# The Saturday Evening Post/The Man Hunters

Extracted from the Saturday Evening Post, 1916, Jan 22, pp. 6-7, 48. Accompanying photographs may be omitted.
THE MAN HUNTERS
Scotland Yard
By MELVILLE DAVISSON POST
WE CANNOT get rid of an impression of mystery when we think about Scotland Yard. Some of the wonder of Bagdad clings to the name. The mystery stories of our youth radiated from this point. It was the delightful center of all the detective acumen of our romances—not more definitely located than the court of Arthur. Somewhere in the British Islands this fabulous seat of mystery existed.
As we thrilled with the "shilling shocker" it never occurred to us that Scotland Yard, from which the infallible sleuth issued on his wonderful adventures, was anything so commonplace as the headquarters of the London Police. Old Scotland Yard was located at Whitehall, and is said to have taken its name from the early residence there of the kings of Scotland. The headquarters of New Scotland Yard is now on the Thames Embankment. Its detective division is merely the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police.
In its investigation of crimes Scotland Yard does not follow the German system of specialization. Unlike the latter it keeps no division of highly trained experts to investigate each particular sort of crime. For example, it has no murder commission, like Berlin. Scotland Yard maintains, in fact, four divisions: the Special Branch, which looks after the secret-service matters relating to the protection of the king and his ministers; the Criminal Registry; the Convict Supervision Office; and the Finger-Print Branch.
The English Detective's Simple System
IN ADDITION to these special departments there is a Central Office Squad, which will take charge of any extraordinary case that may occur in any of the divisions of the Metropolitan Police and, for that matter, anywhere in England. So that if a baffling criminal mystery should occur outside of London the local authorities could immediately have the benefit of a Scotland Yard man from this division.
It would not be exact to say that there is no specialization in Scotland Yard in any way parallel to the detective experts of the Continent. There are individuals in these divisions who become skilled in certain lines and are detailed to handle cases in which particular features are involved. But, as a rule, the whole organization is a rough, matter-of-fact, common-sense system for the investigation of criminal mystery.
The method is illustrated by the manner in which the police went about to discover the assassin of Lord William Russell.
This distinguished person was found dead in his room. The silver plate in the house was scattered about, various articles were tied up in bundles, as though burglars in their work of looting the place had been suddenly interrupted. The valet said that on the night before he had left his master reading in bed, as was his custom, the truth of which was established by the fact that the candle had burned down in the socket. And on one of the outer doors leading into the court were marks indicating that it had been forced open.
The first step in this investigation was to examine the burglar theory.
Scotland Yard reasoned roughly that the crime was either done by someone from the outside or someone already in the house. The one exit from the forced door was into a court. This court was surrounded by a wall. The detectives examined the top of this wall carefully. They found it coated with dust. At no point was this dust disturbed. This showed conclusively that no burglar had entered or escaped by this route.
They then examined the marks on the door, and by the direction in which the bolts were driven they were able to establish the fact that the violence had been applied from the inside. Having disposed of the obvious theory, they abandoned the investigation and began to look for the missing articles. Some of these were presently located in the keeping of a friend of Lord Russell's valet, and the police were presently able to demonstrate that the valet had committed the crime.
It will be seen from this example that the English method is to strike at certain prominent essentials in the solution of its man-hunting mysteries, and not to follow the minute deductive method relied on by the criminal investigator of certain Continental centers.
For example, when the warehouse of a firm of tailors was burned and the tailors claimed insurance on a thousand pairs of trousers the method which Scotland Yard took to ascertain the fact was to search the scene of the fire for trouser buttons. As no trouser buttons were discovered they were able to say, in the direct English fashion, that the claim of the tailors was false.
And where the attempt was made to assassinate a certain unpopular minister they observed where the bullet had entered the window and the panel in the opposite wall where it had finally lodged. From these two points they drew a line extending indefinitely outside until it entered a window in a little house on the opposite side of the square. They arrested everybody lodging in this house, discovered what ones of them were identified with former crimes, and presently determined on their man.
In comparing the English system with that of other great detective centers it is important to remember this distinguishing characteristic: Scotland Yard follows only the essential clew.
