal of care, sa5dng as he performed that operation, ' I see, Mr. Hawkins, what you are going to try to do — you want to put me in a hole.' ' I do, Mr. NethercUft, and if you are ready for the hole, tell me — were those six pieces of paper written by one hand about the same time ? ' " He examined them carefully, and after a consider-^ able time, answered : ' No ; they were written at different times, and by different hands.' " ' By different persons, do you say ? ' " "'Yes, certainly.'" " ' Now, Mr. NethercUft, you are in the hole ! I wrote them myself this morning at this desk.' " The feeUng of distrust with which the evidence of the expert in handwriting is often regarded by the legal profession is iUustrated by a capital story that was told recently by Sir Edward Carson in a letter to the Times, An Irish counsel in a now forgotten 90 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL case began his cross-examination of a handwriting expert with the curious question — " Where's the dog?" " What dog ? " said the bewildered witness. " The dog which the judge at the last assizes said he would not hang upon your evidence." How closely two distinct handwritings may resemble one another was shown in a celebrated case in which handwriting experts were proved to be utterly mis- taken. This was the trial of Sir Francis Truscott, a former Lord Mayor of London, at the Old Bailey in 1879. It was asserted that the defendant had sent a post card to a friend named John Keams, who had at one time served with him upon the City Council, accusing him of a criminal offence and warning him that he was being watched by the poMce. At the trial evidence was given in the most positive manner by a lady who was acquainted with Sir Francis Truscott to the effect that the moment she had been shown the card she had recognised the writing as his. This opinion was supported by Charles Chabot, an expert in handwriting, who stated in the witness-box that he was certain that the writing on the post card had been done by the same individual who had written certain letters of the defendant which he had examined. The similarities between the two writings were, he asserted, too close not to have been the work of one individual. Evidence of the same character was then given by Netherclift, who swore that from a minute comparison of the libellous post card with letters in the admitted EVIDENCE AS TO HANDWRITING 91 writing of the accused there could be no doubt but that they were written by the same person. The defence was opened by a witness named Smith being put in the box. He stated that he knew both Mr. Kearns and Sir Francis Truscott, and was aware that the friendship between them had ceased. He was then shown the post card and asked whose was the handwriting upon it. " I wrote the post card," he said. " It is my own writing." Answering further questions, this witness stated that he had been abroad when the charge was brought against Sir Francis Truscott, and that as soon as he learned what had happened he had made an afl&davit that the writing was his. The father of this witness produced post cards written by his son and stated that the libellous post card was in the handwriting of his son and not in that of Sir Francis. Evidence was also given by another witness who knew both Sir Francis and Mr. Smith, and who had no doubt but that the post card was in the handwriting of the latter. At this stage the jury intimated that they had heard sufficient, and brought in a verdict of " Not guilty." Mr. Justice Wills records a case in which a bank clerk being shown a forged signature swore positively that he had written it, while he was doubtful as to the authenticity of signatures that were undoubtedly his. Another instance of the way in which writing may be so skilfully imitated as to deceive even the man whose writing it purports to be is afforded by the trial of a solicitor named Shaw at the Derby Assizes in 1861. 92 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL He was accused of having forged a mortgage, and at the trial a chent of his named Abel went into the witness-box and in all good faith swore that his genuine signature upon a document was not his, while he recognised the forged signature as his genuine writing. It was proved conclusively, however, at a subse- quent action that was brought three years later, in connection with the forged deed, that Abel's signature upon it had been forged, and the convicted sohcitor was brought into court to give evidence that he had himself signed the document. Another curious example, also cited by Wills, of the uncertainty of evidence as to writing was that of a trial in which a deed that was produced bore the signature of Lord Eldon. The sohcitor in the case had no doubt as to this being a genuine document, and yet it was positively stated by Lord Eldon that he had never witnessed any document in his hfe. The cases of wrong conclusions as to handwriting have been as numerous as those of mistaken identity of person, and have had as tragic consequences. The notorious case of Beck wiU occur to everyone as an instance of a man being not only wrongly identified, but of being also the unfortunate possessor of a handwriting that had a close resemblance to the writing of someone else. The two false identifications combined were sufl&cient to send an innocent man to prison, and it was long before it was estabhshed that the witnesses upon whose evidence he had been convicted had been utterly mistaken both with regard to his identity and his handwriting. CHAPTER VII FORGED DOCUMENTS Use of Microscope — Erasures — Photographic Methods — ^Type- written Matter — Examinations of Charred Fragments — Forgery of Bank Notes. The most valuable methods of detecting forgery have been based upon the use of the microscope, which wiU frequently reveal alterations that are quite invisible to the naked eye. For instance, a letter may have been so carefully erased as to defy detection by ordinary examination, but a microscopical examination will show the slightly roughened surface of the paper, where the fibres have been disturbed in the process of erasure. A notable example of this was seen in the WhaUey will case, an account of which is given on a later page, and numerous instances of the same kind have come under the direct observation of the present Writer. In one of these cases, which was settled before it reached the courts, a letter which was to be put in evidence in a dispute as to some property had origin- ally contained the words " your house," but the " y " had been skilfully erased, so that the words read " our house." When the paper was held to the light it showed an almost imperceptible thinness at that place, but under the microscope the ruffled fibres on the surface of the paper where the sizing had been scratched off, were very noticeable. 