Nigel Cawthorne
is the author of
Military Commanders
and
Vietnam – A War Lost and Won
. His writing has appeared in over a hundred and fifty newspapers, magazines and part-works – from the
Sun
to the
Financial Times
, and from
Flatbush Life
to the
New York Tribune
. He lives in London.
Constable & Robinson Ltd
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www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012
Copyright © Nigel Cawthorne, 2012
The right of Nigel Cawthorne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
UK ISBN: 978-1-78033-002-0 (paperback)
UK ISBN: 978-1-78033-534-6 (ebook)
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First published in the United States in 2012 by Running Press Book Publishers, A Member of the Perseus Books Group
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US ISBN: 978-0-7624-4469-4
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CLEARED AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY
DARLIE ROUTIER – CHILD-KILLER?
THE UNREFORMED JACK UNTERWEGER
T
HE FATHER OF
modern crime scene investigation was Alphonse Bertillon, who went to work for the Prefecture of Police in Paris as a clerk at the age of twenty-six in 1879. Three years later, he introduced a system known as anthropometry (also called Bertillonage) to identify criminals through the measurements of the head and body, which was adopted by the police in Britain and the United States. Although it was later superseded by fingerprinting, it remains in use as a means of furnishing a minutely detailed portrait, valuable to investigators. Bertillon’s system brought with it the methodical collection of detailed criminal records and he took standard photographs of criminal suspects, full face and in profile, giving us the modern mug shot.
Bertillon also took his camera to the crime scene to photograph the evidence before it was disturbed. He employed a system he called “metric photography”, mounting the camera on a high tripod and laying down maps with a grid printed on them so that the relative position of objects could be measured accurately. He also developed the science of ballistics, the casting of footprints to preserve them, the use of the dynamometer to measure the amount of force used in breaking and entering, and the forensic examination of documents. Bertillon was called as an expert witness in the Dreyfus affair in 1890s France, testifying that certain incriminating documents were written by Alfred Dreyfus. However, he was not a handwriting expert and, in this case, he was wrong and contributed to the conviction of Dreyfus, who was then sent to Devil’s Island.
Nevertheless, Bertillon’s scientific approach to crime scene investigation endured and was popularized by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who mentions Monsieur Bertillon in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
and the short story “The Naval Treaty”, in which Dr Watson says that Sherlock Holmes talked of the “Bertillon system of measurements” and “his enthusiastic admiration of the French savant”.
Crime scene investigation has developed by leaps and bounds since Bertillon’s day. In 1892, the world’s first fingerprint bureau was set up in Argentina. That year, Francisca Rojas of Necochea, some 300 miles (482 km) south of Buenos Aires, was convicted of murdering her two sons on the strength of fingerprint evidence. A fingerprint bureau was established in Calcutta in 1897 where a system of classification was developed by Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose. It was called the Henry Classification System after their supervisor Sir Edward Richard Henry and was adopted by Scotland Yard in 1901. The following year, Bertillon used it to identify a thief and murderer named Henri-Léon Scheffer.
Modern scientific equipment is used to study tiny fibres, hairs, poisons, pollen and dust. Murder weapons are subjected to minute scrutiny and pathologists make the most detailed study of dead bodies. But the greatest breakthrough came with DNA profiling, developed by British geneticist Alec Jeffreys of Leicester University in 1984. Using modern duplicating techniques, forensic scientists are now able to magnify samples, making it possible to identify an intruder from the tiny traces they leave behind.
Not only are the latest forensic techniques employed to solve current criminal cases, they are also used in historical investigations into, for instance, the fate of the Russian royal family killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918 or the murder of a man whose 5,000-year-old body was found in the Alps in 1991. However, crime scene investigation still has its limitations. So far, it has not been able to tell us what became of Madeleine McCann . . .
I
N MAY
2007, Madeleine McCann was on holiday with her family in the Algarve region of southern Portugal. At around 6 p.m. on the evening of 3 May, just a few days before her fourth birthday, Madeleine’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, put Madeleine and her two-year-old twin siblings, Sean and Amelie, to bed in the ground-floor bedroom of their holiday apartment in Praia da Luz. Madeleine was wearing a pair of pink pyjamas with the words “Sleepy Eeyore” on them. Before she went to sleep, Madeleine said to her mother: “Mummy, I’ve had the best day ever. I’m having lots and lots of fun.”
At around 8.30 p.m., Kate and Gerry McCann left the children asleep in the apartment and went out to the tapas bar of the Mark Warner Ocean Summer Club. It was just 130 yards (120 m) away and part of the resort complex where they were staying. The McCanns and their fellow holidaymakers – Dr Matthew Oldfield and his wife Rachael, Russell O’Brien and Fiona Payne – agreed to take it in turns to check up on the children.
At 8.55 p.m., Dr Oldfield went to the apartment and listened outside the bedroom window to see whether he could hear any noise from the children. Ten minutes later, Gerry McCann went to check up on the children. Soon after Jane Tanner, another resident of the resort, noticed a man carrying a child but did not think anything of it. Gerry McCann had stopped to talk to Jeremy Wilkins, but did not notice Tanner as she walked past them to join the rest of the group.
Dr Oldfield checked on the children again at 9.30 p.m. This time he glanced through the open bedroom door. He only saw the twins, but had no reason to suspect anything was amiss with Madeleine. However, when Kate McCann took her turn to return to the apartment, she went inside. To her horror, Madeleine’s bed was empty. The bedroom window was open and she was heard to scream: “They’ve taken her, they’ve taken her! Madeleine’s gone!”
The police were called and, within ten minutes, were at the crime scene. Meanwhile, the staff and guests had begun searching the holiday complex. There was no sign of Madeleine and it soon became clear that the little girl had been abducted, so the police on the border with Spain were alerted, along with the authorities at all Portuguese and Spanish airports. Sniffer dogs were brought in. The local council searched the sewers and other waterways. But, after a week, they had found nothing.
The search was then widened. The Maritime Police combed the caves along the coast. Holidaymakers’ photographs were examined for suspicious characters that may have been caught in the background. Even the Portuguese Secret Service was called in, in case there was some terrorist aspect to the abduction. Portuguese newspapers reported that a man with short brown hair, approximately 5 ft 7 in. (1.7 m) tall, was being sought. But otherwise the police drew a blank.