In 1879, Alphonse Bertillon, a clerk at the Prefecture of Police in Paris, produced the first systematic method of identifying individual criminals. Based on 243 separate body measurements, Bertillonage, as it became known, often proved surprisingly accurate, but it was doomed almost at birth by the simultaneous development of another means of identification, this one foolproof.

Nothing has more greatly enhanced the cause of crime detection than the discovery that no two people have the same fingerprints. This individuality had long been recognized in such civilizations as China and Babylon. A line in the book of Job reads, "He sealeth up the hand of every man that all men may know his work." But it was not until 1880, when a Scottish physician in Tokyo, Dr. Henry Faulds, published a letter in the British scientific journal Nature that modern fingerprint analysis began. Intrigued by finger impressions on fragments of ancient pottery, Faulds promulgated the idea that they might be a means of identification. The notion was roundly endorsed by Sir William Herschel, chief administrative officer of Bengal, who reported that he had used thumb impressions to identify illiterate prisoners and workers in India for years. The initial excitement sparked by the debate in Nature led to the first serious study of fingerprints by English scientist Sir Francis Galton.

After establishing that fingerprints were not inherited and that even identical twins had different ridge patterns, Galton laid the groundwork for a basic classification system, putting the most commonly observed features into three groups—arches, loops, and whorls. Galton's book Finger Prints appeared in 1892, but yet another Indian police officer, Sir Edward Henry, completed the task of fingerprint classification.

Henry established five basic patterns, adding tented arches to Galton's three groups and dividing loops into two classes. In 1896 he instructed the forces under his command to take up dactyloscopy (the term used for fingerprinting). Success with the new system was immediate; the rate of criminal identification in India soared dramatically.

Sir Edward Henry—the father of modern fingerprinting.

Fingerprint impressions fall into three basic types: latent, visible, and the plastic, or molded, print. By far the most frequent is the latent print, which is invisible to the eye. These are formed by sweat, either from the hands themselves or by unconscious contact between the fingers and the face or other parts of the body where the sebaceous glands are situated. Even if a criminal scrubs his hands and dries them thoroughly, if he then puts a hand to his face or his hair he is likely to leave a latent print, invisible to the naked eye, on anything he touches, particularly on such surfaces as glass or polished wood.

Treating, or developing, latent prints so they can be examined may be done in a variety of ways. The most common method is to use a gray or black powder (formerly a mixture of mercury and chalk, but nowadays organic to reduce the risk of health hazards to the user). Because they are more difficult to develop, prints on porous items such as paper and cardboard are best treated with either iodine fuming, which reacts with grease, or ninhydrin, which reacts with amino acids.

The second type of print, the legible kind, results from fingers stained with blood or ink or some other similar medium and is rarely found at the crime scene. The same goes for the third category, the plastic print, which is an impression made on a soft surface such as cheese, soap, or putty.

The durability of a latent print varies and is governed by several factors, but if it is made on a hard, protected surface and left untouched, it is virtually permanent. Latent prints have been found and developed from objects in ancient tombs.

Of course, a fingerprint is worthless without a reference database. This used to mean long hours of poring over card indexes. Computerization has changed all that. All the world's major law enforcement agencies maintain huge, ever-expanding fingerprint records, and what once may have taken weeks or even months is now accomplished in seconds.

For most of the twentieth century the sanctity of fingerprint identification remained unchallenged; it was the one item of evidence that police, courts, and juries agreed on. But recent developments on both sides of the Atlantic have raised troubling doubts. At issue lies one fundamental question: Is the identification of fingerprints—especially partial or smudged prints—a science or an art? Concerns arose in America when a 1995 proficiency test of 156 examiners conducted with the approval of the International Association of Identification, the profession's certifying organization, found that one in five examiners made at least one "false positive" identification —linking a mock crime scene print to the wrong person. In the real world, the 1997 Scottish murder trial of David Asbury was jeopardized by the insistence of a police officer, Shirley McKie, that she had not left a thumbprint at the crime scene (Asbury's defense hinged on the claim that the disputed print might belong to the real killer.) Despite McKie's denial, four experts from the Scottish Criminal Record Office (SCRO) testified that the print belonged to her. Because of their testimony, David Asbury was sentenced to life imprisonment and McKie faced charges of perjury. In 1999 McKie was acquitted after several international fingerprint experts declared that the original experts got it badly wrong: She had not made the print. This cleared the way for Asbury to appeal and, in August 2002, his conviction was quashed. In 2006, McKie was awarded $1.25 million in damages. Thus far, Asbury has not received a penny in compensation. The SCRO still refuses to acknowledge that its identification was flawed.

The McKie/Asbury fiasco has already been cited in several trials as an example of the fallibility of fingerprint identification. No objective assessment of the evidence could fail to condemn the SCRO's original blunder and its subsequent intransigence. The stakes are high. If official pigheadedness ends up sparking off a wholesale assault on what has always been the gold standard for human identification—the fact that in more than a century of usage, in every country on earth, no two people have ever been shown to share the same fingerprint—then the future of crime fighting looks bleak, indeed.

Francesca Rojas

DATE: 1892

LOCATION: Necochea, Argentina

SIGNIFICANCE: Criminals who have been convicted through the evidence of their own fingertips can trace their dubious heritage to this tragic, star-crossed girl who murdered for love.

At first glance, the town of Necochea, on Argentina's Atlantic coastline some 250 miles south of Buenos Aires, might appear to be an unlikely setting for criminological history. Yet it was here, in 1892, in a hut on the outskirts of town, that a double murder took place, the repercussions of which are felt to the present day. The victims were the two illegitimate children of a twenty-six-year-old woman named Francesca Rojas.

On the evening of June 19, Francesca burst into a neighbor's shack, screaming that Velasquez had killed her children. Velasquez, the neighbor knew, worked at a nearby ranch and had been an ardent if unsuccessful suitor of Francesca's. After sending his son for the police, the neighbor went to Francesca's hut and found the children, a boy of six and a girl of four, dead from massive head wounds. No weapon was found.

The chief of police spent little time examining the crime scene; he wanted to know more about Velasquez. Francesca sobbed that Velasquez, a middle-aged simpleton, was madly in love with her, but she had spurned his every advance. That afternoon the feebleminded ranch worker had called, more insistent than ever. Finally she had stunned him with the revelation that she had promised herself to another, younger man. Velasquez became apoplectic. Insults flew wildly. So did the threats of revenge. Then he rushed off. That evening, returning from work, Francesca found the front door wide open. As she approached, Velasquez had bolted from the hut, almost knocking her over in his haste to get away. In the bedroom, she found both children dead.

Taken into custody that night, Velasquez admitted having threatened

Francesca but denied putting any such plans into practice. Even a severe beating could not budge Velasquez's claims of innocence. In frustration, the police chief opted for drastic measures. He had Velasquez bound and laid beside the illuminated corpses of the children all night in hopes that remorse and fear of retribution would loosen his tongue.

The next morning Velasquez was unshaken; neither did another week of relentless torture elicit any change in his story. Whether through weariness or a growing sense that he might be investigating the wrong man, the police chief began to look elsewhere. Already rumors were circulating about Francesca and her young lover, who had previously been overheard saying that he would marry her were it not for those two children.

While the police chief's suspicions were now focused elsewhere, his investigative techniques had lost none of their flair. He sought to jolt Francesca's nerves by spending an entire night outside her hut, rattling the windows and doors and crying out in what he imagined the voice of an avenging angel might sound like. But Francesca was made of sterner stuff than that. At dawn she left for work, her conscience intact, none the worse for the chief's nocturnal nonsense, and still she was adamant that Velasquez was the killer.

