Getting more from fingerprints
Kerri Jansen · C&EN Global Enterprise · 2019
On March 24, 1994, a man walking his dog in Albany, Georgia, found the body of a woman named Angela Sizemore, who had been brutally raped and murdered and left in the front seat of her SUV behind an apartment complex. When they arrived at the scene, crime-scene technicians collected semen from the body and fingerprints from the vehicle in an attempt to identify the killer. At the time, DNA analysis was accurate enough to pinpoint a suspect on the basis of the genetic code within sperm cells, and fingerprint analysis could ID a suspect from the loop-and-whorl patterns left behind by substances on the skin. The semen analysis identified Georgia resident Marcus Ray Johnson as having had sex with Sizemore sometime before her death. Witnesses also placed someone fitting Johnson’s description near the site where police believed Sizemore was murdered the previous night. Investigators collected a total of 38