The Case of the Totally False Fingerprinting Propaganda

A few weeks back, Jan Thornhill wrote a post about accuracy in the era of the Internet. It got me thinking about the biggest fact-checking challenge I ever encountered as a children's writer - and how glad I was that someone caught the problem before it made it into print. Here's the story.

by L. E. Carmichael

The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century was responsible for more than just technological breakthroughs and the novels of Charles Dickens. It also caused a major spike in crime rates, as people moved from the countryside into the cities looking for work - and turned to crime when they couldn't find any.

Urbanization also made it harder to reliably identify repeat criminals. In small villages, everyone not only knew everyone, they knew with a high degree of certainty which of their neighbours was likely to blame for the local crime wave. Not so much in cities, where many people lived surrounded by strangers. Witness reports were often useless, because criminals wore masks or otherwise changed their appearances, and there was no such thing as photo ID. Many governments instituted harsher penalties for career criminals, but these penalties couldn't be applied without certainty that the suspect in custody was actually a repeat offender.

Enter Alphonse Bertillion. A file clerk with the Paris police, he was the fussy, meticulous son of a statistician, and he had a revolutionary idea. A criminal could change his hair cut or moustache or even his name, Bertillon believed, but he couldn't change his bones. Careful measurements of body dimensions, like the length of the finger or the long bone in the thigh, could be combined to produce a one-of-a kind profile - the first (Western) scientific basis for identifying human beings.

The Paris police took a while to come around to this idea, but in its first year of use, Bertillon's system, called anthropometry, identified 300 career criminals. By 1888, it was implemented in all French police stations and quickly spread around the world.

Until 1903, when a man named Will West was taken to Leavenworth Prison in Kansas and identified based on his measurements as a repeat offender. But West swore he'd never set foot in the prison before. By a bizarre coincidence, West's measurements perfectly matched those of William West - a man already imprisoned in Leavenworth! While the men did, in fact, bear a strong resemblance to each other, their fingerprints were completely different. This incident was one of the reasons fingerprinting replaced anthropometry as the standard method of legal identification.

Or was it?

When I was researching Forensic Science: In Pursuit of Justice, I came across this story in not one, but several of my reference books. Since it appeared well-verified and was the perfect anecdote to explain how fingerprinting came to dominate criminal identification, I included it in the initial draft of Chapter 6. Imagine my shock when the content consultant* for the book told me the entire incident was a myth.

A myth.

As Simon A. Cole explains in his book Suspect Identities (a volume the consultant kindly referred me to), the West story was carefully fabricated and cleverly circulated as a means of promoting fingerprinting as a superior alternative to anthropometry. And while fingerprinting ultimately replaced Bertillon's method due to its numerous advantages, this incident was not one of them.

For mysterious reasons, I had more "fact" trouble while researching Forensic Science that with any of my other books (excepting maybe Fox Talk, because some of the science in that book is both new and controversial). I have no idea why this subject matter in particular was so affected by conflicting sources and legend-as-truth, but it just goes to show that fact checking is one of the most important steps in writing new nonfiction - especially for young audiences, who may not have the broader context needed to be critical of what they read.

What about you? Do you have a favourite fact that turned out not to be true? 

Calling all Nova Scotian kids' book lovers! I, and many other amazing local authors, will be signing at the Celebrating Children's Literacy Book Fair. It's on Saturday, April 23, from 8:30-1:30pm, on the NSCC Kingstec Campus in Kentville. Come out and see us!

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* Content consultants are experts that review my books before publication - they help me ensure that no errors make it into the final draft.

Solve the Forensic Puzzle, Win a Copy of Trouble in the Hills

Posted by Helaine Becker

Research is naturally a big part of my life as a science writer. For my nonfiction books, I regularly get on-line, into the library stacks or on the phone to dig out interesting science-y information, and find out from experts how things really work. But what about when I write fiction? How much scientific research is required to produce a frothy adventure story?
Quite a lot, it turns out.

For example, I had to call in the experts when writing my most recent book, Trouble in the Hills, an action-packed YA adventure that pits an injured teen against the elements. As Cam slowly makes his way back to town over cold, mountain terrain, he encounters a trio of kidnappers, the girl who escaped them, his former best friend, and a gang of drug runners. The book is less concerned with scientific theory than with, “Will he escape the baddies, and wind up happily ever after with the girl?”

Nevertheless, I did want to make my plot, my scenery and my action as believable as possible. And I can tell you without embarrassment I have never mountain-biked in the Kootenays, or stumbled across a mad mama bear, human traffickers, or a corpse in a cave.

But my gutsy and attractive teen protagonists, Samira and Cam, do.

When I was writing the scene in which they find the corpse, I had a problem. In order to write it, I needed to know: ‘in what state was the body?’ Being a science writer, I could not just rely on conjecture and hope nobody noticed. I needed facts.

To learn them, I turned to an expert in forensics, Dr. Shari L. Forbes. She’s the Director of Forensic Science and Associate Professor of Forensic Science and Chemistry at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.

I posed this question to her:

“A corpse has been lying in a cave complex in British Columbia for close to a year. Here is a description of the (real) caves I’m using as a model for my fictional ones:

                    The Crystal caves are the remains of an old mining prospect,
                    crystal quartz cover part of the rock wall on the exterior of the
                    caves. Make sure to bring a flashlight along, as the caves can be
                    pretty dark, but safe to check out. The cave is laid out in a ‘L’ shape
                    extending to about 25m into the mountain side to a dead end.

The cave would be at about 750 m altitude.

What would my characters be likely to find when they come across the body in the cave L? Would the boy’s body be skeletonized? Mummified? Frozen? (I think the avg. temperature in the cave must be quite cool). What condition might his clothes be in? Would they be able to be removed from the body, or is that just too gross and unlikely to happen?”

Dr. Forbes was able to give me the scientific information I needed to write the scene as accurately as possible. It appears about mid-way through Trouble in the Hills, and is well, troubling. :)


So what does the body look like? Can you guess – or do you think you know – the answer to this gruesome forensic puzzle?

If you do, please post your anwer in the comments section below. The most accurate answerer will win a signed copy of Trouble in the Hills!