Photographing Crime Scenes in Twentieth-Century London

Microhistories of Domestic Murder

Alexa Neale

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Academic
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350089433
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: History
• Thema: Modern British History

How can we read crime scenes through photography? Making use of micro-histories of domestic murder and crime scene photographs made available for the first time, Alexa Neale provides a highly original exploration of what crime scenes can tell us about the significance of expectations of domesticity, class, gender, race, privacy and relationships in twentieth-century Britain. With 10 case studies and 30 black and white images, Photographing Crime Scenes in 20th-Century London will take you inside the homes that were murder crime scenes to read their geographical and symbolic meanings in the light of the development of crime scene photography, forensic analysis and psychological testing. In doing so, it reveals how photographs of domestic objects and spaces were often used to recreate a narrative for the murder based on the defendant's perceived identity rather than to prove if they committed the crime at all. Bringing the history of crime, British social and cultural history and the history of forensic photography to the analysis of the crime scene, this study offers fascinating details on the changing public and private lives of Londoners in the 20th century.

1

Introduction: Encountering Crime Scenes

Imagining a crime scene

Picture a crime scene photograph. When we imagine still images of sites of murder, we think of chalk outlines, blood spatter or hidden keys in close-up. We might conjure a lonely glove surrounded by fallen leaves or the faint imprint of a lower lip on the rim of a drinking glass. We may imagine Scenes-of-Crime Officers (SOCOs) or Crime Scene Investigators (CSIs) in paper suits behind yellow or blue tape, pointing their cameras with quick clicks and flashes, countless images captured as they document entire rooms in infinite detail, touching nothing but seeing everything.¹ Later, in a caffeinated conference room, or crowded around a computer screen, detectives and scientists review and examine the photographs, select and filter, zoom and enhance, finding clues hidden in everyday objects. In the courtroom, experts explain enlarged images to the jury, pointing to the position of the body and blood-spatter patterns, interpreting their significance for the identity of the accused. The photographs show, they say, the defendant’s presence at the scene, inviting the jury to view for themselves the fingerprint on the fallen key-fob, common sense dictating that the alibi is disproved by locating the discarded glove or drinking glass DNA. Photography has been furnishing evidence for more than a hundred years, the camera called upon as a regular witness in courtrooms since the beginning of the twentieth century. But has it always been objective and infallible? Were crime scene photographs as instrumental in convincing juries of a killer’s identity in the early twentieth century as the early twenty-first? This book explores how crime scenes were read and recorded in the past, challenging what we think we know about forensic photographs: from how and why they were made, to the meanings and evidentiary powers ascribed to them.

Holmes, Poirot, Jessica Fletcher, CSI, Silent Witness and many hours of Netflix have all contributed to public perception that forensics and forensic imaging, past and present, are concerned primarily with examining self-evident truths, capturing small things and representing them at large scale. This book argues that twentieth-century crime scene photographs were rarely called upon to represent such detail; cameras at the crime scene were not required to communicate clues or record investigations. Police the world over took different approaches to capturing crime scenes, but until well into the second half of the twentieth century, English police photographers were united in their lack of concern for facsimile, unburdened by demands for ‘proof’ or the location of facts through their images. Rather, the place of the police photograph was the courtroom, where monochrome prints made wide views of rooms and streetscapes portable in space and time. The authority of the photograph did not rely on its ability to enlarge, highlight or accurately copy but on its visual endorsement of an imagined crime narrative.

This book centres each of the six thematic chapters on a case of murder and its photographs, supported by references to additional examples. It reveals twentieth-century police photography as selective rather than complete, widely surveying scenes rather than documenting them in detail. Readers will quickly comprehend the extent to which tropes in TV, film and fiction have leaked into their own understandings of how crime scenes were recorded and represented in the past, corrupting views of historic cases and inflating forensic meaning. Photographing crime scenes in twentieth-century London, I argue, was more about visualizing a narrative in the courtroom than investigating and establishing that narrative in police detection. I confront assumptions about crime scene photographs in the twentieth century as infallible facsimile evidence by describing how they were commissioned, made and viewed in murder cases with a variety of outcomes, from not guilty verdicts to conviction and capital punishment.

Through careful reconstruction of crime scene practice in each twentieth-century case, I argue that forensic images represented, and were shaped by, space, place and narrative. By depicting crimes spatially, they acted as surrogates for the actual scene, allowing rooms and their look and layout, the relationships of objects to one another, to be captured. They transported the place of the crime to the place of the courtroom, collapsing time and distance. In so doing they communicated information about the places depicted, without the jury having to actually go there, including inferences about geographical place and social groups outside of the photographic frame. Most significantly, however, they were used to endorse crime narratives: ideas of how events played out, notions of assumed timelines with all their implications. Calling on familiar visual referents, crime scene photographs could be used to tell a very particular version of what happened, inferring behaviour, culpability and criminal intent in order to support legal definitions and determine trial outcomes. These effects relied heavily on imagination, I argue. Just as our own perceptions of what images show are contingent upon the present cultural moment, so too were readings of crime scene photographs in the past. Courtrooms viewed crime scene photographs through a lens shaped by the historical, cultural, social and legal moment in which the case was tried, including contemporary ideas about race, class and gender that determined how people’s identities, homes, relationships and crimes were interpreted.

