Scene of the Crime (12 page)

developed) print is in fact
patent
(visible) under light coming from the appropriate angle.

• Then, twirl the handle of the brush between the palms of your hands to fluff out the bristles.

• Next, dip the very tip of the brush into the powder.

• Begin to brush the dust very lightly onto the print (or onto the item to be dusted, if light has not revealed a print).

• As soon as a print becomes visible, brush very carefully and lightly in the direction of the flow of the print.

• If necessary, blow excess powder off with your breath. Most of the time, the brush will take off the excess powder, but sometimes stray grains remain when more brushing might damage the print.

• Then, using special pressure-wound tape, press the tape very carefully, leaving no air pockets, down on the print.

• Using your thumb, forefinger or pencil eraser, press the tape down onto the print as hard as possible.

• Then, in
one motion,
because pausing will leave lines on the tape, lift the tape from the item.

• Press the tape down
on the edge
of a lifting card.

• Only then do you cut it from the roll, preferably with a sharp pocketknife.

• Immediately—
not waiting till later because you will certainly forget even if you think you won't—label the lift card, note it in your notebook, and put the lift in a safe place.

Sometimes, if the print was still quite moist when you began working with it, you can make two or three lifts from the same dusting with increasing clarity each time. But if you do that, be prepared to explain in detail to the jury how and why you did it.

You may, if you read very old mysteries, have come across a description of people dusting for fingerprints with a gadget called an
insufflator.
I never saw one, but I have in my mind that it's sort of a cross between an ear syringe and a bulb-spray-type perfume atomizer. Suffice it to say, nobody uses them anymore.

You've started by dusting the door frame, just in case somebody you didn't know about was in the house that night. Now let's see how the lift is going to look, in Figure 4-3.

Who initials those cards? Why, you, of course-Detective N.E. Boddy, and your partner, Mel(vin) or Mel(anie) Smith.

That's about the best you're going to be able to do on this surface; too many hands have been laid on top of hands for you to get anything more identifiable than a bowl of spaghetti. It's time to start on those seventeen liquor and wine bottles. If you just had one you might take it in and dust it in the office, but with seventeen, there's too much chance of bottles rolling against each other and breaking, or of prints being rubbed off by paper rubbing against the bottles. So you're going to do it all right now, right here.

Bottles can be tricky. The surface is so glossy that regular fingerprint brushes, even carefully used, tend to cut the print. You have something special to use on them: magnetic powder, so nothing except the powder itself will ever touch the surface being dusted. The "brush" is a wand containing a magnetic metal post inside a flexible closed rubber tube, and the fingerprint powder is extremely finely ground black iron filings. The wand can be held in either of two positions: with the metal post held up in the handle, so that the tube does not pick up fingerprint powder, or with the metal post pushed down into the tube, so that the tube does pick up the fingerprint powder. Theoretically, magnetic powder cannot be used on any surface that reacts to magnetism. But that, as you'll see later, is only theoretical.

All right, you've made several lifts from this bottle. You already know what the fingerprint lifting card looks like, so let's not bother with making more of them. Instead, let's go on and write up the evidence tag (see Figure 4-4), as you're going to want to take all the bottles that held prints into the police station with you.

Notice that once again, both you and Mel initialed the card, although only one of you collected the evidence. Notice also that each individual piece of evidence collected at any given crime scene will be given a separate item number, keyed to notes in the investigator's notebook. How many items might you collect at a crime scene? As few as zero, as many as thousands. How long does it take? It takes as long as it takes. There's no other possible answer. I spent two entire days working a crime scene inside an automobile, collecting several hundred pieces of evidence. As I recall, in the real Jackson Street Corpse case, I spent several hours there that afternoon.

It was a Saturday. I had been shopping, and I did not possess a pager. Police cars all over town were asked to look for me, and an

officer spotted my car in the parking lot of a local department store and went in to haul me away from a going-out-of-business sale. I had my younger daughter, then not quite a year old, with me; she still remembers waiting in the car (a police officer played with her while I worked the crime scene) and then being dropped off at the day-care center long enough for me to wash my hair in the darkroom.

I went back again for several hours on Sunday and again on Monday, before I was to the point I could call myself through at the scene. How well I yet remember—I had ident all to myself then; it was before we had added a third person. Doc went on vacation to Florida, and the last thing he said to me before he left was, "I hope you have a corpse a day while I'm gone." He meant it as a joke; we'd never had that many in that short a period. (Doc's vacation lasted thirteen days. I had nine corpses, starting out Friday at 4:30
p.m.
with a triple shotgunning where several innocent bystanders got in the way of a drug deal that went sour.)

But the murder rate increased steadily. The first year I was with the Albany Police Department, we had four murders the entire year. The last year I was there, we had four murders before New Year's Day was over.

