Cases solved by fingerprint (afis)
A latent fingerprint — finally matched years later through the AFIS/IAFIS database or tied to a named suspect — solved these cases.
16 documented cases.
Berit Beck
Berit Beck, an 18-year-old from Sturtevant, Wisconsin, vanished on July 17, 1990, while driving to a computer seminar in Appleton. Her van was found abandoned two days later in a Kmart parking lot in Fond du Lac, and her body was discovered about a month afterward in a ditch near Waupun; she had been suffocated and strangled. The case stayed cold for nearly 25 years until a 2014 re-analysis of evidence from the van matched fingerprints to Dennis Brantner, a Kenosha trucker. After a 2016 trial ended in a hung jury, Brantner entered an Alford plea in 2018 to second-degree reckless homicide and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Carla Lowe
Carla Lowe, a 21-year-old woman, was beaten to death and run over by a car on November 13, 1983, near the Amtrak train station in Delray Beach, Florida, where she had been waiting for a train she never boarded. Ralph Williams was arrested that same day on unrelated grand theft auto and burglary charges and was long viewed as a person of interest, but for nearly four decades investigators lacked the physical evidence to connect him to the killing. After the Delray Beach Police Department created a dedicated cold case unit in January 2021, Detective Todd Clancy reopened the file and sent crime-scene evidence that had sat in police storage since 1983 to the United Kingdom forensic firm Foster + Freeman, whose RECOVER chemical vapor-fuming process was able to develop a latent fingerprint that traditional methods could not. The recovered print was identified as Ralph Williams. A Palm Beach County grand jury indicted Williams for first-degree murder on November 30, 2021, and he was arrested in Jacksonville. On November 15, 2022, Williams accepted a plea agreement, pleading guilty to the reduced charge of first-degree manslaughter with a weapon; Judge Cymonie Rowe sentenced him to one year in jail and ten years of probation, and with credit for time served he was released the same day. The outcome left Carla Lowe's family bitterly disappointed even as it brought the only criminal conviction ever obtained in her death.
Carol Bishop
Carol Bishop, a 50-year-old convenience-store worker who lived alone in Las Vegas, Nevada, was found beaten and stabbed to death in her home at 980 Westminster Avenue on November 15, 1991, after she failed to show up for work. Investigators lifted fingerprints from a bottle of peppermint schnapps and a shot glass left in her kitchen, but in 1991 the prints matched no one, and the case went cold for more than two decades. In 2012, as part of a grant-funded cold-case initiative, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police detectives re-submitted the old latent prints to the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). The database returned a name that had never come up in the original investigation: Dale Bryant, who by then was already serving a life sentence in Arkansas for stabbing another woman to death in 1992. It was the fingerprint hit, not DNA, that named the killer. Bryant later admitted to the killing, pleaded guilty, and in August 2017, 26 years after the crime, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Concetta 'Penney' Serra
Concetta 'Penney' Serra, a 21-year-old dental assistant, was chased through the Temple Street parking garage in downtown New Haven, Connecticut, and stabbed once in the chest on July 16, 1973. The case became one of Connecticut's most notorious unsolved murders, including the wrongful 1984 arrest of an innocent man, before forensic advances finally identified the killer. A bloody fingerprint left on a tissue box in the victim's car was matched in 1997 to Edward R. Grant, a Waterbury auto-body worker, and DNA from a bloodstained handkerchief at the scene confirmed the link. Grant was arrested in 1999 and convicted of murder on May 28, 2002, nearly 29 years after the crime.
Diane Maxwell
Diane Maxwell, a 25-year-old Southwestern Bell telephone operator and single mother, was abducted on December 14, 1969, as she arrived for work in Houston, Texas. She was forced into a nearby shack, raped, strangled, and stabbed to death; her killer fled in her Ford Mustang, which was abandoned about a mile away with the keys still in the ignition. Houston police lifted several latent fingerprints from the car but never matched them, and the case went cold for more than three decades. The victim's brother, David Maxwell, who became a Texas Ranger, pushed for the file to be reopened. On July 23, 2003, Texas Department of Public Safety latent print technician Jill Kinkade submitted the prints to the FBI's national IAFIS database; within five hours the system returned 20 candidates, and Kinkade identified the number-one candidate, James Ray Davis, a career criminal who had been released from prison just days before the murder. Confronted with the fingerprint evidence and crime-scene photographs, Davis confessed; DNA testing later confirmed he had also raped her. He was convicted of murder with malice and sentenced to life in prison on November 24, 2003, and died behind bars on June 14, 2007. The FBI later honored the investigators with its 2011 Latent Hit of the Year Award.
