Strange Case Of How Two Non-Related Men With The Same Name And Identical Looks Sparked The Need For Fingerprinting
They looked identical and even shared the same name, but the two prisoners pictured were actually different people and their remarkable case helped bring in the era of fingerprint identification.
The man above was called Will West, the man below William West, and they were both sentenced to jail at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas over 100 years ago.
McClaughry then set about taking his Bertillon measurements – named after the French policeman Alphonse Bertillon – which was the usual method of identifying people and involved recording the dimensions of key physical features.
McClaughry, still convinced the man before him had already been to the prison, looked up his name in his filing system and found one William West – who looked identical to Will West in the photographs in every respect.
William West was a different person altogether and in fact had been admitted to the prison two years previously for murder.
