The Crime Book

(Wang) #1

214


W


hen brothers Alfred and
Albert Stratton robbed
and murdered the
husband and wife who managed
a paint shop in south London in
1905, they left something behind:
an oily fingerprint on an emptied
cash box. This evidence became
the cornerstone of the case against
them, and paved the way for further
development of fingerprint analysis.

A brutal robbery
Elderly couple Thomas and Ann
Farrow lived in an apartment above
their shop Chapman’s Oil and

Colour on Deptford High Street.
On the morning of 27 March 1905,
their assistant arrived to find
Thomas dead in the parlour with
terrible head injuries. Ann was
found unconscious in the bedroom;
she had been beaten around the
head, and died a few days later. A
tin cash box lay near her body;
after a search, police found two
masks made from stockings.
Detectives wrapped the cash
box and took it to Scotland Yard’s
Fingerprint Bureau, which had
been established four years earlier.
On examination, they determined
that the fingerprint was left by a
thumb. It was compared to the
victims’ prints, those of the police
at the crime scene, and more than
80,000 others on file at the bureau,
but there was no match.

The tipping point
The police searched for witnesses.
A milkman saw two men leaving
the shop at the time of the murders,
but he was unable to identify the
Strattons. A breakthrough came on
31 March when another witness,
Ellen Stanton, told police that she
saw the two brothers running
across the top of Deptford High

Street while she walked to work
on the morning of 27 March. The
brothers were arrested and on
31 March Stanton picked them
out of a police line-up of 16 men.
The police also interviewed
Alfred’s girlfriend, who said he had
borrowed stockings from her, and
Albert’s girlfriend, who claimed he
had arrived home that day with
unexplained money. The evidence
against the brothers was highly
circumstantial, but when their
prints were taken, Alfred’s matched
the thumb print on the cash box.

A master stroke
During the trial, the prosecution
counsel explained the new science
of fingerprinting to the jury. In his
testimony, Detective Inspector
Collins of Scotland Yard showed
an enlarged photograph of Alfred

IN CONTEXT


LOCATION
London, UK

THEME
Fingerprint evidence

BEFORE
1902 Burglar Harry Jackson is
the first man to be convicted
of a crime in the UK using
fingerprint evidence. Police
find his prints on a windowsill
in a London home that had
been robbed.

AFTER
1911 Murderer Thomas
Jennings is the first person
in the US to be convicted on
fingerprint evidence.
2014 Police in Utah solve the
1991 murder of 78-year-old
Lucille Johnson when they
match fingerprints on Lego
bricks with those of a man
who played with them as a
child while his father, John
Sansing, killed Johnson in
an adjacent room.

Until the arrest of Alfred
Stratton I had not been able to
find any fingerprints that I
tried which agreed with the
print upon the cash box.
Detective Inspector
Charles Collins

Sir Melville Leslie Macnaghten
co-led the police investigation. He had
been on the Belper Committee (1900),
which recommended that criminals’
fingerprints be taken and classified.

THE STRATTON BROTHERS


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215
See also: John Leonard Orr 48–53 ■ The Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping 178–85 ■ Colin Pitchfork 294–97

MURDER CASES


The Henry system, used in most countries today, classifies
fingerprints by four basic patterns – the arch, the loop, the whorl,
and the composite. It is named for Sir Edward Richard Henry, who
founded the Scotland Yard Fingerprint Bureau in 1901.

COMPOSITES
are a combination
of arches, loops,
and whorls.

ARCHES
produce a wave-
like pattern.
Tented arches rise
to a sharper point.

LOOPS
curve back on
themselves to
form a loop shape.

WHORLS
form circular or
spiral patterns.

Fingerprinting


Although it has been known
since 200 bce that each person’s
fingerprints are different from
every other person’s, Sir William
James Herschel, a British
magistrate in India during the
1850s, is credited with the first
systematic use of fingerprints for
identification. In 1891, English
scientist Sir Francis Galton
developed Herschel’s findings.
Galton devised an efficient
system that allowed fingerprints
to be matched against each
other. He discovered that every
person has a different pattern of
ridges and valleys on the pads
of their fingers (and on their
toes) that do not change with
time and will even grow back
in their original form if the digit
is damaged. In his classic book
Finger Prints (1892), Galton
referred to the lines, ridges, and
shapes of fingerprints as “little
worlds in themselves.”

Three types of fingerprints can
be recovered from a crime scene.
Patent prints can be made by
blood, grease, ink, or dirt, and
are easily visible to the naked
eye. Latent fingerprints are not
visible – they are impressions
secreted on a surface or an
object by sweat and oil on the
skin surface. Plastic prints,
which are visible to the naked
eye, are 3D indentations that
occur when a finger touches a
soft, malleable surface.
Although fingerprinting has
stood the test of time, since the
1990s, several court cases have
challenged their interpretation.
Tests have found a margin of
error, and there have been “false
positives” – two prints can be
similar enough to fool experts.
In 2002, a US federal judge ruled
that fingerprint witnesses can
no longer tell juries that two
prints are a “definite match”.
Fingerprinting may soon be
replaced with DNA tests.

Stratton’s thumb print alongside
the thumb smudge on the cash box,
and pointed out 11 characteristics
that agreed in the prints.
The defence counsel, Mr Rooth,
attempted to cast doubt on
fingerprinting as a scientific
technique, and on the reliability of
the work carried out by Collins’s
department. Rooth argued that the
print taken at the crime scene did
not match the one taken while
Alfred Stratton was in custody.
In a stroke of genius, Collins
offered to take the prints of a jury
member to show the court that
differing amounts of downward
pressure could account for the
deviation. The jury was convinced
by his scientific demonstration and
took less than two hours to deliver
a guilty verdict. The brothers were
later sentenced to death. It was the
first murder conviction in the UK
based on fingerprint evidence.
The high-profile media coverage
caused one drawback: criminals
became aware of the precautions
they had to take to avoid detection
by this new forensic tool. ■

The up-to-date professional
criminal now seeks to prevent
the leaving of telltale prints by
covering the fingertips with
thin india-rubber, gold-beater’s
skin, or silk finger-stalls.
The Mirror

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