93 94 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL Skilful forgers guard against this obvious sign of alteration by treating the erased place with a solution of rosin in spirit, which leaves a fine shiny layer upon the paper similar to that of the original sizing. A treatment first with hot water and then with alcohol will remove this coating of glue or rosin, and when the paper has been dried again it wiU be found that this part, which wiU now be free from its pro- tective layer, will absorb a drop of water more rapidly than the rest of the surface. Another simple test to reveal erasure is the use of iodine vapour, which will often cause a blue colora- tion (due to starch) upon the moistened surface from which sizing has been removed, but will only colour the remainder of the paper brown. This test gave a very pronounced result in the examination of the letter to which reference has been made, in which erasure of the letter " y " had been suspected from the general appearance and micro- scopical examination of the surface of the paper. The course of the tests described above should be followed under the microscope, although in some instances the fraud is so extensive as not to require any magnification. As a rule, however, it is prefer- able to use only one drop of a reagent, and to follow closely under a low power of the microscope, its action, both upon the material of paper and upon the ink of any writing, which it may render visible. The detection of mechanical erasure, which as was mentioned above, is frequently indicated by the paper being thinner and more transparent at that place, is often rendered more certain by photography. FORGED DOCUMENTS 95 Thus if the document on which was the suspected erasure is placed between a strong Ught and the camera, the negative will show a darker area corre- sponding to the place where more Ught was transmitted through the paper. A photograph taken in direct light would probably in such a case show nothing, but in a negative taken with the Ught falling obUquely upon the paper, the fibres that had been roughened by the erasure would be visible, unless a subsequent treatment with glue or rosin had been used to conceal the injury to the surface. Ink applied to the surface of paper from which the sizing has been removed will show more or less tendency to spread, as upon blotting paper, and although this may be so slight as to escape the notice of the naked eye, it will be plainly visible under the microscope, and on a photographic enlargement the rough edges of the marks wiU be very pronounced. Every Uttle fault or attempt at touching up will be brought into prominence, and in cases where writing has been removed by the use of chemical reagents the sUght yellow stain which is frequently formed upon the paper — a stain so trifling that it would not ordinarily attract notice — will appear as a dark blotch upon a photographic reproduction. It has frequently been claimed that it is possible to distinguish between different kinds of ink by means of photography. Since inks contain provisional colouring matters which cause the dried pigment upon the paper while apparently black to be in reality red-black, blue-black, etc., it was asserted that such 96 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL differences would be made manifest in photographs taken on an ordinary plate, and still more by the use of colour-sensitive plates. The present writer, however, has been unable to confirm these statements. It is true that differences in intensity appear upon the negative, but these are not any more pronounced than the differences obvious to the eye in the writing, and the use of special plates and screens does not give any more satisfactory resrdts. The chief use of the photographic methods is to distinguish differences in form rather than in colour, and to record them for purposes of demonstration. One direction in which photography is particu- larly useful is in deciphering the words in faded ink upon old documents, for the yellow colour of the ancient vellum is due to the formation of iron oxide. Of recent years photography has supplied another valuable means of detecting alterations in docu- ments, and it has been found particularly useful for demonstrating to a judge and jury the results of a microscopical examination. Photographic reproduction and enlargement has the advantage over chemical methods of not producing any alteration in the ink or paper, and in some instances is just as effective as the latter. In the examination of wills, for instance, it is necessary to obtain the express permission of the President of the Probate Court, before any chemical tests may be applied to the document, and except under special circumstances such permission would certainly be refused. All the details of the writing and of the texture of FORGED DOCUMENTS 97 the paper may be recorded by the camera, and a photographic enlargenient may then be made to any reqioired extent, so as to obtain what practically amounts to a record of the microscopical appearance. And the process has the additional advantage over microscopical examination that a large portion of the magnified surface may be examined at the same time, whereas in stud5dng a document under the microscope, the view is restricted to a very minute portion of the surface. With the more general use of the typewriter it became possible to write libellous letters with much less risk of detection than in the case of letters written in ordinary pen and ink, for the machine eliminates the personal characteristics of the writer. The differences between various makes of typing ink are also less pronounced than the differences between different kinds of writing ink, and the proof of the identical character of two inks has, therefore, usually less significance. There are, however, certain t37pewriting inks, which are characteristic from the fact that they contain finely- divided carbon, and are, therefore, unlike most typing inks, exceedingly permanent, and it is also possible to distinguish between the more common violet aniline inks by the different degrees of resistance that they offer to bleaching reagents. Although it is not possible to identify the writer of a t5^ed document by a study of the typing it is frequently not a difficult matter with the aid of the microscope to identify the machine upon which it was written. 98 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL The principle underlying such identification is that the letters upon a new typewriter are arranged at very nearly equal spaces from each other and produce a fully horizontal Une of writing. But after being in use for a very short period some of the letters are certain to get out of alignment, and to give faults in their relative position, which are usually reproduced every time those letters are struck. Thus, for instance, an " a " may be a little above the line and an " r " fall too much to the right, and these peculiarities will alfjnost invariably recur throughout every scrap of writing done upon that machine, tmtil the alignment has been adjusted. In no two machines are exactly the same variations in the relative positions of the different letters likely to occur. The chances of this happening is exceedingly remote, for there are some seventy letters and signs dpon a typewriter. A practical illustration of the value of the evidence thus afforded, was seen in a case that occurred about a year ago. It was suspected that a letter had been written in collusion with a clerk in a certain office, and proof of this was thought likely to have considerable influence upon the issue of the trial. When this letter, which was in typewriting, was compared with another letter that had unquestionably been written in that office it was found that the faults of alignment in both were identical. Wherever a letter, or combination of letters, in the one fell above or below the line, the same thing occurred in the other, and wherever there was unequal spacing between two letters the distances were invariably equal in both cases. In addition to this, the ink, which was of the FORGED DOCUMENTS 99 violet t3^e, contained the same pigment, and the watermarks on the two sheets of paper were the same. There could, therefore, be no reasonable doubt as to the two letters having been written upon the same machine. As a matter of fact, this proof of collusion did not carry the weight