Category Techniques

After five women form Bogota, Colombia, aroused suspicion at London’s Heathrow Airport in 1988, sniffer dogs were brought in to examine their luggage. The dogs led customs men to 20 LP records in each of the women’s suitcases. When the vinyl layers of the records were split open, cocaine was discovered sandwiched between the halves. A total of 16 kilos of the drug was found in the records and in the jackets of books. The women were all jailed for 14 years.

Sniffer dogs are used by police and customs throughout the world to detect drugs and explosives.

Dogs that are trained for the job include natural retrievers used in filed sports, such as Labradors, collies and spaniels. Dogs have a far better sense of smell than people because the smell receptors at the top of a dog’s nose are 100 times longer than in humans.

The training course for a sniffer dog normally lasts about 12 weeks. The dog is first taught to recognize a particular drug or explosive.

Its handler conceals a sample of the substance inside something the dog can grip in its mouth – a rolled-up newspaper, a piece of pipe or a rag – which is known as a training aid.

The dog is commanded to bring the aid back to the handler, and then receives a reward. The reward will be whatever that particular dog enjoys doing – usually a friendly fight with the handler or a game of hide-and-seek.

The dog learns to recognize the smell of the training aid, which is in fact the smell of the drug or explosive. The type of training aid is changed regularly, but the smell always remains the same. At fist the aid is placed within sight of the dog, but is then hidden out of sight.

Smells such as perfumes, which some smugglers spread to disguise the scent of drugs, are also used so that the dog becomes familiar with them.

A dog can eventually be trained to respond to up to 12 different types of explosives and four different types of drugs, usually cannabis, cocaine, heroin and amphetamine.

When a dog is sent out to search for drugs, perhaps in a lorry or warehouse, it is put into a special harness – a signal that it should start working. When it locates a smell which it knows will lead to a reward, it will become agitated and excited.

Other customs or police officers then take over.

The handler drops a training aid where the dog will see it and return it, and the dog then gets its reward.

Air samples

Machines that are used to detect drugs and explosives suck in air through a tube that can be inserted into concealed spaces such as petrol tanks, paneling in vehicles or gaps between walls.

They also take air samples from containers and lorries where drugs and explosives might be hidden.

The samples are analyzed by a machine called a mass spectrometer which breaks them down into their chemical parts and identifies minute traces of individual substances used in explosives or drugs.

It is claimed that traces as small as one-trillionth of a gram can be detected.

Electron movement

‘Sniffer’ machines large enough for people to walk through have been installed at the Houses of Parliament in London and at some international airports, including Seoul before the 1988 Olympic Games. They can detect dynamite or nitroglycerine, which gives off a vapour that attracts electrons. A current running through the sniffer machine detects the movement of the electrons.

 

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Applicants for the job of deputy personnel of a computer company had been whittled down to two young men of equal experience, skill and qualifications. Outwardly, there seemed little to choose between them – so the interviewing board called in a graphologist, or handwriting analyst, to assess character and potential.

The handwriting of the first applicant was large, fluid and rounded, that of the second was small, sharp and angular. According to the graphologist, the first handwriting showed someone who was self-confident, flexible and who got on well with people. The second handwriting, however, portrayed someone who – despite his social and professional ‘front’ – was self-doubting and rigid. So the job went to the first applicant.

Graphologists maintain that handwriting – from public relations companies to banks – use expert handwriting analysts for sifting through job applicants, requests for promotion, and business ideas that come through the post. In West Germany 80 per cent of major companies employ graphologists for personnel selection. It is not widely used in Australia although the practice is growing around the world.

Its adherents claim that it is an effective way of deciding whether a person can be trusted. In the USA –where firms lose up to $40,000 million each year to dishonest employees – graphology has taken the place of polygraph, or lie detector tests, which are no longer legal.

Critics of graphology say that it has no firm validity. Not only are many handwriting experts self-trained but their evaluation are often found to contradict each other.

However, most graphologists agree on certain basic concepts – such as the importance of assessing character on a combination of several main factors, and not any one ‘peculiar’ characteristic.

They divide handwriting into three ‘zones’: the upper and lower zones, formed by the tops and bottoms of capital letters and other letters such as b, d and g; and the middle zone, containing the remaining small letters. The relative forms and sizes of the zones are said to reveal people’s true selves.

For example, a large upper zone indicates someone who is outgoing and cheerful; a small lower zone suggests someone shallow and emotionally stunted; and an average-sized middle zone may point to someone who is well-organized and practical.

