Criminal - Bonus Episode: Like a Page from a Book

Episode Date: January 15, 2018

In 1892, a gruesome murder took place in a small fishing village in Argentina. The police had a suspect who would not confess. What happened next would change the way murders were investigated around the world. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This is a special bonus episode of Criminal, made possible by TNT's new limited series, The Alienist, based on the best-selling novel by Caleb Carr. When a series of gruesome murders grips New York in 1896, Dr. Laszlo Kreisler and his team must investigate, analyze, and capture the killer. The Alienist premieres January 22nd, and we'll have a preview after the show. To learn more, visit thealienist.com. There's a small fishing village called Necochea, and it's a little bit south of Buenos Aires, along the coast, along the Atlantic coast. And there's a murder that happens there, or a couple murders. This is Eric Ray, a forensic scientist, and he's telling the story of a murder that happened in Argentina in 1892, a murder that was gruesome and horrible, but that's

not why we remember it today. The police go to this house, and a woman and her two kids have been attacked. The woman's name is Francisca Rojas, and her two kids, Pansiano and Teresa, have been killed, and Francisca had had her neck cut, her throat slashed. But it wasn't deep enough to kill her. She survived the attack. When Francisca Rojas recovered enough to speak, she told the police that a man named Pedro Ramon Velasquez

was the one who had attacked her, killed her children, and left her to die because she would not marry him. So the police go and they arrest Velasquez, and they take him in, and they try to get him to confess, to match up with the statement of the victim here of this crime. And he won't confess. They beat him, and over multiple days, they have him tied up, and they repeatedly try to get him to confess to killing these two little kids, and he just won't do it. At one point, they physically tie Velazquez to the bodies of the two dead children overnight,

hoping this will elicit a confession. But it didn't work. He would not confess. So what they do next is they call up to the bigger city, further north near Buenos Aires, a city called La Plata. And they ask for help. And they send down an inspector named Eduardo Alvarez. And once Inspector Alvarez arrives and starts to look around, he begins to question Francisco Rojas' story.

He speaks with Velazquez's friends, who all say that he was with them that night. And then Inspector Alvarez discovers that Francisca Rojas had a boyfriend she hadn't mentioned during the investigation. The boyfriend didn't want to be with her because she had children. And so that really sets him as to thinking, well, maybe this didn't happen the way that Francisca said it did. Inspector Alvarez goes back to the house where the attack took place and combs every inch of it, searching for any clues that might have been missed the first time. And as he's looking around, he sees on the doorframe a smudge of blood. And he starts looking very carefully at it,

and his eyes get big as he sees that it's a fingerprint left in blood on this doorframe. So he immediately gets excited, grabs a saw, and actually cuts out this section of the door frame. Right then, at this exact moment in Argentina in 1892, fingerprints became a viable tool for solving crime. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. criminal. That same year, 1892, a cousin of Charles Darwin named Sir Francis Galton published

the first scientific study of the potential use of fingerprints to identify individuals. Galton was also the guy who coined the term eugenics and the phrase nature versus nurture. His book was simply called Fingerprints, and he even put his own prints on the title page. He grouped the patterns into the categories we still use today, like arch, loop, and whirl. He wrote, let no one despise the ridges on account of their smallness. They are, in some respects, There was a guy in France named Alphonse Bertillon not fingerprinted. Instead, every inch of their body was measured meticulously. There was a guy in France named Alphonse Bertillon that really had this idea of, okay, we need to be able to figure out who these people are. And that wasn't to solve crimes. It was more just, as people came into jail, if they lied about who they were, then how are we going

to be able to tell? And this was at a time when photography was maybe still too expensive to use for this purpose. So he developed a system of just measuring people, measuring their height, their wingspan, the size of their head, the length of their foot, and the length of a finger. He measured the head with a special tool, and he created tools for that because they did not exist.

This is Xavier Espinasse, chief of the forensic identification service in Paris. So he measured from the front part to the back part of the skull, the left part to the back part of the skull, the left part to the right part of the skull, the color of the eyes, the length of the hand, the length of the foot, of one foot, the height,

the width, the amplitude, the amplitude. The arm span. Yes, the arm span, yes. And he took pictures about every kind of measurement. All these numbers together would define a person. So if you were arrested again and tried to lie about who you were, police could simply look you up according to your measurements.