Call for Assistance

At this point, assistance was requested from the regional headquarters at La Plata. This was a stroke of immense good fortune, for overseeing the Bureau of Identification was a Dalmatian immigrant named Juan Vucetich, who earlier than most had seen the advantages of fingerprinting over Bertillonage. In September 1891, using Galton's basic material, he had formulated a ten-finger classification system. Thus far, its use had been restricted to inmates at the local prison, but Vucetich was eager to spread the gospel. When he dispatched Inspector Alvarez to investigate the murder at Necochea, though, it could hardly have crossed his mind that history was about to be made.

The level of police incompetence that Alvarez uncovered was astounding. Velasquez, he soon learned, had an unshakable alibi for the time of the murder, but the poor man, with his limited intelligence, had neglected to mention it. Francesca's young lover, too, was absolved from complicity. Which, Alvarez speculated, left only Francesca. . . .

Without any great confidence he visited the hut in search of clues. After several hours of fruitless rummaging, he noticed a brownish mark on the bedroom door, suddenly made visible by the evening sun. Closer inspection revealed it to be the imprint of a bloodstained human thumb. Alvarez obtained a saw, cut out that section of the door, and returned to the police station with orders that Francesca be brought in. He rolled her right thumb on an ink pad, then pressed it upon a sheet of paper. Even to Alvarez's relatively inexperienced eye, the imprint when studied under a magnifying glass matched the bloody thumbprint on the door.

Confronted by the evidence of her own hand, Francesca's previously steely resolve collapsed. She admitted killing her children because they blighted her chances of marriage to the young man. After battering them to death with a stone, she had tossed the stone into a well and washed her hands carefully. But inadvertently she had touched the bedroom door.

Francesca Rojas was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, her place in criminal history assured.

Conclusion

For Juan Vucetich, the events at Necochea were a glittering triumph. He wrote to a friend, "I hardly dare to believe it, but my theory has proved its worth. . . . I hold one trump card now, and I hope I shall soon have more." Sadly, his confidence was misplaced, as official hostility to fingerprinting forced a return to Bertillonage. Undismayed, Vucetich fought back and in 1916 actually succeeded in setting up a General Register of Identification predicated on fingerprinting the entire population. But the scheme proved hopelessly unpopular. Riots and civil disorder eventually forced the government to abandon the plan and destroy its records. In 1925, Juan Vucetich died—some said of disillusionment.

The Stratton Brothers

DATE: 1905

LOCATION: London, England

SIGNIFICANCE: Although the first British trial to admit fingerprint evidence occurred in 1902—a burglar was convicted of stealing billiard balls—it was not until this sensational murder that the new technique made headlines.

For more than two decades, Thomas Farrow and his wife, Ann, had managed a paint shop in Deptford, South London. The elderly couple were popular in the neighborhood and were regular in their habits, which explains why on Monday, March 27, 1905, puzzled because the store had not opened for business as usual, other employees 

Fingerprint expert obtaining fingerprint specimens. (FBI) forced an entry. The reason for the lapse was soon apparent. In the parlor, Mr. Farrow had been bludgeoned to death; upstairs his wife lay sprawled across a bloodstained bed, still alive but just barely. She, too, had been savagely beaten. Four days later, without ever regaining consciousness, Ann Farrow died.

It was common knowledge locally that every Monday the Farrows handed over the week's earnings to the store owner, George Chapman, so there was little doubt that robbery had been the motive. An empty cash box and its inner tray lay on the bedroom floor, and there was a mask fashioned from a black silk stocking. The discovery of two similar masks downstairs suggested the presence of more than one intruder. The cash box and tray were examined by Scotland Yard's Fingerprint Branch. They found a clear print on the tray that did not correspond to either of the victims or any of the police officers present (one of whom admitted to having touched the tray). Neither did it tally with any of the eighty thousand prints already on file at the Yard.

Milkman Henry Jennings and his young assistant told of seeing two men leave the store at about 7:15 on the morning of the murder. They described the taller of the two as dressed in a blue serge suit and bowler hat, and walking hurriedly. His companion was wearing a dark brown suit, cap, and brown boots. Neighborhood rumor soon put names to these descriptions— Albert and Alfred Stratton, two brothers with a record of burglary who had been seen in the vicinity of the crime scene. Albert's landlady, when interviewed, recalled him asking if she had an old pair of stockings she could give him, to which she replied no. Later, while making her lodger's bed, she found a silk stocking mask hidden between the mattresses.

Yet more circumstantial evidence was supplied by Hannah Cromerty, Alfred's mistress. In no mood to help her violent lover—she was sporting a black eye—she revealed that he had been out on the night of the murder; the next day he had given away his overcoat and blacked over the brown shoes he'd worn.

Brothers Caught

On Sunday, after a week spent scouring the brothers' known haunts, detectives tracked Alfred to a public house. His brother, he claimed, had gone to sea, but the next day Albert was located in a nearby lodging house. Both were taken to Tower Bridge police station, where Detective Inspector Charles Collins, a founding member of Scotland Yard's Fingerprint Branch in 1901, rolled their fingers on the ink pad. He took impressions of every digit, then compared them to the print on the tray. It matched Alfred's right thumbprint exactly. As a consequence, both brothers were charged with murder.

At their trial, the prosecution, led by Richard Muir, suffered a severe setback when neither milkman could identify the accused as the men they had seen leaving the store. This shifted the burden of the Crown's case entirely to the fingerprint evidence. With the aid of photographic enlargements, Collins demonstrated twelve points of resemblance between Alfred's thumbprint and the impression left on the tray. Just as significant was the complete absence of characteristics that did not agree. The jury was clearly impressed, watching avidly as Collins, asked to clarify the technique of obtaining prints, fingerprinted one of their own members.

Quite naturally, the defense dismissed any suggestion that fingerprinting was an infallible means of identification. To argue this point, they produced Dr. John Garson, longtime advocate of Bertillonage and occasional practitioner of the new technique. After a blistering personal attack on Collins, the doctor went on to state categorically that the thumbprint on the cash box did not belong to Alfred Stratton. At this, Muir produced two letters, both written by Garson on the same day, offering his services to both the prosecution and the defense. Such opportunism prompted a caustic response from the judge, who made his own feelings about Garson's duplicity abundantly clear. Even so, the judge stressed that the thumbprint evidence should be approached circumspectly, but he did admit the extraordinary resemblance. What weight the jury gave this admonition is unknown; what is certain is that they found both Strattons guilty of murder.

Conclusion

Besides ruining his own career, Garson's recklessness did have one other interesting outcome. Thereafter, the medical profession rarely concerned itself with fingerprinting; it became, and remains, the domain of the skilled specialist. As for the Strattons, their unwitting contribution to the advancement of forensic science far outlived them. Both were hanged on May 23, 1905. 

Thomas Jennings

DATE: 1910

LOCATION: Chicago, Illinois

SIGNIFICANCE: History was made when this case resulted in the first American murder trial to admit fingerprint testimony.

Clarence Hiller lived with his wife and four children in a two-story house on West 104th Street in Chicago. In the early hours of September 19, 1910, Mrs. Hiller awoke and noticed that a gaslight near the bedroom of their daughter Florence was not burning as it should. She aroused her husband and he hurried to investigate.

On the landing he encountered a stranger. In the ensuing struggle, both men tumbled down the staircase. Moments later, Mrs. Hiller heard two shots and then her husband's faint call for help. This was followed by the slamming of the front door. At the foot of the stairs, Mrs. Hiller found the lifeless body of her husband.

