One of the narcotics investigators came to me in the lab at Arizona DPS in the early 1990s with a problem. He had just brough a pickup truck load of 30# bales of marijuana back from a rural sheriff’s department in Southern New Mexico. The bales had been seized by the Sheriff’s office when a U-Haul was stopped on Interstate 10 for a traffic infraction. The two men in the cab of the U-Haul denied knowledge of the truck’s contents and said they had been hired to drive the U-Haul from Tucson to a destination in Texas. They were released, along with the U-Haul, but the marijuana was put into the Sheriff’s evidence room.
The bales were large brick-shaped bundles wrapped in cling wrap and each bundle was contained in a heavy-duty black plastic garbage bag. Shortly after the seizure, the Sheriff’s office ran out of garbage bags and began removing those on the marijuana for the office garbage cans. By the time all the garbage bags had been used, the office staff decided they had to get rid of the marijuana. Perhaps the smell of the drying weed was becoming too strong to tolerate after the heavy-duty, non-porous plastic garbage bags had been removed.
Since the two men in the U-Haul had told the Sheriff they had picked the truck up in Tucson, the Sheriff called Arizona DPS and asked if we wanted to try and make a case on the marijuana. Our narcotics officer had driven to New Mexico and brought the marijuana back to Tucson. I told the narcotics officer I would see what I could do.
I unwrapped the cling wrap, keeping it as flat and un-balled as I could, and hung it drapery fashion in the superglue cabinet. I was using a homemade plywood cabinet 4’ wide, 4’ high, and 2’deep with removable shelves and wires near the top to hang items from. At that time, most departments were using fish aquariums for superglue cabinets. Reliable large cabinets were just coming onto the market, but we had been unable to talk management into buying a commercial cabinet for the lab.
I unwrapped six or eight feet of cling wrap from each bundle and hung several pieces in the cabinet for each run. Luckily, that cling wrap, whatever brand it was, proved excellent for developing fingerprints and soon I had a large number of photographs of full pattern latents. All the prints were on inner layers of the cling wrap, indicating that the prints were deposited during the wrapping of the marijuana into bales.
The two men who had been driving the truck had extensive criminal records and when I compared their prints, it was easy to identify them both on all the bales. But a third set of prints also turned up on the bales. Digging into the files, I discovered an associate of those two who had been arrested with them on a couple of prior occasions. When I compared his prints to the remaining latents, sure enough, I identified him as the third person.
When I called the investigator to tell him that not only had I identified his two suspects, but I had also identified a third person, and all of the prints were on the inner layers of the cling wrap from when the three had been wrapping the bales, he was ecstatic over the news. Armed with verified identifications and a formal scientific examination report, he obtained arrest warrants and went off in search of his three marijuana dealers.
I never did hear anything of the case after that. It never went to trial, and I don’t know if it was because the three were never found or if they were eventually arrested and simply pled guilty.
Meanwhile, back in New Mexico, I guess the Sheriff finally had to go out and buy some more garbage bags.