The victims were six-year-old Ponciano Carballo Rojas and his four-year-old sister, Feliza.
Their throats had been slit.
Whatever the truth may be, Ramon Velazquez was arrested on suspicion of murder.
Fingerprints of Francesca Rojas.
He even had an alibi who corroborated his account.
He had the piece of wood with the fingerprint removed.
At that time, the use of fingerprints for crime detection was in its nascent stage.
Instead, fingerprints were primarily employed for identification purposes.
In ancient China, around 220 BC, fingerprints were utilized to authenticate government documents.
European academics began to seriously study fingerprints from the late 16th century onwards.
Inspired by the ideas of Francis Galton, Vucetich began experimenting with fingerprints in 1891.
He began recording the fingerprints of criminals and developed his own classification system.
Francesca was subsequently convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The Rojas murder case is considered to be the first homicide solved by fingerprint evidence.
One of the earliest such cases occurred in 1898 in the district of Jalpaiguri in West Bengal, India.
There was also suspicion against the relatives of a woman with whom the murdered man had a liaison.
Moreover, an ex-servant whom he had caused to be imprisoned for theft was under suspicion.
Inside the dispatch box, police discovered a diary with two very faint brown smudges on the outside cover.
Upon closer examination with a magnifying glass, these smudges were revealed to be fingerprints.
Consequently, he was arrested and brought to Calcutta for trial.
However, he was convicted only of theft, as there was a lack of corroborating evidence for murder.
The idea of using fingerprints to apprehend criminals eventually made its way into fiction as well.
The development and utilization of fingerprinting as a tool for criminal investigation have revolutionized law enforcement practices worldwide.