Everett Delano
On the morning of September 1, 1966, Everett Delano, a 49-year-old retired Navy veteran who worked part time at Sanborn's Garage on Route 4 in Andover, New Hampshire, was found shot in the garage office. He died the next day at Mary Hitchcock Hospital. Money was missing from the cash drawer, and a bathroom sink faucet had been left running. Investigators lifted fingerprints from the sink and sent photographs of them to the FBI, but the case stalled and no one was charged. The prints were never entered into the FBI's Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which was not fully operational in 1966. New Hampshire's Cold Case Unit, formed in 2009, reopened the case in 2013 after Delano's daughter contacted it. When the prints were finally run, they matched Thomas Cass, then 67, of Orleans, Vermont, who had been 20 at the time of the killing. Investigators visited Cass in the fall of 2013, when he denied knowing anything about the case, and again in February 2014, when they told him that forensic evidence linked him to it. Four days later, on February 24, 2014, he died by suicide. On February 20, 2019, the attorney general announced that the evidence established beyond a reasonable doubt that Cass shot Delano during a robbery. Because Cass was dead, no charges were brought, and no court ever heard the case.
Freddie Farah
Freddie Farah, 34, was shot in the head on May 22, 1974 while working the counter of the Grand Park Food Store, the grocery he owned on Kings Road in Jacksonville, Florida. A teenage gunman had carried a box of cake mix, a can of frosting and a soda to the counter, announced a hold-up and fired once when Farah moved, then ran without taking anything. Technicians lifted fingerprints from the cake mix and frosting and a partial palm print from the soda can, but nobody on file matched them, and a 1998 search of the federal fingerprint database found nothing either. In December 2016 the sheriff's cold-case detectives resubmitted the prints through the upgraded system and got a hit on Johnie Lewis Miller, who had been 17 in 1974 and had since become the New Orleans French Quarter human statue known as Uncle Louie. The fourteen-year-old customer who had watched the shooting was found, aged 57, and identified the sequence of events. Miller was arrested in the French Quarter on May 16, 2017. When the witness died suddenly in December 2017, a month before her deposition, prosecutors offered a plea in exchange for a face-to-face meeting with Farah's family. Miller pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on April 25, 2018, was sentenced to the 344 days he had served, and returned to New Orleans.
Jeanette Ralston
Jeanette Ralston, 24, of San Mateo, California, was last seen leaving the Lion's Den Bar in San Jose with an unknown man just before midnight on January 31, 1977. She told friends she would be back in ten minutes. The next day, February 1, her body was found wedged in the back seat of her Volkswagen Beetle in the carport area of an apartment complex near the bar. Prosecutors said she had been strangled with a long-sleeve dress shirt and that the evidence showed she had been sexually assaulted; someone had also tried and failed to set the car on fire. Police interviewed her friends and other witnesses and made a suspect sketch, but no suspect was identified and the case went cold for nearly half a century. Prosecutors said a latent fingerprint on a cigarette pack in her car could not at first be identified through an FBI database. After the FBI upgraded its fingerprint search algorithm, the Santa Clara County District Attorney's cold case prosecutors ran the prints again in 2024 and, in August, matched them to Willie Eugene Sims, who in 1977 was an Army private at Fort Ord. Investigators then collected his DNA in Ohio, and prosecutors said it matched DNA on Ralston's fingernails and on the shirt used to strangle her. Sims, 69, was charged with murder in May 2025. He is presumed innocent; as of the latest reports found, from May 2025, he had not entered a plea.
Marshall Adams
Marshall Adams, a 74-year-old jeweler who had spent about 25 years as a schoolteacher before opening his own jewelry store in San Bernardino, California, was found beaten and stabbed to death on the floor of his store on December 2, 1999. His wallet and several pieces of display-case jewelry were missing. San Bernardino police, assisted by the Scientific Investigations Division of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, collected latent fingerprints, palmprints, and blood from a knife, the doors, and a store catalog; an identification technician also found a bloody palmprint on the victim's face. With no suspect in local files, the case went cold. In September 2001 the sheriff's department linked electronically to the FBI's national fingerprint database, IAFIS, through the California Department of Justice, and as a test of the new system it submitted a latent print recovered from the jewelry catalog at the Adams scene. IAFIS returned a list of candidates, and supervising fingerprint examiner James Nursall identified the print as belonging to Jad Salem, a man who had been arrested in Texas roughly two weeks after Adams was killed, which is how his prints had entered the national system. Confronted with the evidence, Salem pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 32 years in prison. The FBI later recognized the work with its 2013 Latent Hit of the Year Award.