In the Muswell Hill mystery they found that the criminals had left behind some housebreaking tools, together with a child's bull's-eye lantern. Scotland Yard immediately seized upon the lantern as the distinguishing clew. The detectives examined it carefully and discovered that the wick was made of a piece of tartan of a peculiar color and pattern. They now abandoned everything else and endeavored to determine whether such an article or piece of tartan stuff of that character could be connected with any old offenders known to the Metropolitan Police force. Bending every energy on this one clew, they ran it down in the family of a bad crook named Millson, whose wife had just finished a dress of this particular sort of tartan stuff.
The Germans say that dogged adherence to this one plan is the reason why Scotland Yard never was able to solve the extraordinary mystery at Battersea Park Road.
Here, on the sixteenth of July, 1910, Thomas Anderson, a strolling player, entered an unoccupied flat at nine-thirty in the evening. Some persons at supper in a neighboring flat heard two reports of a pistol. They looked out of the window and saw a man climbing over the dividing wall and disappearing into the next garden. The police were summoned. They entered the empty flat on the ground floor. There was no disorder anywhere about the flat; but on the mantelpiece of the dining room were a pair of heavy boots and a small hand bag. On the sill of the door opening into the garden Thomas Anderson was found shot to death. He wore a pair of carpet slippers and in his coat tail pocket was a deadly weapon known to the police as a life preserver. An examination of the garden wall showed that a man had climbed over not only one garden wall but four, in order to get out that way.
When the System Falls Down
NOW this case presented a wholly detached mystery. Why did the strolling player Anderson go to this unoccupied flat with a deadly weapon, there remove his boots, put on a pair of carpet slippers, and endeavor to prepare himself for some extraordinary adventure? Why did his assassin climb over four garden walls when he could just as well have entered the flat and gone out of it by the open door? Who killed Anderson? Whom did he go to kill? The thing was a vicious circle.
And there was the Waterloo Bridge mystery, with its sinister carpet bag. There was no clew, no crime, no event known to Scotland Yard that this bag related to; nevertheless it sat there on a buttress of the bridge on an October morning, the conclusive evidence of a ruthless, deliberate, cold-blooded criminal mystery. But it sat alone, like a single track in a desert. Scotland Yard never could advance. Finally an agent from the Sûreté, in Paris, connected it with the death of an Italian police spy at the hands of revolutionists in a house in Cranbourne Street, Soho.
These cases lacked the distinguishing clew without which the English method of man-hunting could not be set on its way. And for this reason Continental authorities maintain that a certain class of mystery cannot be unraveled by the English system. Scotland Yard could never get started on these mysteries, and consequently they were never solved.
There used to be a picturesque old constable about London named John Shore. He was to be distinguished anywhere by his Quaker dress and his broad-brimmed shovel hat. He was one of the experts of Scotland Yard—an old-thieves man. These experts were for a long time the only means which the department had for identifying criminals. There were certain of these persons in every division of the Metropolitan Police. It was their business to know personally all the thieves and crooks operating in that part of London.
For many years the old-thieves man was wholly relied on. If a crime was committed an essential clew was picked up in the theater of the act and the detective worked on that clew in connection with the old-thieves man of his division. Putting together characteristics of the crime and characteristics of the criminals known to the old-thieves man, a correlation was established and the mystery solved.
But crime began to be an international profession. It became a career. Various departments of it required experts, and these experts were cosmopolitan in their habits. The old-thieves man was no longer useful when the bank cracker and the assassin came on the mail boat from Paris or Holland, or on the P. & O. from India.
The finger-print system is now generally relied on. This system was invented by Robert Galton and was forced on Scotland Yard by the present commissioner of police, Sir Edward Henry. It is now almost wholly relied on in the identification of criminals, not only by Scotland Yard but by every other detective department of any standing in the world.
Finger-print impressions are taken by placing the bulb of the finger on a slab that has been thinly spread with ink. The finger is rotated, coating the ridges to the edges of the nail. After the finger has been thus inked it is rolled over white paper, beginning on one side of the nail and ending on the other. All the fingers are taken, beginning with the right thumb. To check this, plain impressions are taken by inking the four fingers and placing them all at once on a sheet of paper. It is a very simple process and can be done by anybody.
