through perspiration and appeared to have been left by the thumb, probably from the right hand. He compared it with those of the Farrows and that of Detective Sergeant Atkinson and was satisfied that the print did not belong to any of those people. Although the Bureau had 80,000-90,000 sets of prints on file, there was no match on any of them as well, which meant that they would need to find a suspect to compare it with. The initial hope of the police was that Mrs Farrow would give a description of her assailants, but she died in hospital on 31 March without regaining consciousness. Positive identification and arrest In an effort to identify the robbers, the police resorted to the usual practice of interviewing potential witnesses to the crime. Fortunately there was no shortage of them, for many saw two men — one of them dressed in a dark brown suit and cap, the other in a dark blue serge suit and bowler hat — leave the paint shop at around 7:30 in the morning of 27 March. Two of these witnesses — a professional boxer named Henry John Littlefield and a local girl named Ellen Stanton — positively identified the one in the dark brown suit as Alfred Stratton. Although he did not have a criminal record, Alfred Stratton was known to the police as being a "vagabond" and was known to have contacts in the criminal underworld. Alfred's brother Albert was also a known police character, and the description of the other man given by the witnesses matched him. The identification of Alfred was apparently confirmed when Alfred's girlfriend Annie Cromarty told the police that he had disposed of his dark brown coat and changed his shoes the day after the murder; she also recalled him asking for a pair of old stockings. Based on this lead, warrants for the arrest of the pair were issued, and they were taken into custody on 2 April and fingerprinted. Based on a tip by Annie Cromarty, police were able to recover £4 that was buried near a local waterworks. When Detective Inspector Collins received the two sets of fingerprints taken from the Stratton brothers, he compared them to the print on the cash box, and he concluded that it exactly matched with the right thumbprint of Alfred Stratton. The brothers were charged with murder and the trial set