Milton Curtis and Richard Phillips
In the early hours of July 22, 1957, El Segundo, California police officers Milton Curtis, 25, and Richard Phillips, 28, were shot to death during a routine traffic stop after pulling over a stolen 1949 Ford that had run a red light. The gunman had spent the previous hours robbing and terrorizing four teenagers at a Hawthorne lovers' lane and raping a teenage girl. He fled wounded, abandoned the stolen car, and vanished, leaving the double murder of two officers unsolved for 45 years. The case broke in September 2002 when latent thumbprints lifted from the stolen car's steering wheel in 1957 were searched through the FBI's national IAFIS database and matched a 1956 South Carolina burglary arrest card belonging to Gerald Fiten Mason, by then a prosperous retiree in Columbia, South Carolina. Mason pleaded guilty to both murders in 2003 and was sentenced to two consecutive life terms; he died in prison in 2017.
Priscilla Strole
Priscilla Lee Strole, 40, lived with her 15-year-old son on Buchanan Street in Fairfield, California, where she sold dinnerware to friends and neighbours. On the evening of August 31, 1983, her son went out with a friend; she asked him to be home before ten. He came back at about 9:45 p.m., got no answer at the door, looked through a window and saw his mother on the living-room floor. She had been sexually assaulted and beaten to death with objects from her own kitchen. The house had been ransacked, a jewelry box was gone, and there was no sign of forced entry, so police believed she had let her killer in. Fingerprints and semen were collected, but when the prints were run through the state's automated fingerprint system on September 27, 1983, nothing matched, and the case went cold. Fairfield cold-case detectives began reworking it in 2012. In January 2014 they sent the prints to the Solano County latent-print bureau, and on January 28 the prints matched Robert Hathaway, a Fairfield man of 48 who had been 17 in 1983, a school friend of the victim's son who had visited the house. His prints were on file only because of a burglary arrest in December 1986. Detectives served a court-ordered warrant for his DNA on February 11, 2014; he denied any involvement. Four days later he hanged himself at home, leaving a note to his wife that said he had taken the coward's way out. The state crime lab matched his DNA to the semen from the scene, and the case was officially closed on February 20, 2014. Police said he acted alone, and that the family would never know why.
Richard Finney
Richard Finney, 75, a retiree who lived alone in an apartment on East Mission Avenue in Escondido, California, was found stabbed to death on the morning of November 13, 1986. Money, jewelry and other items had been taken. Detectives collected knives, fingerprints and blood, including a bloody handprint on a wall, but could identify no suspect, and the case went cold. Escondido police cold-case investigators reopened it in 2007, when newer testing of the blood produced a DNA profile that matched no one in a national database. In 2016 an Escondido police fingerprint expert, Cassaundra Barnes, re-photographed a fingerprint from the apartment with newer equipment and submitted it for a match. Police said the higher-quality print and advances in fingerprint comparison databases led them to Nathan Eugene Mathis, a retired security guard from Ontario, California, who had lived in northern San Diego County at the time of the killing. Prosecutors said his prints, submitted with a security guard job application, matched prints left at the scene. He was arrested on April 18, 2018, at 62, and pleaded not guilty. On May 23, 2022, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and on July 22, 2022, he was sentenced to 15 years to life. Police and prosecutors have not said why Finney was killed or whether the two men knew each other.