that had been expected, for the case was decided upon issues that were not affected by such proof. With the aid of a measuring-scale upon the eye- piece of the microscope it is possible to measure the thickness of strokes of writing only ten thousands of an inch across, and in some cases to prove in this way that a certain part of a document was written at a different time or with a different pen than the remainder of the writing. In attempting to reproduce a signature a forger will probably make a prehminary outhne with a blacklead pencil and then go over this with ink. The imperfect removal of the pencil marks may then betray the fraud, as in the Whalley will case described on another page. In some instances the particles of the graphite may be seen with the aid of the microscope to project beyond the upper layer of ink. Additions and alterations made to the letters in writing are clearly visible when magnified, and may be demonstrated in court by means of a photographic enlargement. Any irregularities in the edges of the letters or any break between one part of a letter and another appear much more pronounced when examined in this way, for all faults are enormously intensified. Thus the figure " " might be altered into " 9 " by 100 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL the addition of a stroke, or a " 3 " turned into an " 8," but it would be practically impossible to do this in such a manner as not to show when sHghtly magnified. The accompansang illustrations, for which the writer is indebted to Mr. A. S. Osbom and the pro- prietors of Knowledge, will make these points clearer. In Fig. A is shown the result of an attempt to change the number " 11 " into " 17" by the addition of a stroke to the top of the second " 1." The small inset represents the appearance of the fraudulent alteration, while beneath it is seen the microscopical enlargement, in which the joining of the added portion is plainly visible. Occasionally it happens in fraudulent alteration of writing that a stroke or part of a letter may touch some of the original writing, and betray itself by being above instead of below the older letter. Thus in Fig. B the words " in full to date " were added to the receipt after the signature had been put, and it will be noticed in the enlargement of the cross stroke of the " t " in " date " and the top of the capital " C " in the signature (Fig. C), that the alleged older writing comes uppermost. The point at issue in this dispute was whether the receipt referred to a whole sum or only to a pasnnent on account. The writer in the course of his experience has seen many similar fraudulent alterations, but has never met with a case hke that described by Mr. Osbom, where the perforations which are in common use as a means of preventing fraud had been carefully filled in, and new perforations made. Fig. D shows that a fraud of this kind may be detected with certainty \^ J- An VV %^^ # o < ALTERED NUMBER ALTERED PERFORATION Detection of Forgery by means of the Camera and the Microscope By kind permission of "Knowledge " FORGED DOCUMENTS 101 by the aid of the microscope, the edges of the original perforations appearing as rings of a lighter hue. The subsequent addition of writing to a document was in one instance detected by the fact that the paper had been folded before the later writing was introduced, and in the crease thus formed the sizing on the surface of the paper had become worn, leaving the fibres more porous. Here the ink had shown a tendency to become difEused, and the blurred edges of the hnes thus produced were very manifest. Even where paper has been so completely charred that no signs of writing remain visible, it is frequently possible to render the characters visible once more by continuing the incineration until only a white structure of ash remains. When the writing was originally in ink the charac- ters wiU usually appear in reddish-brown marks (due to the iron in the ink) upon the white background of ash. In the case of inks that do not contain iron, or when the writing was in carbon or anihne typing ink, this method of incineration wiU prove unsuccessful. Writing that has been done with an ordinary lead pencil can usually be rendered visible by carefully regulating the heat during the incineration, so as not to bum away the graphite. Marks done with a red pencil are, as a rule, bmned away with the paper, but blue pencil marks usually persist owing to the presence of an iron compound in the pigment. In the case of printing inks it is rarely possible to render the characters visible again, except when, as in blue printing ink, some iron pigment was present. 102 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL The limits of this method of reading writing upon charred paper have recently been investigated by Habermann, who finds that a main essential for the successful working of the process is that the paper itself shall shield a coherent white ash. In the case of common varieties of paper, especially printing paper, which are loaded with china clay and other mineral matter, this condition is admirably fulfilled. With pure rag papers, however, the ash is much less coherent and is too small in quantity to leave a background. Even in such cases it is possible to increase the amount and coherence of the ash by painting the reverse side of the charred paper with a solution of a mineral fixative agent, such as aluminium acetate. On now drying the paper and continuing the ignition the added substance leaves its own white ash which binds together the ash of the paper. The fragments of white ash upon which writing has been made visible will obviously be extremely fragile, but they may be rendered firm enough to handle by applying a solution of collodion to the reverse side, which on evaporation leaves a layer of nitro-ceUulose similar to that with which incandescent gas mantles are coated. Any shrinkage or distortion of the letters in the writing caused by the contraction of the ash of the paper during the incineration is obviated or minimised by burning the carbonised paper very slowly. A record of the revivified writing may also be made by means of photography. The one pound notes issued by the Bank of England until as late as 1826, appear to have afforded pecuUar i. \ 4 t/:^'.^- (y^^/r' A FORGED RECEIPT PORTION OF THE SAME By kind permission of " Knowledge " ^ Qu4.aMi<;€ r^'2fr^ tests to distinguish old from new inks (see page 110) FORGED DOCUMENTS 103 temptations to forgery, judging by the number of persons convicted of the offence. The statistics on this point are very remarkable. Between the years 1797 and 1811, 471 people were convicted of uttering the notes or having them in their possession. In 1814, the number of fraudulent one pound notes detected was 10,342; in 1815, 14,085; in 1816, 21,860 ; in 1817, 21,241 ; and during the first three months of 1818, 8,937. The ease with which the notes could be imitated, and the readiness with which they could be circulated, caused hundreds of people to take up the trade of forgery, until at length whole days were occupied at the Old Bailey with the endless trials and convictions. Much indignation was expressed in the newspapers that the Bank had not issued notes which could not be imitated, and as a result of this outcry, a committee of scientific men was appointed to examine and report upon the best means of checking the evil. Their report stated that they had examined many specimens of engraving, but none that had been sub- mitted to them was proof against skilful imitation. Most of the forged notes had been clumsily imitated, and from this