I was fingerprinting items of evidence on the dining room table when the victim screamed in terror from the master bedroom down the hall.
I was CSI supervisor at @PlanoPoliceDepartment when I answered a burglary call late one night in west Plano. A burglar alarm had gone off and the patrol officer answering the call found the front door open, its frame shattered. The officer had quickly searched the house and found it ransacked, but with nobody inside. He called for CID and CSI. It was my night on call.
The burglary itself was nothing unusual – drawers dumped, one pillowcase missing from a pillow on a bed, every room in the house bearing some sign of disturbance by the intruder. The burglar had made a swift transit through the house, apparently grabbing only things of value that would fit in one pillowcase so he could make a quick escape before the police arrived.
It was in the mid-1980s, and superglue fuming had not yet come into wide use. We did not have a viable fuming chamber and still did most of our processing with powder at the scenes. I was always careful not to add to the victim’s trauma by making a mess with fingerprint powder. At this scene, there was a large dining room table with nothing on it. I located a stack of old newspapers and covered the tabletop, then began powdering items of evidence there so I could confine the mess to a minimum area.
I had just got started when the residents returned from an evening out to find a patrol officer standing guard at the front door, the burglary detective busy taking notes, and me fingerprinting a jewelry box and other assorted items on the dining room table.
The husband became irate and started asking questions, demanding to know what had happened, what we were doing, and why we hadn’t caught the burglar yet. The wife looked around, became frantic. and ran down the hall to the master bedroom. No sooner was she out of sight than her scream pierced the night.
The burglar had laid out an assortment of a dozen or more dildoes in a row on the bed. With that assortment of implements was a stack of polaroid photographs of the lady of the house in the act of using each one. I was not eager to fingerprint those devices, although the glossy film of the polaroids would be a good surface to use magnetic powder on once I had finished with the items I already had on the table.
As it turned out, I never got to examine those polaroids for fingerprints. The lady was in great haste to return her toys and photographs to whatever place she kept them. I decided discretion was the better part of valor and contented myself with fingerprinting a couple of dozen other items that the husband indicated might have been handled.
That was not the only crime scene I worked at which burglars had found and handled items of that nature, but it was one of the more amusing for the reaction of the embarrassed lady of the house whose secrets had been laid bare by a burglar and left for the cops to see before she got home. I expect she found a better hiding place for her toys after that.