Part One of a Three Part Series by Arkansas Chronicle
by Tom Winters, with J. D. Capeheart and Larry Davis
Part One - February 5, 2000 - Copyright (c) 2000 Arkansas Chronicle, All Rights Reserved
from www.ar-chronicle.com
The “crime scene” was not terribly unusual as crime scenes go. When family members found Mrs. Menke, a harmless and well-loved stuffed toy monkey lying on the floor beside the crib, she failed to identify her attacker. A few feet away lay the weapon she had obviously been shot with: a Daisy pellet gun. Never much to talk, Mrs. Menke is still of no use when it comes to describing who shot her, or why.
The only clues detectives have to work with: those curious “epidermal ridges” or “friction ridges” and “islands;” the impressions left on the weapon we commonly call fingerprints. And in solving the case of Mrs. Menke, only one clear fact will emerge: the fingerprint, as a positive means of identifying a culprit in a criminal case, should never have been trusted absolutely as a means of solving a crime.
Police across America cannot tell how many cases are have been solved over the previous century using the humble fingerprint. They are countless. Neither can police tell how many innocent men and women have been made victims over the last century by fraudulent or forged fingerprints.
Since its discovery as a law enforcement tool the fingerprint has proven invaluable as a unique means of positively identifying individual human beings. Volumes of scholarly papers and countless court opinions have been written in the last 100 years regarding the subject of fingerprints. To almost every degree of certainty your fingerprints are unique to you. Not even identical twins share the same prints.
But just because your fingerprints appear on an object, a piece of paper or even a murder weapon does that mean you handled it? According to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in a piece written in the late 1890’s, the answer is clearly no. With his fictional “Adventure of The Norwood Builder,” Doyle opened a world of real-life intrigue and fraud. For over 100 years, the key players have been national law enforcement and intelligence agencies. And the game they have played is insidious.
It was author R. Austin Freeman, in 1907, who first described in rich detail, the process whereby a fingerprint might be forged and placed on anything. His novel, “The Red Thumb Mark,” is a unique work. It is a “how-to manual” rich in details on the dark art of fingerprint forgery – and the mischief that a forged fingerprint can lead to.
Scientist Henry Faulds is credited by many as being one of the creators of fingerprint science, (although the current debate among experts is that it is actually an art). In a work entitled, “On The Skin-Furrows Of The Hand,” published in the journal “Nature” on October 28, 1880, Faulds described in detail the manner by which print samples are obtained and examined. “I have succeeded in making very delicate impressions on glass. They are somewhat faint indeed, but would be usefull for demonstrations,” he wrote.
“These might be shown by magic lantern,” Faulds explained, as a means of displaying them to large audiences. Today, the science or art of fingerprinting is a fertile ground in which law enforcement and commercial enterprises are racing to see who will be the first to make the fingerprint a universal “biometric identifier.” Some states have used a fingerprint impression for years to verify identities on Driver’s Licenses.
But can a process described by Doyle, and explained in graphic detail in a 60’s era FBI field office memo derail the fingerprint train?
Possibly, for fingerprint forgery is so easy as to nearly defy belief. With a “latent lift” or a formal sample of your prints even a novice operator can easily reproduce a three-dimension replica of your print in less time than it takes to read the morning paper. And once that person has a forged copy of your print, you are completely at their mercy as the strange saga of Mrs. Menke will demonstrate.
Your fingerprints can be placed on anything: a child pornography magazine, a smoking gun or the thigh of a rape-murder victim. If you’ve ever been fingerprinted for a driver’s license, a job, a professional license, for military service or for an arrest, your prints are available to a prospective forger. If not, and if you are targeted, your prints can still be forged by way of a “latent lift” from an object you have handled. With the FBI digitizing all fingerprints in its inventory and most states doing the same, access to your prints will be only as difficult as keying your name into a computer.
Although they are going “hi-tech,” fingerprints have been a linchpin in the justice system in America since the early 1900’s.
It was September 19, 1910 and the Hiller family were sleeping quietly in their Illinois home. An intruder entered the home; a struggle ensued between Clarence B. Hiller and the burglar. Two shots rang out and Hiller fell dead. Several hour later police apprehended one Thomas Jennings. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was suspicious. And, he had a fingerprint card on file as the result of a previous trip to the pen.
A comparison of Jennings’ print card and print impressions found on a freshly painted railing at the Hiller home pointed to Jennings. At his trial, four experts testified that they had been trained in fingerprint science by Scotland Yard experts at the St. Louis World Fair in 1904. They narrated the history of fingerprints, beginning with their use in ancient Egypt as a means of identification. When the trial was finished, and with Jennings convicted, the use of fingerprints spread across America like wildfire. When the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed Jennings’ conviction the use of the fingerprint as a tool of the police was cemented into history.
