Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs Penrose was one of the first police to enlist to fight in World War I. He took his own fingerprints so that if he was killed in battle he could be found.The Age reports on fingerprints used to solve a murder.Credit: Martin archivesHe died in the first landings at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915, and his remains were not identified. He is remembered at Lone Pine Memorial 28.Martin joined the same 14th Battalion (“Jacka’s Mob”, named after Captain Albert Jacka) in May 1917.He and his fiancee, Victoria, were both 20 when they married in September that year. Two months later he sailed to war on the transport ship Nestor.Martin was discharged in February 1919 having served 626 days, including 436 days overseas, spending time in the trenches on the Western Front. He was badly wounded by a German machinegun post in 1918. In his documents is a carefully pressed poppy from the French battlefields.With the death of Penrose, Potter decided he would mentor Martin.Back in Australia, Martin returned to his job as a bank clerk. After three months, he looked up from his cage to see Potter who, impressed by the former soldier’s inquiring mind, wanted him to join the police force to work on fingerprints.Undersized and underweight (although he had been an accomplished athlete at Melbourne High), his first application was rebuffed when he was told: “We don’t take jockeys here.”Clearly Potter pulled some strings, taking the undersized Martin to see chief commissioner Sir George Steward. Persuaded by Potter, the commissioner picked up a Bible and swore Martin in as a detective on May 23, 1919. His record suggests he avoided basic training and walking the beat as he was sent to the Crime Department and the Fingerprint Bureau.From the beginning, Potter saw Martin as his successor and personally trained him. The officer in charge was both a visionary and a zealot, documenting cases and keeping photos of criminals that went back to the bushranger days.It is difficult to believe, but many police opposed collecting and maintaining a fingerprint library, believing it was more black magic than science.A crime docket with fingerprints. The offender was born in 1922.Credit: Martin archives.The case for fingerprints built slowly. In NSW in 1904, there were 209 positive identifications from prints, and the following year there were 451.When Potter retired, Martin continued to build the files that are now in the care of Loveless. They will be donated to the Police Museum.When Martin joined, police had 25,000 fingerprints on file. When he left, there were 150,000.In the files is the 1912 case of safe breaker Edward Parker, who was convicted after Potter identified his prints on a ginger beer bottle. On appeal, the full court decided fingerprints alone were enough to justify conviction. From that moment on, fingerprinting became a key forensic science.In the archives, Potter wrote that the odds of fingerprints from two individuals sharing 16 characteristics was 4.2 billion to one and 20 characteristics was 1.1 trillion to one.Loveless says the bureau had 1024 pigeonholes in their Russell Street office placing each new print in the box that best fitted the individual patterns.Without computers the fingerprint men often committed prints to memory and could identify a notorious criminal from one dab at a crime scene. Martin was known to be able to link a crook to a crime just by glancing at his hands.The most famous case was the 1966 murders of Shepparton teenagers Abina Madill, 16, and Gary Heywood, 18.Two fingerprints were lifted from the top of Heywood’s Holden sedan that remained on file for 19 years until Raymond Edmunds was arrested in Albury for indecent exposure.A NSW police fingerprint immediately matched Edmunds’ prints, including a small scar with the Shepparton set. He was convicted of the murders and remains in custody.In 1931, police had no idea of the identity of a gang of diamond thieves, and after one job in Ascot Vale when the getaway car was found, Martin was disappointed that no prints could be found initially. But he remembered Potter’s teachings that warm breath on a cold day could tease out hidden prints.He removed the passenger door and took it back into Russell Street and using his camel hairbrush with French fingerprint chalk, started checking for prints. There was nothing – until he started to softly breathe on the metal surface and then found three perfect prints.More prints were found on the top of the front leather seats. The two key members of the gang were identified and sentenced to five years.There was the case of the “Silent Worker”, an expert safe breaker who developed pencil-thin explosive charges that fitted perfectly into the key lock of safes, gently opening them without creating damage. Martin had been in the police force only a year when he was called to one of his jobs.The breaker had been to a silent movie at a Collins Street theatre, then hid until it was empty. He blew the safe but had to break out from the locked cinema, removing two plate glass windows from the box office. Martin found a print on the glass – a left thumb with a large scar. When the Silent Worker was finally identified, the scar on his thumb was the clincher. He had blown 21 safes in two years.In 1928, Martin solved a double murder when he found one thumbprint on the polished surface of a bedroom drawer in the victims’ Gippsland home at Bullumwaal, a gold rush town reduced to a hamlet.Richard and Catherine Clements arrived in the gold rush but stayed after most had moved on. When on February 16 the local dairyman saw that a jug of milk he delivered remained outside untouched, he looked in through the kitchen window to see the couple had been bludgeoned to death.LoadingA blacksmith’s hammer was found with the bodies. Martin found no prints on the murder weapon, but the offender had meticulously checked the house for money. Having checked every drawer and cupboard, the offender left with £14, leaving one print on the bedroom drawer.It matched local man George Eric Gordon. He was convicted of the double murder.Martin was a world expert who would attend more than 1000 crime scenes, but it could have all been for nothing when he had a dispute with the chief commissioner Sir Tom Blamey over specialist pay rates.Despite finishing first in promotion examinations two years in a row – “rarely equalled since the examinations commenced (40 years earlier)” – his punishment was to be transferred from fingerprints to suburban stations and then to Geelong.It was only when Blamey resigned in disgrace and was replaced by Scotland Yard veteran Alexander Duncan, who understood the value of fingerprints from his time heading the Flying Squad, Martin returned to the bureau in 1938, when he became officer in charge for 13 years.Martin, and his wife Victoria are presented with his police record by chief commissioner Selwyn Porter.Credit: Martin ArchivesMartin and Potter before him were the two men who guided Victoria Police from a Wild West-style police force to professional investigators. Now fingerprints, DNA, CCTV and phone records are often the spine to any investigations.Alec, with his wife, Victoria, would have three daughters and a son. In 1926, they bought a weatherboard house near the Yarra in Scotsburn Street, Hawthorn. It cost 1045 pounds, three shillings and eight pence (about $2100) and the monthly repayments were about $10 at 4.5 per cent interest. The property is now valued around $6 million.In 1951, he was promoted to superintendent of the Flinders Police District, although he was occasionally called back to fingerprints for difficult cases.Loveless says: “I never really asked my grandfather about his time in the police force and the military, and he never offered to talk about it himself. After retirement, he was more interested in fishing and watching me play cricket.”
