Photo: Christopher Furlong / Getty Images
June Devaney, aged three, recovering from pneumonia at Queen’s Park Hospital in Blackburn, England, she was kidnapped from her bed. The nurses discovered her disappearance at 1: 20 am the next day and the police were immediately called to investigate.
Two hours later, his body was found with multiple skull fractures. The medical examiner determined that Devaney had been raped and then thrown headfirst against a wall.
Two important clues were found in the children’s room that would be useful in catching the killer: footprints on the freshly cleaned floor and a water bottle that had been moved. Although there were several fingerprints on the bottle, the police were able to account for all but one.
These prints also did not match any of the ones in the police database of known criminals.
The investigators took the fingerprints of more than 2.000 people who had access to the hospital. Still, they couldn’t find a match. Detective Inspector John Capstick then went even further: he decided that every male in the town of Blackburn would be fingerprinted. , a city with more than 23,000 households.
A procedure like this would be impossible in the United States, where Fourth Amendment protections prevent searches without probable cause, but the plan went into effect in Blackburn on 23 May, with police assurances that the prints collected would be destroyed later.
Two months later, the police had collected more than 80,000 fingerprint sets and not yet found no match. Checking all the records they could find, authorities determined that there were still some men in town who had not provided their prints.
On 19 August, the police captured to one of these men, Peter Griffiths. His prints matched those found at the scene. When their fingerprints also matched, confessed to the horrible crime and blamed it on alcohol.
This was the first time in history that a massive fingerprint exercise was used to solve a crime and represented a breakthrough in forensic techniques. The police could now use science as well as their own logic and investigative skills to solve crimes.
Griffiths was convicted of murder and executed on 19 November 1948.
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