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e? Y _— an er 7 o- } we found that 52.7% of all persons arrested in the United States, whose fingerprints were sent to us, had criminal records on file with us, and that during the first juarter of the calendar year 1937, 37% of all such crimi- nals arrested on all charges throughout the United States had criminal rec- ords on file in our fingerprint bureau. D . That the fingerprints of twins are not identical nor necessarily similar is amply illustrated by the famous DeAutremont case. The notorious DeAutremont twins, Ray and Roy, held up a mail train in Oregon in 1923 and murdered three of the train crew. They escaped and were captured in 1927° in Ohio by a Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Rureau of Investigation. At the time of their capture, they had attempted to change their appearances in many ways. By 3 strange coincidence, the marks and scars on the bodies of these particular twins were practically identical and the Special Agent ~\ q in Charge at the time of their capture thought that Ruy was Roy and Roy was Ray. However, their fingerprint records on:file in ovr Bureau at Wask- ington were entirely dissimilar. The fallibility of the Bertillon System is well illustrated by the famous so-called “West Brothers” case. In 1905, when fingerprints were in their infancy -in the United States, a colored-man named Will West was re- ceived at the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, and brought to the office of the récord clerk to be measured and photogrephed, He denied having been in the penitentiary before, but the clerk doubted his statement, ran his measuring instruments aver him and from the Eertillon measurements obtained, went to his files and returned with the card the measurements called for, properly filled ovt, accompanied by. the photograph and bearing the name of "William West," which was identical with the prisoner, Will West. Will West, the new prisoner, continued to deny that the card was his, where- upon the record clerk turned the card over and, much to his astonishment, found. that William West was already a prisoner in Leavenworth Penitentiary, who was serving a life sentence there at the same time Will West was admit~ ted to the institution. The Bertillon measurements of these two men, Will West and William West were nearly identical. They had practically the same names and their photographs were apparently exactly identical, but their fingerprint clas- sifications were entirely different. The following fingerprint case comes close to the miraculous, but “we have them almost as interesting every day in the year: In 1928 four bank bandits swooped down on the First National Bank at Lamar, Colorado, and perpetrated a robbery of more than $200,000. The president and cashter of the bank were killed in cold bleod. Two other bank employees were taken along as hostages and the dead body of one of them dumped from the get-away car of the murdarers as they fled across the Kapsas State line. One of the bank robbers had been wounded in the robbery and his com- panions decoyed a doctor from his home in Kansas to treat their companion ° under the pretext that he had been hurt in an automobile accident. They snowed their appreciation by murdering the doctor and pushing his car, ta- gether with his dead body, into a deep canyon. Here is where. fingerprints ress mare