A neighbor, John C. Pickens, alerted by the shooting and the woman's screams, came on the double. By chance, his son Oliver had been talking to a policeman, Floyd Beardsley, just a short distance away. Both heard the shots and arrived immediately. Beardsley heard how the murderer, bearing a lighted match, had entered the bedrooms of Hiller's daughter Clarice, fourteen, and her sister Florence, a year younger. Neither girl was assaulted, but both were too terrified to cry for help. Just moments later the fatal struggle began.

At the foot of Florence's bed were some particles of sand and gravel. Together with three unused cartridges found near the body, they seemed to be the only clues. However, unknown to Beardsley, the killer was already in custody, having been arrested on wholly unrelated charges.

Less than a mile from the Hiller residence, four off-duty officers had spotted a man darting through the darkness, glancing furtively behind him, as if fearful of pursuit. Told to empty his pockets, he handed over a loaded .38 revolver. He gave his name as Thomas Jennings. There were fresh bloodstains on his clothing, and he had injured his left arm, both the result, he said, of having fallen from a streetcar earlier that night.

Unimpressed by this story, the officers escorted Jennings to the station, where news of the Hiller murder had just come in. Immediately the wounded man became a prime suspect, especially when it was learned that only a month earlier he had been freed from Joliet State Penitentiary after serving time for burglary.

Suspicion began to accumulate. Just two weeks after being released, under an assumed name and in violation of his parole, Jennings had purchased the .38 revolver. When examined, its cartridges were found to be identical with those lying next to Clarence Hiller's body.

Prints in the Paint

The most significant discovery occurred at the murder scene. Next to the rear kitchen window, through which the killer had effected his entrance, were some railings. By chance, Mr. Hiller had painted these very railings just hours before his death, and etched into the fresh paint were four fingerprints from someone's left hand.

Ever since the 1905 visit of Scotland Yard's Sergeant John Ferrier to the

St. Louis International Police Exhibition, at which he extolled the virtues of Sir Edward Henry's classification system, American law enforcement agencies had adopted the principle of fingerprinting with varying degrees of enthusiasm. As late as 1910, Bertillonage still held sway with most police forces, but Chicago had embraced the new technology with open arms. Technicians from the Police Department Bureau of Identification (PDBI) studied the railings and made enlarged photographs of the prints. When compared to those of Jennings, they matched in every detail.

At the ensuing trial, a quartet of fingerprint experts headed by William M. Evans of the PDBI agreed that Jennings's hand, and his alone, had left the prints on the railings. Their testimony led to a verdict of guilty and a sentence of death. Immediately defense lawyers filed an appeal on the grounds that fingerprinting was still a fledgling discipline, unworthy of the approbation "scientific," and that Illinois laws did not recognize such evidence.

Across the nation, eyes were on the Illinois Supreme Court, awaiting its decision—which came on December 21, 1911. In a historic ruling the court first sanctioned the admissibility of fingerprint evidence and then upheld the right of experienced technicians to testify as experts, saying:

When photography was first introduced it was seriously questioned whether pictures thus created could properly be introduced in evidence, but this method of proof, as well as by means of X-rays and the microscope, is now admitted without question. . . . We are disposed to hold from the evidence of the four witnesses who testified, and from the writings we have referred to on this subject, that there is a scientific basis for the system of fingerprint identification, and that the courts cannot refuse to take judicial cognizance of it. . . . If inferences as to the identity of persons based on voice, the appearance or age are admissible, why does not this record justify the admission of this fingerprint testimony under common law rules of evidence?

In conclusion, the appeal court affirmed the verdict of the jury and upheld Jennings's death sentence. He was later hanged.

Conclusion

Boosted by the Illinois decision, fingerprinting soon reached every corner of America. In 1915, a small group of fingerprint experts met in California and founded what was later called the International Association for Identification (IAI), the world's first such professional body. A gathering house of information and new developments, the IAI today has thousands of members worldwide.

William Berger

DATE: 1920

LOCATION: Berkeley, California

SIGNIFICANCE: As criminals in the United States became more mobile, agitation for a national fingerprint register acquired momentum.

One of the most peculiar crime waves ever to hit California began in Berkeley in September 1920, when a thief sawed his way into a grocery store, helped himself to some cookies, drained a bottle of milk, and left. An otherwise nondescript offense was made somewhat less so when, among fingerprints found at the scene, detectives noted one in the shape of a question mark. At that time, the Berkeley police department was headed by August Vollmer, an innovative crime fighter who would later figure prominently in the development of the polygraph. Under his auspices, the recently founded fingerprint department had thrived, but on this occasion it was unable to provide a match for the unusual print.

Two weeks later, the burglar struck again, this time at a hardware store. He used the same method of entry, left the same distinctive fingerprint, and again demonstrated his fondness for milk. All that winter, Berkeley suffered a plague of minor robberies. Nothing much was ever taken, but not a single item was ever recovered. Police, used to the proceeds of petty theft ending up in pawnshops and the like, were puzzled. And then, in April 1921, the breakins abruptly ceased. A month, then two, passed without incident. Gradually memories of the so-called Question Mark Burglar began to fade.

The following September, though, soon brought them back into sharp relief, as a new outbreak of nocturnal burglaries left little doubt that the idiosyncratic thief was back. There was no mistaking the pattern: always between 9 P.M. and 4 A.M., always in the same small geographic area, always the same modus operandi, and almost always interrupted with a refreshing bottle of milk. As before, the robberies ceased in April, only to recommence in September, then halt again in April 1922. With the regularity of migrating birds, the following September heralded the arrival of another flock of burglaries.

As the decade wore on, the six-month cycle remained constant: arrive in September, leave in April. Once, the elusive thief was nearly arrested. A police officer, spotting someone sneaking away from a grocery store under cover of darkness, shouted for him to stop. Instead, he took to his heels. The ensuing chase, punctuated with bullets from both parties, resulted in the burglar being hit but still managing to escape. Local hospitals and doctors were alerted to look out for a man with a bullet wound, but no report ever came in.

Rich Pickings

By 1928, the previously petty criminal was stealing goods worth thousands of dollars each winter, and apart from the fingerprint, detectives had only one lead. Because of how and where he broke into each house—always at the point of easiest access in the wall, and always neatly—it was assumed that he was either a carpenter or a plumber. Vollmer ruminated. Where did skilled artisans go in the summer?

Eventually inspiration struck. Each spring, a fleet of fishing boats left San Francisco's Bay Area and headed north to the Alaskan salmon fishing grounds. Besides the hands, all carried expert workers who could make running repairs. The Berkeley agency that sent crews to Alaska compiled a list of thirty-eight names and addresses, which was forwarded to the FBI.

In 1924, the FBI had received 810,000 sets of fingerprints from the Bureau of Criminal Investigation at Leavenworth. These formed the core of what would become a national system of fingerprint identification, planned and instituted by J. Edgar Hoover. America's burgeoning criminal population was taking to the highways, the railroads, even the air, in their attempts to fatten bankrolls and outwit pursuers. Crimes separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles were rarely connected, and hoodlums could, with impunity, leave their fingerprints at crime scenes, secure in the knowledge that chances of capture were negligible. Hoover was out to change all that. He envisaged a national fingerprint system that would make a criminal's record available to every police force in the country. Vollmer had an early example of what lay ahead; what he hadn't been able to uncover in eight years, the FBI found in days—the name of the Question Mark Burglar.