 

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On the afternoon of July 4, 1956, Mrs. Beatrice Weinberger brought her month-old baby, Peter, back from an outing near their home in Westbury, Long Island, USA. She left the pram on the patio of her house and hurried inside to get the baby a clean nappy. When she returned a few moments later, the pram was empty – and a scrawled note was lying where Peter had been.

The note said: ‘Attention. I’m sorry this had to happen, but I’m in bad need of money, and couldn’t get it any other way. Don’t tell anyone or go to the police about this because I am watching you closely. I’m scared stiff, and will kill the baby at your first wrong move.

‘Just put $2000 (two thousand) in small bills in brown envelope, and place it next to the signpost at the corner of Albemarle Rd. and Park Ave. at exactly 10 o’clock tomorrow (Thursday) morning.

‘If everything goes smooth, I will bring the baby back and leave him on the same corner “Safe and Happy” at exactly 12 noon. No excuse, I can’t wait! Your baby-sitter.’

Despite the kidnapper’s warning. Mr. and Mrs. Weinberger, frantic with worry, contacted the police.

A dummy parcel containing cut-up pieces of newspaper was placed on the corner the following morning. But the kidnapper did not show up. He failed to keep two other ‘appointments’ with the Weinberger, and left a second note signed ‘Your baby-sitter’. By then, police felt that the baby was no longer alive.

The FBI was called in and the Bureau’s handwriting experts set to work to try to track down the kidnapper. In both the ransom notes an unusual z-shaped stroke was placed at the front of the y in words such as ‘money’ and ‘baby’.

Starting with New York State Motor Vehicle Bureau, the analysts spent the next six weeks combing through local records and at probation offices, work places, factories, aircraft plants, clubs and schools.

Altogether, more than 2 million signatures and handwriting samples were examined by eye and compared to the writing on the ransom notes.

Then, in the middle of August, the experts’ painstaking efforts paid off. The handwriting of Angelo John La Marca, of Plainview, Long Island, matched that of the kidnapper’s – especially in the peculiar formation of the y’s.

Some time previously La Marca had been put on probation for making illegal alcohol. On being shown the handwriting samples, he broke down and confessed to the kidnapping of baby Peter.

It had been a super-of-the-moment crime, he stated, committed to ease his financial problems. He told the police he had left Peter alive and well in a nearby park on the day after the kidnapping. But when officers hurried to the spot, all they found was the infant’s dead body. La Marca was later executed in New York’s Sing Sing Prison.

Even if La Marca had tried to disguise his handwriting he probably would still have been caught.

No matter how hard someone may try to disguise handwriting quirks and characteristics – or adopt those of somebody else – the ‘individuality’ of the writer shows through. The very angle at which he or she holds a pen; the way a t is crossed and an I is dotted; the height and size of capital and small letters; the amount of space between words; the use (or misuse) of punctuation marks. All these can identify a person as surely as fingerprints.

In 1983 Gary Herbertson, the head of the FBI laboratory’s document department, stated: ‘Any time you try to change your handwriting; you do things that look unnatural. A forger’s writing doesn’t have the speed, fluidity, the smoothness of natural writing.

‘You can see blunt beginnings and ends of strokes, rough curves, inappropriate breaks, little tremors. Two letters may be the same shape, but you can tell if one’s written quickly and the other is carefully drawn.’

In addition to their knowledge, handwriting experts use sophisticated instruments and machines in their work. These include infrared and ultraviolet scanning devices with which they look beneath erasures and changes; spilt-screen equipment for comparing dubious documents with genuine ones; and tools for greatly magnifying handwriting and comparing different ways of joining up letters.

The most notorious handwriting case in recent times involved the forgiving in the early 1980s of the ‘diaries’ of Adolf Hitler – committed his innermost thoughts in an antiquated German script. They included an entry on the Russian attack on Berlin in April 1945, when – in his bunker hide-out – Hitler allegedly wrote: ‘The long-awaited offensive has begun. May the Lord God stand by us.’

The 60 diaries were bought by the German weekly news magazine Stern for a reputed 6 million marks. Stern then sold subsidiary rights in France, Spain, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Norway and England – where extracts were published in the Sunday Times.

Publication in Germany began in the spring of 1983. And two of the diaries – from 1932, the year before Hitler became dictator, and 1945, the year of his suicide – were sent to the American magazine Newsweek, which was also interested in publishing them.

