20 Early Detectives Who Invented Modern Crime-Solving

A Scotland Yard chief inspector named Walter Dew was trying to locate Cora Crippen after she disappeared in 1910. He discovered Cora’s dismembered remains hidden under the cellar floor of the home she shared with her husband, London doctor Hawley Crippen. Crippen had run away on a ship with his mistress, Ethel Le Neve, pretending to be father and son. When the captain recognized them from newspaper photos of the fugitives, he had his Marconi wireless telegraph send a message to Scotland Yard. Dew boarded a quicker ship and overtook them, arresting Crippen as soon as he landed in Canada.

In 1856, a 23-year-old widow named Kate Warne, hired by Allan Pinkerton’s Chicago-based agency, became America’s first female private detective. She believed women could get into places closed off to male officers. Working undercover, she secured confessions from suspects in several high-profile cases. In February 1861, while undercover in Baltimore, Warne discovered that secessionists planned to kill President-elect Abraham Lincoln en route to Washington. She disguised him as an invalid relative and personally escorted him by train through Baltimore all night long. He survived to be inaugurated.

In 1891, Juan Vucetich, a Croatian-born police statistician in La Plata, Argentina, developed a method of fingerprint identification he called dactyloscopy. The next year, investigator Eduardo Alvarez, trained in that method, used it to solve the murder of two children in Necochea. A neighbor was suspected, but Alvarez found a bloody thumbprint on the doorframe. The print was not the neighbor’s. It belonged to the children’s mother, Francisca Rojas. When shown the evidence, she confessed.

Isidor “Izzy” Einstein, who had once been a postal clerk and spoke six languages, joined the U.S. Bureau of Prohibition in New York in 1920. Speakeasy lookouts would know an agent from a mile away, but Einstein showed up to raids disguised as a streetcar conductor, a gravedigger, or an opera singer. His goal was to get into the place, grab some alcohol to serve as evidence in court, then get out. Along with his partner, Moe Smith, he made 4,932 arrests and achieved a 95% conviction rate.

A man named Song Ci served as a judge in 13th-century Imperial China. He was upset that some local officials were failing to understand the cause of death and, therefore, putting the wrong person on the chopping block. In 1247, he wrote the earliest known manual on forensic death investigation. It covered everything from distinguishing between wounds caused before and after death to discovering whether poison was involved. On one occasion, he told villagers to put their sickles on the ground. Blowflies gathered over the only sickle with invisible traces of blood, and the owner confessed.

In 1896, when women cops were relegated to the custody squad, Isabella Goodwin joined the New York police force. When armed robbers stole a taxicab full of $25,000 in bank funds in February 1912, male detectives proved ineffective at solving the crime. Goodwin went undercover as a cook in a boarding house where a suspect’s girlfriend resided and listened in on gang chatter. Based on her intelligence, she helped arrest the gang members within a month. Rhinelander Waldo, the Police Commissioner, then named her the first woman in the city’s history to become a Detective First-Grade.

Vidocq, a French ex-con imprisoned mostly for forgery and brawling, volunteered his knowledge of Parisian criminals to the police. In 1812, he organized and operated a detective service with the police’s approval, staffed primarily by reformed criminals. It made extensive use of disguises, surveillance, and paid informants. He established systematic records of criminal cases and performed some of the earliest tests on matching bullets. In 1833, he opened a private office in Paris, which was widely regarded as the first private detective agency.

Joseph Bell was a medical professor at the University of Edinburgh. He also served as a forensic advisor to the Scottish courts and police. He could usually determine someone’s profession or lifestyle by observing his or her walk, hands, or even the stains on his or her clothes. In the 1893 Ardlamont murder case, he examined bullet paths and shot holes in clothing to demonstrate that the shooting wasn’t accidental. Bell’s student, Arthur Conan Doyle, later wrote in private correspondence that Dr. Bell was the basis for the character of Sherlock Holmes.

Alphonse Bertillon worked as a records clerk in the Paris police prefecture and grew weary of seeing criminals reoffend because they had been released under an assumed name. In 1879, he came up with anthropometry, using measurements such as head length, arm span, finger length, and standardized descriptions of an individual’s appearance to make that person identifiable. The French police used his technique in 1882. He is also credited with inventing the overhead tripod grid, which allowed him to photograph crime scenes, and the two-shot mugshot, both front-facing and profile, which are still used around the world.

A Scottish-born barrel-maker, Pinkerton was appointed as Chicago’s first official police detective in 1849, then established his own firm in 1850. Because city police officers lacked power once a suspect stepped beyond a state border, trains and banks retained Pinkerton’s operatives to pursue train robbers and other lawbreakers across the nation. He set up extended surveillance of suspects under cover and stored pictures of them in a central database, one of the earliest examples of a rogues’ gallery. Pinkerton’s agency’s “all-seeing eye” insignia has been claimed, not conclusively, as the source for the expression “private eye.”