William Berger was indeed a ship's carpenter; he was also a thief who had been fingerprinted while serving time at San Quentin in 1914. The highly individual print came from the middle finger of his left hand. Tempering Vollmer's elation at discovering his identity was the realization that this was July, and records showed Berger as being somewhere in Alaska, well beyond anyone's jurisdiction.

Suspect Returns

All they could do was wait. Sure enough, that September, William Berger returned to his house on Stannage Avenue, right in the heart of the burglary catchment area, unaware that his every move was now the subject of intense scrutiny. One night, as the officers watched, Berger crept out of the house in the early hours. Rather than attempt to tail him in the fog, they decided to await his return. At 4 A.M. their vigil ended. Berger loomed through the murk, laden down with booty. Just as he was about to enter his home, the officers challenged him. Instantly he fled. Several blocks later, having ignored repeated warning shots, Berger was struck by a bullet and fell dead to the ground. When

J. Edgar Hoover, soon after his appointment as Director of the FBI. (National Archives)

inked at the morgue, the middle finger of his left hand revealed the telltale print that had eluded the Berkeley Police Department for so long.

But William Berger still had one more secret to divulge. Every item he had ever stolen was found stashed within his house—the proceeds, it was estimated, of more than four hundred robberies. Financial gain had never been a consideration; a true kleptomaniac, he stole because he couldn't stop. His wife, terrified of his maniacal rages, had been too afraid to inform the authorities. She confirmed that Berger had indeed been struck by a bullet all those years before, but again she had not been able to bring herself to call the police. Humanely, it was decided that the woman had suffered enough, and all charges against her were dismissed.

Conclusion

Gradually Hoover's dream of a national fingerprint reference library became a reality. By 1990, the FBI had more than eighty-three million fingerprint cards on file, representing more than twenty-two million people.

Each day, another twenty-seven thousand cards are added to the system.

The Kelly Gang

DATE: 1933

LOCATION: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

SIGNIFICANCE: In this extraordinary case, the victim's own fingerprints, not those of his captors, led to multiple convictions for kidnapping.

On the evening of July 22, 1933, a bridge game between Oklahoma City oil millionaire Charles Urschel, his wife, and their friends the Jarretts on the patio of Urschel's home was abruptly interrupted by the sudden appearance of two gunmen. "Which of you is Urschel?" snarled one of the bandits. When neither man at the card table responded, both were forced into a waiting car and driven off. Although ordered not to do so, Mrs. Urschel quickly called the police and the FBI. Within ninety minutes, Walter Jarrett was back at the Urschel house, shaken but otherwise unharmed. Once the kidnappers had clarified his identity, they had taken his wallet, pushed him from the car, and then driven off with Urschel.

Four days later, a ransom note arrived in the mail. Besides a demand for two hundred thousand dollars, the kidnappers enclosed a note in Charles Urschel's handwriting. To signify their acceptance of the terms, the family was told to place an advertisement in the classified column of the Daily Oklahoman reading: "FOR SALE—160 acres land, good five room house, deep well. Also cows, tools, tractors, corn and hay. $3,750 for quick sale. TERMS. Box H-807."

Soon afterward, another family friend, E. E. Kirkpatrick, received fresh instructions to check into a Kansas City hotel. Later, carrying a bag stuffed with two hundred thousand dollars in marked bills, he left the hotel as arranged and was approached by a tall stranger "in a natty summer suit with a turned down Panama hat." The man took the grip, assured Kirkpatrick that Urschel would be returned safely, then disappeared. Twenty-four hours later, exhausted, Urschel arrived home.

Extraordinary Detail

Charles Urschel was clearly a remarkable man. The account he gave FBI agents of his ordeal is unparalleled in the annals of kidnapping: Every detail, every incident, no matter how mundane, had been consciously logged for possible future use as evidence. After releasing Jarrett, the kidnappers had blindfolded Urschel and driven through the night. At dawn, they switched cars in a garage or barn. Urschel was told to lie down on the rear floor of a large car he guessed to be either a Buick or a Cadillac. Three hours later, they pulled into a gas station. As a woman filled the tank, one of the kidnappers idly asked about local farming conditions. The woman replied that crops in that area were "all burned up."

At the next stop, another garage or barn, Urschel overhead one gang member mention the time—2:30 P.M. After dark, he was taken on foot to a house where he spent the night. The next morning, the final leg of his journey ended at a farmhouse surrounded by cows and chickens.

Despite being blindfolded and handcuffed to a chair, Urschel missed nothing. When water was being drawn from the farmhouse well, he noticed that the windlass creaked. And the water, drunk from a tin cup without a handle, had had a distinctive mineral taste. By loosening his blindfold a fraction, he was able to glimpse his watch. He noted that each morning at 9:45 and each evening at 5:45 a plane passed over the house. But on Sunday, July 30, there was a downpour of rain, and he didn't hear the morning plane.

Neither did Urschel limit his detective talents to mere observation. While writing the letter to his family, unnoticed by his kidnappers, he deliberately left fingerprints on every surface he could reach. On July 31, his ordeal came to an end when he was driven to Norman, on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, and released.

Wide Search

FBI efforts to locate the kidnappers' lair centered on the rainstorm and the plane's failure on that Sunday to follow its usual flight pattern. All airlines that flew within a six-hundred-mile radius of Oklahoma City were contacted for details of their schedules. Meanwhile, the comment by the gas station attendant prompted calls to meteorological offices to ask if any drought-ridden regions had recently received a heavy drenching.

American Airlines reported that on Sunday, July 30, a plane on the Fort Worth-Amarillo run had been forced to swing north from its usual course to avoid a heavy storm over an area previously afflicted by scorching drought. Calculations showed that the morning plane and the return afternoon flight would pass over Paradise, Texas, at the approximate times recalled by Urschel.

Posing as bankers seeking to extend loans to farmers, FBI agents began visiting every farm in the area. Eventually they came to the five-hundredacre ranch of Mr. and Mrs. R. G. Shannon. Here they arrested Harvey Bailey, a notorious hoodlum, with seven hundred dollars of the marked ransom bills on him. Then investigators remembered that the Shannons' daughter Kathryn was married to George "Machine Gun" Kelly, an infamous if somewhat reluctant gangster (his notoriety was almost entirely due to his wife's mythomania). Warrants were issued for the arrest of anyone connected with the Kellys.

When shown the Shannon home, Urschel immediately identified it as his place of capture. There was the well, the old tin cup, and the chair to which he had been handcuffed. And he could never forget the taste of that water. Most conclusive of all, however, were Urschel's fingerprints; according to one expert, they covered almost every square inch of reachable surface.

Eventually the entire Kelly gang was rounded up and given long jail terms.

Conclusion

It seemed almost inevitable that "Machine Gun" Kelly, a hapless bungler who never once fired a gun in anger, should have chosen Charles Urschel, possibly the most astute hostage ever, for his one excursion into kidnapping. In such a lopsided contest, Kelly never stood a chance. He spent the rest of his life behind bars and died in Leavenworth in 1954.

Edward Morey

DATE: 1933

LOCATION: Wagga Wagga, Australia

SIGNIFICANCE: The durability of fingerprints is well documented— Egyptian mummies have been found with their prints intact—but here a corpse yielded its secrets in a truly bizarre fashion.

One of Australia's most famous murder cases began on Christmas Day 1933, when fishermen on the Murrumbidgee River, close to Wagga Wagga, found a body snagged on a tree. At the autopsy, it was determined that the corpse was male, strongly built, aged between forty-five and fifty; had received several crushing blows to the back of the head; and had been in the water for about five weeks. Identification would not be easy. The features were unrecognizable, and there was no possibility of fingerprints: The right hand was missing completely, and the left was badly mangled.

