In 1892, the double murder of two children in Argentina was the first ever successful investigation of a homicide using fingerprinting.
On 29 June 1892, in the slums of Neocochea, a city in the south-east of Argentina in the province of Buenos Aires, Ponciano Caraballo and his neighbour Ramón Velázquez came upon a terrible scene in the bedroom of the Caraballo family home. Lying on the bed were his two children, Ponciano Ernesto, aged 6 and Feliza, 4, and their mother Francisca Rojas de Caraballo. Their throats had been slit. The siblings were dead, but Ponciano’s wife was still breathing. Her injuries were superficial and she was soon able to reveal what had happened.
Francisca, who had been married to Ponciano for four years, immediately claimed that she and her children had been attacked by their neighbour, agricultural labourer Ramón Velázquez. He had tried to seduce her and when she’d refused, he had threatened to kill them all. She later changed her testimony and claimed that Velázquez had been attempting to take her children away from her, on her husband’s instructions, as he was going to leave her. Whatever the truth of the relationships, Ramón Velázquez was arrested on suspicion of murder.
According to the standard practice at the time, the local police used torture to elicit a confession from the accused. Velázquez was subjected to several brutal beatings, and was forced to spend a night locked in a cell with the children’s bodies. It is also believed that a police officer dressed up as a ghost tried to scare the prisoner into confessing. Despite the violent and intimidating interrogations, Velázquez maintained his innocence. Unsure what to do next, the local police requested help from the force in the provincial capital, La Plata, and Inspector Eduardo Álvarez was sent to Neocochea to investigate.
As soon as Inspector Álvarez examined the crime scene, his suspicions were aroused. Firstly, the bedroom door was barred from the inside with a shovel, suggesting that the killer had not left the room by the door. Francisca claimed that Velázquez had struck her with the shovel, but there were no marks on her body. The murder weapon was a kitchen knife and Inspector Álvarez surmised that a labourer would be more likely to have used the knife that he carried on his belt for his daily work. The police officer also found a soiled rag in some shrubs by the well outside which he thought had been used by the perpetrator to wipe their hands.
The key piece of evidence, however, was a brown mark spotted on the bedroom window, which turned out to be a bloody fingerprint. The inspector thought it looked like the print from a woman’s hand. He cut out two pieces of wood with the print on and, using a stamp pad and ink, took Francisca’s fingerprints. He sent both back to La Plata for analysis.
In 1892, the police department in La Plata, Argentina had the very first working fingerprint database in the world. This had been created, a year earlier, by Juan Vucetich. Originally from Croatia, Vucetich had emigrated to Argentina in 1882. A skilled mathematician, he found employment with the police in La Plata, working on accounting and then statistics. In 1891, Chief of Police Guillermo Nunes instructed Vucetich to set up an anthropology office, following the groundbreaking work of French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon.
Vucetich carried out his superior’s orders but soon became interested in the new science of fingerprinting as a means of identification, after reading an article in Revue Scientifique by Francis Galton. He decided to experiment and, using mummies from La Plata Museum and corpses from the local morgue, he simplified Galton’s system and developed his own practical classification based on four fingerprint types. His first trial was with 23 known offenders, whose prints he collected. This is believed to be the first time that fingerprints were used for a police database. By the end of 1892, Vucetich had compiled the prints of 1,462 individuals. But, would this prove Ramón Velásquez’s innocence?
When Juan Vucetich compared the fingerprints found at the scene of the double murder with those of Francisca Rojas, they were a match. Confronted with the evidence, she confessed to the murder of her two children, claiming that it had been a murder-suicide attempt, following her abusive husband’s threats to take them away.
On 20 September 1894, Francisca Rojas was convicted of murder and imprisoned indefinitely. In 1902, fingerprinting was adopted officially in Argentina, as the sole means of identification in criminal investigations. The Fingerprint Bureau in Scotland Yard had been established the year before, and New York followed suit in 1903.
Fingerprinting pioneer Juan Vucetich became director of the Center for Dactyloscopy in Buenos Aires and published two books on his techniques. He died of TB in 1925. The police academy near La Plata bears his name, as well as the Police Center for Forensic Examinations in Zagreb, Croatia. He is remembered by a memorial in his home town of Hvar.
I shall be writing more about the history of fingerprinting in a future project.