it appeared that the public were quite ready to be deceived by them. It was commonly believed, though without founda- tion, that the Bank placed a private mark upon their notes by which they could subsequently be identified. The general dissatisfaction with the behaviour of the Bank authorities was intensified by the amount 104 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL of public money that was spent in the prosecution of the forgers, and the view was freely expressed that the Bank had no right to assume the office of prosecutor. In the year 1818, for instance, there were 242 prosecutions, the cost of which was £34,357. So pronoimced became pubUc opinion upon the subject that the Bank was forced to allow the culprits to plead guilty to a minor charge, the penalty for which was transportation instead of death. This became almost a necessity, since there were frequently batches of twenty or thirty convicted forgers awaiting execution, though the death penalty was only exacted in a relatively small proportion of the cases. During the seven years ending 1825 there were 78,918 males and 14,800 females tried on the charge of forging these notes. Of these prisoners, 17,874 were acquitted, while out of the remaining 75,844 sentence of death was passed upon 7,770, though not more than 579 of these were executed. Even this small proportion gave the terrible yearly average of eighty-three executions. As it was at that time impossible to stop these wholesale forgeries the aboUtion of the issue of one pound notes, which took place in 1826, was obviously the only solution of the difficulty. CHAPTER VIII DISTINGUISHING INKS IN HANDWRITING Elizabethan Ink — ^MUton's Bible — Age of Inks — Carbon Inks — ^Herculaneum MSS. — ^Forgery of Ancient Documents. In order to make clear the principles upon which are based the methods of distinguishing between different kinds of ink in handwriting it is necessary to give some account of the nature of ink. Ordinary writing ink is essentially a mixture of a decoction of galls (or other substances containing tannin) with a solution of copperas, or as it is now termed, ferrous sulphate. These substances combine with one another to form a tannate of iron, which gradually changes on exposure to the air into another iron tannate, which is insoluble and constitutes the black pigment of writing. Characters written with a pure freshly-prepared iron gall ink are very faint in colour when first applied to the paper, and it is only after the air has acted upon them that they gradually become dark blue and finally black. In the old type of iron-gaU ink, that which was uni- versally employed down to the early part of last century, inks were exposed to the air or were boiled in order that the insoluble black pigment might form within the hquid, and thus give some colour to the ink when it was first put upon paper. The objection to this is that ink thus prepared is hable to clog the 105 106 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL pen and not to penetrate properly into the fibres of the paper. In the modem type of inks, therefore, which are commonly known as " blue-black " inks, this method of partial oxidation is not employed, but a colouring matter is added instead, so that the writing has some colour immediately, pending the formation of the black pigment within the fibres of the paper. The nature of this provisional colouring matter varies in different inks, and no two manufacturers appear to use the same substance for this purpose. In some inks indigo is employed, in others logwood, while the introduction of aniUne dyestuffs placed an abundant choice of colouring matters at the disposal of the manufacturer. In the case of old inks it would only have been possible to distinguish between writings done with different kinds where some mistake had been made in the preparation of the ink, and a large excess of iron or of galls had been used. The possibility of such mistakes occurring, however, wiU be readily understood when it is remembered that ink-making was formerly as much a part of the duties of the housewife as the baking of bread or the making of cordials. As writing was a poUte accomplishment restricted to the educated people of leisure the ink-manufacturer could not have existed, for there would have been no customers, and recipes for the making of ink were therefore handed down for generations. A particularly interesting example of an early domes- tic recipe for making ink is shown in the accompanying DISTINGUISHING INKS 107 figure which Mr. G. WeddeU has kindly allowed to be reproduced. This was taken from a collection of old family recipes dating back to the early part of the sixteenth century, and including among its odd assortment of items directions for making everything needed for the household, from apple pasties to cures for the king's evil. This particular recipe, which was Elizabethan domestic recipe for ink one of several for making ink, was probably written towards the close of the sixteenth century. It gives directions for soaking the galls in rain water (or claret, or red vinegar) and boiling the liquid, after standing for a few days, with copperas and gum. The whole collection of these recipes, which suggest many a picture of the life in an English household in the sixteenth century, has been published in facsimile {Arcana Fairfaxiana Manuscripta, 1890). Ink made by the rule of thumb methods of the 108 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL housewife must have often been very poor stuff, and it is to tpis cause that we must attribute the want of permanency of the ink in some of the relatively modem writing as compared with that upon manuscripts centuries earlier. No more interesting illustration of the effect of the composition of old inks upon the permanency of writing can be found than in the various names written in Milton's family Bible, to be seen in the British Museum. It will be noticed that all the entries of the births of himself and the members of his family are in the handwriting of Milton, and that with one exception all the inks are of a good dark tone. The exception is seen in the entry relating to the birth of his daughter Deborah " on the 2nd of May, being Sunday, somewhat before three of the clock in the morning, 1652." Here the ink has faded to a faint brown tint. Considerable variations are possible in the pro- portions of galls and iron that may be used without interfering with the blackness of the pigment, but a deficiency of tannin outside those limits will cause the writing to turn brown. A lack of tannin to combine with the excess of iron present is probably the explanation of this faded entry in Milton's Bible. It is very probable, too, that tests applied to the freshly-written entries would have shown that the ink in this entry was of different composition from that of the inks in the other entries. Lovibond's tintometer, an instrument which enables shght differences of colour to be distinguished more accurately than is possible with the naked eye, has DISTINGUISHING INKS 109 been used in matching the colour obtained in chemical reactions with those given by the colour scales prepared from known or suspected inks. For recording colour, strips of glass graduated so as to form a series of colour scales are employed in this instrument, and in this way a note can be taken of any given tint. The Tintometer The first occasion upon which this instrument was employed in criminal work was in the Brinkley poison- ing case, in which the colours of the different inks upon the will and other documents were examined by its means. The problem of