Under the direction of Police Commissioner Walter H. Childs, detectives began searching the riverbank for clues. Before long, one of them noticed something brownish and shriveled-looking caught in the bushes. Wading into the water, he retrieved the object and held it up for closer examination. It took a moment to realize what it was.

Back at the laboratory, experts confirmed the find—human skin with a thumbnail still attached. Actually, it was the outer skin of a right hand and wrist, all of the flesh having been eaten away by maggots. What remained looked like a dirty glove—which gave the technicians an idea.

If properly treated, the skin might yet yield a usable fingerprint, but somehow they had to find a way to take that print. The answer was gruesomely simple. First, they needed someone whose hand roughly conformed to the size of the skin. The officer who most closely met this requirement then put on a surgical glove and slid his own right hand into the dead man's skin. It was a delicate operation; one careless move might tear the skin apart and destroy any chance of success. Once the detective's fingers had filled out the limp skin, he pressed the digits on an inked pad and then onto a fingerprint card. The result was a surprisingly clear set of prints with identifiable loops, whorls, and arches. Encouraged by this success, the experts managed to peel the skin off the mangled left hand and obtain a set of prints from it. Now began the task of searching thousands of fingerprint records, with no guarantee that their target was among them.

Hobo Killer

Their good fortune held. The dead man was Percy Smith, an itinerant who traveled the Wagga Wagga region in a dilapidated wagon, taking odd jobs wherever he could. Locals confirmed that Smith had been missing for several weeks. They also mentioned that he and a fellow drifter, Edward Morey, had been seen together near where the body was found. Later Morey was known to have sold some of the dead man's tools.

A widespread manhunt was abruptly halted when officers were told that Morey was already in jail on vagrancy charges. His angry denials of complicity in Smith's death rang hollow when confronted by the evidence. Besides the tools, he had also sold Smith's monogrammed gold watch, and when investigators searched his camp, they found a bloodstained ax that he attempted to conceal from them.

News of the unique fingerprint retrieval method caused a sensation at Morey's trial and dominated every headline until the chief prosecution witness, Moncrieff Anderson, was suddenly gunned down at his home. His wife, Lillian, blamed the killing on intruders until the police noticed that Mrs. Anderson's handwriting bore an uncanny resemblance to that of "Thelma Smith," authoress of two love letters found in Morey's possession. The shooting in no way affected Morey's fate; he was convicted and sentenced to hang, though later reprieved. After serving twenty years, he was freed on health grounds and shortly thereafter died from tuberculosis.

Conclusion

At her own trial, Lillian Anderson, a confused and tragic figure with a mental age of fourteen, claimed that her dead husband and not Morey was the killer. Prosecutors soon established that she had shot her husband and named him as Smith's murderer in order to save her lover. Morey showed no such loyalty. In his testimony, he turned his back on the woman who had tried to save him, denying that he even knew her. Lillian Anderson's conviction for manslaughter earned her a twenty-year jail sentence. 

Peter Griffiths

DATE: 1948

LOCATION: Blackburn, England

SIGNIFICANCE: For the first time, mass fingerprinting of the population was used to bring a savage killer to justice.

At 1:20 A.M. on May 15, 1948, a nurse making the rounds of the children's ward of the Queens Park Hospital, near Blackburn, Lancashire, realized that three-year-old June Devaney was missing from her cot. An hour earlier, the toddler had been sleeping peacefully, recovering from pneumonia, and was due to go home later that day. After fruitlessly searching the immediate vicinity, the hospital staff contacted the police. At 3:17 A.M., a constable found June's body lying beside the hospital wall. Her horrific injuries were described by the police surgeon as follows:

There was a multiple fracture of the skull. . . . Blood was exuding from the nose. . . . There were several puncture wounds on the left foot. They might easily have been caused by fingernails gripping the left ankle. . . . The injuries to the head were consistent with the head having been battered against a wall. It appears to me that the child was held by her feet and the head swung against the wall.

In addition, the child had been raped, and there were teeth marks on her left buttock.

Footprints on the ward's polished floor intimated that the killer had prowled between the cots in stocking feet. He also appeared to have moved objects around. A bottle of sterile water—normally kept on a trolley at the end of the ward—now stood under June's cot. The nurse was adamant that on her earlier round the bottle had been in its rightful place.

For fifteen hours, Detective Inspector Colin Campbell, chief of Lancashire's Fingerprint Bureau, scrutinized the ward. He began with the footprints: ten and a half inches long, almost certainly male, unlikely to have been made by a member of the nursing staff. Next came the misplaced bottle. Judging from the myriad fingerprints, it had been handled by several different people. By that evening, every member of the hospital staff had been fingerprinted for comparison with those on the bottle. All except one set of prints were accounted for; Campbell had little doubt that these belonged to the killer.

When records also failed to make a match with any known criminal, investigators reconciled themselves to the likelihood of a protracted inquiry. They began by compiling a list of all people with general access to the hospital—2,017 people in all, of whom 642 had specific access to the children's ward. All were fingerprinted, yet none matched the mystery prints left on the bottle.

With his options fast diminishing, the commanding officer, Detective Inspector John Capstick, embarked on an unprecedented step. Because the hospital grounds were difficult to negotiate after dark, he believed that the killer was most probably a man with local knowledge. Therefore, he proposed that every male over age sixteen in the town of Blackburn be fingerprinted. It was a revolutionary and daunting prospect. The electoral register showed no less than thirty-five thousand houses; all would have to be visited.

Historic Sweep

The immense operation began on May 23, with officers going from house to house, fingerprinting every male who had been in Blackburn on the night of the murder, recording each set of impressions on a small card. Despite the response—more than forty thousand males— by mid-July the investigators were no nearer to identifying the print. With the electoral register exhausted, it was beginning to look as if the killer had slipped through the net. And then inspiration struck. Because of food shortages since the war, every British adult carried his or her own rationing book; possibly names might crop up there and nowhere else. Three weeks of cross-checking ration book records against the electoral register showed at least two hundred males still unaccounted for.

One of these was Peter Griffiths, a twenty-two-year-old flour mill packer who lived at 31 Birley Street, Blackburn. On August 11, officers called and asked if they could take his fingerprints. Griffiths, whose niece had been in Queens Park Hospital at the same time as June Devaney, agreed. Later that day, his card—number 46,253—was routinely filed with the bureau. The next afternoon, one of the searchers suddenly cried out, "I've got him! It's here!"

At first Griffiths denied the crime; then he made a confession, saying, "I hope I get what I deserve." On the night in question, having consumed a large amount of alcohol, he had gone to the hospital, a

Fingerprint expert comparing latent fingerprints developed during an investigation. (FBI) place he knew well from his childhood. Leaving his shoes outside, he crept into the children's ward. He claimed that a child woke up when he stumbled against her cot and that he carried her outside to keep her silent. But when she wouldn't stop crying, "I lost my temper . . . and you know what happened then." An already strong forensic case against Griffiths was further buttressed by the discovery of fibers from the victim's nightdress on his suit, while his feet fitted exactly those prints found on the hospital floor.

Rejecting a defense plea of diminished responsibility, the jury found Griffiths guilty of murder, and on November 19, 1948, he was executed.

Conclusion

Right from the outset, the police moved to allay concerns about privacy by announcing that all prints unconnected with their inquiry would be publicly destroyed. This was a promise kept, as was their assurance that no one would be compelled to have his prints taken. As it turned out, public revulsion at the ghastliness of June Devaney's death ensured that objections to the exercise were few and refusals virtually nil.

