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A Strange case of Will West: Turning Point of Personal identification from Anthropology to Fingerprint Analysis

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Photo from the Collection of the National Law Enforcement Museum, Washington, D.C. (1960). At the turn of the 20th century, investigators had tinkered with fingerprinting, but the technique was not widely used. The FBI Investigators relied on the much-trusted Bertillon system, which "measured dozens of features of a criminal's face and body and recorded the series of precise numbers on a large card along with a photograph. That system, which had been used by investigators following its initial implementation in 1882 in Paris, met its match -- so to speak -- when convicted criminal Will West was marched into Leavenworth federal prison in Kansas in 1903. "From the Bertillon measurements thus obtained, [the record keeper] went to the file, and returned with the card the measurements called for, properly filled out...and bearing the name, “William West.” This card was shown to the prisoner, who grinned in amazement, and said, “That’s my picture, but I don’t know wh...
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Forensic Ballistics

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For law enforcement personnel, a callout to a crime scene may begin a long and complex series of interlocking investigations into the nature, cause, and persons responsible for  the incident. Specialists known as crime scene investigators  assist law enforcement officers and detectives to uncover the  clues at the scene. Because the United States has more firearms,  and more firearms violence, than any other country, these clues  often involve evidence left behind by firearms.  Firearms have been used for hundreds of years. The world’s  oldest gun was found by archeologists in China. They believe it  was dropped on a battlefield in Manchuria in 1288. By the 1600s,  firearms were becoming essential equipment for the armies of  European nations, and helped pave the way for conquerors who spread out across the globe to the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia. By the 1900s, millions of firearms, and the ammunition for them, were ...
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Crime Scene Investigation (CSI)

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As Paul Kirk, the noted forensic science pioneer, described it, forensic science is interested in the “unlikely and the unusual” (Kirk, 1963, p. 368). This is certainly true of crime scenes: Each one is unique. The crime committed, the location, the items used, the people involved, all vary from scene to scene. Although nearly every police and forensic agency has written protocols about processing a crime scene, these may be trumped by the circumstances of the crime scene. As Barry Fisher, retired Director of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Crime Laboratory notes, “There are few absolute rules in crime scene investigations . . . . There are always cases where guidelines cannot be followed . . . . Situations demand that investigators be flexible and creative when necessary” (2004, p. 49). That is, crime scene investigators (or CSIs, for short), must know and follow their agency’s protocols but must be ready to improvise, within accepted limits, to protect and/or preserve e...
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