Rodney Castlin
Rodney Castlin, 36, a married father working nights as manager of the Wingate Inn in Kennesaw, Georgia, was shot once in the chest on December 7, 2000, when two men robbed the new hotel of $304. His wife was eight months pregnant. Investigators lifted a fingerprint from the front counter, but it was run through Georgia's database in 2000, 2005 and 2009 without a match, and the case went cold. In 2012 a search of the FBI's national fingerprint database returned the name James Lorenzo Randolph, a South Carolina man who had been arrested there for a similar robbery within weeks of the Georgia killing. That same year a Cobb County detective, John Dawes, learned through a Florida detective that a federal prisoner claimed to know about a hotel shooting north of Atlanta. In September 2014, after Georgia granted him immunity, that man, who said he had driven the getaway car, gave a statement naming Randolph as the shooter. U.S. Marshals arrested Randolph in Columbia, South Carolina, on October 6, 2014. A Cobb County jury convicted him on all counts on March 21, 2016, and on April 26, 2016 he was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences plus 35 years. The Supreme Court of Georgia upheld the convictions in August 2023.
Rodney Wyman
Rodney C. Wyman, a 29-year-old window installer from Simsbury, Connecticut, was shot and killed during an armed robbery at the Town Line Motor Inn in Malden, Massachusetts, late on the night of August 22, 1983. Wyman and a co-worker had traveled from Connecticut to install windows at a local job and were staying at the motel; an armed man entered through a back window of their suite and, in the course of the robbery, shot Wyman once in the chest, the bullet piercing his heart, aorta and kidney. The intruder also confronted Wyman's co-worker, demanded money, and tried to take a television set before fleeing when a tamper alarm sounded and motel staff responded. Investigators lifted more than twenty latent prints from the scene, including prints from the underside of the television, but a 1980s search of the Massachusetts Automated Fingerprint Identification System produced no match and the case went cold for nearly three decades. In an October 2010 cold-case review, Massachusetts State Police latent print examiner Trooper Christopher Dolan reassessed the evidence. On November 9, 2010, after a negative state AFIS search, Dolan submitted two latent images from the television to the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS); within about ten minutes the system returned candidates, and Dolan positively identified the print, which came from a left little finger, as belonging to Shawn Marsh, then 46, of Holyoke, Massachusetts. A Middlesex County grand jury indicted Marsh for murder on September 9, 2011, and he was arrested. On April 25, 2013, Marsh pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 15 to 18 years in prison. The IAFIS match was later honored as the FBI's 2014 Latent Hit of the Year.
Sondra Better
Sondra Better, 68, of Highland Beach, Florida, was working alone on the afternoon of August 24, 1998 at Lu Shay's Consignment Shop on South Federal Highway in Delray Beach when a man came in and killed her. It was her last week at a part-time job; she and her husband Seymour, known as Zeke, were about to travel to New York to renew their wedding vows. Police said the killer left a trail of blood from her body to the cash register and out to the sidewalk, and fingerprints on a decorative marble ball. The prints were put into a national fingerprint database at the time and produced no match for two decades, and DNA samples from 36 men also failed to match. In December 2018 or January 2019 (reports differ), Todd Barket of Brandon, Florida, then living near Tampa, gave his fingerprints for a nursing-assistant background check. The prints matched the ones on the ball. FDLE agents and Delray Beach detectives surveilled him, obtained his DNA, and the Palm Beach County Sheriff's crime lab matched it to blood from the shop. Barket was arrested at his home on March 27, 2019. At trial in August 2019 he admitted his prints and blood were in the store but denied the killing. A jury deliberated less than 90 minutes on August 23, 2019 and convicted him of first-degree murder and robbery with a weapon, and he was sentenced to life in prison.
Stella Lintemuth
Stella Lintemuth, an 89-year-old widow living alone in Big Rapids, Michigan, was found murdered in her bedroom on April 23, 1980, just days before her 90th birthday. She had been attacked in her home, and an electrical cord from a porcelain lamp was wrapped around her neck and face. Michigan State Police latent examiner Jerry Disler recovered two fingerprints from the base of the lamp, but in 1980 the only way to identify a print was to compare it by hand against a known suspect, and there was no suspect. The case went cold for more than a quarter century, with local theories pointing to a transient who might have come and gone on the rail line that ran behind the house. In December 2006, Michigan State Police forensic scientist Greg Michaud realized the old latent prints had never been run through the FBI's national fingerprint database, which had not existed in 1980. He entered the print into the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System and got a hit: Scott Elwood Graham, a man who by then was confined in a psychiatric hospital in California. With Graham identified, examiners matched several additional latent prints from the scene to him. The Mecosta County prosecutor charged Graham in 2007, and in 2009 a jury convicted him of first-degree premeditated murder after a six-day trial; he was sentenced to life in prison. The work earned the FBI's 2007 Latent Hit of the Year recognition.