The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence Read Free Page B

the civilised world as the home of scientific crime detection.As early as 1814, the great doctor Mathieu Orfila had written the first treatise on poisons, revealing how they could be detected in the body; but for many years, other branches of crime detection had remained crude and inefficient.Throughout the nineteenth century, police had been pursuing more or less hit-or-miss methods of detecting criminals, relying on informers and policemen who knew the underworld.The chief virtue of a detective was simply immense patience – the ability, for example, to look through half the hotel registers in Paris in search of the name of a wanted man.All that changed in 1883 when a young clerk named Alphonse Bertillon invented a new method of identifying criminals by taking a whole series of measurements – of their heads, arms, legs, etc.These were then classified under the head measurements, and it became possible for the police to check within minutes whether a man arrested for some minor offence was a wanted murderer or footpad.‘Bertillonage’ was soon in use in every major city in the world.The science of identification also achieved a new precision.In 1889, a doctor named Alexandre Lacassagne solved a particularly baffling murder when he identified an unknown corpse by removing all the flesh from the bones and revealing that the man had suffered from a tubercular infection of the right leg which had deformed his knee.Once the corpse had been identified, it was relatively simple to trace the murderers, a couple named Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard.
    The next great advance occurred in England, where Sir Francis Galton realised that no two persons have the same fingerprints.The first case to be solved by a fingerprint occurred in a small town in Argentina in 1892; a young mother named Francisca Rojas had murdered her two children and tried to put the blame on a peasant called Velasquez; an intelligent police chief named Alvarez observed a bloody fingerprint on the door, and established that it belonged to Francisca; she then confessed that she had been hoping to persuade a young lover to marry her, but that her ‘illegitimate brats’ stood in the way . . .When fingerprinting was introduced at Scotland Yard in 1902, it was so successful that Bertillon’s more complicated system was quickly abandoned.All over the world, ‘bertillonage’ was quickly replaced by the new fingerprint system. 1
    It was at this point, when science seemed to be transforming the craft of the manhunter, that killers like Jack the Ripper and Joseph Vacher made a mockery of all attempts to catch them.A well-known cartoon published at the time of the Ripper murders showed policemen blundering around with blindfolds over their eyes.Scientific crime detection depended on finding some link between the crime and the criminal.If a rich old dowager was poisoned, compiling a list of suspects was easy; the police merely had to find out who would benefit in her will, and which of these had access to poison.But the sex killer struck at random and, unless he left some clue behind, there was nothing to link him to the victim.
    One important advance offered hope of a partial solution.In 1901, a young Viennese doctor, Paul Uhlenhuth, discovered a method for testing whether a bloodstain was animal or human.Blood is made up of red cells and a colourless liquid called serum.Uhlenhuth discovered that if a rabbit is injected with chicken blood, its serum develops a ‘resistance’ to chicken blood.And if a drop of chicken blood is then dropped into a test tube containing serum from the rabbit, the serum turns cloudy.It was obvious that the same method could be used to detect human blood, for when an animal is injected with human blood, its serum will then turn cloudy if a drop of human blood – or even a few drops of dried blood in a salt solution – is introduced into it.In 1901, Uhlenhuth used his method to help convict a sadistic killer of children.Ludwig