WA CSI – A HISTORY OF FORENSIC INNOVATION

BEFORE photography, police only had physical descriptions of offenders to work with. Name, age, build, height, hair, eye colour, scars, deformities and tattoos.
Retired forensic chief superintendent John Horton said this changed when Lieutenant Colonel George Braithwaite Phillips was appointed WA Commissioner of Police in 1887 and established the WA Camera Club in 1889.
Phillips understood the value of photos and started to snap prisoners, and their fingerprints, at Fremantle prison.
Cataloguing prisoners’ fingerprints and giving evidence at court was ’Criminal Photographer’ Ernest Francis Edmunds, a Camera Club member who developed a way to make colour prints without fading.
Fingerprinting was developed by Scotland Yard, with WA police, “the first Australian police force to adopt the use of fingerprints as a means of criminal investigation”.
Edmunds provided evidence in the Kalgoorlie murder of two ‘Gold Stealing Branch’ detectives and a double murder at the Federal Hotel in Fremantle.