And then they could say, oh, no, this is the guy. You've been arrested before. No, we figured out who you are now because we've measured you and you match someone else that we've arrested before. And he created a special file with photographs and with measures of 11 parts of the body. And he said, OK, if you have this file, the person cannot say it is not me. Police no longer had to take suspects at their word or rely on their memories

to know whether someone had been arrested before. Bertillon's work marked a huge shift in the evolution of policing. And you feel a connection to Bertillon professionally. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, of course, of course. We are the oldest forensics service in the world here. And due to him, due to his work. And every day we think of it, we think of this and we think of him.

And at the entrance of our office, you have a big bronze bust of Bertillon and we saw him when we come in and we come out. And he's always present. And now I'm, as I commonly say, I'm the 16th direct successor of Bertillon. Because Bertillon's system required exact measurements of your face and head down to the millimet millimeter, the process took a really long time.

Police were hesitant to measure women because it involved too much touching, and they worried that women's hairdos would make exact measurement impossible. But Bertillon's system made its way around the world and was widely adopted in the United States. There was a famous case in Kansas in which a man named Will West was arrested and underwent the Bertillon process to determine whether he was already in their system for a prior crime. And he was. A man matching his measurements was found under the name William West. The photographs of Will West and William West looked the same. The system had worked.

But then, a clerk discovered that William West was already in prison, serving a life sentence for murder. William West and Will West had nearly identical measurements, looked remarkably alike, and had the same name. But they were two different people. Bertillon's method had actually failed. He'd heard about fingerprints, but he wasn't interested. very well that if the fingerprint system was adopted as a way to find criminals, his own system of measurement will end and will fall down. And now we see that physical measurement of the human body is coming back again, we may say, through biometrics.

Okay, measuring the eyes or something. Using the body to solve a crime, it's kind of like it takes lying or what someone's going to tell you out of it. You can't lie about forensics. There is no way to lie. There is no way to lie. There is no way to lie. But even in the best-case scenario, when Bertillon's methods worked, figuring out who someone is and whether they've been arrested before does nothing to place them at the scene of a crime.

This was the problem facing Inspector Alvarez in Argentina. He desperately wanted to figure out who had come into Francisca Rojas' house and murdered her two children. One of his heroes was a Croatian anthropologist and police officer named Juan Vucetec. Vucetec had studied both Galton and Berthiaume and had begun to develop a classification system of his own. He collected as many fingerprints as possible, carrying his ink pad with him everywhere he went,

even fingerprinting the mummies at the city museum. And so Inspector Alvarez was following in the footsteps of Juan Vucetich. That day he grabbed a saw and cut out a section of Francisco Rojas' doorframe. So Inspector Alvarez brings back this fingerprint from a crime scene, and he gets the fingerprints of Pedro Velasquez. And in comparing those, sees that they don't match. We'll be right back. This bonus episode of Criminal was made possible by TNT's new limited series, The Alienist, based on the best-selling novel by Caleb Carr.

The Alienist premieres January 22nd, starring Daniel Brule, Luke Evans, and Dakota Fanning. To learn more, visit thealienist.com. You can hear an audio trailer after the show. Inspector Alvarez had a bloody fingerprint that did not match his prime suspect, which means that someone else's bloody hand was on that doorframe. If it wasn't Velazquez, who could it have been? Then he gets the fingerprints of Francisca Rojas and starts comparing the fingerprint and sees that everything matches between the bloody fingerprint on the doorframe and Francisca's finger.

They went back to Francisca, who was still recovering from her throat injury, and again asked her to tell them the whole story of what had happened, but this time presented her with the bloody fingerprint on the doorframe, her fingerprint. And she breaks down and confesses and says that she was the one that killed her kids. She cut her own throat to make it look like somebody else had attacked her because she is in love with this other man who would not pay any attention to her

because of her two bratty kids. And only by not having these kids around could she be with this other man. So she puts it all on her old boyfriend and saying that he was the one that did this attack in the hopes that she could then one day be with this other man that she's fallen in love with. And what happens to her? So she's convicted of the crime and put into prison. And it was this fingerprint that led the police to suspect and question her, and then her confession that really sealed this whole thing and revealed what actually happened that day.

Francisco Rojas was sentenced to life in prison. It was a landmark case, considered to be the first homicide solved by fingerprint evidence, and Argentina became the first country to rely solely on fingerprints. Juan Vucetich's fingerprint filing and classification system was adopted in many places around the world and is still used in parts of Latin America today. The La Plata Police Academy is named after him,

and so is a forensic examination center in Croatia. Bertillon was furious that Vucetich's method was overshadowing his. So angry, the story goes, that when Vucetec visited Paris, Bertillon actually attacked him, physically. Bertillon did begrudgingly incorporate fingerprints into his system, but at first, only halfway. Only the fingerprints of the right hand. This caught up with him when a former Louvre employee stole the Mona Lisa in 1911.

Because Bertillon's files only contained right-hand fingerprints, he couldn't find a match for the prints left behind at the museum, which were only from the left hand. The thief eventually turned himself in. He hadn't even done anything with the painting. It just sat there on his kitchen table for two years. And as more police departments started keeping fingerprint files, things got a lot harder for those hoping to break the law. You could no longer assume, if I get away without getting caught, I'll be safe. We always leave something behind. Unless, of course, you try to remove your fingerprints.

The famous Chicago gangster John Dillinger tried to burn his off with acid, thinking, if I do this once, I'll be all set. But you can cut your hair, grow a beard, lose weight, but you can't ever completely destroy your fingerprints. Even if they went through the trouble of dripping acid onto each of their fingers, if you look closely at your fingers, the ridges, they go all the way out to the far edge

and all the way up to the tip of where the fingernail is and then all the way down each finger and across the entire palm. And to be able to obscure all of it would just be crazy. It wouldn't really be possible to obscure all of that, to escape detection. And then once it became an established practice, if someone were to come in with burn marks or cuts on their fingers, well, that's now a flag to say,

well, maybe we should hold on to this guy, figure out who he really is. It became not a way to hide yourself, but a way to make yourself more noticeable to the police. There was a strange case in 2008 where a man in his 60s was detained at the airport after a fingerprint scan showed that he just didn't have any. It turned out that one of his chemotherapy drugs had caused his hands to swell and peel and apparently erased his fingerprints. Similar issues have been reported by bricklayers who wear down the ridges on their fingertips

and even some office workers who handle pieces of paper all day long. Our thinking around fingerprints has changed a lot since the days of Juan Vucetich. There are more precise ways to identify someone, and it's hard to collect a perfect fingerprint. Most of the fingerprints left behind are just fragments or obscured by blood. And there's controversy over what kinds of human error can occur when a forensic scientist tries to make a match. This question of human error is very interesting to Eric Ray.

It's one of the topics he discusses on his podcast, The Double Loop Podcast. Welcome to The Double Loop Podcast, your source for everything about fingerprints. While you're working on your comparisons, we'll talk about comparisons. With the recent travels that Glenn and I are going on soon, we'll be bringing you The Double Loop Podcast from all over the world. Other recent episodes include tips on how to manage stress when working in forensic situations, a discussion on the new FBI latent print lab, and how one Australian woman became obsessed with latent prints at a young age. So this is mainly people who are in the fingerprint industry.

That's most of our listeners. My brother, who's an engineer, he's listened to every episode so far as well. I wish I could say that about my brother. He has not listened to every episode of my podcast. I think he just enjoys podcasts. So he says he keeps up more or less with what we're talking about. Sometimes we get a little too in-depth. Eric Gray says he thinks of a fingerprint like a page torn from a book.

If you come across a loose page, you can still read all of the words, and you can still understand what those words mean. And that gives you a place to start. Then you get started figuring out which book these words belong to. He also makes fingerprint art, cutting the pattern into sheets of metal before mounting them on pine boards and painting them. He takes custom orders.

He'll make your fingerprint or your mother's or father's. He says he finds them beautiful. He likes to look at photographs of ancient pottery in which a person would press their thumb into the soft clay, imprinting it forever, the last step before putting it in the Fire. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr, Nadia Wilson, and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Matilde Erfolino is our intern. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud

member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. And special thanks to AdCirc for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia from PRX. Here's a preview. You think I'm crazy? A monster unleashed. My God. A man obsessed. He's watching us. A city in fear. Hey! Mondays on TNT.

The hunt for pure evil begins. Cold-blooded killers walk among us. Based on the best-selling novel, Daniel Brule, Luke Evans, and Dakota Fanning. What compels a man to do evil? The Alienist, new limited series, Mondays at 9, 8 central on TNT. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults.

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