Evening Star Newspaper, January 31, 1932, Page 76

2 THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, - e keeping the peace, directing traffic and patrolling the neighborhood. But to the average Englishman “Scotland Yard” has gnother meaning that does not include the patrolmen on their beats or the white-sleeved traffic policemen. Scotland Yard has now become a symbol for one part of the Metropolitan Police, the “C. I. D.”—Criminal Investigation Depart- ment—which, with less than a thousand employes, concentrates on the detection of crime. It is this branch of the Yard that is best known; the publicity whieh it has received from English authors has been priceless. It seems to be a depository of superhuman intuition. In fact? it is composed of a group of men who work with the most prosaic methods and who have several unique advantages, due to the geographical position and psycho- logical makeup of England. Not only can these men not enter cases outside the metropolitan area unless asked, but they cannot take up all the cases in London; the central part—the ctty—has always had its own separate police and detective forces. Finally, the men of the Yard, whether in uniform or in plain clothes, have all come into the service in the same way—by spending several years as ordinary patrolmen on their beats, pounding pavements. Scotland Yard and its C. 1. D. branch takes no men who have not come up through the ranks. The Metropolitan Police has numerous branches besides the C. I. D. There 13 a “Flying Squad,” patrolling the streets by motor; a Lost Property Bureau, a Criminal Records Bureau and a Special Branch. The Special Branch is the most mysterious group at the Yard,; its duties are chiefly political —protecting royalty and other important personages, watch- ing for subversive movements and doing work that closely approaches that of a Secret Service. Accounts of their activ- ities almost never appear in the news- papers. The uniform branch has given Scot- land Yard its reputation for politeness and quiet ability; and the “bobby” is a well known figure with qualities that every American in London has experi- enced with admiration. But it is the €. 1. D. which has given the Yard its reputation for efficiency, and the C. I D. is proud of the statistics that show its work. In 1929-30 there were 20,553 crimes known to have been committed in the metropolitan area. In 13,030 of them persons were found, many of them by the C. I. D., against whom proceedings were taken. URDER—real murder—Is a crime rare in London. In 1930-31 there were only 21 murders in the metropolitan area, and this has been the average number for the last 10 years. In nine of these cases the murderer committed suicide; in one case the C. I. D. feels certain that it knows who committed the murder, but, from lack of sufficient evi- dence, the case is still recorded as un- solved. In the other 11 cases, one of them a double murder, arrests were made and seven of the murderers were found to be insane. In the other three cases the suspects were acquitted. But the figure of which the C. I. D. is most proud is this: Between 1926-31 there were 95 murders committed, aand only eight of them are unsolved at this time, one of these a case involving three victims. Any detailed study of a number of the cases solved by the system used by the C. 1. D. will reveal that the charac- teristics of the system are disconcertingly prosaic, and, in mgst cases, far from the flashes of rapid second sight which marks the detective in fiction. The same system is used whether the case be a spectacular murdeg problem or a trivial matter of petty larceny. The first essential of the system is speed. Every man available is detailed on the case when a murder is discovered, for the Yard has found by experience that as a rule more can be learned in the first 12 hours than in the next 12 days. Various cases illustrate the value of rapid work. A man and wife were walking down a dark street toward their home late one October night in 1922, when suddenly, at a corner, the husband was attacked from the rear and instantly killed. Be- ginning at that midnight hour, without a clue—the wife had seen no one—Chief Constable Wensley, the most famous de- tective that the Yard has produced, had a suspect detained at 6 o’clock the next evening and had a confession from him the following morning—the very morn- Ing on which the young man had planned to sail on the boat upon which he worked. Wensley solved the mystery by detailing several scores of men to examine every friend and relative of the couple; one of the relatives mentioned the name of a man who he thought had been seeing the wife without her husband’s knowledge; and the wife, asked to name her friends, carefully forgot to list that young nran’s name. The division of the “Flying Squad” which is attached to the C. I. D. helps in the matter of speed. This squad has its cwn automobiles, which may or may not be disguised as delivery wagons (with facilities to- change the name on them around any convenient street corner), which, as they cruise the streets of Lon- don, are in censtant touch with the Yard by radio. No case better illustrates the value of concentration of all forces toward a rapid solution than the Mahon case of 1924. A Mrs. Mahon, suspicious of her hus- band’s frequent absences, asked an in- spector to examine a bag which he seemed to have checked at a railroad station; he had dropped the ticket for it in his home. On May 1 the bag was opened and in it were the bloodstained garments of a woman. The husband was immediately questioned, but gave no genuine information. Here was a crime turned backward—a suspect detained under a suspicion that a murder had been committed, but the Yard yet had to find the corpse. In four days, with the entire organization of the C. I. D. work- ing at full speed, they discovered that he had a cottage far from London, that a young woman had been staying there recently, that he had purchased a knife at the end of April. The