Most crime scene investigators have the opportunity at some point in their career to process a “chop shop” where stolen cars, vans, or pickup trucks have been stripped. The chop shop that stands out most in my memory was a warehouse in which stolen motor homes and RVs were disassembled for parts.
Late one morning when I was working for the Arizona Department of Public Safety Crime Laboratory, I received a callout to process a chop shop in a rural desert area on the western outskirts of Phoenix. Detectives had received information about the location and had obtained a search warrant. When they arrived, the site was abandoned. After they had secured the scene, they called for a CSI and I had been the lucky one on call.
Following the dispatcher’s directions, I arrived at a large metal building with a wide, tall, garage-style door and perhaps 3,000 square feet of floor space in one huge room. Several motor homes in various stages of disassembly stood in the middle of the large warehouse. Scattered around the periphery of the room were stacks of parts that had been removed from a series of prior motor homes and travel trailers that had been torn down inside the facility.
Where does a CSI working alone begin to process evidence in such a scene? I decided to begin with the motor homes themselves and dust for prints in the areas where parts had been removed. Once I had worked several hours and examined most of those surfaces, I moved out to the stacks of parts on the warehouse floor around the inside of the walls of the building. Some parts I dusted, and some I boxed to take back to the lab when powder would have been inappropriate for the surfaces to be examined.
As I was working around the warehouse moving from one stack of parts to the next, I saw a pile of round, gray balls in a back corner. Curious, I wondered over to look at them and discovered they were gobs of caulking putty that had been peeled away from window frames when the windows were being removed. Whoever was chopping the motor homes would peel and scrape all the putty off into a ball and throw it over into that corner. The surface of every one of those clay balls was covered in three dimensional impressions of friction ridge skin!
By the time I finished processing the scene, I had several rolls of film with 1-to-1 photographs of plastic impressions of fingerprint pattern areas, as well as a large stack of lift cards. This occurred over thirty years ago, and I can’t even remember doing comparisons. But I will never forget that pile of putty balls and the beautiful fingerprints that the RV thieves had pressed into them. You never know what kind of evidence you will find at a crime scene, so you have to keep an open mind and look at everything!