Defendant’s Prints Match Those in ’63 Murder, Expert States

Four crime lab technicians verified that fingerprints from a 1963 Hollywood murder scene matched those of a building maintenance executive now on trial for the crime, a former police fingerprint expert testified Thursday.

Donald Keir, a civilian employee of the Los Angeles Police Department for 21 years before he retired last year, also testified that it is impossible for two people to have the same fingerprints.

Fingerprints, Keir added, “are everlasting until the day of death.”

Keir’s testimony, which came in the second week of the trial of Vernon Robinson, 48, helped lay the groundwork for Deputy Dist. Atty. Paul W. Turley’s contention that Robinson was at the scene of the Oct. 3, 1963, bludgeoning and strangulation death of Thora Marie Rose in her apartment on North Detroit Street and that he was the person who killed her.

Robinson was 18 at the time of the killing. Since his arrest in 1990, he has maintained that he was at a Navy training camp in San Diego when the slaying occurred.

Police were led to him after LAPD technicians in 1989 ran fingerprints from the Rose murder scene through a new computer system and the computer indicated the prints possibly matched those of 10 people, including Robinson.

Technicians, using traditional techniques, concluded that Robinson’s prints were the ones that matched.

Robinson was arrested a short time later in Minnesota, where he had recently moved from Los Angeles. The match of his fingerprints with those found at the murder scene is the only evidence against him.

In his testimony Thursday, Keir, a supervisor in the LAPD identification section when the Rose case matches were made, identified his initials and the initials of three other experts on the back of two cards with prints taken from the murder scene.

Multiple verification of fingerprint matches was routine at the time, he testified, to safeguard against error.

Robinson’s lawyer, Bruce G. Cormicle, has said that human error could have been introduced into the fingerprint matching process and that it cannot be shown that fingerprints purported to have been found at the murder scene were indeed taken from there.

Cormicle will cross-examine Keir on Monday when testimony in the trial is scheduled to resume.