Mere About Collecting Latents

Let's move on now to some more general methods of collecting latent prints, and look at a few more specific examples of those methods in use. Bear in mind that we're still talking about collecting latents; we'll get on to fingerprinting people (alive or dead) a little later.

There are four main ways of collecting latents:

• Dusting

• Spraying

• Dipping

• Fuming.

Dusting is the most common. You've already looked at dusting with a regular brush and with magnetic powder. In general, magnetic powder is never used on magnetic objects; that is, it is not used on steel, iron, or any other object that has any built-in magnetic property of its own. But that generalization, like most generalizations, is not true in some specific cases. And therein lies a tale. I remember it well. So does the Georgia Supreme Court, to which it was appealed.

How ihe Georgia Supreme Court Ruled Me Expert

A small mom-and-pop grocery store was robbed. I was busy on something else; I didn't get the original call. Detective Howard Yelverton got there soon after the uniform officers did, and because the perp had definitely fled on foot, Howard called for the dogs.

Bear in mind that you must use specially trained dogs to find a scent trail, although bloodhounds are not required. In Albany, Georgia, when we needed dogs we borrowed them from the nearby Lee County Prison Branch. The dogs—actually one dog, a well-trained German shepherd —arrived in a truck. His trainer showed him where the trail had started, and he took off through yards and back alleys. A couple of blocks away, he stopped at a house and began barking lustily—nowhere near a door. In fact, he was standing by a back wall jumping up and down and barking.

The trainer took a look and called Howard, who was following a few paces behind the dog. Howard took a look, reached for his hand radio, and called me.

By the time I arrived, the dogs were gone. But the television cameras were still there, and the television news later showed a picture I could really have done without: me from the back, leaning over, very carefully collecting the shiny bright chrome-plated .38 revolver that the perp—whoever he was—had stopped long enough to drop behind a loose board.

The people in the store said their assailant had been very careful about prints; he'd wiped with his shirttail everything he touched. Evidently he did that with the revolver, too. He very, very carefully wiped off, with his shirttail, every fingerprint he'd left on the revolver until that moment—and then, equally carefully, he took the revolver in his hand, leaned over, and placed it inside the wall behind the loose board—leaving behind probably the best thumbprint I had ever seen in my life. Because of the angle of the sun, Howard saw the print as soon as he saw the gun.

As the detective and the television news team went on after dogs and dog trainer who were on the perp's trail, I rushed into the police station. I had a bit of a problem. Although the print was visible, and gorgeous, I had to get powder on it and lift it before I could begin to search it—that is, to find out whose print it was. And chrome is an extremely hard and glossy surface; powder and brushes, even the finest powder (which isn't fingerprint powder at all, but powdered photocopier toner) and the softest brushes tend to cut prints on chrome.

I had a good print on one side of the revolver. Turning to the other side, I made several test prints of my own thumb and then methodically began to try out different powders and brushes. Lo and behold, the mag powder—which is supposed to be unusable on any magnetic surface—worked beautifully on the chrome-plated steel. Turning the revolver over, I dusted and lifted the print. Then I headed for that collection of 10,000 fingerprint cards and started searching.

I knew that I had a thumb. I knew which hand it was from. I knew the pattern on that thumb. That narrowed the search down to less than 2,000 cards. But just for the heck of it, before I started searching the whole file, I searched the cards that were already on my desk.

And there it was. He'd been arrested for public intoxication less than two weeks before, and I still hadn't finished classifying and filing his card.

By the time dogs and police hauled Leon McCoy out of the house he had holed up in, I had his fingerprint card out with the latent lift paperclipped to it.

Yes, this time I'm using the perp's real name. After the kind of publicity that one got, there wouldn't be much sense in trying to disguise it.

Why the appeal?

The first trial was declared a mistrial. For the second trial, nobody could find the fingerprints and charts. The court thought I had them, and I thought the court had them. (They turned up, years later, in somebody else's file. To this day nobody knows how they got there.) Leon McCoy said: (1) I wasn't a fingerprint expert; (2) it was improper to base a conviction on fingerprints nobody could find; and (3) we were persecuting him because he was a Muslim.

The court ruled: (1) I was a fingerprint expert; (2) although normally the prints had to be produced, this was an unusual situation and the prints had been seen by enough people that the court decided their discussion, without their production, was proper; and (3) nobody but Leon McCoy seemed to care that Leon McCoy was a Muslim. (In fact, the local imam had in effect disowned him, and it was perfectly obvious why. Proper Muslims do not become intoxicated, in or out of a public place, nor do they go about robbing stores and then trying to get away with the crime on the basis of religion. Islam was at that time working very hard to be accepted in Georgia as a proper religion, and Leon McCoy wasn't helping much.)