The murder of Richard Finney

There was no witness and no confession; the case was solved with evidence that had been kept for decades. Detectives in 1986 collected knives, fingerprints and blood from Richard Finney's apartment, and, according to the lieutenant who led the scene work, photographed a bloody handprint on a wall and cut it out of the drywall for possible future identification. They could identify no suspect. In 2007 Escondido police cold-case investigators Chuck Gaylor and Norman Wight reopened the file, and newer testing of the blood produced the DNA profile of a potential suspect. Compared with known profiles in a national database, it matched no one. The break came in 2016, when Cassaundra Barnes, a forensic fingerprint expert for the Escondido Police Department, re-photographed a fingerprint from the apartment with newer equipment and submitted it for a match. Police said the higher-quality print, together with advances in fingerprint comparison databases, led investigators to Nathan Eugene Mathis. Prosecutors later said that after Mathis submitted his fingerprints for a security guard job application, investigators were able to match his prints to those left at the scene, and that a bloody handprint and a fingerprint on the knob of a sink tied him to the apartment. Police also said they compared his DNA with the genetic material collected in 1986, and one report lists that comparison alongside the print as part of how he was identified as a suspect. The 2007 DNA profile, however, had matched no one in the national database, and the other reports credit the fingerprint alone. He was arrested at his home in Ontario on April 18, 2018, after police obtained a search warrant. He pleaded not guilty, then, in May 2022, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Reports differ on some details, such as how many times Finney was stabbed and how many knives were used, and police have never stated a motive.