determining the age of an mk in writing is much more difl&cult than that of deciding whether two writings are in the same or in a different kind of ink. It is, as a rule, possible to distinguish, with the aid 110 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL of the microscope and tintometer, between fresWy- written and old writing up to about the sixth day, after which the black pigment has attained sufficient intensity to prevent further differentiation until after the lapse of two or three years or more, when the provisional pigment will have faded or have become fixed by the iron tannate. In most cases the provisional pigments used offer, greater resistance to the action of chemicals, but are infinitely less stable than the iron tannate when exposed to the action of light and air, and eloquent testimony to this difference is given by the comparison of certain manuscripts of the seventh and eighth centuries with t5rpewritten matter in aniline ink, which has been put aside for a few years. Thus it happens that when characters written in blue-black ink are kept, the blue pigment will gradu- ally fade out, leaving the black pigment ; and when this stage is reached the ink in old writing is readily distinguished from ink that has been freshly put upon paper. Prior to this, however, the blue provisional colouring matter appears to become enveloped in the particles of iron tannate so that it no longer reacts rapidly with chemical reagents. Thus, if writing done within the last year or two be treated with acetic acid there is an immediate diffusion of the blue pigment, whereas in the older writing, diffusion, if it occurs at all, is very slow and limited in extent. A stiU more useful reagent for this purpose is a saturated solution of oxalic acid, which causes the DISTINGUISHING INKS 111 pigment of relatively fresh writing to give an imme- diate smudge, but has very little, if any, effect on writing six or eight years old. The differences in the behaviour of old and relatively recent writing are seen in the tests here illustrated, in which the old writing of 1898 was hardly affected by the reagents, whereas the writing done in 1908 gave the results shown. Both writings were in the same kind of ink and the tests were applied simultaneously. Speaking generally, a writing done with blue-black ink ceases to show such diffusion after five to six years. When slight diffusion occurs in an older ink it is seen under the microscope to differ in character and only to affect the surface of the letters, whereas the diffusion in an ink written within the last two or three years affects the whole of the pigment in the letters. The first occasion on which chemical evidence as to the age of blue-black ink has been given in the law courts was in the recent forgery case, in which Colonel Pilcher was accused of forging his cousin's will. This wiU was alleged to have been written in 1898 ; and assuming this to have been the case, the ink should only have reacted very slowly with the different reagents ; there should have been little or no diffusion with oxahc acid ; and if any slight diffusion occurred it should only have been upon the surface of the letters. The ink upon the will, however, gave an immediate reaction with the different reagents, the blue pigment diffused at once with oxalic acid, and the diffusion extended throughout the whole of the letters. There was thus no doubt but that the ink upon the will had 112 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL been written within the last year or two — certainly within the last six years. Cheques written by the deceased lady during the last thirteen years were also subjected simultaneously to the same tests, and while those written quite recently gave an immediate diffusion, the ink upon those written in 1903 showed only the shghtest diffusion in the heaviest writing, and no diffusion at aU was obtained upon the cheques written in 1901. The general adoption of blue-black ink for the old iron-gall ink has made it a simple matter to distinguish between old and new writing, for it is easy to differen- tiate the two kinds of ink by tests which show the presence of the blue pigment. The test has been found useful of late in checking the statements of certain claimants of old-age pensions, who, as a proof of their age, have pointed to the entries of date of their birth in old family Bibles. In more than one instance the results of a scientific examination of the inks have failed to support the claim, for they have proved conclusively that the ink was of recent origin. It is a simple matter to distinguish between the ancient types of ink that were in use during the early centuries of the Christian era until they were gradually replaced by iron-gaU inks and modem writing inks. For the basis of all these ancient inks is lampblack, or some other form of carbon, which is very resistant to the action of reagents. It is for this reason that printing ink, the pigment of which is carbon, is so much more stable than any ordinary writing ink can be. In fact, in order to increase the permanence of DISTINGUISHING INKS 113 writing inks it has frequently been recommended to add a small amount of some carbon ink. The most easily obtained preparation of the kind is the commercial Indian or Chinese ink, which con- sists essentially of a mixture of glue with lampblack in the finest possible state of division. In order to distinguish between a carbon ink of this nature and an ordinary writing ink all that is necessary is to apply a dilute bleaching agent. The blue-black pigment of the writing ink will then gradu- ally disappear, whereas the fine particles of carbon in the other ink will show little, if any alteration, and may still be discerned under the microscope as minute black granules resting upon the fibres of the paper. It was by a method similar to this that Sir Humphrey Davy proved that the writing upon pap5rri found in the ruins of Herculaneum, which was destroyed in A.D. 79, had been done with a carbon ink, of the same nature as that used by the ancient Egyptians and by the Chinese and Japanese at the present day. On none of the Herculaneum MSS. could any trace of iron ink be detected. The same tests may be applied to determine whether the writing upon a document has been lithographed or has been written with ordinary ink. An amusing instance of the kind came within the present writer's experience. A sheet of paper upon which was some writing that was believed to have been written by Nelson had been handed down in a family for several generations as an heirloom, and had always been looked upon as a genuine document. The ink had the faded yellow tone of old iron ink, and there 8— (2iai) 114 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL was nothing to show that the writing was not what it professed to be. Its present owner, however, happened to notice in a museum what appeared to be a duplicate of the manuscript in his possession, and when a chemical test was applied to the ink upon the latter the pigment was quite unaffected. Hence there could be no doubt as to its being a copy of the original reproduced by hthography. ^ Cases in which it is necessary to distinguish between iron-gaU writing inks and printing or other carbon inks occur from time to time in criminal investigations. As a recent example a case that was tried a few months ago may be mentioned. The chief clerk of a firm of merchants had for a considerable time been defrauding his employers, and when suspicion at length fell upon him, endeavoured to conceal his doings by falsifying the entries of previous years in the ledger. ,In