Photo by Tim Dalrymple, copyright 2024. All Rights Reserved.
There is something awe-inspiring to walk where the great people of history have walked and where momentous things have happened. I’ve been incredibly blessed to do that in many places and at many times. I’ve walked through George Washington’s home and through the corridor at Ford’s Theater where Abraham Lincoln walked to reach the viewing box where he would be assassinated and where I peered through the hole in the door through which John Wilkes Booth entered to kill the great President. In Israel, I saw the home of Peter the apostle, touched the steps to a synagogue where Jesus surely stepped. I’ve explored the grounds of Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Antietam, Manassas, Chickamauga, and Bunker Hill. I’ve visited the Texas School Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald set up his sniper’s perch to kill John F. Kennedy.
In Egypt, I had the opportunity to do more of the same. In today’s photo (taken by my son), I’m standing in one of the colonnades in the Ramasseum, the funerary temple for Ramesses II, or Ramesses the Great. It is an eerie thing to stand where one of the most powerful men in the history of the world stood. He surely walked between these columns as the magnificent temple was being built and perhaps his mummified body was carried.
For more on the Ramasseum, you can click here.
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY: in 1905, the trial started in the murder case of Thomas and Ann Farrow, shopkeepers in South London. The case would be the first resolved on the basis of fingerprint evidence.
The neighbors had found the Farrows in their home, badly bludgeoned, on March 27 of that year. Thomas was already dead, but Ann was still breathing. She died four days later without ever having regained consciousness.
Only three years earlier, the first English court had admitted fingerprint evidence in a petty theft case. But the Farrow case was the first time that the cutting-edge technology was used to prosecute a high-profile murder case.
Since the cash box in which the Farrow’s stored their cash receipts was empty, it was clear to Scotland Yard investigators that robbery was the motive for the crime. One print on the box did not match the victims or any of the still-tiny files of criminal prints that Scotland Yard possessed. Fortunately, a local milkman reported seeing two young men in the vicinity of the Farrow house on the day of the murders. Soon identified as brothers Alfred and Albert Stratton, the police began interviewing their friends.
Alfred’s girlfriend told police he had given away his coat that day and changed the color of his shoes the day after the murders. A week later, authorities finally caught up with the Stratton brothers and fingerprinted them. Alfred’s right thumb was a perfect match for the print on the Farrow’s cash box.
The fingerprint evidence became the prosecution’s only solid evidence when the milkman was unable to positively identify the Strattons. The defense put up expert Dr. John Garson to attack the reliability of the fingerprint evidence. But the prosecution countered with evidence that Garson had written to both the defense and prosecution on the same day offering his services to both.
The Stratton brothers, obviously not helped by the discrediting of Garson, were convicted and hanged on May 23, 1905. Since then, fingerprint evidence has become commonplace in criminal trials and the lack of it is even used by defense attorneys. – The History Channel
TRIVIA FOR TODAY: Giraffes give birth while standing up. Their babies must drop more than five feet (1.5 meters) to the ground as they’re born.
Twolfgcd's Blog (Galen Dalrymple) 