Who the hell has time to do a thorough and complete job at a crime scene?
We all work at agencies with limited resources – too few people, lacking the latest technology, without sufficient supplies. But most of us struggle anyway to do the best we can with what we have.
Leicester and Kay Sherrill, both 82, were found brutally murdered in their home on September 3, 1989. I worked in the state crime lab. The local sheriff’s office asked me to examine the scene in the far northeast corner of the county. A burglar had beat Kay Sherrill to death in her wheelchair with the butt of a handgun so forcefully that the wooden grips of the weapon had splintered. He had pummeled Leicester to the floor and, as he lay there prostrate, drove the leg of a chair down through the old man’s eye into his brain. Then he showered to wash off the blood and dressed in the Leicester’s clothes before he left the house.
Letting my other work pile up, I spent several days processing that scene. I felt that my obligation to the victims, who I’d never met, demanded no less of me. I fingerprinted literally everything I could think of that the killer might have touched. I had hundreds of lifts by the time I was through.
The investigators brainstormed for suspects. The first list of names they sent me included all the violent criminals in the county. No idents.
The second list contained all the known or suspected burglars in the east part of the county where the murders had occurred. Again, no idents. By then, I had compared scores of subjects to the hundreds of latents.
The third list was a Hail Mary pass. It was a page of random names of all the unlikely people who had popped into any investigator’s mind in a wild brainstorming session.
John Patrick Eastlack was on that list. He was a non-violent check forger who had escaped from a minimum-security prison in another part of the county some weeks earlier. I identified latent prints to him from the middle part of a closet door in the hallway, the door frame leading into the bedroom where Kay’s body was found, from a telephone ripped out of the wall in one of the bedrooms, from the handgun used to beat Kay to death, and from a jug of ice water at the back of the top shelf in the refrigerator.
Yes, I had even gone so far as to process the contents of the refrigerator for latent prints. And all the trash. And any item that might have been picked up by a curious burglar in every room of the house. And everything in the locked double garage that might have been touched, including the outsides of both cars.
I have worked as a latent print examiner in other agencies where I considered myself lucky if a crime scene technician had even submitted a dozen lifts from a scene like the Sherrills’. It is easy to fall into the rut of doing a superficial job because we are fighting backlog and we have other calls waiting. But we owe it to the victims to do better.