A call from a self-serve car wash one Sunday morning reported that somebody had emptied the dollar changer the previous night by running photocopies of dollar bills through the machine until all the quarters were dispensed. The sensitivity of the dollar bill reader could be adjusted to only accept pristine dollars, which would have prevented the theft, but the sensitivity could be decreased to allow old, worn bills to be accepted. Most unattended facilities lowered the sensitivity in order to enable more car washes.
I processed the photocopied dollars with ninhydrin and developed a beautiful right thumb print with a large whorl pattern on a couple of the bills. But this was in the late 1980s and we did not have an AFIS system, nor was there a State system at the time.
A couple of weeks later, we had a second report from another car wash. Again, I processed the new set of photocopies with ninhydrin and developed a couple more prints easily identified as having been made by the same right thumb. It was in the position where you would hold the bill if you inserted it into the change machine with your right hand, perfectly consistent with normal handling in that situation.
A week or two later, we had another case and again, I found the same right thumb print. In all of the cases, the same serial numbers were repeated on the stack of bills. I went to an area police intelligence meeting and announced to the officers from dozens of area agencies what I was working on, and volunteered to fingerprint the bills for any other departments dealing with similar cases.
I was the ID Supervisor for Plano Police Department at the time, but soon I was processing cases from as far south as North Dallas and all the way up to the Oklahoma state line, with a case from Denton on the west and as far east as Tyler. For a period of several months, I was taking in hundreds of these counterfeit dollars and was able to match at least one latent print from each batch to that same right thumb. By then, I could sketch an accurate reproduction of that thumb print from memory.
The break came when a Denton police officer on deep-nights noticed a car visit several of the local car washes after midnight without washing the car. He stopped the car to investigate. There were two boys and a girl in the car, all from the Denison/Sherman area on the Oklahoma border. He got them out of the car and conducted a search. Lo and behold, he found a stack of several hundred photocopied dollars in the glove box.
It turns out the kids had been making their copies late at night on a coin-op Xerox machine in the lobby of the Sherman Post Office. They were making large loops out from their home base every weekend. If a bill changer in a car wash did not accept the bills, they simply drove on to another car wash. If it took the bills, they would empty the machine. They were rolling the quarters and turning them in at the bank for currency, but nobody at their bank was ever suspicious. In the end, rather than go for counterfeiting, we charged them under a state statute for forgery. The kids all three got felony arrests on their records and the car was seized due to its use in the ongoing criminal e
