The murder of Rodney Wyman

The case against Shawn Marsh was built almost entirely on a single latent fingerprint that had been recovered in 1983 but could not be matched to anyone for twenty-seven years. When Rodney Wyman was shot to death at the Town Line Motor Inn in Malden on August 22, 1983, crime-scene examiners recovered more than twenty latent prints from the motel suite, including prints lifted from the underside of the television set that the intruder had tried to steal. Other prints from the room were determined to be unusable or to belong to the victims and motel staff. The prints were searched against the Massachusetts Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which was relatively new at the time, and produced no result. Without a suspect, the case eventually went cold. A critical detail of the original processing would matter decades later. In 1983, examiners commonly regarded the friction ridges of the right and left little fingers as being of limited value, and to conserve resources it was standard practice to exclude little-finger prints from the AFIS repository. The latent print from the underside of the television in the Wyman case had been left by a left little finger, a print that the database conventions of the era effectively set aside. The breakthrough came through a deliberate cold-case effort rather than a chance development. In October 2010, the Massachusetts State Police asked that the latent evidence from the Wyman homicide be reassessed, and the work was assigned to Trooper Christopher Dolan, a latent print examiner. Dolan reviewed the large volume of paperwork and physical evidence that had been processed twenty-seven years earlier. On November 9, 2010, he searched two latent images collected from the television set against the state AFIS, again with negative results. Dolan then prepared the same latent images for a search of the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, IAFIS, the national database that had not existed in usable form when the crime occurred. In less than ten minutes, IAFIS returned a response containing possible candidates for comparison. Dolan examined the latent evidence against the candidates and positively identified the print to the first candidate in the IAFIS response, a Massachusetts man named Shawn Marsh. With a suspect now identified, Dolan was able to match additional fingerprints from the scene to Marsh as well. The identification was made possible by the very category of print that 1983 practice had discounted: the friction ridge of a left little finger. The Middlesex District Attorney's office had begun systematically reviewing unsolved cases by running crime-scene fingerprints against modern forensic databases that had been unavailable in 1983, and the Wyman match was a product of that program. Marsh, then 46 and living in Holyoke, Massachusetts, was arrested in September 2011. A Middlesex County grand jury indicted him for murder on September 9, 2011, and a trial was scheduled for early 2013. The prosecution did not reach a jury verdict. On April 25, 2013, Marsh pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 15 to 18 years in prison. The IAFIS identification was later recognized as the FBI's 2014 Latent Hit of the Year. No DNA evidence was reported in connection with solving the case; the identification of Shawn Marsh rested on the latent fingerprint evidence developed at the 1983 scene and matched through IAFIS in 2010.