George Ross

DATE: 1951

LOCATION: Cleveland, Ohio

SIGNIFICANCE: Although most fingerprints are of the latent type— invisible until dusted—here the killer unwittingly recorded his prints for posterity.

While cruising Cleveland's east side on December 8, 1951, patrolman Forney Haas spotted a Lincoln with California plates driving in the wrong direction down a one-way street. After a brief chase, the Lincoln drew to a halt. The driver apologized for his unfamiliarity with the local traffic system but could not produce his license when asked. It was, he said, back at his boardinghouse. Haas insisted on seeing it, and the two cars set off in convoy. When they reached the rooming house at 8210 Euclid Avenue, both men went indoors.

A short while later, as she was cleaning the hallway, the landlady, Lottie Cooper, heard male voices arguing. One shouted, "I'm telling you my license was in my wallet when I left. It's been stolen from here!" A fusillade of bullets terminated the outburst. The door flew open, and a man brandishing a revolver ran past Mrs. Cooper and out into the street. Haas, grievously wounded, was rushed to the hospital, but he died half an hour later without regaining consciousness.

A tearful Mrs. Cooper told officers that the gun-wielding fugitive had given his name as Montgomery when renting the room. But his true identity was revealed when detectives ran a check on the abandoned Lincoln. It had been stolen in California and used by two criminals in a string of robberies across the country. One of the bandits was thought to be George Ross, a twenty-seven-year-old hood who had graduated from car theft to grand larceny. When shown a picture of Ross, Mrs. Cooper identified him as the slim, swarthy man she knew as Montgomery. Immediately a description was circulated to police nationwide.

Meanwhile, Ross had fled in a panic after the shooting. Eventually he found his way to Bedford, a suburb of Cleveland, where he stopped at a diner to take stock of his situation. He needed to get rid of Haas's revolver, the murder weapon; its serial number would be on record, and worse, his fingerprints were all over it. Earlier in his career, Ross had neglected to wipe his prints off a pistol. That lapse had resulted in a lengthy prison term; any similar blunder this time would mean the electric chair. As he pondered this unappetizing prospect, an idea came to him, one that would get rid of the gun for good.

Ditched Weapon

He went to the restaurant washroom and locked himself in a cubicle. Once the washroom was empty, he dropped the revolver into the toilet bowl and flushed it from view. Afterward Ross stole a parked car and headed south. But he was already a marked man; a bystander had seen him take the car and called the police.

For the next week, Ross dodged from one state to another, always staying one step ahead of his pursuers. He attempted to rob a gas station in West Virginia but had to flee when a customer arrived unexpectedly. In his haste to escape, Ross dropped a revolver, but early official elation at this discovery evaporated when tests eliminated it as the murder weapon. Two days later, he was asleep in a car in Ellicott City, Maryland, when two police officers approached. In the brief gun battle that ensued, Ross was hit but managed to escape.

His luck finally ran out on December 17. By now, radio bulletins, including his description, were a regular feature on the daily news programs, so it was no surprise when a farmer in Maryland, Edward Duval, recognized the unkempt hitchhiker he had picked up as Ross. Wisely, Duval said nothing until he had dropped Ross off. Then he found two police officers. When challenged, Ross insisted that his name was Perkins, but exhausted from days of running, he soon admitted his identity and went meekly into custody.

When he came to trial on February 4, 1952, Ross claimed that he had killed Haas in self-defense. It was a weak argument, and, anticipating its rejection by the jury, the defense team cobbled together an alternative and uncomplimentary insanity plea for their client, describing him as a "moral imbecile" and "psychopathic." But one piece of evidence in the prosecution's arsenal proved devastating.

Shortly after the Cleveland shooting, a customer at the diner in Bedford reported that one of the toilets was backed up. A friend of the proprietor's volunteered to clear the obstruction. After a few moments' tentative exploration, he found the source of the trouble. Lodged in the waste pipe, just around the bend, was the missing revolver. Its serial number, when checked against the police records, confirmed that this was the gun issued to Officer Forney Haas.

After several days of immersion in water, there was little reason to expect that the gun would yield any identifiable fingerprints. Sure enough, the handle and trigger were clean, but when technicians looked more closely at the barrel, they found to their astonishment a clear fingerprint. More amazing still, the print had seemingly been etched into the gunmetal. Experts studied the print in astonishment: Its like had never been seen before.

Various theories were advanced to explain this extraordinary phenomenon. Some attributed it to the heavy lime content of the water, or a chemical reaction with the copper ball in the tank; others thought that Ross's own sweat, which contained an unusually high salt content, had eaten into the metal of the gun as he handled it.

Whatever the reason, the revolver proved decisive. Introduced right at the end of the prosecution's case, it caused a sensation and left the defense reeling. Convicted of murder, with no recommendation for mercy, Ross went to the electric chair on January 16, 1953.

Conclusion

Fingerprints have immense durability. Under optimum conditions they can remain intact on a surface for decades (see the Valerian Trifa case on page 136). Although the circumstances of George Ross and the corrosive fingerprint can only be described as freakish, they remind us that every time we touch something, until that surface is either cleaned or degraded, our presence at that spot has been indelibly recorded. 

Richard Ramirez

DATE: 1984

LOCATION: Los Angeles, California

SIGNIFICANCE: Computerization of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) fingerprint records dealt a deadly blow to one of California's worst killers.

The man who became known as the Night Stalker first struck in June 1984, when a young woman was stabbed to death in her Los Angeles home. Over the course of the next year, another twelve people would die at the hands of this psychopath. The murders followed a set pattern, usually occurring in the early hours of the morning and most often at homes where a window was left open. After gaining entry, the killer would sever the phone lines and then go about his evil business. Any adult males present were dispatched with a bullet to the head. Female victims were raped, often next to the bodies of their dead partners. At the seventh murder scene, the killer daubed a pentagram, a sign often associated with devil worship, on a bedroom wall and on the thigh of one female victim. Another woman, after seeing her husband shot to death, was ordered to "swear upon Satan" while being sodomized. Survivors described their assailant as a tall, slim, scruffy Hispanic male, unwashed and stinking, with bad teeth.

The homicidal outburst culminated at Mission Viejo in August 1985, when a young couple was attacked at home. The Night Stalker shot the man through the head while he slept, then raped the woman beside him. Somehow, in the midst of this nightmare, the woman managed to keep her wits about her enough to note the license plate number of the killer's old orange Toyota as he drove off. Records showed that the car had been stolen in Chinatown while the owner was eating in a restaurant. An all-points bulletin led to the vehicle being located two days later in a parking lot. After mounting around-the-clock surveillance in case the killer returned— he didn't—officers eventually removed the car for forensic examination.

This proved vital, as experts managed to lift a partial fingerprint.

In a city the size of Los Angeles, manually searching fingerprint files was a tedious process that could take days, and even then, human error always left open the possibility of missed correlations. But in 1985 the LAPD had installed a computerized fingerprint database system similar to that used by the FBI and capable of more than sixty thousand comparisons per second. The system works by storing information about the relative distance between different features of a print

The latest in fingerprint analysis—laser technology that seeks out latent prints. (FBI) and comparing them to a digitized image of the suspect's fingerprint. Within minutes, the computer provided a positive match for the print from the orange Toyota—the Night Stalker was Richard Ramirez, a twenty-fiveyear-old drifter from El Paso, arrested several years previously on a misdemeanor traffic violation.

