“That new medical examiner in Collin County is sending post-mortem prints that are impossible to use,” the manager at the state criminal history repository told me. “I’ve tried to talk to him, but he is oblivious to suggestion. I’ve got to be careful of my politics there. Can you help me?”
The state criminal history manager was a personal friend. This occurred about 40 years ago when Henry Classification required all ten fingerprint patterns to be recorded clearly.
“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll talk to his investigators. They take the postmortems. I will tell them I need practice taking postmortems and ask them to call me when they have some bodies to fingerprint. Then when I’m printing them, I’ll explain what I’m doing.”
“That’s perfect,” he replied.
So I called the ME’s office and asked one of the investigators if I could come fingerprint some of their corpses for practice. “Sure,” came the answer, “we’ll call you.”
Weeks went by, then a month. No call. So I phoned back to repeat my request. And again in a couple more months. They never called back, although I knew plenty of bodies were passing through the morgue.
I called the state criminal history manager and told him of the lack of response I was getting. Meanwhile, he was still getting worthless post-mortems.
Finally one day, I got a call from one of the ME investigators. They had a corpse for me. I grabbed my inked print kit and hurried to their office. The body they had for me was an old guy who must have been close to 100 and had been paralyzed for years. His hands were clenched in a tight arthritic grasp. When I managed to pull his fingers apart, his hands were full of smelly “hand cheese” (a huge clump of dead skin cells congealed in a damp mass).
I carefully cleaned his hands, all the while explaining to the two ME investigators who were watching what I was doing. They gratefully accepted the finished product for their records and to send in to the state.
Back at the ID office later that day, a patrolman stopped in to see me.
“I wanted to talk to you about that dead guy you fingerprinted today,” he began. “I was there at the old guy’s house when those two morons from the ME’s office arrived. They were complaining of the smell and how hard the old guy was going to be to fingerprint. Then one of them said, “Hey! Wertheim has been bugging us to print a dead guy. Let’s call him and let him handle this one.” And then they laughed at the fast one they were pulling on me.
I thanked the officer for letting me know, then I called the state criminal history manager and let him know what had transpired. That was the end of cooperation between my ID unit and the ME’s office for as long as I remained at Plano Police Department. To the best of my knowledge, the state files never received legible postmortems as long as that ME held the office.