Pat Wertheim on LinkedIn: Home (2024)

Reported cases of fabricated latent print evidence far outnumber cases of known erroneous identifications. And yet we focus quality control policies on preventing erroneous identifications. Every latent print examiner needs to know the warning signs of fabricated evidence because a shocking percentage of career examiners will see it at some point in their career.In addition, criminal defense attorneys should be aware of the possibility that evidence against their client has been fabricated, especially when the client is adamant about innocence and the only physical evidence is a latent fingerprint. In that case, a private expert in latent print fabrication should be consulted. I will be leading an 8-hour webinar on forged and fabricated latent print evidence on Wednesday, June 12, 2024. I will discuss cases of fabricated evidence throughout the history of fingerprints, with special attention to the cases I have caught personally both in the crime lab and as a defense consultant. The webinar is being hosted by TriTech Forensic Training and is accepted by the IAI for 8 hours of training credit for both latent print and tenprint certifications.For more information or to register, see: https://lnkd.in/gmK7Miyi#criminaldefense #latentfingerprint #crimelaboratory #fabricatedevidence #defenseattorney

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Early August, 1978. Kerrville, Texas. I watched a large mobile home float down the middle of the rampaging Guadalupe River on a record rise due to unprecedented rainfall in the previous few days.Slow moving tropical storm Amelia came ashore in Texas the end of July, 1978, and stalled over the Texas Hill Country from August 1-4. Rain measured over 48 inches in some areas. Creeks and streams crested at record heights throughout the Hill Country.My own home was only 23 feet above the water line and my family had evacuated to stay with friends on higher ground. The river in central Kerrville crested at 21 feet, so our home survived. But as a Kerrville police officer, I was on duty 12 to 16 hours a day with the entire force on overtime assisting with flood emergencies.In all, 27 people lost their lives in the flooding. A mobile home park in Center Point was built in a wide meander on the banks of Verde Creek. The creek crested around midnight, cutting across the meander and washing away the entire trailer park with sleeping residents still in their mobile homes.When the flooding subsided, the sheriff’s office put out a call for assistance in searching for the bodies of missing people downstream from the trailer park. Peace officers from throughout the area volunteered to help, myself included. I will never forget the huge steel I-beams from the frames of mobile homes – wrapped like bent coat hangers around large cypress trees lining the creek banks. Mountains of driftwood and debris as large as houses had piled up where there were eddies or blockages on the banks. We dug through those piles trying to locate the missing people.I thought I had found a body while pulling driftwood from one pile. I saw the back of a man’s head under some debris, dark skin with a stubble of hair visible. As I dug down to recover the body, however, it turns out all I had seen was a whole ham with the skin and hair stubble still on it. Apparently, it had been in somebody’s refrigerator or freezer that had broken open in the flood.Moving debris from one pile, I jumped back in fright when I grabbed a log and saw a small alligator with its mouth ready to bite me only inches from my hand. It turns out it was only a rubber toy, but it was very detailed and looked quite real at first sight.Another thing that made me jump was when I was pulling limbs from another debris pile and saw the most monstrous, bright red crawfish in the world ready to snatch my fingers off, only to realize an instant later that it was a cooked lobster which, like the ham, had washed out of somebody’s freezer or refrigerator.Some of the bodies of missing people were never recovered, probably carried in the flood waters all the way to the Guadalupe and perhaps miles downstream to be deposited under mountains of driftwood to decompose undetected. Whether it's a hurricane, a tornado, a flood, a tidal wave, or some other mass natural disaster, clean up is part of the job of law enforcement.

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Louisiana State University (LSU) lets large oil companies direct their research, including environmental research. The more an oil company donates, the more say they have in what research is done. Presumably, they also have review privileges, too.If academic scientists and university research laboratories can get away with that, why not forensics labs? I'm sure some of the big private prison corporations would be willing to kick in and fund a grand forensics lab. https://lnkd.in/gbQgU_kV

