Vucetich on Galton

Vucetich’s admiration for a colleague

“What are you reading darling? Could you please just lift up those heavy books for a moment so I can wipe your side table? Oh, I hate that you smoke in here Juan. One day, you and all your books will stand ablaze.” “Honey, I am not merely reading. I am connecting with Sir Franics Galton, my brother in thought, my brother in crime, one could even say.” “Brother in crime? Juan, what…?” No no, do not worry honey, I am not engaging in any criminal activities. Quite the opposite, Sir Francis Galton made outstanding achievements in the forensic field and after reading his biography, I am not surprised he came to fame. By the age of two this prodigy child was able to read and when he was five he already knew some Latin. Later in life, he went on to study medicine and became an enthusiastic traveler. Among exotic countries like Damascus, Beirut and Egypt he also travelled to my beloved motherland Croatia. 

However, the one specific trait which led him to become a scientific polymath was his penchant for measuring, comparing and identifying patterns.  He excelled in mathematics, meteorology, statistics and geography. It was only when his cousin, who was no less a figure than Charles Darwin, published his Theory of Species that Galton dedicated his life to one specific field, namely, the hereditary of human ability. To paraphrase it, he wanted to scientifically proof that intelligent parents have intelligent children. 

While this is all very fascinating, his findings in the forensic field are those which I was most impressed by. Sir Francis Galton was the first to scientifically prove the uniqueness of human fingerprints, convincing courts to accept them as evidence. On top of that he identified eight common patterns in fingerprints and drew up a system to classify them. In doing so he made fingerprinting implementable. Nowadays, when trying to match a crime scene fingerprint with one that is already in the database, one does not have to go through all the fingerprint cards anymore. When the crime scene fingerprint has a loop I can already narrow my search down to a small fraction and after taking subcategories into account I am usually quick to find a match. You remember the mysterious Rojas case? You know, the woman that strangled her two poor children? I could not have solved it without Galton’s fingerprinting classification technique. [400]

Bertillon on the West Brothers

Bertillon's curse

Before he had to go to bed, little John West zipped through the family home, checking if all his ghost traps were still activated. As he had been doing this every night for three years now, this was a quick undertaking. John was absolutely sure that their New England home in Leavenworth was haunted. Sometimes at night, he heard these inhuman wailing cries. He wasn’t scared though. On the contrary, he was really curious and put all his effort into catching the ghost.

This particular night, when the clock struck twelve, he suddenly woke up. Still confused he rubbed his eyes and suddenly realized that a milky-white figure was sitting on his window-sill. “What are you?” John stuttered. “How rude!” the ghost growled. “Sorry, who are you?” John’s voice was cracking with excitement. “I, I am the father of forensics. I am the famous Alphonse Bertillon” the ghost said as he lent back and crossed his legs. “Bertillonage, how does that sound, boy? Fantastic, does it not?

"Bertillonage is a system with which criminals can be identified by having 11 different body measurements taken and recorded. You know, people always thought I was a bit odd, unsociable and simple-minded but I created this ingenious identification system that was used in criminal institutes worldwide. With Bertillonage I put an end to repeat offenders masquerading as someone innocent and getting away with mild punishments. I thought the system infallible. You know what the odds of two people having the exact same measurements are? One to 4,191,304! Ingenious, I know. Bertillonage finally got me the praise I deserved.

"However, in 1903 your great-grandfather, Will West, put an end to my glory days. When he was caught, an officer took his measurements and identified him as the repeat offender William West. When your great-grandfather denied having been arrested before, the police officer turned the record over and saw that William West was already an inmate of the prison.

"Then those fingerprinting people were summoned and established what my Bertillonage could not – that Will and William West were in fact two different people. Afterwards, Bertillonage was disregarded as unreliable and replaced by fingerprinting. The thing is that your great-grandfather’s case was an exception because he and William were actually twin brothers! If they had just admitted that my system would not have been called a failure!" [392]

Napolitano on the theft of the Mona Lisa

Mona Lisa – an influential painting

“I hate art”. “That is quite a strong statement darling, why have you broken with art at such an early stage in your life?” “Well, we have this assignment to describe how we feel about the Mona Lisa and quite frankly I don’t feel anything. To me it just looks like an average portrait. I really don’t understand all the fuss about it.” “I do not blame you my darling, I was never the artistic type myself but the Mona Lisa really is a very influential painting. Actually, you might even say that it had an impact on my personal life.

This has nothing to do with smile though. For me, as Secretary of Homeland Security, the Mona Lisa, or more specifically the theft of the painting in 1911, made way to the mean of identifying people we use today: The fingerprinting system. Its predecessor, Bertillonage, worked quite differently. In Bertillonage, which was invented in the 19^th century by the Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon, several distinctive body features, like width of head or length of right ear, were measured and catalogued. So when a criminal was caught his body measurements were compared to those in the catalogue in the hope of getting a match. This system contained a number of flaws, for example were the measurements often inexact as every officer took them a lit bit differently.

 Critcs’ voices rose but it was the theft of our lovely smiling lady that was the undoing of Bertillonage. As the theft had caused a public uproar and one conspiracy theory chased the other the government wanted the case resolved as soon as possible. Bertillon was personally summoned to the crime scene and even managed to secure a fingerprint. He and his colleagues engaged in seven months of comparing I with thousands of data cards but found no match.

When the painting was finally regained two years later it turned out that the thief had actually beenin Bertillone’s files all along. They just could not find a match because it was the left thumbprint that was left on the crime scene and the right one that was in the files. Needless to say, this incident caused the police to rethink their tactics.