When did fingerprints first catch a murderer?
When two boys living near Buenos Aires were brutally murdered in 1892, police soon identified Velasquez, who had fallen in love with the children's mother, as the sole suspect. But a few days later, police officer Juan Vucetich (1858-1925) proved that the murderer of the children was undoubtedly Francisca Rojas, (the children's mother).
Working at the La Plata Diagnostic and Statistical Police Bureau, Vucetich's job was to identify criminals with the help of anthropometry (the science of measuring the human body). About ten years ago, the Frenchman Aphonse Bertillon proved that some parts of the human body never change. In this way, he defended the thesis that each individual had an anthropometric identity specific to that individual, in addition to their individual characteristics and signs such as tattoos and scars on their bodies. This method, called "Bertillonage" (the system for identifying criminals by their physical characteristics), has been widely used by police forces as a much more efficient method than identifying with the help of witnesses and photographs.
Vucetich, who had previously reviewed the widely accepted research of British scientist Sir Francis Galton on the use of fingerprints (a technique first used in China in the ninth century to record debts between individuals) He was sure that there was a highly effective and less laborious method that could be used. Meeting with Galton to get his opinion on whether fingerprints could do anything in forensics, Vucetich then began taking fingerprints of criminals who had already been caught and categorizing them. Vucetich called this method "dactyloscopy" (the science of studying fingerprints).
Juan Vucetich Kovacevich (20 July 1858 – 25 January 1925) was a Croatian-Argentine anthropologist and police official who pioneered the use of dactyloscopy (fingerprint identification).
Juan Vucetich began collecting fingerprints in 1892, based on the information he obtained from Galton.
Vucetich's easy-to-use system soon replaced Bertillonage. His work Dactiloscopia Comparada ("Comparative Dactyloscopy"), published in 1904, won him a number of awards.