Forensic Miracle

Those working in the fingerprint department described the identification as "a near miracle." The computer had only just been installed, and this was one of its first trials. Moreover, the system contained the fingerprints of only those criminals born after January 1, 1960— Ramirez was born in February 1960! Immediately his name and photograph were circulated to the media. Ramirez, on his way back from Phoenix, Arizona, after buying cocaine, returned to Los Angeles unaware that his face was front page news.

Customers in the East L.A. liquor store first recoiled from the foulsmelling man buying a Pepsi and doughnuts and then noticed his similarity to the wanted killer whose picture appeared on the newspaper rack. East L.A. is a predominantly Hispanic area, and locals, infuriated by the prejudice that the Night Stalker had aroused against them, were in no mood to apprehend Ramirez gently. A wild chase ensued. After trying unsuccessfully to steal several cars, Ramirez ran panting into the arms of a waiting patrolman (curiously, also named Ramirez) and begged to be taken into custody before the crowd lynched him. A few days later, he was arraigned on thirteen counts of murder.

Ramirez, a master manipulator, managed to delay his trial for more than three years. During this time, he changed his appearance drastically, washing regularly, wearing smart clothes, and having extensive dental work done so that the man in court bore little resemblance to published descriptions of the Night Stalker. Even so, the case against him was ironclad. The gun used in the killings—a .22 caliber semiautomatic—was traced to a friend's house, and jewelry stolen from the victims turned up at the home of his sister.

Another year would pass before he was convicted. In that time, hardened police and court officials stated that no defendant had ever so unnerved them. Ramirez, menacing behind dark glasses, would erupt into totally unpredictable paroxysms of rage, invoking Satan's name and cursing everyone around him. On November 7, 1989, as he was led away after being sentenced to death, he grinned evilly and flashed photographers a devil sign. Earlier, Ramirez had delivered a chilling monologue to the court in which he warned, "I will be avenged."

Conclusion

Without the recently installed fingerprint database, Ramirez might well have remained at liberty much longer at a cost of countless more lives. The inventors of the computer microprocessor could hardly have envisioned that one day it would play such a vital role in fighting crime. 

Valerian Trifa

DATE: 1984

LOCATION: Green Lake, Michigan

SIGNIFICANCE: The first American citizen to be deported for war crimes, Archbishop Valerian Trifa had his background mercilessly exposed in a most unexpected and ingenious manner.

In the years after World War II, the United States opened its arms to a vast wave of European immigrants. Most had endured unimaginable levels of hardship and deprivation; a few had not. For this tiny minority migration to America meant more than a chance to carve out a new life; it was their opportunity to bury the past.

One such man was Romanian-born Viorel Trifa. Arriving from Italy, he entered the United States on July 17, 1950. Immigration officials listened with sympathy as this thirty-six-year-old priest of the Romanian Orthodox Church recounted harrowing details of his ordeal in Nazi concentration camps. They granted him immediate residency status. Trifa moved to the Detroit area, where thousands of his fellow Romanians had settled. Ambitious and impatient, he advanced quickly through the church hierarchy, and in 1952 he was consecrated as a bishop. At the same time he adopted the first name of Valerian, a saint who was commemorated every January 21. It was a date that had figured prominently in the life of the man from Romania.

In 1957 Trifa was naturalized as a U.S. citizen. Thereafter, outside the confines of his church, he was virtually unknown and anonymous, and he probably would have remained so had it not been for the unstinting efforts of a few people determined to ensure that justice would be done.

The first uneasy murmurings about Bishop Valerian Trifa had surfaced in 1952. Letters received by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) contained accusations that not only had Trifa been a Nazi sympathizer in wartime Romania, but that he had instigated the Bucharest pogrom of 1941. Why, asked the writers, because the 1948 Displaced Persons Act forbade entry to "any person who advocated or assisted in the persecution of any person because of race, religion or national region," had this murderer been allowed entry into the United States? Surely, having perjured himself on his entry application, he was now subject to deportation? The INS disagreed; it brushed aside every allegation, saying, "This Service cannot interfere in religious matters."

Brutal Pogrom

To describe the events in Bucharest in 1941 as "religious matters" was stretching incredulity to the breaking point. On January 21—St. Valerian's Day—hordes of green-shirted members of the Iron Guard, Romania's virulently pro-Nazi political party, scythed through the Jewish quarter of Bucharest, laying waste to everyone and everything. The madness lasted three days and left almost six thousand dead. An eyewitness wrote, "Perhaps the most horrifying single episode was the 'kosher butchering' of more than 200 Jews in the municipal slaughterhouse. The Greenshirts forced them to undress and led them to the chopping block, where they cut their throats in a horrible parody of the traditional Jewish methods of slaughtering fowl and livestock."

Among the leaders of this massacre was a squat, heavily built man named Viorel Trifa. Later that year, to escape reprisals, Trifa sought and received sanctuary in Germany. Tried in absentia for his part in the atrocities, he was condemned to life imprisonment with hard labor. His whereabouts in the postwar years were shrouded in mystery until his arrival in America in 1950. For two decades, campaigners waged an unceasing struggle to have Trifa's citizenship revoked. Finally, in 1975, the U.S. Department of Justice instituted deportation proceedings against Trifa, alleging that he had concealed material facts in obtaining his citizenship.

By this time, Trifa had been elevated to the rank of archbishop and was in no mood to surrender easily to government pressure. In 1980, stripped of his citizenship, he admitted membership in the Iron Guard, but remained unrepentant. "I am not ashamed of my past at all," he told an interviewer. "For those circumstances in that time I think that I didn't have any other alternative but to do what I thought to be right for the interests of the Romanian people." And he insisted that claims of high-level connections with Nazis were nonsense. Then, in May 1982, came the evidence that undid him. After searching its archives, the West German government made available to the FBI's Identification Division numerous documents pertaining to Trifa. One such document was a postcard, dated June 14, 1942, allegedly authored by Trifa and addressed to Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi SS. Trifa emphatically denied writing the card.

Mindful of Bonn's request that the card not be damaged or defaced, the FBI fingerprint department turned to its latest weapon. With laser technology, a sample can be examined for prints without being dusted or treated in any other way. The argon laser is turned on, and the sample passes under the viewing area. By looking through a protective filtering lens, the examiner can detect latent fingerprints. In this case, the postcard yielded a clear impression of a left thumbprint. When compared to Trifa's, it was identical. The disgraced archbishop's forty-year-old lie was over.

On August 13, 1984, Valerian Trifa left the United States for good and settled in Portugal. In a disquieting interview given shortly afterward, he was characteristically unapologetic. "I am a man who happened to get put in a moment of history when some people wanted to make a point," he said. "The point was to revive the Holocaust. But all this talk by the Jews about the Holocaust is going to backfire." Quite what Trifa meant by this was never made clear. Nor did he get much chance to explain. After suffering a heart attack, he was admitted to a hospital in Cascais on the Lisbon coast, and on January 28, 1987, he died.

Conclusion

Of the millions of Jews slaughtered in World War II, 425,000 were Romanian. Those who survived the horror of Bucharest in 1941 wanted only one thing: justice. Few could have imagined that they would find it in a high-tech beam of light.

Stella Nickell

DATE: 1986

LOCATION: Seattle, Washington

SIGNIFICANCE: Product tampering is one of the most odious of all crimes. Here it was used to mask a callous murder for profit.