order to do this it was necessary to abstract certain pages in a particular part of the ledger and to substitute the necessary alterations. Then, finding that the ink of the writing would appear too new, and thus invite inquiry, he added a small amount of Indian ink to an ordinary writing ink, and thus obtained a mixture, which gave an immediate effect of age to the writing. To the naked eye there was nothing to show that these pages had not been written on the dates mentioned on them, three or four years previously, but on appljnng a weak bleaching agent the fraud was at once made obvious. The iron-gall part of the pigment faded away, but the particles of carbon that had formed the basis of the Indian ink DISTINGUISHING INKS 115 were left, and their nature could easily be recognised under the microscope. The entries on the other pages in the ledger, which had been written in ordinary writing were completely bleached in the test. A very curious illustration of the difficulties that beset the forger of ancient documents was afforded by the trial of Humphreys in 1839 in Edinburgh. The prisoner was the claimant to the earldom of Stirhng, and in support of his claim had produced a number of documents supposed to date back to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. One of these purported to be a portion of a charter granted by King Charles I to the first Earl of Stirling in 1639, permitting the succession to the earldom to descend through the daughters of the house. As witness to this there was appended the signature of Archbishop Spottiswood described as " our Chan- cellor," whereas as a matter of history the seal had been handed to the Marquis of Hamilton a year prior to the date of the pretended charter. There were also various other anachronisms in the document, such as margins in red ink, which were not used before 1780. Scientific evidence was also given that the ink upon the pretended charter was not old ink, but ink that had been treated in such a manner as to appear old. Similar inconsistencies were shown in the other pieces of documentary evidence, and scientific proof was given that the date upon an engraved map, upon the back of which were memoranda supporting the claimant's case, had been added at a later period. The jury unanimously found the prisoner guilty of forgery. CHAPTER IX TWO NOTABLE TRIALS Trial of Brinkley— Trial of Robert Wood The first occasion upon which scientific evidence as to the difference of blue-black inks upon a document was given in a court of law in this country was at the trial of Richard Brinkley at the Guildford Assizes in July, 1907, for the murder of Mr. and Mrs. Beck. Bririkley, at the time of his trial, was about fifty years of age. He was a carpenter by trade, but in the course of his Ufe had turned his hand to many occupations, and for many months had been living upon the proceeds of the property which he claimed to have inherited. For some time prior to her death he had made himself indispensable to an old lady named Blume, and when, early in 1906, she died, he produced a will in which she had left him her house and money. On the strength of this will, which he proved in the usual way, Brinkley took possession of Mrs. Blume's house, much to the disgust of her daughter and grand- daughter, who had always resented his influence over the old lady. They had no knowledge that anything was wrong with the wiU, but they determined to test its validity, and accordingly a caveat was entered against it. Brinkley had not anticipated that he would have to prove that it was a genuine document, or that he would have to depend upon the testimony of the men 116 TWO NOTABLE TRIALS 117 whose signatures as witnesses were present upon the will. He knew that he could rely upon one of his witnesses, a man named Hird, who had drawn up the will ; but the other witness, Parker, refused to perjure himself for Brinkley's benefit. He owned that he had signed a paper when he had been out with Brinkley, but denied that he had ever seen or signed a will. As Parker's refusal to appear in court meant that the wiU would be declared a forgery, Brinkley. decided that he must be cleared from his path. He therefore obtained some prussic acid from a man who described himself as " a friend of our dumb feUow-creatures," alleging that he needed it to kill a dog, and this poison he introduced into a bottle of oatmeal stout, which he took round to Parker's lodgings in Croydon, and placed in his sitting-room. Before Parker came home his landlady, Mrs. Beck, went into his room and seeing the bottle of stout called her husband and daughter, and they all drank the poisoned beer that had never been intended for them. Mr. and Mrs. Beck died the same night, and their daughter, who had taken less of the stout, was very ill, though she ultimately recovered. Parker was immediately arrested, but being able to prove his innocence was soon set free, and suspicion then feU upon Brinkley who, after the coroner's inquest, was committed for trial on the charge of murdering the Becks, the law being that if you deliberately intend to kill one person and unintentionally kill another you are none the less guilty of murder. On the way to the police station, after his arrest, Brinkley made the significant statement : " If anyone 118 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL says I put poison in stout, he's got to prove it." Up to that moment there had been no mention of poisoned stout. At the police court proceedings it was proved that the Becks had died from the effects of prussic acid, that Brinkley had bought that poison, that he had bought a bottle of stout in West Croydon, and that he had been seen on the platform at Wandsworth waiting for the West Croydon train. The motive of the crime was an important hnk in the chain of evidence, but Brinkley held stoutly to his story that the will was signed by both witnesses in the presence of Mrs. Blume. Parker's version of his signature, the authenticity of which he did not dispute, was that while he was out with Brinkley one evening the latter asked him to sign his name upon a paper petitioning for an outing, and that they had thereupon turned into a public-house, where he, Parker, had written his name upon a sheet of paper, the upper part of which was folded over. In order to test the truth of Parker's statement the bottle of ink was obtained from that public-house, and he was told to write his name upon a sheet of paper in that ink, and this paper and the original wiU were submitted to the present writer for examination. By the aid of the methods described in the preceding pages it was found that the ink of Parker's signature upon the will and that of the writing upon the piece of paper were of the same kind — an ink readily recog- nisable from its particularly brilliant blue pigment. In addition to this, three distinct kinds of ink were TWO NOTABLE TRIALS 119 present upon the will, the body of the document and the signature of one witness being in one kind of ink, the signature of the testatrix in another, and the signature of the other witness in a third. When the case came on at the Assizes at Guildford Mr. R. D. Muir appeared for the prosecution, while the prisoner was very ably defended by Mr. Frampton. Every day the judge, counsel on both sides, the prisoner, and many of the witnesses went down to Guildford by a train in the morning and returned to London again in the evening. Each morning the prisoner when he entered the court appeared quite unconcerned, and chatted with the warders. As is so often the case, he did not seem to realise the gravity of his position. It