The magazine called in a leading handwriting expert, Kenneth Rendell, of Boston, Mass – who was immediately suspicious. ‘Even at first glance,’ he stated, ‘everything looked wrong.’

Using a powerful microscope and samples of Hitler’s genuine handwriting, he compared the two sets of writing – particularly the capital letters E, H and K – and found major discrepancies and dissimilarities between the two. These convinced Rendell that the diaries were fakes. In addition, the ink proved to be modern; and Hitler, when he had made notes and records in the early 1930s, had used only the finest quality, gold-embossed paper. He would not have resorted to the sort of cheap, lined notepaper on which the fake diaries were written.

As a result of the expose, a German criminal with a string of convictions – Konrad Paul Kujau – was later arrested along with two accomplices and tried for forging the diaries. In July 1985 he was found guilty by a Hamburg court and sentenced to four and a half years imprisonment. Once again, the handwriting expert had exposed the handwriting cheat.

 

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In February 1959 an armed robber held up a liquor store in southern California and made off which the takings, it was a typical small-time crime, but for one thing: the store owner gave Sheriff Peter Pitches of Los Angeles County Police a detailed description of the robber. This enabled the police to create a lifelike portrait of the wanted man.

Pictures of the robber were circulated in the area and, as a result of them, he was identified and arrested. He confessed to the crime and was duly punished – so becoming the first criminal in the world to be caught by means of Identikit.

The system had been conceived in the mid-1940s principally by Hugh C. McDonald, a detective with the Los Angeles Identification Bureau. Taking some 50,000 photographs of people’s faces, he cut them into some 12 main sections – and used them as the basis of what he called Identikit.

This consisted of almost 400 different and contrasting pairs of eyes, lips, noses, chins, hairlines, eyebrows, beards, moustaches  and so on. To build up a likeness, the various features were drawn on transparent plastic sheets, which were changed and overlaid until a composite portrait was created that matched eyewitness descriptions of the wanted person.

The use of photographs or artists’ impressions to identify and apprehend criminals dates back to the 1880s in France. Then a French criminologist named Alphonse Bertillon introduced a system which he called portrait parle, or ‘speaking portrait’. It involved the use of front and side photographs of captured criminals, cut into sections and mounted so that particular features – a hooked nose, a pointed chin, protruding ears and so forth – could be studied.

In the mid-1970s a second and now more commonly used Identikit system was introduced in North America. It was developed by Pat Dunleavy, an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and it uses plastic sheets which contain actual photographs of facial features.

In the United Kingdom a system called Photo-FIT (Facial Identification Technique) has been used by the police since 1970. It is also used in Australia where it is commonly known as the Penry system. Photo-FIT also uses real photographs of ‘ordinary’ people mounted on thin plastic sheets. The basic five-section kit consists of 195 hairlines, 99 eyes and eyebrows, 89 noses, 105 mouths, and 74 chins and cheeks, which enable billions of possible combinations to be assembled. Features such as facial hair and spectacles are available as overlays. The pieces are cut so that the length and width the composite face can be fitted into a frame which holds them in place.

The basic kit relates to Caucasian (white) faces and there are supplementary kits to give North American Indian, Indian subcontinent and Afro-Caribbean features. A kit has not yet been developed for Oriental faces, which are usually drawn by artists.

Witnesses of crimes are interviewed by the police as soon after the events as possible – most people’s ability to recall starts to diminish after about a week.

For both Photo-FIT and Identikit, detectives begin by asking witnesses to recall details of the crime itself. They then move on to general descriptions of the suspect or suspects. For instance, were they short and burly, or lean and tall? What sort of clothes were they wearing? And what did the suspects actually do at the scene of the crime? Only then are the witnesses asked about facial details.

They leaf through books, or ‘feature atlases’ containing the various Photo-FIT or Identikit sheets, from which they make their selections. Faces are put together sheet by sheet, or strip by strip.

Often, a police artist is then called in to heighten the picture. A clear plastic sheet is laid over it and fine details such as hair shade, skin blemishes, scars or shaped eyebrows are added. The picture is then covered with an artist’s fixative spray and is signed by the witness.

Recently, computer technology has been introduced to enhance the pictures. This enables extremely lifelike faces to be drawn n computer screens according to eyewitness, descriptions, and fine alterations can be made to the image. From this, a photograph-like print can be obtained.

In addition, police mugshots (photographs of arrested criminals) can be stored on computer. They are coded according to physical characteristics and the computer can choose a selection which most closely matches witness descriptions.