When finger-print impressions are looked for it is remembered that any smooth surface or any surface with a high polish will retain the imprint of those who touch it. In order to develop these prints, if the surface of an article is black it is treated with mercury or chalk powders; if it is white it is treated with graphite or lampblack. These powders are sprinkled over the surface and brushed gently with a delicate camel's-hair brush. For this reason criminal investigators are very careful to see that no article at the scene of a crime is touched.
In the High Street mystery Scotland Yard found a small cash box with a japanned surface. On one side of it was a blurred mark that had the appearance of a finger print. It turned out, however, that a detective sergeant had touched the box. Nevertheless, Scotland Yard experts went ahead and developed the finger prints on the box. And they were able not only to locate where the sergeant had touched it but also where the unknown assassin had touched it; and by comparing the unknown finger prints, according to the system of classification invented by Sir Edward Henry, they were able to put their hands on the assassin.
A recent chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard says that on Derby Day they took the finger prints of fifty-four men at Epsom, who were arrested on the race course for various offenses. These men were arrested up to six o'clock in the evening and were to be disposed of by the court at nine-thirty the next morning. Within that time Scotland Yard detectives compared all finger prints with their files at headquarters, and when they appeared before the justices next morning they were able to show that twenty-nine of these persons were old offenders with criminal records.
Old Sleuth Outdone
HE ADDS that on one occasion he saw a criminal on his way to Brixton Prison excoriate the papillary ridges of his thumb and fingers with a metal tag attached to his boot lace, so that his hands were awfully mutilated. Nevertheless this heroic treatment did not save him. One of the inspectors of Scotland Yard examined his hands with a magnifying glass and was aide to make out all the identifying ridges on every finger. He was detained; and a little later, when his hands were healed, impressions were taken that established his identity as a notorious criminal.
The chief cites a further instance as gruesome as any to be found in the Old Sleuth Series:
At daybreak a constable in Chesswell Street saw a man's finger impaled on a spike of a fence. It was evident that someone had attempted to scale the spiked fence and a metal ring on his finger had caught on one of the spikes. The man had fallen and the finger had been severed. Scotland Yard took a finger-print impression of this human document and an old impression of the fingers of the hand to which it belonged was located in the files.
Some weeks later, near the Elephant and Castle public house, two men were taken up in the crowd as suspected pickpockets. One of them had his hand bandaged. He pointed out that with an injured hand such a vocation was impossible to him. But his uninjured fingers corresponded to the old impression in the files, his identity was established, and he got a year at hard labor.
In addition to this system a Tattoo and Deformity Register is usually kept by the great detective centers. This register lists criminals according to distinguishing marks on the face, hands, arms and body, but especially on the face and hands, as these are more likely to be noticed. This register has a connected index to the finger-print file. This helps to identify suspects and to locate criminals reported as having some peculiar mark of deformity. A Nickname and Alias Register is usually kept with this, in order that the police may be advised of the names by which criminals are distinguished in the underworld. Dago Frank and Lefty Louis are indicatory names perhaps more valuable for detective purposes than the correct ones.
A weekly list of habitual criminals is published by Scotland Yard, describing convicts about to be released from prison, with the names and descriptions of habitual criminals. These lists give a convict's physical aspect, his name and aliases, specialty in crime, office number, record file and finger-print form in Scot land Yard; so that a complete record of the entire criminal class is available everywhere to the police in England.
However, the descriptive method of identification is not to be relied on. When Doctor Crippen and Miss LeNeve attempted to escape from England, Scotland Yard had information that a father and son had taken passage on t he Montrose at Antwerp. But the description sent in from that city did not in any way correspond with the correct description of the two persons. Nevertheless the mysterious father and son were Doctor Crippen and Miss LeNeve.
And in the celebrated Beck case fifteen out of seventeen persons who had been defrauded identified Beck us the individual, he was convicted on these identifications. He was not guilty and was not the person who had accomplished the swindles. It is interesting to remember that when the English authorities released him he was paid twenty-five thousand dollars by the government as damages for his improper imprisonment—a system of compensatory justice unknown to the American courts.