The crime scene in the archive

Many historians and criminologists have highlighted how problematic straightforward readings of archived crime sources, including case files and press reporting, can be. However, there still exists a temptation to review evidence from past cases in the assumption that ‘forensic’ or ‘scientific’ exhibits possess a greater evidentiary value than other documents, or that more recent knowledge regimes have the power to reach superior understanding of old evidence.² Yet cultural representations of more contemporary crimes demonstrate popular knowledge of the fallibility of evidence. Defendants can lie, confessions can be extracted under pressure and witnesses can get things wrong. People are only human after all.³ The camera, in contrast, we imagine can be trusted to tell the truth; a photograph (pre-Photoshop at least) is self-evident, possessing a retrospective realism, or at least a power of authentication; it can uniquely testify to what was really there.⁴ Through characterization and narrative, this book describes the ways people have encountered crime scenes, and how those encounters have shaped representations of those crime scenes. Crime scene photography in the past is revealed to be the product of human encounters. Each chapter sets the scene with a descriptive vignette, highlighting practices that led to the creation and interpretation of crime scene photographs, drawing out the perspectives and experiences individuals brought with them. I also reflexively observe my own encounters with crime scenes (in the archives) and how they have shaped my own interpretations and hence the research and writing of this book.

When the majority of murders, past and present, occurred in people’s homes, one might imagine crime scene photographs could be an excellent source for studying domestic interiors. Indeed, archived crime sources have much to offer historians and criminologists. Crime scene photographs and their case files are a rare example of a source in which images of everyday spaces accompany descriptions of people, activities, emotions and experiences in the same places.⁵ The crimes could even be incidental, couldn’t they? This was what I imagined before my first encounter with a crime scene, which occurred on 8 May 2012 at the UK National Archives, Kew.

Encountering Appleford Road, Part I

A soft grey folder scattered with coloured stickers and handwritten labels appeared, by invisible hands, behind the orange Perspex of locker number 43D. I snatched it up greedily, side-stepping impatiently through the not-so-automatic doors, racing to the old leather and wood octagon where I had been waiting for thirty minutes that felt like a hundred. The bright yellow production slip was whipped out of the pages, either by my haste or by the over-powerful air conditioning. I caught it before it reached the government-issued carpet tiles. As I did so, I attempted to decipher its many codes, recognizing only my name and seat number besides the file reference ‘CRIM 1/2783’. My serious-faced neighbours were hunched over their crumbling boxes and leather-bound books as I placed my bounty on the table and took my seat. With my pre-approved pencil (no eraser) and supermarket-Moleskine, I diligently copied the text of the stamps and stickers fixed to the cover including ‘Warning: Images may cause distress’. I opened it cautiously, wondering how high or low my distress threshold might be. Inside was a motley collection of ephemera, held together with punched holes and treasury tags. Dozens of lightly foxed tracing-paper thin pages covered in regular lines of mechanical type, each annotated with lines of pencil and loops of ink. Buried beneath them, a creased and dirty envelope, several sheets of handwriting in biro, two torn scraps of patterned paper and nine glossy black-and-white photographs. The first two showed a room in monochrome. No white chalk outlines or bloodied weapons. Flat and grey, these chilly prints were lacking intimately framed details but bearing the unmistakable markers of lives lived between the papered walls. Colour and meaning were promised by page after page in the plentiful file, and this was only the first of dozens I could order until 43D was overflowing. I looked around for someone with whom I might share my archival joy, for here was everything I had hoped for and more besides. But with all eyes in the room silently and obediently glued to their papers, mine fell back to the file in front of me and settled on a single sentence swimming in a page filled with handwritten cursive, and I allowed myself to whisper it: ‘We’ve really hit the jackpot now doll.’⁶