corpse was dis- covered in a back rcom of the cottage and on the fifth day the man confessed. ? The second feature of the system is the tremendous attention which the C. I. D. gives to detail. Amazing deductions have been made through seemingly trifling things, but very seldom are they the de- ductions of one man. There was a time when the motto was “Every man for him- self or the hogs will take all the credit.” Today all the information collected is pooled; the “Big Five” meet every morn- ing and discuss the results of the previ- ous day's work. The young men in the C. L. D. are taught to seek for every pos- sible detail, to be unceasingly painstak- ing. And they are then told of solutions that have come about because some in- spector saw clues where there seemed to be none. In one case an old man was found dead. In the shack in which he had lived there was an oil lantern which the neighbors said had not been there before. One inspector examined it and found it had a homemade wick, taken from a piece of a girl's dress. With this clue he searched through the neighborhood and found a girl who had had such a dress, and through her he found the murderer and secured a confession. N another case the murderer was con- victed because in the trunk in which he had put the bodies of his wife and child he drepped a few bits of tobacco of the sort which he always used. Here the Yard did approach the Sherlock Holmes method. 4 The most striking application of the use of every detail occurred, perhaps, in the Bonati case in 1922, The body of a woman, along with a few rags, was found in a trunk which had been checked at a railroad station. The identity of the vic- tim was discovered in 48 hours by giving to the newspapers pictures of the laundry marks on a bit of the clothing, but this discovery did not lead to the murderer. Then Inspector Cornish, now a superin- tendent and one of the “Big Five,” no- ticed on a rag that seemed to be a part of a dish towel of the sort used in saloons, three letters—GRE. The Yard put every man it had on the job of visit- ing any saloon that had GRE in its name. In one, “The Greyhound,” they found the wife of the man suspected, working as barmaid. With this known, the Yard soon fastened the crime on the husband. He was convicted and hanged. The third feature of the Yard’s system is as important as the preceding two and plays a tremendous part in the work of any detective force—relying on informa- tion that comes from those people who are willing to listen and then to pass on a bit of what they have heard. “One tip is better than a hundred clues,” is a proverb that is known in every detective headquarters. The Yard’s stool pigeons are of great importance in many cases of larceny and housebreaking. Such in- formers, however, are of little value in murder cases; the murder is very often the first crime the man has committed, so it does little good to seek for informa- tion in places where ordinary criminals congregate. The fourth feature of the system of crime detection used at the Yard is the D €., JTANUARY 31, 1932, e use of records, arcther feature which plays little part in murder cases. But in cases of larceny and forgery the records which the Yard keeps are laigely respon- sible for the impressive figures shown in its annual report: “Number of simple larcenny cases known to the police— 5,809; taken into custody—5,378!” The records of the Yard are filed according to the technique used in previous crimes. “Cutting bell wires,” “Killing dog,” “Wears gloves,” “Works with woman,” “Pretends to be war veteran”—these are some of the hundred different classifica- tions down to that rarest of all, “Carries a gun.” The Yard can often build up a hypothetical picture of the criminal from the description given by the victim, and by searching the thousands of folders, it can almost perfectly identify the man wanted. In addition, the Yard has mil- lions of fingerprints on file. Such is the Yard's system, which has the advantage of being no hidebound system at all. But other factors come to the help of the Yard. First is the fact that England is a small island, with comparatively few exits. At each port there is always a Scotland Yard man, watching incoming and outgoing traffic Once the alarm is out it is extremely difficult to escape from England. And the Yard is not limited to any bounds in carrying on its investi- gations. While i cannot cases arising in the provinces without being asked, it can go anywhere it wishes to carry on its investigations. The size of England helps the Yard in its desire to work speedily; a fast auto- mobile can traverse all of England in eight hours. At the same time Scotland Yard deals with a population that is almost entire- ly native-born. The number of for- eigners in London has decreased in re- cent years, and the great slums in Whitechapel and the Limehouse dis- trict, once chiefly inhabited by foreign- ers, have been cleaned up. In all London now, with its 7,000,000 people, there are less than 140,000 foreign born. This leads to what is probably the big- gest factor behind the success of Scot- land Yard—the attitude of the average Englishman toward law and order. Many an American, fresh from New York and memories of armored express cars, has been amused in passing the Bank of Eng- land, to see a money transfer operation going on. A rickety truck stands by the curb. Inside it, in plain view and seem- ingly easy to grab, are small cloth bags of money, their contents clearly marked. The back of the truck is open, and un- armed men carry the bags into the bank. The driver of the truck stands near by, far more interested in exchanging racing tips with a friend than in watching mov- ing operations. Pedestrians move past in an unbroken stream. A policeman stands a hundred yards cff —at his post, directing traffic. HEN I asked a man at Scotland Yard what was to prevent one of the “grab and drive off raids” that had led to the introduction of armed cars in America, his first answer was, as