[MUSIC]
There are many crimes with no witnesses.
This is a crime from 1948, and it concerns
a three year
old girl called June Devaney, who had been
in hospital with pneumonia.
She was recovering, but in the very early
hours of
May 15, the nurses noticed that her cot
was empty.
Under the cot was an empty water bottle,
that's a bottle that
would contain medical sterile water. And
prints from adult feet,
stocking-ed adult feet, could be seen going
from the cot to the door.
There was a search of the hospital and the
hospital grounds, and
a couple of hours later, her dead body was
found in the grounds
and she'd been killed by being smashed
against a wall.
So what evidence have we got?
Well from the footprints, you can see the
pattern of the weave of the
socks, but more importantly on that water
bottle, there were fingerprints.
Well, who's likely to handle a water bottle
in a hospital?
Well, doctors, nurses, hospital staff.
So these all had to be fingerprinted, and
it was found the fingerprint didn't
belong to them.
Then patients, visitors, ambulance drivers,
fingerprinted, also eliminated.
That was 642 sets of fingerprints in three
days.
And remember, this is 1948.
All these has to be done by fingerprint
examiners.
There's no electronic databases available.
Second, they moved on to anyone familiar
with the hospital.
Another 200 sets of prints, again, no
matches.
The investigators, therefore, decided to
fingerprint every male in the town.
Every male in this town of Blackburn over
the age of 14 years.
This is a similar strategy to the one used
in our DNA lecture, in the Colin
Pitchfork case.
This is a huge undertaking, 50,000 fingerprints.
And you run up against a problem,
because how
do you actually know who lives in a town?
Well, one way of course is to walk around
the town, knocking on every door,
but you can't guarantee that every time
you
knock a door, you're going to get an
answer.
Another way is to look at the tax records,
but then not everybody pays tax, so this
is not perfect.
You can also look at the electoral
register, but then
not everyone is registered to vote, so
this is also imperfect.
However, this was Britain in 1948,
and in that post-war era of austerity,
there was rationing.
Even though not everybody answers the
door, not everybody
pays tax, not everybody votes, everybody's
got to eat,
and the only way to get food is using
coupons from ration books.
So when the next issue of ration books
were
made, police were able to get the list of
names.
And sure enough, there was a name on that
list that hadn't shown up on any other
lists.
There was former soldier called Peter
Griffiths.
He was fingerprinted and his fingerprints
matched the fingerprint on the water bottle.
He was found guilty of the murder and
hanged.
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