Cold Case Resolution: A Lasting Impression

I bring you this column out of my pure fascination with cold cases, forensics, police work, and all things mysterious. As an active duty Police Officer, I hold an interest in all cases especially those that bring justice to light in the end. It has long been said one should not forget where they came from, and the same should be said of forensics. It is not uncommon to find a digital fingerprint scanner in any given police station, capturing high resolution images and instantly thrusting them into state and federal databases. A gun can't be fired anymore without leaving experts a plethora of evidence. Private labs are making incredible strides with new methods of DNA sequencing, regularly cracking long dormant cases. However, before these methods were accepted, there was skepticism. Was this nonsense, or the cutting edge of forensics? Though this case wasn't necessarily cold, it spotlights the genesis of one of the tent-poles of modern forensics, opening the door for countless cases to be solved throughout the next century.

Cold Case Resolutions #8: A Lasting Impression

Chicago Illinois, September 19, 1910. As Summer comes to a close, blood runs cold in the South Side. A rash of robberies throughout the neighborhood has residents' nerves shot. In the early morning hours, father and railroad employee Clarence Hiller wakes with a start. The Hiller's always kept a gas lamp burning in the hallway, as Mr. Hiller often checked on his children in the night. Mrs. Hiller woke him and informed him the lamp had gone out. As he entered the hallway to reignite it, Hiller discovered the lamp had not simply gone out, but had been extinguished by an intruder. Hiller was met by a dark, broad shouldered figure as the man exited the doorway of 13 year-old Florence Hiller's bedroom. Hiller and the intruder fought at the top of the staircase, eventually tumbling down to the first floor. At the bottom of the staircase Hiller was shot twice, and the intruder fled as Mrs. Hiller screamed over her husband's lifeless body. Neighbors and a nearby police officer rushed to the scene after hearing the commotion. Hiller died almost immediately as the rounds had passed through his heart and lungs, and exited through his back. Several blocks away, a group of off duty officers awaited a train to take them home. They observed a man with bloody clothing running through the area. The officers stopped him and asked what he was doing out at that hour. The man's behavior was suspicious and he had clearly been involved in a scuffle. In addition to his bloody and tattered clothing, officers located a revolver in the man's possession. Given how peculiar these circumstances would be even in daylight hours when there hadn't been an uptick in crime in the area, a decision was made to take the man into to custody. Unbeknownst to them, this man had just committed murder. In an attempt to conceal his true identity the man gave the name William Jones, however it was soon discovered he was actually Thomas Jennings.

Jennings was recently paroled from Joliet Prison, and of course would not admit to the crime. He offered an alibi, insisting he was elsewhere when the murder occurred. The Hiller household had not been Jennings' only target that night. It was learned and later testified to in court, Hiller assaulted a woman in a neighboring home before he moved onto the Hiller's, and another homeowner in the area managed to rip off a piece of Jennings' coat after catching him breaking in earlier in the evening. The accounts from these witnesses easily dismissed the alibi, but prosecutors had even better evidence tying Jennings to the scene of the crime.

For decades police kept fingerprint records, but until the Jennings trial, fingerprints had never been used to convict someone of a crime. In an serendipitous turn of events, the wooden rail outside of the window Jennings used as a point of entry into the Heller home had recently been painted. Jennings placed his hand on the wet paint as he climbed inside, leaving behind several distinct impressions of his fingers. The railing was photographed, cut out, and entered as evidence. Experts compared the fingerprints on the railing to Jennings' fingerprints already on file in Police Department records and determined they were undoubtedly a match.

Questions were raised during the trial, after all fingerprint analysis was new to American Policing. In 1904, Scotland Yard sent representatives to the World's Fair in St. Louis to teach the Henry system of fingerprint identification. This knowledge spread from St. Louis, to detectives throughout the United States. Without any precedent in American criminal trials for the prints to rely on, Jennings' Defense Attorney, W.G. Anderson assumed it would be easy to skew the fingerprint evidence as junk science and have it thrown out of the trial. However, in one of the most spectacular blunders in the history of criminal defense, Anderson inadvertently gave the best public demonstration of fingerprint identification to date, eliminating any doubt the jury may have had. Anderson asserted if fingerprint lifting and identification techniques were effective, the team of fingerprint experts should have no trouble lifting his fingerprint from a piece of paper he touched. A short time later the experts presented to Anderson, the judge, and the jury a perfect lift of Anderson's fingerprint. The jury would go on to convict Jennings of the murder of Clarence Hiller. Through various appeals to higher courts, the conviction based on the fingerprint evidence was upheld each time, citing convictions in Britain as legal precedent. In a matter of decades every court in America came to recognize fingerprints as admissible evidence. Thomas Jennings' decision to hoist himself up on a wet railing left his signature on the crime scene that night, and on forensic evidence for eternity.