Motorola

30-Year-Old Murder Solved

Fingerprint Technology Played Key Role

In 1978, 61-year-old Carroll Bonnet was stabbed to death in his apartment. Police collected evidence, including latent fingerprints and palmprints from the victim’s bathroom (officers believed the killer was trying to wash off blood and other evidence before leaving the apartment). The victim’s car was then stolen.

The car was found in Illinois, but after collecting additional latent prints, investigators couldn’t develop any new leads. The crime scene evidence was processed, and latent prints recovered from the scene and the car were searched against local and state fingerprint files. Investigators also sent fingerprint requests to agencies outside Nebraska, but no matches were returned and the case soon went cold.

In late 2008, the Omaha Police Department received an inquiry on the case, prompting technician Laura Casey to search the prints against IAFIS (which didn’t exist in 1978). In less than five hours, IAFIS returned possible candidates for comparison purposes. Casey spent days carefully examining the prints and came up with a positive identification—Jerry Watson, who was serving time in an Illinois prison on burglary charges.  On October 17, 2011—33 years to the day that Bonnet’s body was discovered—his killer was sentenced to life in prison.

The murderer’s fingerprints is the left thumb, the general Pattern is Plain loop.

One immediate technology example that comes to mind is automated fingerprint searching—more precisely, searches of latent prints of violent unknown perpetrators left at crime scenes. The FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), which houses known records for approximately 73 million criminal subjects, is used daily by local, state, tribal, and international law enforcement for current cases, but increasingly for help in solving cold cases as well. And once a year, the Bureau’s Criminal Justice Information Services...