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Dispatchers loved to give me the weird calls, even when they were out of my beat. One such call in the mid-1970s was the report of a guy in a wheelchair popping wheelies in the center of Highway 27 in west Kerrville near the city limits.I arrived and the guy was doing exactly as reported. Speeding traffic gave him a wide berth on the four-lane highway as he spun around in tight circles, jumping the front wheels of the chair off the pavement on the double yellow stripes in the middle of the highway. I pulled the squad car off the asphalt onto the gravel shoulder and got out to talk to the guy. He was agitated and said that his life of boredom in the wheelchair was driving him crazy. I managed to coax him over to the shoulder next to my squad car to talk to him.He was thin and wiry with shriveled legs that were obviously paralyzed. His face was gaunt, his hair disheveled. He was wearing old jeans, a faded shirt and ratty sneakers with holes in the canvas. He had an intense look on his face. His actions and speech made it clear that he was stressed out by his circ*mstances.It turns out he was a Vietnam veteran who had been critically wounded in action during the closing days of the war. He had only recently been released from the VA hospital in Kerrville with his new wheelchair. He had no family or friends in Kerrville and was having a difficult time readjusting from fighting in Vietnam jungles to living in a cheap trailer park confined to a wheelchair. The veteran told me he had started out to roll himself to the supermarket a half-mile away but decided what the hell. He just wanted a little excitement back in his life.I asked if I could take him to the store and he eagerly agreed. I helped him into the front seat of the squad car and loaded his wheelchair into the trunk. Off shopping we went. I rolled him through the supermarket and helped him load the items on his list into the shopping cart. Then after loading his groceries into the back seat, I took him back to his trailer park and helped him into his little trailer home.I did not go to Vietnam. I had a cousin four years older who did go and wrote me weekly letters. His disillusionment with the war led me to keep a student deferment while I was at university. When the lottery was held, my number was high enough to preclude the possibility of being drafted. But while I never went, I had nothing but the utmost respect for those who either volunteered, as my cousin had, or had been drafted, as was the poor veteran I helped that day.I don’t know whatever became of him after that. But I do know there are thousands of disabled veterans whose lives were ruined by their military service fighting for our country and they receive poor compensation for their troubles. Many of those have turned to drugs and because of addiction, have lost their military benefits. It is a disgrace our government doesn’t take better care of those who sacrificed so much for America. God bless them all.

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For all my followers, contacts, and students who may be looking for employment opportunities in Crime Scene Investigation in the US, this Facebook page lists a number of job openings (You may need to register for Facebook if you do not already have an account):https://lnkd.in/gYbECThA

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I testified today in the capital murder trial, but it was pretty much a let down. At Fort Worth PD Crime Lab where I worked when I compared the fingerprints in this case, each investigative unit is largely partitioned off from the other units. I wasn't really aware the suspect I identified was living with the two murder victims. Naturally, because that was the case, then his fingerprints would be all over the apartment. The prosecution only asked about half the questions I expected and the defense mainly pointed out that the defendant lived there, so of course I identified his fingerprints. I had been hoping that since it is a capital murder case, the opposing attorney would have come after me with a vengeance, questioned my identification and really make me prove it. But today's testimony was mostly just softball and easy pitches. In other words, you didn't miss much.

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John was crazy. Psychotic. Combative. Big and strong. Every cop on Kerrville PD in the 1970s knew that if you stopped John, you were in for a fight.One night, I spotted a slow-moving vehicle weaving badly. I began following at a comfortable distance while I ran a check on the license plate. It came back to John, who had a history of DUIs.I didn’t want to get in a fight, but I knew I had to stop him. I activated the red lights on the squad car, tapped the siren, and after a block or so, he pulled over.I approached the driver’s door. The window was down. As was my practice, I leaned in close before speaking so that when he responded, I could smell his breath. “Good evening, sir,” I began. “The reason I pulled you over is that you were weaving and I wanted to make sure you are okay. May I see you driver’s license and proof of insurance?”He was muttering as he got his wallet and removed his driver’s license, then reached over to the glove box for his insurance card. I could smell the odor of deep alveolar alcohol and made the decision to get him out of the car for a sobriety test. I took the driver’s license and insurance card he offered, then opened the driver’s door and asked him to step out of the vehicle. As he did, I had to steady him to prevent him from falling over. I anticipated that he would fight and knew I had to be quick, so I asked him to put his hands on top of the car. I frisked him, then told him he was under arrest for DUI. He immediately spun around while drawing back his right fist to hit me and screamed “I ain’t goin’ to jail!” But I was a step ahead of him. I already had the little can of mace out of its holder and I gave him a squirt in the face. He straightened up, arms tight at his side, and went stiff as a board – not the response I had expected. I managed to wrestle his hands behind his back and get the handcuffs on.His eyes were squeezed shut tight with the burning of the tear gas distracting him from fighting. I led him to the patrol car and opened the back door. He wouldn’t sit and I had to load him into the back seat while he was still straightened out stiff. Once he was safely in the back seat, I called for a tow truck to impound his car.After I had booked him into a jail cell, he lay on his bunk stomping his feet against the metal wall of the cell with a rhythmic thud, thud, thud for hours.The next morning when another officer was booking him out of jail, John was compliant, but silent. He only responded with grunts. As officer released him and John walked out the door, John uttered the only coherent sentence from the time I stopped him until his release.“I’m going to go up on top of the hospital and throw oranges at you,” he said. John did not respond further and we were left wondering, what did he mean by oranges? Whatever it was, he never retaliated and, to the best of my knowledge, none of the other officers had occasion to stop John again while I was still at Kerrville PD.

