30-Year-Old Murder Solved

A cold case is just that- an investigation of a crime, usually a violent one, where all leads have been exhausted and the trail has gone cold. But in recent years, the use of various technologies has begun heating up many of these cold cases, uncovering new leads for investigators and providing justice for victims. 

One immediate technology example that comes to mind is automated fingerprint searching- more precisely, searches of latent prints of violent unknown perpetrators left at crime scenes. The FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), which houses known records for approximately 73 million criminal subjects, is used daily by local, state, tribal, and international law enforcement for current cases, but increasingly for help in solving cold cases as well. And once a year, the Bureau's Criminal Justice Information Services Division recognizes an outstanding major case solved with help from IAFIS. 

 incremental replacement of today's IAFIS, will specifically focus on the latent user community next March when a National Palmprint System (NPPS) is scheduled to be established. The NPPS will create a centralized repository of known palmprints within the FBI's database, allowing searches of unknown palmprints against the repository... as well as searches of known palmprints against the Unsolved Latent File. Both types of searches will enhance law enforcement's ability to identify criminal and terrorist suspects.

In 2012, Latent Hit of the Year Award was presented last month to two employees of the Omaha Police Department- Detective Douglas Herout and Senior Crime Laboratory Technician Laura Casey- for their efforts to identify the man responsible for a brutal murder more than 30 years ago. 

The Crime: In 1978, 61-year-old Carroll Bonnet was stabbed to death in his apartment. Police collected evidence, including latent fingerprints and palmprints from the victim's bathroom (officers believed the killer was trying to wash off blood and other evidence before leaving the apartment). The victim's car was stolen. 

The Investigation: The car was found in Illinois, but after collecting additional latent prints, investigators couldn't develop any new leads. The crime scene evidence was processed, and latent prints recovered from the scene and the car were searched against local and state fingerprint files. Investigators also sent fingerprint requests to agencies outside of Nebraska, but no matches were returned and the case soon went cold. 

The Re-Investigation: In late 2008, the Omaha Police Department received an inquiry on the case, prompting technician Laura Casey to research the prints against IAFIS (which didn't exist in 1978). In less than five hours, IAFIS returned possible candidates for comparison purposes. Casey spent days carefully examining the prints and came up with a positive identification- Jerry Watson, who was serving time in an Illinois prison on burglary charges.