Scotland Yard reminds us that it is not alone in detective fiction that one finds a striking coincidence leading to the identification of a criminal. When Mr. Briggs was killed in a compartment of a train somewhere between Fenchurch Street and Hackney a hat was picked up on the floor of the compartment. This hat was found not to fit the head of the dead man and was stamped inside with the name of a shop in Marylebone. The assassin, in his hurry to escape, had by inadvertence taken his victim's hat and left his own.
Perhaps the most incredible coincidence—too improbable for even a shilling shocker—occurred before the German Embassy, on Carlton House Terrace, in January, 1897. An assassin from the Continent, who had determined to kill one of the attachés and had made the journey to London for that purpose, appeared in the street as the attaché was leaving the embassy and began to shoot at him with a pistol. A constable on duty rushed in, whereupon the man turned about and fired.
The bullet struck the constable in the chest. But it happened that, as this day was particularly hot, the police force had been ordered to wear their summer tunics instead of their heavy coats. The constable was consequently carrying his notebook in the breast pocket of his tunic instead of in the tail pocket of his heavy coat. The bullet lodged in this notebook and his life was saved. Thus, as the writers say, truth is not required to adhere to probabilities.
In the celebrated railway tragedy in 1897, known as the four-minute murder because it was done between Putney and Wandsworth, two stations four minutes apart, the assassin had used a chemist's pestle as the deadly weapon. This he attempted to get rid of by throwing it out of the window of the compartment into the River Wandle; but by accident it struck a telegraph pole and bounded back on the railroad embankment, where it was afterward picked up by the police. This furnished Scotland Yard with the distinguishing clew upon which it always relies in the investigation of crimes.
The Rising Sun Postcard
THIS unvarying rule of Scotland Yard to seize on the prominent clew and disregard all others is continually ridiculed by the Continental criminologists. They point out that even in the famous Crippen case the chief at Scotland Yard reported that he had two clews, where any Continental criminal investigator would have had scores.
Instead of following one or two lines Continental departments would have followed every possible line. They hold that a criminal mystery is a sort of web of indicatory clews; one or two coarse lines do not exhaust the evidences. The number of remaining lines to be discovered will depend upon the degree of minute inspection. The eye of a constable will see only the obvious one, while the trained investigator will discover the innumerable faint and inconspicuous evidences. They say that the crudity of the English system was shown in the Camden Town mystery. Here, in the room in which the assassination occurred, the police picked up a postcard that slipped out of an old newspaper found folded in the bottom of a drawer. It was addressed to a fictitious name and contained these words:
"Phylis darling, if it pleases you, meet me at eight-fifteen at the——" Here the writing ended and the cartoon of a rising sun was drawn on t he card, signed: "Yours to a cinder, Alice."
Scotland Yard took this as the dominant clew. It was known all over England as the rising-sun postcard. The method of Scotland Yard was to photograph this postcard and have it printed in all the newspapers in the hope that the handwriting would be identified. Naturally the criminal was located at every corner by a thousand cranks, as Jack the Ripper had been located in every town of Europe. And no one was ever convicted.
There were a good many other things in this case that might have been followed. There were scraps of burnt paper covered with writing. This writing was classical in form; the e's resembled the Greek epsilon. There was an old album opened at a particular place; and a sharp instrument, with which the assassination had been accomplished, had cut the pillowcase, showing that the deed had been done in the night and while the victim was asleep. All of these clews would have been followed under any Continental system. It was crude and rough, they pointed out, merely to reproduce the rising-Bun postcard and depend on the newspapers to find the assassin.
On the other hand, Scotland Yard justifies its system on the ground that criminals must all be convicted by a jury, and that juries in England absolutely are not to be moved by metaphysical refinements.
"We define a crime roughly as a violation of the law," they say, "and not, like the Germans, as 'the product of the physiologically grounded psyche of the criminal and his environing external conditions.'
"We engage a constable in man-hunting, and not a professor of psychology."
They do not believe that a criminal can be distinguished because his temperature rises when the crime is discussed before him; or that one can put a gauge on his wrist and determine his guilt by his quickening pulse. A superintendent at Scotland Yard is very apt to smile when you tell him that Prof. Hans Gross, of the University of Gratz, asserts that what a woman suspected of crime does not say in words, or express in her features or by the movement of her hands, can always be determined by the position of her feet.
