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.
10 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.
Freddie Farah
Freddie Farah, a 34-year-old grocery-store owner, was shot and killed on May 22, 1974 during an attempted robbery of his Grand Park Food Store on Kings Road in Jacksonville, Florida. The teenaged gunman fled, leaving behind grocery items he had carried to the counter. Investigators lifted finger and palm prints from those items but could not match them, and the case went cold for more than four decades. After the prints failed again when entered into a federal database in 1998, Jacksonville cold-case detectives resubmitted them in December 2016, when improved Automated Fingerprint Identification System technology returned a hit on Johnie Lewis Miller. Miller, by then a New Orleans street performer known as Uncle Louie, was arrested in May 2017 and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on April 25, 2018.
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.
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.
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.