the Irish might put it, silence. The idea had never occurred to him. Then he said, “If any one tried to grab, every man near by would feel personally outraged and give chase. The people are the allies of the police.” This same attitude explains the tre- mendous response given to any request published by the Yard in the newspapers, a custom which Scotland Yard follows more and more. “Scotland Yard wants to find . . . any one having informa- tion please call . . . ,” and for a week thereafter the Yard is busy filing the in- formation received. A very mysterious series of robberies took place in London. The Yard asked for any information that might be of assistance. One old landlady telephoned, very much embarrassed: “I only want to say,” she explained, “that I have a lodger who sleeps most of the afternoon. Perhaps he does it so that he can go robbing at night.” The Yard, neglecting no detail, found thereby the man who was wanted. This attitude of respect for Scotland Yard explains the most surprising thing about the work of that organization: No one in it, not even in the C. I. D,, ever carries a gun unless out to search for a man whom they know is armed. There are some superintendents at the Yard, men with more than 30 years’ exp-rience, who have yet to go on a case armed. The young recruits are not trained par- ticularly in the use of firearms. “Sure, our men can shoot,” an official at the Yard told me, “they learnt in the war.” The most spectacular case in the his- tory of Scotland Yard was the siege of investigate’ Sidney street, in East London, in 1911, Here the police cornered two of a band of anarchists in a little house and bom- barded them until the men, who opened the shooting and returned it vigorously, set fire to the house and died in the flames. One of the outstanding facts about that siege was the poor marks- manship of the police; the only guns they could get were double-barreled shotguns; finally the police called out the Royal Scots Guards and even a squad of the Royal Artillery. That siege was preceded by an at- tempt to arrest the whole band three weeks earlier; five policemen visited their lair at midnight and were met oy soft-nosed bullets. Three of the police were killed and the other two wounded. but even that experience did not arm the Yard, and today inspectors go out on night calls with nothing but per- haps a small blackjack. CARRYING a gun during the com- mission of a crime automatically adds 6 to 10 years to one’s sentence, as every criminal in England knows. Merely be- ing found with a gun, without a permit, can lead to a heavy sentence. A house- breaker knows that if he is caught un- armed, he will receive two years’ impris- onment, but if he carries a gun he will get 12 years; so he goes unarmed. At the same time the Yard makes it difficult to secure a gun. Any one wish- ing to purchase either gun or ammuni=- tion must first apply to the police super- intendent of the local district for a per= mit, a system which is rigorously en- forced. There has been some “bootleg- ging” in guns, but Scotland Yard knows where most of the guns in England are. The C. I. D, though giving news- papers legitimate information through its press bureau, still works under a great gray coat of secrecy. The story goes to the papers: ‘“Scotland Yard has been called in. Inspector So-and-So has been assigned to the case.” And that is near- ly all that is officially published until the crime is solved. The names of assistants who have perhaps brought the case to a successful conclusion are seldom given. But out of the cloak of anonymity wrapped about the C. I. D. and its work there have emerged the names of some of the great detectives and stories of their exploits. Chief Constable Wensley, now retired, is perhaps the most famous; many of the most difficult cases in the last 40 years were solved under his lead- ership. It was Wensley who was called to solve the Voisin case. Parts of a woman's body were found done up in a package with a %it of paper on which there was written one phrase: ‘“Blodie Belgium.” A suspect was taken, but had a perfect alibi. Wensley asked him to write “Bloody Belgium” on a piece of paper. The man immediately wrote “Blodie Belgium"—and a little while later confessed to the murder. It was Wensley who was given the job of breaking up various gangs, with rack- ets that are only too familiar, which ex- isted in East London in 1902-03. Through his work the leaders of the “Bessara- bians” were imprisoned, and one by one the gangs were wiped out. It was Wens- ley, too, who was faced with the death of a girl by gas. Everything suggested sui- cide—she was found with a gas tube in her mouth—but there was no smell of gas in the room. A young man who knew her had a shaky story. Wensley suddenly turned to him and asked, “Who turned off the gas? It could not have been the girl.” The question unbalanced the man, who confessed strangling the girl and then arranging the ‘“suicide.” It was Wensley who was given the curious task of discovering the truth about an undertaker who claimed to have found the body of Gen. Kitchener, drowned at sea in 1915, and who was keeping it. No crime had been commit- ted, but some breach of decency might soon arise. How could the police dis- cover whether the undertaker was a fraud? Wensley went to the place and demanded the certificate showing the cause of death. There was none—so the casket had to be moved to a mortuary to await the coroner’s inquest. When the casket was opened it contained nothing. Wensley was given the task of getting the evidence on a gaming house which a lot of young army officers attended. He, dressed in a very tight and modish pair of riding breeches, and with a crop under his arm, strode into the place. The police were to follow soon after. When the raid was anncunced, Wensley fell on a table and covered the cards and coins with his body. Some one grabbed the crop and kept beating him until he re- gretted the cut of his trousers, but he held on to the evidence.