The murder of Stella Lintemuth

The case was broken open by two fingerprints that had been sitting unidentified in a Michigan State Police file for more than twenty-six years. When Stella Lintemuth was found dead in her Big Rapids bedroom on April 23, 1980, state forensic personnel processed the scene, and latent examiner Jerry Disler recovered two prints from the base of an old porcelain lamp whose cord had been wrapped around the victim. In 1980, those prints were close to useless as a lead. There was no national fingerprint database; a latent print could only be confirmed by comparing it, by eye, against the inked cards of a person already suspected. Big Rapids was a small town unaccustomed to violent homicide, and with no suspect to compare the prints against, investigators were left to theorize about who might have done it. Because a rail line ran behind the Lintemuth home, one prevailing theory held that the killer was a transient who had stepped off a train, committed the crime, and moved on. The murder went cold. Disler eventually retired, roughly sixteen years later, with the case still open. The decisive change came not from the evidence, which never changed, but from the infrastructure built up around it over the following decades. The FBI created and expanded the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a national repository holding the criminal fingerprint records of tens of millions of people, and Michigan crime laboratories gained electronic connectivity to it. In December 2006, Michigan State Police forensic scientist Greg Michaud was reviewing the Lintemuth file and realized that the latent prints had almost certainly never been searched against the national database, for the simple reason that the database had not existed when the prints were lifted. He took the latent image, entered it into the FBI's searching software, and the system returned a candidate. Michaud confirmed the identification: the prints belonged to Scott Elwood Graham. With a name finally attached to the evidence, examiners were able to compare several other latent prints recovered from the scene and tie those to Graham as well, strengthening the link between him and the killing. By the time he was identified, Graham was confined in a psychiatric hospital in California, far from Michigan. The identification turned a hopeless cold case into a prosecutable one. In 2007, the Mecosta County prosecutor initiated charges against Graham for the 1980 murder. The fingerprint evidence also retroactively cleared another man: years earlier, investigators had compared the Lintemuth crime-scene prints against a local suspect named Bailey in connection with a separate Big Rapids killing, and those prints had not matched him. In 2009, Graham went to trial in Big Rapids. The proceeding lasted six days, and the case rested largely on the fingerprint evidence placing him at the scene. The jury deliberated only a few hours before convicting him of first-degree premeditated murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison. The solve was recognized by the FBI as its 2007 Latent Hit of the Year, the annual award given for an IAFIS identification that leads to the resolution of a major violent crime.