Sir Edward Henry was Inspector-General of Police in Bengal, India, in the 1890s. He recognized that fingerprints were superior to Bertillon’s body measurements as a method of identification, but he needed a way to organize all these fingerprints for quick retrieval from hundreds of thousands of records. Working with two Indian police sub-inspectors, Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose, who developed the mathematics behind the system, he created the Henry Classification System in 1897. It organized prints into arches, loops, and whorls with numerical codes.

Marie Owens was a widow from Ottawa with five children who began her career as a Chicago health inspector. She transferred to the police department in 1891, where she received full arrest powers, a badge, and the rank of detective sergeant. In doing so, she became the first officially sworn female police detective in America. For the next 32 years, she busted illegal sweatshops and helped families in crisis, enforcing laws on child labor and school attendance. She shut down entire factories using kids as young as 7.

Hans Gross was an examining magistrate in Graz, Austria. He was upset because many investigators were basing their decisions on hunches or on the coerced confessions of innocent people. In 1893, he wrote a guidebook for investigators and examining magistrates. The book introduced a new term, “criminalistics,” the scientific study of physical evidence left at a crime scene. Gross believed that detectives should make use of such techniques as microscopy, chemistry, and bloodstain analysis. He even gave guidelines for how to secure a crime scene so that no one could touch anything. His handbook soon became a foundational textbook for scientific police work worldwide.

Charles Frederick Field was recruited into the London police in 1829 and moved over to Scotland Yard’s Detective Branch in 1846, becoming a Chief Inspector by 1850. Field was known for his disguise work, night-time raids, and intimate knowledge of London’s underworld. Novelist Charles Dickens accompanied him on his night-time rounds and modeled his Inspector Bucket character in Bleak House (1852) on him.

An Irish-born officer named James McLevy was one of the first official “detectives” in Edinburgh, hired by police in 1830. He patrolled the crowded Old Town slums and cultivated an extensive network of informers, but his most valuable tools were his keen eyesight and sharp memory for faces. Court records indicate that he carried out more than 2,000 inquiries during his 30 years on the force. After retiring in 1860, he wrote and published Curiosities of Crime in Edinburgh, one of the earliest true-life detective memoirs in the world, many decades before Sherlock Holmes was born on paper.

Raymond Schindler apprenticed with Secret Service agent William J. Burns before opening up his own agency in New York. Because he felt that spoken testimony was unreliable, he obtained an exclusive contract on the dictograph, a device originally designed for dictation, which Schindler modified into a clandestine listening device. During the 1910s, Schindler placed microphones in hotel lamps, desk accessories, and walls, capturing confessions from murder, bribery, and extortion suspects. Through his work, covert electronic bugging first made its way into American courtrooms.

Wensley was a constable in Scotland Yard from 1889 and survived multiple stabbings while patrolling the East End. After the First World War, criminal gangs started to use fast motorcars for smash-and-grab robberies, outrunning pursuing foot policemen long before anyone could call for help. In 1919, Wensley established Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad, which consisted of unmarked, high-speed vehicles equipped with covert radios, designed to intercept crimes in progress rather than pursue them after the fact. He was later appointed Chief Constable of the Criminal Investigation Department.

August Vollmer led the Berkeley, California, police department from 1905 to 1932, and is frequently referred to as the father of modern American scientific policing. In 1921, Vollmer supported officer John Larson in the development of the first practical polygraph machine for use in police interrogations. In 1923, during a brief stint as Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, Vollmer established the first centralized municipal crime laboratory in the United States. He was also among the first to equip his police officers with two-way radio transceivers in their vehicles and encouraged detectives to receive college educations.

Sir John Fielding had been blinded in an accident in the Royal Navy and became known as the Blind Beak of Bow Street. He and his half-brother, Henry, created the Bow Street Runners in 1749, a tiny group of detectives attached to the court and Britain’s first dedicated crime-fighting squad, although Sir John took over when Henry died in 1754. There are numerous reports from people at the time that he knew the voices of thousands of repeat offenders and could recognize them by voice alone in court. Eventually, he began sending his own paid detectives out to find out more about crimes as they occurred.

In 1910, Dr. Edmond Locard, a French forensic scientist from Lyon, convinced the local police department to give him two attic rooms and two assistants and set up the first-ever police crime laboratory. What he did there is summarized today as “every contact leaves a trace.” This is the concept that someone committing a crime will always leave behind traces of himself, minute particles of dirt or fibers, and take some of the scene with him.

This content was created with the help of AI.