"In anger," says Gross, "when a woman cannot stamp, because that would be too expressive, she turns her soles slightly inward and makes small curves with the point on the ground. Impatience is shown by the alternating and swinging pressure of the heel and toe, repeated with increased rapidity. Defiance, by raising the sole so that the heel only is on the floor." And a certain dangerous mental state is always indicated when the foot is put forward and the shin bone slightly stretched out, with all the toes drawn in toward the sole of the foot, like a cat when it feels good.
Nor will he believe, with Friedrich Gerstacker, that the character of a suspect can be determined by the way he wears his hat—namely, that the honest pedantic man wears his hat set squarely on his head; the nimble-witted and pleasant wears it slightly tipped; the frivolous wears it tipped at a greater angle; the extravagant, conceited and impudent wears the hat on the back of the head; while the pessimistic wears it pressed down on the forehead.
The Austrian Peasant Case
NO constable in England would bother to make such observations. They say at Scotland Yard that the common belief that a criminal in a strange country, in attempting to escape in the night, always returns to the theater of crime is not reliable; and if it were it could not be explained by the German theory that in the night the right eye sees objects on the right too small, and the left eye sees objects on the left too small. Consequently, according to the eye in control, there is a tendency in the moving person to turn in nearer to either the right or left. He travels thus in a circle either to the right or left, according to his tendency to be governed by either his right or left eye; and that this false estimate can be definitely ascertained to be from three to seven tenths of one per cent.
Scotland Yard insists that a sensible constable of long experience is more apt to locate a criminal in a man hunt than a laboratory specialist is. They say that, though they may have failed to solve the criminal mysteries in the cases indicated by the German critics, they would be entirely incapable of the blunder of the Teuton criminologists in the Austrian Peasant case.
One morning, in a tributary of the Danube, the police found a body horribly mutilated. The hands, feet and head had been removed, and the entire trunk and extremities flayed. It had been sewed up in a sack after the hideous crime and thrown into the river, in the belief that this mutilation would completely prevent identification.
It was taken before the proper authorities and the professors sent for. They examined the body and reported that, from its muscular development, it was evidently a peasant of about sixty years of age. The examination of the contents of the stomach showed that it was filled with masticated bark. This was a disturbing and significant evidence. The condition of the body annulled a starvation theory and the professors finally declared that the peasant had been insane.
They analyzed the bark and determined that it came from the forest of a certain nobleman whose estates were a few miles above the point on the river where the floating body had been picked up. The nobleman was summoned to appear. When he arrived the mystery departed. He had killed a bear in the forest, removed the head and pelt, and ordered the forester to bury the carcass; but, instead, he had sown it up in a sack and thrown it into the river.
A Chinese Melodrama
THE whole active force of Scotland Yard are practical policemen. They are not recruited from London. They come almost wholly from the country districts outside. The authorities prefer to have these new men, they say, directly from the plow, so that they have no interest in or relation to any city affair. They are trained in the regular metropolitan force and finally, if efficient, are assigned to the detective department.
Scotland Yard is a close, independent organization. It is not accountable to the London public. It cannot be controlled by it. It is little subject to the pressure of public opinion. It is entirely under the control of a commissioner, who is responsible alone to the Home Secretary. The people of London are not able to force explanations from Scotland Yard. The commissioner does not permit himself to be interrogated. No attacks are ever answered; no attempt is made to correct reports in the newspapers; no official ever gives out a statement for publication.
The expenditures of the department are not ever subject to public review. It happens, therefore, that Scotland Yard does not change and is not inconvenienced by change in administration. It is able to go ahead undisturbed with its work and to preserve a continuity in its investigations impossible to any public-detective center of the United States.
Scotland Yard's greatest difficulty in a man hunt is with the Continental criminal.
According to diplomatic custom it cannot communicate directly with the detective department in any foreign country. All communications must be made first to the foreign minister, who in turn communicates with the ambassador in London for his country. This ambassador takes the matter up with the British Secretary for Foreign Affairs, who finally turns it over to the Home Secretary, where it at last, in this roundabout method, reaches Scotland Yard. This very greatly complicates all criminal investigation attached to foreign affairs.