was shown in the evidence that he had some knowledge of poisons, and that he had selected one that would disappear more or less rapidly from the body after death. The chemical evidence as to the presence of prussic acid in the bodies was given by Dr. Stevenson and Mr. Bodmer, and was not called in question by the defence. Evidence was also given by the writer with regard to the inks upon the wiU, and this, too, was not dis- puted. In fact, Brinkley, who went into the witness- box, when asked how he explained the fact of three kinds of ink being on the will replied that Mrs. Blume had three different sorts in the house. He was then asked what had become of two of them, since only one bottle of ink was discovered when the house was searched, and to this his answer was that he had given these to a little girl. 120 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL Throughout the trial Brinkley's explanations of damning facts were never supported by any evidence, while for every statement of Parker there was abundant corroboration. The scene in court on the opening day of the trial will probably never be forgotten by anyone present. A heavy thunderstorm passed over Guildford, and for some minutes such blackness filled the interior of the haU where the Assizes were held that it was barely possible to distinguish the faces of those who were trying a man for his hfe, excepting when they were lit up by the vivid flashes of lightning. Throughout the storm Mr. Muir continued, in clear incisive tones, which could be plainly heard across the noise of the thunder, to marshal the array of deadly facts, from which there could be no escape for the prisoner sitting motionless in the dock. To the journalist nothing that means " copy " is sacred, and the representative of one leading London paper whispered to another sitting just behind the writer, " What a pity this couldn't happen while the sentence of death was being passed ! " Mr. Frampton in his speech for the defence dwelt principally upon other possible explanations of evidence, which, as he urged, was entirely circum- stantial in character, but he was unable to pro- duce any witnesses to support the assertions of Brinkley. After a trial which lasted four days, the judge (Sir John Bigham) summed up, and the jury, after a short retirement, found the prisoner guilty. Until the end he protested his innocence. TWO NOTABLE TRIALS 121 Th^ most sensational trial that has taken place in this country for many years was that of Robert Woodj a young artist, in 1907, on the charge of murdering a woman. The story of the crime itself is a particularly sordid one, but the behaviour of the prisoner in court, and the excited state of public feeling upon the subject gave a profound psychological interest to the trial. A woman had been found brutally murdered in her lodgings in a small house in Camden Town, and no trace could be found of the murderer. In the fire-grate, however, had been found some charred fragments of a letter, while in the chest of drawers a post card that had escaped notice had been discovered. A reproduction of this post card was posted up at the poUce-stations and pubHshed in the papers, and was soon recognised by several people as being in the handwriting of Robert Wood. In the meantime, Wood, finding that suspicion was likely to attach to him, persuaded a girl of his acquaint- ance, named Ruby Young, to promise to support his statement that he had been with her upon the evening when the murder took place. A day or two later Ruby Young became uneasy as to the effect her promise was likely to produce, and asked the advice of a journalist as to what would be the best thing to do, putting the case as a hypothetical one. The man, however, at once saw to what she alluded, and immediately telephoned to the police, and this led to the arrest of Robert Wood. At the police court proceedings an expert opinion 122 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL was given that the fragments of charred paper found in the grate of the dead woman, were in the handwriting of Wood, and evidence was also given by the present writer that the pigment in which the characters were written was identical with that of a marking-ink pencil found upon the prisoner. For a long time Wood denied that he had had any- thing to do with these fragments. Subsequently, at the beginning of the trial at the Old Bailey, he admitted that he had written them, though to the end he strenuously refused to admit that the words had the meaning which they appeared to suggest. He denied that they referred to any appointment made with the dead woman for the day upon which she was murdered. The proof of the fact that these bits of charred paper had really been written by Wood brought him very close to the scene of the crime, and his attempt to create a false ahbi and to get Ruby Young to bear this out still further strengthened the suspicion against him. The most telling evidence, however, was the state- ment of a carman, who had, he asserted, seen a man leave the house of the murdered woman at five o'clock in the morning. He had not seen the face of the man, but had noticed that he had a characteristic swinging walk, and when taken to the police station had identified the prisoner among a number of other men, who had been made to walk round the yard, as the man that he had seen coming down the steps of the house. Other evidence was given as to Wood's having been TWO NOTABLE TRIALS 123 seen in the company of the deceased woman on several occasions in the past, although he asserted that he had only known her a few days and had seen her only once or twice. The bad reputation .of most of these witnesses detracted from the value of their evidence. Mr. Marshall Hall, who conducted Wood's defence, made a very brilliant speech, in which he laid stress upon the weak points in the case for the prosecution — the evidence that had been gathered from a tainted source, the complete absence of any motive for the crime, and the fact that the jury were trying the prisoner for murder and not for immorality or lying. He urged that the keynote in this case was that Wood, who had a great deal of vanity, could not take upon himself the responsibiUty of admitting what would cause him to occupy a lower position in the estimation of those who had given him their undivided respect and affection. What, he asked, was the evidence of murder ? The only iota of evidence that turned the scale against Wood was that of the man McGowan, who stated that he had seen the prisoner leaving the house, and had afterwards recognised him by an alleged peculiarity in his gait. Two months after the arrest of her lover, Ruby Young, for the first time, had said that he had a peculiar gait similar to that described by McGowan, and so far as she was concerned this, said counsel, was a gross and vindictive Ue. The chief evidence called for the defence was that 124 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL of Wood's father and brother, who stated that he was at home on the night of the murder, and of a neigh- bour who had Uved beneath them, who had seen Wood come home that evening. A ticket collector named Westcott, employed at King's Cross station, stated that he lived in the same road, and that on the early morning, when Wood was stated to have been seen, he left his house at five minutes to five. He was then wearing a loose over- coat. Westcott was a broad-shouldered man, and a boxer, and had a brisk swinging walk. It was this man, it was suggested, whom McGowan had mistaken for Wood. Wood, himself, was put into the box and gave his evidence in a low, and