***

I was far from the first to hit the archival jackpot with murder files like that representing Appleford Road in The National Archives. Refracted through the extraordinary events accompanying a murder investigation and trial, these documents used at the Old Bailey (more accurately known as the Central Criminal Court) represent detailed accounts of ordinary everyday encounters between people and places in London. Cultural historians have used them, and other collections of court and crime sources, to tell about social mores and contemporary concerns in their cultural and historical contexts from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Crime historians and historical criminologists have applied a Microhistory method to individuals and their crimes, through which ‘macro’ themes have been illuminated such as the socio-cultural implications of crime, connected contemporary political priorities and moral campaigns by the media.⁷ Microhistorical writing has turned to increasingly creative narratives in recent years, drawing on techniques of characterization and description usually found in fiction, highlighting close relationships between crime and narrative storytelling. In so doing, cultural and social historians have demonstrated the rich detail crime archives contain regarding everyday lives and spaces in the past which would otherwise be obscured from view.⁸ Narrative criminology, meanwhile, analyses the stories people tell about identities to make sense of crime in the present, including storytelling about the self through visual culture and portraiture.⁹ Visual criminology in turn is deeply critical of representations of criminal and social ‘others’ through art and photography and accompanying captions and narratives.¹⁰ Recent reflexive turns have seen scholars reflect on their own positions in relation to their sources and the individuals they study, and at the time of writing publications are in the works which promise to explore historical writing as creative practice, bringing new insights by imagining subjects beyond the limits of more traditional ‘academic’ styles of writing and research.¹¹ This book shares many of these same aims but takes murder crime scene photographs and their forensic deployment as narratives in the past as its jumping off point, whereas other historians have used visual and material exhibits as part of a range of evidence.¹² Few scholars have applied a microhistorical or creative histories approach to visual representations of crime scenes, though some have used international examples to furnish fiction.¹³

This book contributes to a field taking shape which approaches visual and material sources from Cultural-Historical-Criminological perspectives, interrogating the narratives told with and about those sources, and telling further stories with them.¹⁴ Still and moving images, art, photography, film, cartoons, graphic novels and computer games, for examples, can all contribute to histories and sociologies of crime, punishment and violence and their means of cultural communication.¹⁵ So too the artefacts of jurisprudence; objects and materials used as exhibits of evidence and letters narrating personal and public feelings about punishment and mercy, for examples.¹⁶ Emerging areas which marry methodologies offer unique opportunities for bridging disciplinary boundaries, including historical criminology, visual criminology, socio-legal studies and imaginative criminology. Each takes social sciences as their subjects (Crime, the Law) but closely identify with the humanities by exploring them through, or analysing their impact on, the social, cultural, spatial and experiential.¹⁷ Each has influenced this book, but multi-disciplinarity also presents multiple difficulties. Readers will realize that the sources on which this book draws are so richly detailed and varied in the subjects they allow us to explore that they open doors to endlessly labyrinthine libraries of literatures. Focusing on any one of the many theoretical approaches one could apply to historical crime scene photography necessarily detracts from others, or overwhelms a book like this with secondary citations. I have deliberately prioritized the primary sources and invite further research and future discussion about the frameworks which might be applied to enhance their analysis and comprehension. Historians have been notoriously light-touch in their approaches to visual sources until very recently, yet present students of histories and sociologies exist in a world where images, and perhaps mainly photographs, are a privileged means of communication.¹⁸ New conversations are to be had, and so many uniquely creative and collaborative approaches are currently emerging that the timing seems ideal to suggest new ways of thinking about representations of crime.

It can be tempting to consider the crime in crime scene photographs incidental, as some practitioners have attempted to do, so remarkably detailed and fascinating are these exhibits as windows on everyday spaces and ordinary lives in the past.¹⁹ However, to do so is to overlook the historically contingent contexts within which and for which they were designed. Narratives negotiated in the courtroom and debated in the press are essential to comprehending the empirical meaning and value of exhibits of evidence to contemporaries. It is the life-or-death [sentence] consequences of capital trials that make murder files particularly descriptive and comprehensive and such fertile grounds for microhistorical analyses.²⁰ With the most voluminous archival traces, capital cases have tended to be those from which recent television programme-makers have selected. The moralizing of the past continues unchallenged when eagerness to entertain – couched in the language of reinvestigation to uncover possible miscarriages of justice from cases charged, convicted and capitally punished – obscures opportunities to reflect upon the contemporary conditions, damaging stereotypes and biases that produced archives of crime.²¹ Attempting something like a reinvestigation of a crime based only on the limited selection of evidence that has survived many decades, even centuries, without an understanding of the empirical, theoretical and legal limits that shaped their creation and deployment, assumes a straightforward and linear process of forensic development that brings us to an accurate and factually superior present. Popular culture and ‘CSI Effects’ further complicate these issues.²² For example, a work of scholarship that analyses historical images of crime and interprets English scenes based on methods of policing depicted in fictional US television programmes decades distant imagines that crime scene photographs were framed to include items and locations of direct evidentiary significance.²³ More critical examinations of such cases and how they were constructed and communicated by contemporaries have the potential to reveal something of the background to enduring legacies of sexism and racism in criminal justice.²⁴ The extent to which the uses of visual evidence at the Old Bailey differed from modern conceptions will be illustrated in the next section by an exploration of the traditions upon which crime scene photography drew.

Picturing a crime scene

Picturing crime scenes, or representing scenes of crime visually, predates the photograph by a considerable margin. The oldest, and certainly the most common visual representation of the crime scene in use in the twentieth century, was the scale plan. These documents demonstrate that it was police who designated the boundaries of the crime scene space and selected areas, objects and viewpoints relevant to a case. They also show something of a common-sense approach to the investigation of crime; when a body was found, or murder was suspected, the most prominent and straightforward narrative was the most likely, and this line was pursued to its logical conclusion. First,...