Fingerprint Evidence throughout History Name: _________________________ Date: ________________

the skin on the inside of your hands and the soles of your feet are different than skin on the rest of your body there is a system of papillary ridges on your fingers and toes that form during the third and fourth month of development when you are a fetus after birth, there is no changes in the shape of your fingerprints, however they do change in size as you grow no two individuals, not even identical twins, have fingerprints that are exactly alike one of the first people to experiment with fingerprints was William Herschel, who started using handprints and then finger prints instead of a signature on documents o William Herschel worked in India in the late 1800s and found that the prints of the right first and middle fingers he took of pensioners did not change with age, and might be important for criminal records around the same time, a Scottish doctor, Henry Faulds, was working in a hospital in Tokyo, Japan o Dr. Faulds found that many illiterate Japanese signed documents with their hand prints o when a suspected thief left a dirty hand print on a wall, Dr. Faulds compared the handprints of the suspect and the crime scene, and discovered that the suspect was not the thief another man later confessed o Dr. Faulds then realized how important handprints could be to police work a Frenchman, Alphonse Bertillon, developed a method of body measurements to identify people o in 1903 a criminal named Will West was sentenced to Leavenworth Prison in Kansas o when clerks took Will Wests Bertillon measurements, he found that another prisoner with the same name already had the same measurements o the two men named Will West were not related but looked physically very similar o the only thing different about the two men were their fingerprints o the next day, Leavenworth stopped using the Bertillon method and began using fingerprints to identify inmates an English physician and anthropologist, Sir Francis Galton, discovered four basic types of fingerprints and in 1892 published a book on fingerprinting to be used to identify criminals it took a long time for fingerprints to be accepted as evidence in the courts by the early 1900s, prisons across the USA were fingerprinting inmates, then the Army, Navy and Marine Corps followed suit for enlisted men and officers

in 1924, the U.S congress established the FBIs Identification Division to store fingerprint records o now the Identification Division employs the most people in the FBI, and there are currently more than 200 million prints (over 68 million people) on file there some famous criminal cases that used fingerprint evidence: 1. the Nazi in disguise in 1975, the U.S. Department of Justice began starting deportation proceedings against Valerian Trifa, a former archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church in America the Justice Dept. argued that Trifa was a member of Romanias proNazi party in the second world war Trifa denied the charges against him in 1982, the West German government found a postcard that Trifa had sent to a high-ranking Nazi officer, where Trifa pledged his allegiance to the Nazi party FBI agents lifted Trifas thumbprint off the postcard using laser technology, which was identical to the print Trifa gave when he became an American citizen Trifa was deported in 1984 2. Dr. Martin Luther King Jrs killer in 1968 the great civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee police found a left thumbprint on the rifle that was suspected of shooting Dr. King, and they found prints on a pair of binoculars officers knew that an Eric S. Galt had signed into the hotel, but there was no suspect to match the prints to police eventually tracked Eric Galt to hotel rooms across several states, where they obtained a fingerprint from a map he had touched this was one of the first times that police used computers to help solve a crime using fingerprint identification at that time, only 53 000 people were in the FBI data bank the search narrowed down the number of matches to 1900, and officers began looking through fingerprint cards 100 at a time eventually James Earl Ray, who had previously escaped from prison where he was serving time for a robbery, was identified as the man who killed Dr. King

Attempts to Erase Fingerprints criminals have tried many ways to get rid of their fingerprints

in the 1930s, some American gangsters decided to remove their fingerprints, so they hired a mob physician who surgically tried to remove their prints o unfortunately for the gangsters, all they got was an extremely painful experience (the physician was inexperienced) and their prints grew back to their original patterns in the 1930s, John Dillinger had a physician use acid to burn a hole in the centre of his fingers to get rid of his prints o the operation destroyed the centre of his fingertips, but left small ridges outside of that area intact o this was enough information for FBI to identify Dillinger he was shot and killed by the FBI in 1941, a criminal had the skin from his chest grafted onto his fingertips o the criminal was identified by his original print card which had not only his fingertips, but prints from below the first joint of his fingers o the prints below the first joint were enough to indict him Miami, Florida police arrested a suspect on a drug charge in 1990 who had sliced the skin on his fingerprints into tiny pieces and then transplanted them onto different fingers, much like a skin jigsaw puzzle o an FBI latent print specialist took photographs of the mans fingers, enlarged them, cut them into pieces, and unscrambled the prints to make their original pattern o after several weeks, the suspect was convicted because his unaltered prints were previously on file for another drug case fingerprints are not only used to identify criminals, but to identify bodies that have been burned, decomposed, drowned, or are otherwise not recognizable for example, the astronauts aboard the space shuttle Challenger that exploded in 1986 were identified by their fingerprints if skin has been badly shrivelled or wrinkled, forensic scientists can soak it in water or heat it in the microwave or inject fluid into it to build it up sometimes the prints on the outside of the skin have been mutilated, but the skin can be turned inside out and printed sometimes, a finger or the skin from a finger can be sliced off and placed over the forensic scientists own fingertips to make a print

information from: Bodies of Evidence, Brian Innes, 2000, Amber Books Ltd, p. 110 135 Threads of Evidence: Using Forensic Science to Solve Crimes, Herma Silverstein, 1996, Twenty-First Century Books, p. 30 39 http://www.crimemuseum.org/blog/?p=839