Word: fingerprints
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Three minutes after California's new automated fingerprint identification system received its first assignment, the crime-stopping computer scored a direct hit. It matched a smudged print lifted from an orange Toyota in Los Angeles to one taken from a 25-year-old drifter with a record of drug and auto-theft arrests. Two days later, Richard Ramirez was caught and charged with one of 15 murders attributed to the Night Stalker, the serial killer who had been terrorizing the city for the past seven months...
...speedy identification of Ramirez was the latest and most dramatic example of a technique that has police officials across the U.S. clamoring for fingerprint identification computers of their own. Says Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman: "It could revolutionize law enforcement in a way that no other technology has since radios were put in patrol cars...
...Fingerprint identification of criminals has been routine since the turn of the century, when Scotland Yard pioneered its systematic use. Computers were brought into the process in 1976, when the FBI began converting some 17 million prints to digital form. Today, every armchair detective knows better than to pick up a gun by its handle, lest he obliterate fingerprints that could identify the killer...
...pizza to a professional hit man who had gunned down a target while posing as a delivery boy. But some police complain that their computers are too slow and too undependable for routine police work. A typical computer search of the files can take more than six seconds per fingerprint and often overlooks prints that are even slightly smudged...
Before finding Ramirez's fingerprint, investigators had been baffled by the lack of a discernible pattern in the attacks. Serial murderers usually seek out a particular kind of victim, but the Night Stalker assaulted people ranging in age from 16 to 84. He had killed men and women, Asians as well as whites. In two cases he reportedly left behind written messages. Police confirmed that the killer had a distinctive trademark, but to avoid copycat assaults, they were tight-lipped about what...