Jennings had protested his innocence. But throughout the decades it has not been unusual for defendants to claim innocence despite the presence of their fingerprints at a crime scene.
It was a series of cases in New York state and the Netherlands in the mid 1990’s that brought to light the more insidious use of fingerprints evidence.
Robert M. Lishansky is a former New York State Trooper. His police career came to an abrupt halt in late December, 1995, when he confessed to the fraudulent use of fingerprints. It was a plot worthy of a Sherlock Holmes novel. Lishansky and at least three other troopers were convicted of various schemes to frame suspects and send them to the penitentiary.
When the walls of silence finally tumbled down New York officials found themselves in a nightmarish situation. They had to carefully sort through hundreds of criminal convictions and try to determine the innocent from the guilty. The sad truth was that a number of innocent people had been imprisoned, based on the fraudulent use of state police faked fingerprint evidence.
In one morbid example, Lishansky testified in court that he had taken eight fingerprints from the body of a 12-year-old murder victim. In a previous statement to investigators, Lishansky explained that when he and fellow state cops found a suspect “they liked for the killing,” they planned to use the fingerprints from the victim. Their scheme was to either frame the suspect or bolster a weak case, just in the event that they actually had the real perpetrator. Either way, they planned to lie and commit perjury.
That particular fingerprint scam ran in New York from at least 1984 until 1992. Those involved frequently pulled suspects into the police barracks for questioning. While there they would be offered coffee, canned pop and other items to handle. When they left, investigators would simply take a standard fingerprint kit, develop the “latent prints” from the objects and then save them for later. All the cops then had to do is claim that they had lifted the print from an object at a crime scene rather that the police barracks. Once a print is “dusted” and lifted, it is physically transferred from the original object to the tape. In court, it was their word, not the defendant’s which was always trusted by the court.
According to renowned fingerprint expert Pat Wertheim, that process is referred to as a fraudulent fingerprint scheme. It has inherent limitations. For example, the print must usually be on an object that allows it to be “developed” using a powder. After it is developed and visible to the naked eye it is then “lifted” using a special adhesive tape. The tape is then reattached to a card or piece of paper to provide contrast. That image can then be scanned, photographed or digitized.
In New York, Lishansky and his cohorts were unable to place prints on certain types of objects. For example, they could not place prints on checks, paperwork, or other objects where the prints could be “developed” and photographed at the scene. And, they lacked the ability to create “bloody fingerprints,” an inherent limitation in many murder investigations. Also, fingerprints on paper have to be developed using a process that permanently leaves them on the original object, like a check or a ransom note. Nevertheless, their conspiracy ran for over eight years and resulted in hundreds of convictions.
The particular problem with fraudulent fingerprints is that they cannot be “developed in-situ” on an actual object, like a firearm or knife using what’s termed the “cyanoacrylate process.” That process, which uses ordinary “super glue,” permanently develops a three-dimensional image of the print on an object by a chemical reaction.
Experts are quick to say that when they have a recognizable cyanoacrylate image on an object, the game is absolutely over for a suspect. This process, many cops are quick to claim, completely eliminates any doubt about whether or not the print is fraudulent; the result of a faked “latent lift.” They are of course, completely wrong.
If the New York troopers-turned-convicts lacked the requisite knowledge to successfully frame suspects, it may owe to their simple failure to read a Sherlock Holmes novel. If they had studied closely they would have learned what every world-class national police force and intelligence agency has known for decades . . . how to acquire and put your fingerprints on anything – even the body of a murder victim. And had they chosen that route, it is unlikely they would have ever been caught according to experts in fingerprint technology.
Comparing fraudulent fingerprints compared to forged fingerprints, is like comparing pick-pocketing to cat burglary. The former is a crude manner of chicanery while the latter is the realm of the highly motivated and trained operator.
The process of covertly acquiring, manufacturing and then actually placing your prints on an object is differentiated by experts as “fingerprint forgery.”
A series of high-profile cases in the Netherlands, was exposed by Hank Groenendahl of the Dutch National Police in the early 1990’s. He revealed that national police there had developed a technique called the “orthotic glove.” Groenendahl’s investigation subsequently developed a means of identifying the use of the glove when a large enough area was available, to show irregularities in the surface pattern caused by the glove material itself. The material lacked the suppleness necessary to create complex large patterns. Other experts surmise that had the police not been so anxious to create large prints; had they merely stuck to small latent fingertips and “partials,” they would never have been caught.
The scandal unfolded in Dutch newspapers and for a while, trust in fingerprints failed.
