Science and the Criminal

by C. Ainsworth Mitchell

The present writer was therefore asked to examine these documents to see whether any evidence of the date of writing could be obtained.

They were both written in blue ink upon common billheads, but the fact that the ink and paper were of the same kind was no proof that they were not genuine receipts.

When, however, the receipt stamps were examined under the microscope it was obvious that the right-hand side of one stamp corresponded with the left-hand side of the other stamp. That is to say, the little projections of paper left when two stamps are torn apart across the perforation exactly coincided in every instance, a long projection on one being matched by a short projection on the other, and so on.

The exact coincidence of seventeen points could not have been the result of chance, and the stamps on the two receipts must therefore originally have been attached to one another in the sheet.

The further inference was that the jeweller must either have torn them apart and put one on the earlier receipt and the other on the later one at the same time, or he must have had the second stamp put aside for three months and then affixed it to the later receipt.

A much more obvious slip than this was made some years ago in a bogus claim upon a fire insurance company, the story of which is related in Lord Brampton’s “Reminiscences.” The fire broke out on the premises of a firm of tailors, and it was claimed by them that the whole of their stock, including many hundred pairs of trousers, had been destroyed.

The insurance company, after examining the burnt-out building, instructed a number of their agents to sift carefully the whole of the ashes.

At the hearing of the case the counsel for the company remarked that it was strange that in a fire in which so many pairs of trousers had been burned the metal buttons upon them should not have been found.

On the next day the tailors appeared with a whole bucketful of buttons, but their production was too late to be convincing, for the ashes had been thoroughly sifted before the claimants attempted to make good their oversight, and only a very few trouser buttons had been discovered.

On the other hand, the danger of jumping to a sudden conclusion from circumstances has been frequently demonstrated. Thus, a very extraordinary case in which some facts that clearly pointed to the guilt of a prisoner were found to have misled many witnesses, was tried in 1813 at the assizes at Bury St. Edmunds. A farmer who owned upwards of 1,200 acres was accused of burglary, and as evidence against him it was positively stated that certain articles in his possession had been stolen from the house. The witnesses swore that they had identified some sheets by stains upon them and a cask by the fact of its being marked with the letters P.C. 84 in a circle. For the defence, witnesses stated that the prisoner was in possession of sheets stained in exactly the same way, and that the cask was one of those in which he had received cranberries from Norwich, all of which casks were marked in the same manner. The prisoner was acquitted.