In the 1970s, we could not envision today’s technology. The dawn came in the 1980s and 1990s.
It was mid-winter in the early 1990s. A college coed picked up a hitchhiker in Phoenix late one afternoon. No sooner was the car rolling than the hitchhiker produced a knife and poked it into the girl’s side. He told her to drive east on I-10.
Some 200 miles later, the kidnapper told his victim to exit the highway and take a farm road into the desert. Away from the highway, he got her out of the car, raped her, beat her unconscious, and left her for dead.
Taking her car, he drove back to I-10 and again went east. The car ran out of gas around Willcox. He abandoned it and hitchhiked from there.
By the time the victim regained consciousness, it was after midnight. Seeing lights from a ranch house, she made her way there for help.
The next day, the car was recovered and brought to the @ArizonaDepartmentofPublicSafety Crime Lab in Tucson, where I was the Latent Print Examiner. We did not have a processing bay, but used a place in the mechanics’ area. Fuming an entire car was not practical there so we were still just powdering and lifting prints.
I processed the vehicle in the traditional way, but only developed one decent latent print. It was on the slider mechanism located beneath the driver’s seat.
Arizona did not yet have an Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), but I reasoned that if the attacker was headed east, maybe he had come from the west. California was known for its AFIS, so I called a friend with California DOJ. He agreed to search the latent through their system. I mailed him a 4”x5” photograph of the lift taken on our MP-4 with CPO, my favorite high contrast black and white film.
My friend phoned me as soon as he had received the photograph and searched it. He had a hit. I gave the information to our DPS investigator, who got an arrest warrant and entered it into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC).
A couple of days later, a deputy sheriff in East Texas stopped a hitchhiker and checked him through NCIC. He arrested the rapist, who was extradited to Arizona where he stood trial, was convicted, and given a lengthy sentence for his crime.
The victim recovered physically, but to the best of my knowledge the psychological trauma never left her.
Sophisticated processing techniques, IAFIS, and electronic recording and transfer of images today make that case from over 30 years ago seem primitive by comparison. But for the time, it was amazing to find a latent print in Arizona, get it identified in California, and have the rapist arrested in Texas – all within one week!