The murder of Marshall Adams
San Bernardino, San Bernardino County, California · 1999
Overview
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.
How it was solved
The Marshall Adams case was solved by a single latent fingerprint that meant nothing for nearly two years and then identified his killer in a matter of days once it was finally searched against the right database. When San Bernardino police responded to a report of an unresponsive man on the floor of a downtown jewelry store on December 2, 1999, they found 74-year-old Marshall Adams beaten and stabbed to death, with his wallet and several pieces of jewelry taken from the display cases. The crime scene was worked carefully. San Bernardino police detective John Munoz headed the investigation, and identification technicians from the Scientific Investigations Division of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, among them Randy Beasley, collected latent fingerprints and palmprints along with blood evidence from a knife, the store's doors, and a jewelry catalog. Beasley also located a bloody palmprint on the victim's face. The physical evidence was abundant, but it pointed nowhere: when the prints were compared against the records available locally, there was no match, and the murder went cold. The breakthrough came not from a new lead but from a new reach. In September 2001 the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department linked up electronically with the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, the national database, through the California Department of Justice. To test the connection, the department selected a latent print from an unsolved case, the print lifted from the jewelry catalog at the Adams scene, and submitted it. IAFIS returned a short list of candidates. Supervising fingerprint examiner James Nursall compared the latent print against the candidates and concluded that it matched one of them, a man named Jad Salem. The national database also explained why the print had never surfaced in California: Salem had been arrested in Texas about two weeks after Marshall Adams was murdered, and it was that out-of-state arrest that had placed his fingerprints into the federal system in the first place. A print left in a San Bernardino jewelry store had been matched to a man whose prints were taken halfway across the country, something no local search could ever have accomplished. Faced with the fingerprint identification, Jad Salem pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 32 years in prison. In 2013 the FBI honored the investigators and examiners with its annual Latent Hit of the Year Award, the recognition it reserves for cases in which a search of the national fingerprint database produces an identification that leads to the resolution of a major violent crime. The solve rested entirely on fingerprint evidence and the expansion of fingerprint searching from local files to a national database; no DNA or genetic-genealogy analysis was involved in identifying the killer.
Sources
- 2013 Latent Hit of the Year Award
“On December 2, 1999, the San Bernardino Police Department responded to a call regarding an unresponsive male on the floor of a jewelry store; the victim was 74-year-old Marshall Adams, who had worked about 25 years as a teacher before opening his own store. In September 2001 the sheriff's department joined IAFIS and submitted a latent print from a jewelry catalog; supervising fingerprint examiner James Nursall concluded it matched Jad Salem, who had been arrested in Texas two weeks after the murder. Salem pled guilty and was sentenced to 32 years in prison.”
- Latent Hit of the Year 2013
“The FBI's 2013 Latent Hit of the Year recognized the San Bernardino jewelry-store murder case, solved when a latent print from the crime scene was matched through the FBI's national IAFIS database to the man responsible.”
- FBI 2013 Latent Hit of the Year (San Bernardino jeweler murder)
“Identification technicians, including Randy Beasley, collected latent fingerprints, palmprints, and blood evidence from a knife, doors, and a store catalog; Beasley also discovered a bloody palmprint on the victim's face. In September 2001 the department linked to IAFIS through the California Department of Justice and, to test the system, submitted a latent print from the 1999 murder, which returned the match leading to a guilty plea.”
- 2013 Latent Hit of the Year
“The 2013 Latent Hit of the Year Award was presented for the identification, through the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, of the man responsible for the 1999 murder of San Bernardino jeweler Marshall Adams; the latent print had been recovered from a jewelry catalog at the scene.”
- FBI Latent Hit of the Year Program
“The Latent Hit of the Year is awarded annually to an examiner or officer who solved a major violent crime through a search of the FBI's national fingerprint database; the program highlights cold cases identified when latent prints are matched against IAFIS.”
- Latent Hit of the Year
“The FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System houses the criminal records of tens of millions of subjects and is increasingly used to solve cold cases by matching crime-scene latent prints to records entered from arrests elsewhere in the country.”