 

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Genetic fingerprinting has changed the course of crime detection. It is the most accurate method yet developed of identifying individuals. The probability against any two genetic fingerprints being the same by pure chance is greater than the number of people on Earth. The technique can also prove paternity of children and is being used to control the breeding of rare animals.

Professor Alec Jeffreys, a British geneticist at Leicester University, discovered genetic fingerprinting in 1984. He was conducting research into DNA – the chemical substance in the nucleus of every living cell which determines a person’s individual characteristics, such as the colour of hair and eyes. The structure of DNA is different in everybody, with the exception of identical twins.

Professor Jeffreys discovered that within the DNA molecule there is a sequence of genetic information which is repeated many times along the structure of the DNA, which looks like an endless twisting ladder.

The length of the sequence, the number of times it is repeated and its precise location within the DNA chain are unique to each individual. A process was developed to translate these sequences into a visual record. The finished picture, the genetic fingerprint, is a series of bars on an X-ray film, rather like the bar codes printed on food packets.

To obtain a DNA specimen, a scientist only needs a biological sample containing some human cells. This is usually blood, semen or hair, and only very small amounts are necessary.

Genetic fingerprinting is an important in establishing innocence as guilt. For example, a burglar who breaks a window may leave a blood sample behind on the glass. This can be used to create a genetic fingerprint. When police arrest a suspect, a blood sample can be taken from him and compared. If it matches, he is the burglar. If it does not, he is innocent.

When the police have a genetic fingerprint, but no suspect, they can fingerprint groups of people by taking samples of their blood. The first mass genetic fingerprinting happened in Leicestershire in 1987 when samples were taken from 5500 men living around a village where two young girls had been raped and murdered.

The killer was eventually found when a man was heard to say that a workmate had asked him to take his place when the samples were being taken. Another man who had previously been accused of one of the murders was freed because his genetic fingerprint did not match those made from the scene-of-crime evidence.

Genetic fingerprinting can also determine who is the father of a child and resolve paternity disputes. A DNA strand is made up equally of the characteristics of each parent. By comparing the genetic fingerprints of mother and child, a scientist can say with certainty that the parts of the child’s fingerprint which do not match those of the mother must have come from its true father.

Another use is in bone-marrow transplants which are given to people suffering from leukaemia. Doctors can check whether the genetic fingerprint extracted from a patient after a transplant matches that of the donor. If it does, the transplant has been successful and is producing healthy white blood cells. If it does not, the transplant has failed to take. This allows the possibility of another transplant.

Zoologists can use genetic fingerprinting to control the breeding of rare animals and preserve species. They can compare genetic fingerprints taken from animals to ensure that inbreeding among endangered species, which is known to lead to weaker animals, is avoided.

 

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Fingerprint evidence led to probably the only case in which two brothers, jointly convicted of murder, were executed by two other brothers.

In 1905, Alfred and Albert Stratton were accused of murdering an elderly couple who were battered to death above their shop in London.

Lying on the floor next to the bodies was an emptied cashbox in which the couple had kept their takings. On the box’s metal tray, fingerprint officers found the impression of a sweaty or oily thumbprint which did not match those of the dead couple – or that of the first police officer at the scene.

Suspicion fell upon the Strattons, both known housebreakers. They were arrested and tried at the Old Bailey. The thumbprint was the main piece of evidence.

Bothe men were found guilty and sentenced to death. They were hanged together by the brothers John William Billington, the public executioners, on May 23, 1905.

‘Mr Fingerprints’

The comparison of fingerprints for catching criminals was first developed in the 1890s by Edward Henry, the British inspector-general of the Indian police in Bengal.

Previously, the usual method of registering the characteristics of criminals was the anthropometric system, developed by Alphonse Bertillon, a French criminologist. It involved measuring the criminal’s arms and legs, and taking photographs from the front and sides.

Edward Henry became interested in fingerprints which had previously been used to study racial characteristics and evolution. He instructed his police officers to take impressions of criminals’ left thumbs in the belief that as most people were right-handed the ridges on the left thumb would be less worn. He then went on to devise a system based on the patterns of prints which was adopted in India.

His revolutionary ideas attracted interest in England, and in 1901 he was put in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard. He set up the first Fingerprint Branch which made more than 100 successful identifications within six months.

Henry later became Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. He retired and was made a baronet in 1918, but was always known as ‘Mr Fingerprints’.

 

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