SOLVING CRIME BY THE FINGER PRINT
Ellard, Roscoe
Solving Crime by the Finger Print Alibis of No Avail if Rogue Leaves An Impression of Hand at Scene of His Crime; Many Famous Solutions Made by This Method By ROSCOE ELLARD "A CRIMINAL is...
...They toiled side by side in the payless factory, whispered of "release day," and exchanged the confidences men will when the heart is lonely...
...It is the story of one of Wisconsin's most baffling murders...
...His shouts brought the rest of the men and they fished out of the water a bluish, water-soaked body of a man about 25 years old...
...But a fingerprint of the slayer from the cottage—and Otis says he would be free...
...Found in River Grove IT did look clear, and another unknown grave was about to be filled—with no possible clue as to the assassin...
...Another of the cases which encourage murder...
...The chances are against it...
...The ridges and technical peculiarities which make every finger print in the world different to the glass of the expert were noted...
...Wanderers unknown and murdered in some alley in the great transient cities, -shell shock victims whose memories had left them, well dressed elderly men and women suffering from aphasia, unable to communicate with searching panic-stricken relatives...
...He's nobody's fool...
...prohibitionists stand right up in meetin' and recite statistics about "alcoholic criminals...
...At least, I'll wait till you've gone...
...They always come, Mr...
...I borrowed this from your notebook," Mr, Benson explained...
...The natural adoption of thoroughly scientifie methods of crime prevention and detection and the national organization of American police would in five years cut crime in the United States exactly in half—and American crime is now bringing gasps from all the rest of the world...
...For what Mr...
...A man had entered the house through a broken back window, she testified...
...Wrong number, professors...
...Krause is dead, so that's his real name...
...If you are contemplating stealing an automobile, don't do it in Wisconsin...
...No need to page a Sherlock now...
...Then Krause's buddy, Aleck Otis, was released, and Chaplain S. J. Dowling, now a Beloit pastor, bade him God's speed at the big iron gate...
...Benson declares...
...Back in 1913, two short-timers at Waupun got to be "buddies...
...Wisconsin News...
...Osborne means is that the highest forms of science, the shrewdest kind of wit, the most long-headed sort of thinking is today being dedicated to the Underworld...
...criminologists from Paris and Frisco all agree...
...1, 1916...
...Bloody fingers had clasped a door inside and out...
...But chemicals were injected in the veins and tips pretty well restored for the time...
...Story of Krause OTIS declared he had left Krause, well and healthy, at Beloit...
...That was in the fall of 1916...
...Doctors were called to determine if the blood was human or not, and they carefully scraped it all off the woodwork to carry to their laboratories...
...He photographs ail the "cases" he can hear about, and the photos almost fill the upper right hand drawer of his desk...
...He shook the paper gently and the powder fell on the desk...
...Some day, I'l clear 'em all up," he promises, The shadows were getting long in the big prison record office...
...Now for Aleck Otis...
...Even the shoes and shirt and under wear...
...This is Called "doctoring...
...Still finer print peculiarities were traced and noted, and the prints of the deceased and the record pronounced identical...
...the record clerk, with his trained pessimism—or intuition —with a bit of doubt...
...Benson laughed jovially...
...This is the disconcerting opinion of Warden Osborne, broadcasted from the famous Sing Sing prison in New York...
...When there isn't any dust on other soft surface which will leave a print, we can bring the print out with powder...
...Who was with him those few days ? Father Dowling remembered the "pal" who met him—the prison friendship, the $300...
...He sticks to it yet...
...Prison friendship...
...The priest noted it with satisfaction...
...She pointed to the glass the man had broken out...
...And in the attempt to accomplish this, the great detectives of the world, and employers of men whose identities are important are now working with the intricacies of a still new, highly accurate science of identification—the romance of the finger print...
...That's why he isn't known here...
...No papers or identification marks of any sort were in the clothes...
...But he begs to point out that the typical criminal—the housebreaker, the counterfeiter, the murderer—needs no nurse to tuck him in at night, no guide to show him around the big city...
...The first was immediately classified as & "circular whorl" type, the ridges printing in a circular whirling pattern which gives the primary classification...
...a jury at Janesville some six years ago "deliberated the case" a trifle over twenty-four hours—and decided against him...
...and he quotes pages of the Bible when it suits him to "impress" a person or a debutante...
...Here is the inside story of that "lifer's" plea...
...It was found to be human, all right...
...The police put the body in a Beloit morgue, newspapers printed theories, townspeople talked a lot over the back fence—all scratched their heads and wondered...
...Of course, sociologists come charging up to tell us that mental defectives throng-our penitentiaries...
...Up at Waupun, where the state perntentiary nestles in the low hills like a great feudal castle, a "lifer" still maintains he is innocent...
...Two weeks after this, a little girl was playing on the river near Beloit...
...They haven't got them yet," Reported Is Trinted' "No Mr...
...They both laughed...
...He recalls his research in chemistry and physics to counterfeit and to go silently through steel vault doors...
...No one in the vicinity of the two towns or nearby villages was missing...
...It was nearly "bus time" back to Milwaukee...
...Fred Sanberg, Washington expert, got on the case and found several well defined prints on the window...
...Many Famous Solutions Made by This Method By ROSCOE ELLARD "A CRIMINAL is frequently a genius gone wrong...
...guardians of our safety must be just as scientific—G...
...and stuck to it...
...He had chased her around the rooms till she was exhausted, assaulted her, and left with $185 which was in the house...
...Had they been, there could have been no doubt...