These international cases are the most incredible of any with which the detective centers have to contend.
The late chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard says that one Sunday a physician of very high standing brought him the most extraordinary letter he ever saw. It had been picked up back of Portland Place and was written from the Chinese Embassy in London. The envelope requested the finder to take it at once to the physician's address. A hostler, who picked it up, carried out that direction.
The envelope contained a letter from Mr. Sun Yat Sen, a Chinese reformer, saying that he had been kidnaped as he passed the Chinese Embassy and was now confined within it; that the intention on the part of the Chinese officials was to drug him, convey him to the dock and ship him to China; that, being in the embassy, he was constructively on Chinese territory and could not be interfered with by the English authorities; that if any difficulty should arise, as they had exterritorial authority over him, the Chinese would promptly decapitate him and end the controversy.
This communication seemed wholly incredible. Nevertheless it was precisely true. Mr. Sun Yat Sen was, in fact, a prisoner in the embassy; and it was only after long negotiations of great diplomatic delicacy that the Home Office was able to obtain his release.
Scotland Yard's method of arrest is always direct; it is never by ruse or finesse. Once the man hunt is ended and the quarry rounded up, the constables force in and seize him. It is a method unusually dangerous.
Take, for example, the Houndsditch affair, in December, 1910. Here four desperate foreign cracksmen entered a house adjoining a jeweler's shop. They were at work with a crowbar, forcing the wall, when sounds were detected and the police notified. When they attempted to force the door the cracksmen emptied their pistols into the group of constables on the steps.
These desperadoes were afterward located in the second story of a house in Sidney Street. Here they were besieged for a whole day, not only by the police force but also by a detachment of the First Battalion of, the Scots Guards, and the house finally burned to the ground.
The police of New York were greatly amused at this all-day siege in the heart of London. But Scotland Yard showed by statistics that one was more apt to be shot on Broadway than in the province of Chihuahua during a Mexican revolution.
These Lithuanian desperadoes gave Scotland Yard no end of trouble; they were only to be taken after a pitched battle or running fight. If the final drama that began at Cheshunt Road, Tottenham, had come under the eye of an American spectator he would have believed that an enterprising motion-picture director was staging a thrilling "chasie." About nine-thirty one Thursday morning a cashier got out of a motor car, with the wages for his factory employees in a bag. He was accompanied only by the chauffeur. Two men rushed out, fired several shots, snatched the bag of money and ran away with it.
The End of the Chase
BOTH of the robbers were armed. Several persons were winged and fell out of the man hunt. Presently the police from a neighboring station joined in and the running fight advanced along the bank of the River Lea. When the robbers reached Chingford Road they found a street car. They covered the motorman and conductor with their pistols and compelled them to drive on. The police got a pony cart and followed. The robbers shot the pony.
Presently another street car approached from the opposite direction; the police commandeered it, reversed it, and the chase continued. The two cars went away madly on parallel tracks, the robbers in one, the police in the other. Finally the robbers abandoned their car as the police car began to overtake them and made off in the direction of Woodford, where at last in the deeps of Epping Forest they died like the cornered heroes of a Yellow Saga.
This system of man-hunting by hue and cry is apt to be a costly method. Like the direct form of arrest by forcible entry, it drives the trapped quarry into a resistance that otherwise he might have hesitated to present. This direct action and the method of following only the dominant clew are the distinguishing characteristics of Scotland Yard. They are illustrative of the English mind, which seizes only essential factors and drives through to its object on the shortest line.
So it happens that one finds the records of criminal trials crowded with convictions based on a single paramount item of circumstantial evidence, as in the Blight mystery, which Sir Ashley Cooper cleared up by showing that the assassin was left-handed; and the great Humphreys fraud, when a charter granted by Charles I to the Earl of Stirling was shown to be spurious because it contained margins in red ink, when red ink was not in use before 1780 in England.
We shall see how this method of Scotland Yard compares in efficiency with that of other great detective centers.
Author's Note—See European Police Systems, Fosdick; Days of My Years, Macnaghten; Science and the Criminal, Mitchell; Criminal Psychology, Gross; reports of trials, memoirs, and the like.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1930, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 93 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse