Forensics continues to go through some growing pains, but man, once upon a time evidence was simple. You got a bunch of teenage girls to claim that someone bewitched them into seeing spectres and bang, the people of Massachusetts were building gallows. Modern forensics obviously looks a tad different now, but there’s one very strange case that drove home the importance of using more than “I know what I saw” for policing.
Today’s Moment of Science… The Fable of Will and William West.
It’s a tad embarrassing how many kinds of forensic evidence have become obsolete in the short fifteen years since I got a masters degree in the subject. There exists a tall pile of things I have conferred expertise in that’s now been shown to be, at best, scientific masturbation. These things make us feel good, but they’re not producing viable results.
Bite marks are the evidential version of wishful thinking. The marks often blur into forensic Rorschach bruises. Somehow you could always find an expert for court who sees the suspect’s teeth in a bruise. Microscopic hair analysis- not DNA analysis using hair, but enhanced af visual analysis- had been used to positively match suspects in cases. It’s now considered supporting evidence, at best. And though there’s some fuzzy science happening, polygraph results are so unreliable that they’re only admissible in court under extremely limited circumstances.
Brb, gonna cry into my masters degree and hope toxicology is still a thing.
In the late 1800s French police officer Alphonse Bertillon suggested perhaps we should write down something about people serving time other than “le guilty.” Along with being credited with inventing the mugshot, he came up with a standard set of measurements to take for identification records. The dimensions of their head, length of the left foot, the forearm, and middle finger were their Bertillon measurements.
It had its limitations.
In 1903, when Will West was brought into Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas, it was super fucking confusing for clerk M.W. Claughry who thought he looked familiar.
Now this story is from over a hundred years ago and surely some of the exact quotes here are lost to legend. I’m gonna get creative.
“Dude not to be weird but have you murdered someone?”
“Uuuh why who’s asking?” *nervous laughter because who wants parole? This inmate*
“So your name is Will West and your forearm length is exactly the same as this guy who did some murder, William West.”
“Well goddamn if that picture isn’t me. But I’ve never set foot in this place before because fuck Kansas.”
Claughry reportedly took another look at that card of William’s and saw that he was actually still in the prison, clearing up that racket. The ‘legend’ goes that fingerprinting the men demonstrated the usefulness of the system, and that’s why we have fingerprinting today.
Which is horseshit.
At the 1904 World Fair in St. Louis, Claughry took a course from Sgt. John K. Ferrier of Scotland Yard in his new fingerprinting identification system. Ferrier was then invited to conduct an instructional course on fingerprinting at Leavenworth. As for this incident being “the reason” that fingerprinting caught on, they were long desperate for a better way to identify people than their left foot length. The US Military adopted fingerprinting in 1905, with law enforcement following soon thereafter.
Depending on the reporting, Will and William were related, possibly even twins. Some stories circulated that one was a model prisoner, serving his time and getting back to his life, while the other was a repeat offender.
Then again, there’s also no record that there was ever even a case of mistaken identity between Will and William West.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, just reminding you that the evidence that we still rely on the most today is also the least reliable: eyewitness testimony.
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