...But the papers had published the identification, and Otis suddenly disappeared—by way of Italy, it was finally discovered...
...If so, his finger prints would be on file...
...Careful ink prints were made and the work of classification and record searching began...
...The romance of the fingerprint is unfolded in the big steel vaulted record office of the Wisconsin state prison at Waupun...
...No one had heard a struggle...
...Four plain, finger prints stood out in black against the white sheet...
...Riddled by Bullets THE face was badly battered and twenty bullet holes were found in the chest and back...
...Sixty-five thousand persons in this country were last year buried in nameless graves...
...A universal system of finger printing with a central clearing house bureau would make such tragedy impossible," Mr...
...He had been idly playing with a blank sheet of paper—sifting some black powder from a little bottle on it, with a camel's hair brush...
...burglary released, Nov...
...They were identical with those on the broken glass, and the woman confessed to trumping up the story to get $185 of her husband's money...
...Waupun records were "searched" by opening the drawer of a file, turning to half a dozen cards—and pulling out the card of Henry A. Krause, "Register number 11961, received at the prison, March, 6, 1913...
...The second was a "spiral whorl," the third, quite different, an "ulnar loop...
...A. Benson, identification expert at Wisconsin's state prison points out...
...Finger Print Test HIS clothes were all new...
...Finger prints...
...Benson's hobby...
...Need Trained Police AMERICA'S police must be just as enterprising...
...It was very strong circumstantial evidence...
...The rest was easy...
...But that was before finger printing was thoroughly understood in Beloit...
...The reporter looked quizzically toward the upper right hand drawer of the desk...
...Out on a canoe wharf she scampered...
...He works with the newest and freshest fruits of knowledge which will help him...
...Nothing else to it—he dressed like a sport, his clothes from the skin out are new, yet his face looks hard and dissipated...
...a jury found the ex-convict guilty...
...At last Beloit, peaceful little college town, had a mystery...
...It has its shock for sentimentalists—and its significance for those of us who like to go to bed at night in some measure of security...
...Every other print he gets he compares with these...
...G. A. Benson, F. P. E.—which is a new degree meaning, "fingerprint expert"—explains the rudiments of it this way: Woman Made Marks AWOMAN in Washington, D. C, recently declared she had been assaulted...
...A talk with the woman's husband led him to take her finger prints...
...I wanted to show you one way we work...
...says the head of the largest force in the world, trained to struggle with the world's most intricate criminal problem, Richard E. Enright, police commissioner of New York...
...on dark surfaces, a mixture of powdered aluminum and chalk...
...America looks good to the best and worst of them...
...Certain of these figures were then added to give the card index "address" of this particular sub-class of print in which never more than fifteen or twenty fingers in the world ever fall...
...There were prints in the hallway...
...On white surfaces we dust fine lamp black...
...Probably got into some rumpus over a game and his partner plunked him...
...The finger prints were shrivelled from the water and decomposing tissue...
...I'll commit my crimes before they get my finger prints," he smiled...
...They have discovered a speechless language of human identities...
...Simple as day —he must have been released, just before his death, from a state institution, probably the penitentiary...
...Prison "Friendship" ONE was a foreigner and thrifty—Henry A. Krause...
...He heaped up extra time and told his "pal" eagerly that there would be $300 for him to start on when the "bit" was over...
...No one knew him...
...THAT was only the primary classification...
...It was near Yost park on the concrete highway to Janesville where a number of summer cottages dot the vicinity overlooking the river...
...But had not all the bloody finger prints on a cottage door at Beloit been carefully scraped off by doctors to discover "if they were human or not," no doubt could exist in anybody's mind...
...A dark object that she thought looked like one of the giants her mother told her lived on the river bank was swaying back and forth, deep down in the clear water...
...It is frequently resorted to in taking prints from metal surfaces in bank robberies, windows in burglaries and similar instances...
...For two stepped off a boat in New York harbor into years, his mail was watched, and one day he the arms of a sheriff...
...He's a Milwaukee gambler," the shrewdest of Beloit's police force announced...
...But along about Thanksgiving time that year, when Krause shook hands with the chap-lain on his big day, there was Otis back to meet him and to take him to a job at Beloit he said he had found...
...The few cents daily over-time the state allows, Krause watched accumulate in the prison office...
...She ran screaming to a gang of workmen nearby...
...The left forefinger, the left thumb, and the left little finger were printed...
...This adheres to the very fine impressions left by the "finger type" and we are ready to photograph and permanently preserve...
...A good score of them...
...They sent for G. A. Benson, record clerk at Waupun and one of the country's outstanding finger print experts...
...Benson says...
...Prints from stolen cars are Mr...
...To humor her a big jovial foreman went to the river and lot her point out her "giant...
...Benson rost to go...
...At Meehan's undertaking rooms, the body was now found almost beyond recognition...
...A quarter of a mile away from river-grave where the body had been weighted down with sacks of cement, the scene of the crime was discovered...
...For none of the finger prints in the death-cottage were preserved...
...Bullet holes, broken plaster, and large stains of blood on the lower floor of a half-finished, vacant cottage told a pretty clear story of murder and robbery...
...Krause's date of discharge and that of his murder left only a few days unaccounted for...
...The body, in the water apparently ten days, was shrunken and blue...
...Osborne admits that...
...Red lines terminating in the particular code designation were drawn to the margin of the card...
...Warden Coles, one of the understanding and humano wardens of the country, dislikes to have his present prisoners read their own names in the papers which come to the prison library...
Vol. 14 • December 1922 • No. 12
