The Real Story of Will West and William West, the Leavenworth Look-Alikes
- Jul 10
- 5 min read
If you've ever sat through a forensics class, you've probably heard the story. Two prisoners, same name, same face, same measurements, at the same federal penitentiary in Kansas in 1903. Only their fingerprints told them apart, and that one mix-up supposedly killed off the Bertillon system and ushered in the age of fingerprinting. It's a great story. It's told in textbooks, FBI materials, and true crime blogs to this day. The trouble is, when you actually dig into the documented record, most of the dramatic parts don't hold up, and the version usually repeated skips the part where the men who were actually there never once mentioned it.
Two Men, One Name, One Prison
What's solidly documented is this: William West arrived at the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth on 9 September 1901, convicted of murder and sentenced to life. Almost two years later, on 4 May 1903, a second prisoner named Will West arrived and was booked in by the records clerk, M.W. McClaughry. When McClaughry ran West's Bertillon measurements, the numbers matched an existing file so closely that he pulled the card and found himself looking at a prisoner already serving time in the same building. The two men were brought together and did genuinely look alike. Their fingerprints, taken later, did not match at all. Two different people, filed under the same name.
A Story Nobody Told for Fifteen Years
Here's the part that rarely makes it into the retelling. The West case wasn't published anywhere until 1918, in Harris Hawthorne Wilder and Bert Wentworth's book Personal Identification, a full fifteen years after it supposedly happened. Robert D. Olsen Sr. of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation went looking for earlier references and found twenty-six books and articles on fingerprint identification published between 1899 and 1922. Eighteen of them came out before Wilder and Wentworth's account, and not one mentions the West case.
Even stranger, M.W. McClaughry, the records clerk who personally took both men's Bertillon measurements and later their fingerprints, published two of his own articles on the history of fingerprinting in America. He never brings up the Wests in either one. If the case had really been the dramatic turning point it's remembered as, it seems odd that the one person who processed both men in real time never thought it was worth writing about.
What the Real Timeline Shows
The switch away from Bertillon at Leavenworth wasn't a same-day reaction to the West mix-up. M.W. McClaughry attended the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, where he met Sergeant John K. Ferrier of Scotland Yard and learned the fingerprint classification system developed by Edward Henry. His father, Major Robert W. McClaughry, the actual warden of Leavenworth, wrote to the U.S. Attorney General on 24 September 1904 requesting permission to install it. Ferrier travelled to Leavenworth that October to train staff, and the Attorney General signed off on 2 November 1904. Will and William West themselves weren't fingerprinted until October 1905, well over a year after the switch had already been approved and more than two years after Will West's arrival. The paperwork trail simply doesn't support a dramatic, overnight conversion sparked by two look-alike inmates.
How the Legend Picked Up Extra Details Over Time
Once the story started getting retold, writers added flourishes that don't appear in the earliest account. A 1953 book by Douglas Browne and Alan Brock claimed Will West's prints were all whorls and William West's were all loops, a detail that doesn't match the men's actual documented classification codes. The same authors also merged the warden and his records clerk son into a single person and misspelled the family name. A 1941 book by Charles Chapel gave Will West a stereotyped, invented dialect that doesn't fit the time or place. Plenty of versions still circulating today have the warden declaring "This is the death of Bertillonage!" and scrapping the Bertillon system the very next day, a claim that the documented chronology flatly contradicts.
Were the Two Wests Actually Related?
This part genuinely isn't settled, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. Some later researchers found that both men corresponded with the same family members, and a fellow Leavenworth inmate named George Bean claimed he'd known both Wests before prison and that they were twin brothers. No birth records or formal genealogy have ever confirmed that. What is confirmed is that the Bertillon clerk overlooked a genuine 7mm discrepancy in the two men's foot measurements, a gap the Bertillon system's own rules were supposed to flag as significant. That's arguably the more useful takeaway: not that two strangers happened to be identical, but that a supposedly objective measuring system still depended on a clerk's willingness to call a mismatch close enough.
What Happened to Will and William West Afterward
Will West served out his sentence and disappears from the historical record after his release, with no further trace in prison files. William West stayed at Leavenworth much longer. He spent stretches in solitary confinement for fighting, but by 1916 had earned enough trust to work as a trusty, an inmate given limited authority over other prisoners on work details. That year he walked off the job, hopped a freight train, and made it as far as Topeka before local police picked him up the next day. Fittingly, they didn't need fingerprints to identify him. A prison circular carrying his old-style mugshot and written description had already reached Topeka ahead of him. He was returned to Leavenworth and eventually released on parole in 1919.
So What Actually Ended the Bertillon System?
Not a single dramatic afternoon at a Kansas records desk. The real credit belongs to years of unglamorous institutional work: the Henry classification system proving itself reliable in British and colonial courts, Sergeant Ferrier crossing the Atlantic to personally train American prison staff, and bureaucrats like the McClaughrys filing the paperwork to switch systems. The Will and William West case is a genuinely interesting coincidence, two unrelated-looking men who shared a name and nearly identical measurements at the same prison. It just wasn't the moment that changed criminal identification in America. That happened slowly, on purpose, and mostly off the page.