By 1995, at an international symposium in Israel, intelligence and police agencies were already doing damage control. The ability to forge the fingerprint has proven to be a tool of inestimable value in the shadowy world of intelligence and international law enforcement. One Israeli expert explained, “When I have your fingerprints, when I have the ability to place your fingerprints on any object at any time I want, I can control your life. If I want you to do something that you might otherwise not be willing to do, for any reason or any amount of money, I can force your cooperation by this means. Or I can destroy your life and use you as an example.”
Groenendahl, in exposing a national fingerprint scandal, revealed for the first time how Dutch police were able to take a full hand print from a suspect, create a casting from it and the use the standard “orthotic” casting process to create a perfect copy of a handprint. Groenendahl’s work documented the suspected materials used to create the forged prints and the manner in which objects were handled and prints transferred. In the end, he was often able to prove that the image came from a polyethylene glove rather than a living being, or vice-versa.
It would seem that the revelations of the Dutch police would have ended forged fingerprints. It may have in the Netherlands but certainly not in the United States where the FBI and CIA have always used a different process and material for fingerprint forgery. Their process is reportedly so good that without a live witness to corroborate the forgery it is impossible to detect.
In the United States, in many state courts and especially federal courts, there is no lower limit on the number of “matching comparison points” that are needed to convict a defendant. In the federal trial of Oklahoma City bombing defendants Timmy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the trial judge allowed the jury itself to decide if their fingerprints were on critical pieces of evidence.
In McVeigh’s case the questionable print appeared on a fertilizer receipt. Looking at the receipt the appearance of the print seems unlikely; out of place. It is an index finger print at the bottom of the receipt for a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Nowhere else on the piece of paper, allegedly found in Terry Nichols home, does any other print appear, including the prints of the clerk who wrote it out. The way the receipt was located, wrapped around a gold coin, as both troubled and perplexed some investigators close to that case. One investigator said, “It was just too convenient.”
In Nichols’ case, a print allegedly appeared on the outer sleeve of a piece of Primadet cord, a component of bomb making. The government says it was found in Michael Fortier’s home in Kingman, Arizona. They claim it proves Nichols was there with McVeigh and that he actively participated in the bomb plot.
In closing arguments at Nichols’ trial, his lawyers argued against the evidence but were at a loss to explain how their client’s print was found on the Primadet. Fingerprint evidence of Nichols was either scarce or absent on other physical evidence, like plastic barrels, and alleged surplus bomb making components.
When prints appear “gratuitously” on physical evidence, seasoned fingerprint examiners will often give the evidence a second look, especially if they don’t know the cops in the case. In the Oklahoma City bombing case the fingerprint evidence was processed at the FBI’s own lab at a time when the lab was the center of an unfolding scandal.
Ultimately the FBI lab was found to have skewed many other test results in favor of prosecutors. But did FBI agents actually forge the prints of McVeigh and Nichols in the Oklahoma City case? At least one FBI source said it was remotely possible but extremely unlikely.
In Mrs. Menke’s tragic shooting, Arkansas Chronicle writers used the FBI’s own instructional memo written in the 1960’s as part of the COINTELPRO project, to duplicate some very infamous fingerprints and place them on the weapon that shot Mrs. Menke.
Mrs. Menke was seen at midnight, December 31, 1999 sitting comfortably in her chair in the room of the eighteen-month old she watches over. But only an hour later, she was found shot; the gun was found not five feet away. And no one heard or saw anything. When the gun was checked for prints, who do you suppose emerged as our suspects?
Fingerprints from these individuals were found on the gun: Charles Manson, Timmy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. We chose them simply because they are people who could not possibly have access to the Daisy pellet gun. We chose McVeigh and Nichols because they are involved in complex criminal cases where fingerprints are major issues, and government chicanery has been alleged.
The particular problem with solving this dastardly crime, the shooting of Mrs. Menke, is that each of the suspects were nestled snug in prisons in California, Colorado and Indiana at the moment Mrs. Menke was shot. We know because we checked with the prisons and none of them had a pass that weekend.
Still, we know they must be guilty because we found their prints twice – once with a conventional “latent lift kit,” and in a second recreation, with the cyanoacrylate process. They’re guilty alright, but how did they do it? How did they leave prisons in three states, handle the weapon, shoot poor Mrs. Menke and then sneak back into prison in time for breakfast, all without being missed?
Working only from their police fingerprint cards we forged their prints and placed them on the pellet gun. In the next part of our series, we’ll tell you how perfect copies of their prints appeared on the weapon and demonstrate for you the “fingerprint forgery” process which has worked flawlessly for over 100 years in American law enforcement.
-30-