As she was getting ready for work on June 11, 1986, Sue Snow, a fortyyear-old bank manager in the Seattle suburb of Auburn, collapsed in her bathroom. Paramedics summoned to the scene found Mrs. Snow semiconscious, unresponsive, and gasping for breath. Later that morning, in hospital, she died. Doctors were puzzled. The symptoms suggested either an aneurysm or drug overdose, but neither seemed probable because there was no evidence of internal bleeding, and Mrs. Snow was the kind of woman who restricted her drug use to the occasional painkiller. Coincidentally, earlier that morning she had taken two Extra-Strength Excedrin capsules to combat a persistent headache.

During the autopsy, an assistant detected a faint odor of bitter almonds emanating from the body—a telltale sign of recently ingested cyanide. A laboratory test came back positive. Family members continued to insist that Sue Snow would never have poisoned herself. Yet somehow she had swallowed cyanide, which left only the Excedrin capsules. Might they have been tainted? A follow-up test confirmed that the capsules did indeed contain cyanide.

On June 16, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published the lot number of the contaminated capsules, and the manufacturer, Bristol-Myers, cabled stores across the country to take all bottles of Extra-Strength Excedrin off their shelves. Meanwhile, Seattle police found two other bottles of cyanide-laced Excedrin, one in Auburn and the other in Kent, an adjoining suburb.

Already control of the investigation had been ceded to the FBI.2 Initial suspicions that the killer might be a political terrorist or a disgruntled Bristol-Myers employee soon faded when no one called to either take credit or issue demands. Then, on June 17, a forty-two-year-old widow named Stella Nickell telephoned the police with a strange story. Just twelve days earlier, she said, her husband, Bruce, fifty-two, had died suddenly after taking Extra-Strength Excedrin capsules. She wondered if there could be any connection between his death and that of Sue Snow.

Second Victim

Investigators feared the worst. Although Bruce Nickell's autopsy had recorded the cause of death as emphysema and he had already been buried, an exhumation was unnecessary because the deceased had volunteered to be an organ donor. Consequently, a sample of his blood had been preserved. When that sample was tested, it, too, revealed the presence of cyanide. Even before the results were known, police officers had already recovered two bottles of contaminated capsules from the Nickells' home.

While agents labored in vain to establish a connection between Bruce Nickell, a heavy-equipment operator, and banker Sue Snow, a chemist at the FBI Laboratory found something peculiar: all of the tainted capsules recovered so far contained particles of an algicide used in home fish tanks. He even came up with the brand name— Algae Destroyer. Whoever spiked the capsules, it appeared, had mixed the cyanide in a container used previously to crush algicide pellets.

Another, more sinister, oddity emerged. The FDA had examined more than 740,000 capsules sold throughout the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, yet only five bottles were contaminated, and of those bottles, two were found in Stella Nickell's home. Had she purchased both bottles at the same time, then it could have been ascribed to ill luck, but her claim to have bought them on different days and in different stores defied every known law of probability. The odds against such random misfortune were astronomical.

Immediately, Stella Nickell came under closer scrutiny. As a grandmother with two daughters, she seemed an unlikely killer; neighbors said that she and Bruce had been happy together. It was the same at the

Seattle airport, where Stella worked as a security guard. Fellow employees described her as cheerful and hardworking. Bruce's death had devastated her, they said, she had been inconsolable. But the FBI had found out something else—Stella Nickell had a fish tank in her home.

It might have been coincidence, of course, but allied to doubts raised by the bottle episode, this latest revelation catapulted Stella Nickell into the position of prime suspect. Agents visited local pet stores, anxious to know if anyone recalled a middle-aged woman buying Algae Destroyer. It was a long shot, but on August 25 they got lucky. When shown a photo layout, a store clerk in Kent had no hesitation in identifying Nickell as having bought the algicide from him. He remembered her distinctly because a little bell attached to her purse had jingled as she walked around the store.

As agents delved more deeply into her background, slowly the real Stella

Nickell began to emerge. Between 1968 and 1971, while living in California, she had been convicted of check fraud, forgery, and child abuse. Since then she had steered clear of the law but had not managed to steer clear of debt; the Nickells were permanently broke. At the time of Bruce's death, the bank was moving to foreclose on their home. Earlier, they had come perilously close to bankruptcy. And yet, despite this mountain of debt, in the past year Stella had somehow managed to find the money for extra insurance coverage on Bruce's life. As a state employee, he was already insured for $31,000, with an additional $105,000 should death result from an accident. Stella had topped up that sum with another $40,000 of coverage. In total, she stood to receive $176,000 if Bruce's death was judged to be accidental.

All this was well and good, except that the doctor who signed Bruce Nickell's death certificate recorded emphysema as the cause, despite several phone calls from an anxious-sounding Stella, eager to learn if he could possibly have been mistaken in his findings. There was good reason for her concern. Under the provisions of the insurance policies, had Bruce Nickell died from cyanide during a product-tampering scare, then his death would have been ruled accidental and Stella would have pocketed the entire $176,000.

Hostile Interview

On November 18, more than five months after Sue Snow's death, Nickell was brought in for questioning. She first denied ever buying Algae Destroyer, then scoffed at suggestions that she had purchased additional insurance on her husband's life. This second denial—so foolish and unnecessary—immediately branded her as a liar. As the questions became more penetrating she brought the interview to a tearful conclusion, angrily refusing to submit to a polygraph test. Inexplicably, four days later she changed her mind. When asked by the examiner if she had laced the capsules with cyanide, she replied "No." The polygraph needle jumped wildly. So did Nickell. Furious at the outcome, she refused to say another word without benefit of counsel.

For several more weeks the case languished. Then Stella's own daughter, twenty-seven-year-old Cindy Hamilton, contacted the police. Although estranged from her mother, she had felt an understandable loyalty when initially interviewed; now she wanted to clear her conscience. Her mother, she said, had often talked of killing Bruce, even the possibility of hiring a hit man. At other times, she had mentioned cyanide. Although certain that Cindy was speaking the truth, prosecutors knew that any competent defense lawyer would portray this testimony as the product of a disaffected daughter out to gain revenge. While they sought how best to combat this likelihood, Cindy herself provided the answer.

She mentioned that her mother had researched the effects of cyanide at various libraries. Immediately agents visited every local library. In her hometown of Auburn, an overdue notice came to light for a book that Stella Nickell had borrowed and never returned titled Human Poisoning. Armed with her card number, an agent searched the aisles for every book that Stella had borrowed. Inside a volume on toxic plants called Deadly Harvest, he found her number stamped twice on the checkout slip—both dates before Bruce's death. Acting on a hunch, he sent the book to the FBI Laboratory.

There, fingerprint experts brought the case home to Nickell. Eighty-four of her prints were lifted from the pages of the book, most from the section dealing with cyanide.

On December 9, 1987, Stella Nickell was indicted on five counts of murder and product tampering. Her trial began the following April. Prosecutors painted a damning portrait of a psychopath prepared to murder complete strangers in order to profit from the death of her own husband. She was convicted on May 9, 1988, and sentenced to ninety years of imprisonment.

As often happens in high-profile cases, Nickell has accumulated a large number of supporters who believe her to be innocent. Some claim to have new evidence; others argue that the prosecution case was tainted, with accusations that Cindy's testimony had been driven by a craving for the reward money. In 2001, Nickell herself appeared on the TV program 48 Hours, defiant as always. "I am not guilty and I won't quit fighting until I prove it," she said. Thus far, her arguments and those of her supporters have fallen on barren ground. In 2001, a court decided that there was insufficient new evidence to grant a new trial.

Conclusion

Despite these recent developments, any objective appraisal of the evidence suggests that Nickell was justly convicted. For this she had no one to blame but herself. Had she been willing to settle for the original $31,000, the circumstances of her husband's death would have gone undetected.

Frustration and greed ruined the perfect murder.