Fingerprints Unchecked in 6,000 Deaths

Los Angeles police have fingerprints from more than 6,000 unsolved slayings that have not yet been compared with the national computer database that two weeks ago produced the match and the arrest in a 45-year-old killing of two police officers, authorities said.

The prints on file were taken from Los Angeles Police Department cases both before and since 1985, when computerized fingerprint technology was developed. Advances since then allow searches in as little as two hours of databases containing tens of millions of prints.

With the creation of a specialized cold-case unit, the LAPD only recently began to focus on reexamining the backlog of older cases. But police and prosecutors say there is a larger issue: The department is not moving quickly enough to take advantage of the great leap forward in forensics technology, including fingerprints, DNA and ballistics markings taken from bullets and shell casings.

“This is cart-and-buggy stuff,” one prosecutor said.

The value of the technology was dramatically demonstrated with the recent arrest of Gerald Mason in Columbia, S.C., in the slayings of two El Segundo police officers in 1957. Mason, 69, is fighting extradition.

LAPD Capt. Jim Tatreau said the fingerprint backlog is a big problem, which the department has lacked the money and technical support to solve.

“There was always an immediate crisis that seemed to get the response, rather than the huge number of unsolved cases,” Tatreau said.

Included in the backlog are fingerprints taken from the crime scene in South-Central Los Angeles where 74-year-old college professor Edgar M. Easley was found stabbed 71 times in 1984. Police ran the prints through the FBI database in October and found a match, but no arrest has been made.

An FBI fingerprint hit has also jump-started the investigation into the 1978 killing of June Roman, 45, who was found bound and beaten to death in her Hollywood home. Detectives now say they are close to solving that two-decade-old mystery.

Print comparisons also have renewed hope of finding the killer or killers of Elizabeth McKeown, who was sexually assaulted and slain and whose body was found in the trunk of her car in Venice in 1976.

But for every one of those cases, there are many others like that of Karl Radenberg, a former LAPD traffic officer who was killed in 1984 along with another man outside a Van Nuys bar. Prints from that crime have not yet been run through a fingerprint database.

Nor has print evidence from the case of Timothy George Long, 26, a Louisiana resident who was found shot to death in 1984 on Mulholland Drive. Receipts found in Long’s car helped investigators retrace his West Coast trip, but fingerprints from the crime scene remained unmatched and not compared.

Rick Jackson, a veteran LAPD homicide detective, said many investigations have laid dormant because of a lack of resources. “There are only a few people in the LAPD crime lab to input fingerprint information on cold cases,” Jackson said.

“We need to change the LAPD to bring it into the 21st century, although frankly, I would settle for the 20th century,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Jack Weiss. “The use of fingerprint technology was championed by Teddy Roosevelt when he was police commissioner in New York City over 100 years ago.

“There’s absolutely no excuse for failing to prioritize the necessary technology and resources in a modern department’s budgets,” he said.

The case against Mason was made by detectives working for Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who runs the largest law enforcement agency in the county. Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley has recently sharply criticized the LAPD over what he calls its reluctance to commit resources to new DNA technology at a joint police laboratory now being planned.

“Backlogs exist in many areas, and they should be addressed,” Cooley said last week. “The issue is bigger than just the backlog. The issue is the historic, chronic and long-term neglect of forensics in the county and city.”

About one-third of all slayings in Los Angeles go unsolved, among them cases that date back four decades. Thus far, the LAPD cold-case unit has reviewed 8,000 cases from 1960 to 1997, and has made 100 requests for fingerprint analysis.

The LAPD Scientific Investigation Division’s latent print unit, responsible for locating and recovering latent prints from items of evidence and crime scenes, is staffed by about 80 people. Two are assigned to enter cold-case prints into the federal latent print database, while 20 others compare prints for investigators and enter prints into the state database, Cal ID.

New System Expected

“We have vacant positions, and we’re doing the best we have with the current technology and staffing,” said the division’s commanding officer, Steve Johnson. “We expect things to vastly improve with a new countywide fingerprint system, which is expected to come online this summer.”

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department fingerprint unit is staffed by 54 people, including six people assigned to enter latent prints into the state and federal databases, said Capt. Chris Beattie.

In 1985, the department decided to enter all old murder cases with usable prints into the Cal ID system, Beattie said. “Essentially, we have no backlog of homicide cases because of that.”

Officials with the Sheriff’s Department’s crime lab said they also have no backlog of cases involving other major crimes, such as rape, robbery and kidnapping.

For most of the century in which law enforcement has used fingerprints, police agencies kept print records on paper.

At LAPD, fingerprints were analyzed on the second floor of Parker Center by technicians using table lamps and magnifying glasses. That began to change in the mid-1980s, with the introduction of the first automated fingerprint system. Even then, because the technology was primitive, detectives had to compare hundreds or thousands of similar prints by hand, a process that could take weeks or even months.

The steps were repeated if federal assistance was needed. Prints would be sent by mail to the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., for comparison in a national fingerprint database. Like most local systems, searches on the federal database were slow and time-consuming.

Then the FBI created the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, at a cost of $640 million, in 1999. With a work station, a modem and special encryption software, police could submit digital copies of fingerprints and search the present massive all-digital national system in a few hours.

Police agencies that tapped into the system in its first year made 1,000 fingerprint matches, more in one year than in the previous 10, said Steve Hooks, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services division, based in Clarksburg, W.Va.

Today, the database holds 44 million sets of fingerprints, and police agencies searched a total of 8,343 prints last year. In the process, 130 cases were solved. The database is now used by 30 states, 11 federal agencies and 32 local law enforcement agencies.

LAPD Delays

But as the federal system went online, LAPD’s system was becoming antiquated and expensive to maintain. That system was scrapped in 1999, and the LAPD has since relied on a database maintained by the California Department of Justice.

LAPD officials say that they have been hampered in part by delays as they wait for the upgraded county system to come online.

“This is one of the simplest and cheapest ways to identify suspects and witnesses,” said LAPD Det. Dave Lambkin, who is in charge of the department’s cold-case unit. That prints haven’t been run through the system, he said, “is a travesty.”