at times, nearly inaudible voice, though he showed not a sign of nervousness. He gave emphatic denials to the questions put to him in cross- examination by Sir Charles Matthews, but he admitted having lied in the matter of the false alibi that he had attempted to set up. He was, he said, in a tight corner, and any man would have done the same if placed in the same conditions. With reference to the fragments of paper on which were words in his handwriting he denied that they were part of a letter, and suggested that it might have been some scrap of writing taken from his pocket by the dead woman. The theory of its referring to an assignation was, he suggested, an act of imagination upon the part of the prosecuting counsel. The judge, Sir William Grantham, in summing up the case, pointed out that had it not been for the conduct of Wood himself in telling lies and keeping TWO NOTABLE TRIALS 125 back what he knew, there would have been no justification for such a lengthy trial. The evidence of McGowan was, he said, open to a certain amount of doubt, owing to the fact that the witness had not mentioned at once about having noticed a peculiarity in the walk of the man he saw leaving the house in St. Paul's Road, just before five o'clock on the morning of September 12th. Then the statements of Ruby Young did not bring the crime home to the prisoner at all. That was a remarkable feature in the case. A number of witnesses for the Crown did not directly connect the prisoner with the crime. The inference, in view of the evidence of other witnesses, was that Wood in his evidence had been lying all through. But the jury could not convict him because he was a har. It was mainly in conse- quence of Wood's own false statements that the prose- cution were bound to rely upon the evidence of the other witnesses who had come forward. " Although," said the judge in concluding his address to the jury, " it is my duty to do all I can to further the interests of justice, it is also my duty to inform the jury that they must not find a man guilty unless no loophole is left by which he can escape. In my judg- ment, strong as is the suspicion in this case, I don't think the prosecution have brought the case near enough home to the prisoner — ^with the exception of the evidence of McGowan. That evidence, if implicitly rehed upon, would justify you in finding him guilty ; but that evidence is considerably controverted. I don't think the identification, even if true, is sufficient to 126 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL justify you in finding this man guilty. Therefore, although it is a matter for you alone, it is my duty to point out the effect of the evidence, and it is my duty to point out that unless the effect of the evidence is so conclusive that there can be no doubt in anyone's mind, you should give the prisoner the benefit of the doubt, and say you don't think he is guilty." It was a quarter to eight in the evening when the jury retired to consider their verdict, and before eight had struck they were back again in court, and had pronounced their verdict of " Not guilty." Cheer on cheer swept through the court, and for some minutes it was impossible for the judge and the court officers to obtain silence. Men and women thronged round the dock eager to grasp the hand which Robert Wood held out to them over the rail. Outside, in the street, the dense mob that thronged up to the very doors of the court, took up the cry, and yelled itself hoarse with the words " Not guilty. Not guilty." The public had long before this decided that Wood was innocent, and the orgies of wild enthusiasm that followed upon the announcement of the verdict were some indication of the tense excitement that had been pent up for so many days. Robert Wood had become the popular hero of the hour. It is difficult now to account for this hero-worship of a man who had done nothing to justify such wor- ship, except upon the theory of an emotional infection that had destroyed the balance of collective judgment. This want of proportion reached its limit perhaps in an article written for a Sunday paper by one of the TWO NOTABLE TRIALS 127 best known actresses. After describing the emotional stress through which she had passed while waiting for the jury to give their verdict she mentioned that she had gone into the hall. There she had noticed a forlorn little figure of a girl wandering listlessly up and down. Someone told her that this was Ruby Young, and for a moment she had felt an impulse to go and speak to her, for she pitied her from the bottom of her heart. And as she looked at her, with tears welling up in her eyes, she thought of Peter when he had gone out and wept bitterly ! It was a matter of the greatest difficulty for those connected with the case to force a way through the surging crowd that was waiting to give a boisterous welcome to the acquitted artist and his solicitor and counsel, and to vent their disapproval upon witnesses who had dared to give evidence against him, and particularly Ruby Young. For hours she waited, trembling, within the building, for it was not thought prudent to allow her to venture outside ; and it was quite late at night before, disguised as a charwoman, she was able to make her escape through a small door that had not attracted the notice of the mob. This was the climax of one of the most unpleasant features of the trial, in the course of which several of the witnesses had complained to the judge of the attempts that had been made to intimidate them from giving their evidence. Another memorable feature in the trial was the behaviour of the accused. Throughout his ordeal Wood seemed to be more 128 SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL concerned about the impression he was making upon the spectators in court than about the necessity of accounting satisfactorily for many suspicious circumstances that told against him. So well did he appear to be able to control his emotions that, as he himself wrote afterwards, he could notice whether one of the actresses who attended the trial day by day, smiled upon him. Never for one moment did he lose this self-control or appear otherwise than an unconcerned witness of the events upon which his life depended. This absence of nerves in the accused is what struck most people as one of the strangest features in a strange trial, and caused Mr. HaU Caine, who was present in the court throughout the whole time, to write of him: "That he felt nothing I will not dare to say, that his mental processes were not frequently stirred to such pain as comes of baffling difficulties, but that the ordeal of his trial was a terrible one to him I absolutely refuse to believe. Robert Wood, innocent of the murder of Emily Dimmock, is yet the most remarkable man alive." In what trial upon a charge of murder has there ever been witnessed the sight of the prisoner, whose life was hanging in the balance, laughing and chatting with his friends, and making sketches of the judge, the counsel, and the witnesses ? Even at the most crucial moment of the tri9,l, when the jury had withdrawn to consider their verdict he exhibited no trace of anxiety, but until called below sat calmly sketching, while he waited for their return. And thus Mr. Hall Caine wondered, as he got the TWO NOTABLE TRIALS 129 prisoner to sign his name upon the back of a copy of the charred fragments of the letter, whether " with all his mental alertness, his intellectual activity, his temperamental composure, this was not one of those men, the rare and mysterious men, who lack some necessary quaUty on the moral side of their nature." 9—