The latent palmprints were beautiful – a thousand points or more on each. Crystal clear. No smudging. All ten latent fingerprints were there, too, in order. In the days before AFIS, that was a miracle occurrence that would allow searching the Henry Classification files.
The crime was burglary of a business, some offbeat store in the middle of a long strip mall. The burglar alarm had gone off after midnight and I was the CSI on call. The responding officer was standing by in front of the business. His backup was guarding the back door. The K-9 handler and his dog were on their way.
The burglar had kicked in the lower plate glass windowpane below a big picture window next to the front door and crawled in across the plate glass now laying on the floor inside the business. Just shining my flashlight across the surface of the glass, I could see gorgeous latent prints. I decided to dust them and take my lifts immediately. To wait for the K-9 to search the building might mean having the latent prints damaged or even destroyed.
I got down on my hands and knees and reached through the opening to dust the fragments of glass pane lying just inside the business. Very carefully, I overlapped the tape so that I could lift the entire palm and fingers of each hand as whole units. I then carefully put the lifts onto sheets of copy paper and avoided wrinkling the tape. The result was that I had several lifts of each palm with the fingers of the respective hands as unified lifts. Amazed at my good fortune, I took my lifts back to my car to admire my handiwork.
But something about the latents screamed, “Too good to be true.” So on a hunch, I went to the patrol officer who was standing watch by the front door and asked him if he had conducted a building search. “No,” he said. “We secured the building and we’re waiting for the K-9.”
“Let me see your hands,” I said. I quickly determined that his finger and palm patterns were the same as the patterns I had just lifted. So I accused him, saying, “Those are your handprints crawling into the building across the broken glass pane.”
“Oh, uh, well, yeah, I remember now. I did crawl in to do a quick search,” he admitted.
“Where all did you search,” I demanded. “In the back? The storeroom? The bathroom?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess so,” he remembered.
I haven’t kept count, but I bet I’ve seen that a hundred times or more in my career. I develop beautiful latent prints on evidence, once even on the trigger of a murder weapon, only to later identify the prints to officers on the scene who deny touching anything (in the case of the murder weapon, the whole shift passed it around at debriefing, taking turns dry firing the weapon at the clock on the wall).
I don’t know what the moral of this story is, except don’t always believe your officers when they say they didn’t handle the evidence.