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"Detection of Forged and Fabricated Latent Print Evidence,"an 8-hour workshop in webinar format, has just been scheduled with www.tritechtraining.com for Wednesday, June 12, 8:00 to 5:00 CDT.Latent print examiners are likely to see fabricated latent print evidence submitted to their labs at some point during their career. Informal show of hands during conference presentations has recorded this fact over and over. If you are a latent print examiner who accepts latent print evidence from outside agencies, or even from officers outside the lab in your own department, there is a frighteningly high likelihood that one day you will open an evidence submission and be confronted with fabricated evidence.I just confirmed the date/time of the upcoming webinar with TriTech Training yesterday, so the formal announcement is not up on the website yet. For now, if you are interested in learning more about how to spot fabricated latent print evidence and challenge it with confidence, block out Wednesday, June 12 on your calendar and stand by for the formal announcement and registration information. I will post the link here as soon as it is available.This training is approved for certification credit by the International Association for Identification and is appropriate for anyone involved in the realm of fingerprint evidence. I will discuss the methods that may be used to forge or fabricate evidence, with special emphasis on how to detect fabrications. I will also discuss how to design experiments in suspected cases in order to either confirm or rule out fabrication. In addition, I will cover the details of numerous major cases of evidence fabrication I have discovered in my own career and others reported in the literature.#fingerprints #criminaldefense #policecorruption #forensicscience #forensics #crimelabI hope to see you there!

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I’m going to be an iconoclast today and upset a few folks. I'll have my say and welcome dissenting views, but I won't respond and argue. I was the sergeant over the #CrimePrevention and Community Relations unit for Plano Police Department in 1985-86. I oversaw 1,500 Crime Watch groups, managed the #CrimeStoppers program, coordinated all of the public talks that were requested, and supervised the #SchoolLiasonOfficers.At one monthly meeting with PD staff, Captain Lyndon Payne asked me how the #CrimeWatch neighborhood groups were doing.“People are like ants,” I replied. “A 6 year old boy can be holding a stick above an ant bed and the ants go about their business as usual. Then the boy takes the stick and stirs the ant bed. Now the ants are mad as hell. They swarm on the stick, stinging it. The boy steps back and watches for a few minutes. Then he gets bored and goes back into the house. Meanwhile, the angry ants continue to swarm and sting the stick for another half hour. People are like that. They ignore the threat, but they swarm after the incident and the threat is gone.”Captain Payne dropped his head on his folded arms. That was not the expected response.Another time, at the 1985 annual conference of the International Society of Crime Prevention Practitioners , I stood up to address the business meeting during a discussion of how to expand programs to fingerprint children. “This whole program is a fraud,” I announced. “We set up booths and fingerprint babies and toddlers on the premise that it offers some degree of protection for the children. It does not. The fingerprints are not kept in any national database. There is no way to use them to find a missing kid. If a live kid is found, we just need to ask his name. If the kid is dead, we search the missing and abducted database. If we believe we know who the parents are, we ask them to identify the body. The fingerprint card we take at a public event is worthless, either to protect or find a kid.“There may have been a few cases in which a kid’s fingerprints helped identify an adult years after the kid’s disappearance, or helped identify a body when the whole family was wiped out in the same disaster. But even then it only works if somebody kept the fingerprints and they can be located.“Baby fingerprints are little more than a nice souvenir. We need to tell parents that. I feel like a total fraud when a parent tells says they want this protection for their child. There is no PROTECTIONassociated with having a set of your kid’s fingerprints. They do not protect your baby from anything and they cannot help us find your kid!”Like I said, this week I am being an iconoclast. Those programs may be great public relations tools and I expect some of my readers will respond with anecdotal cases of a success here or there, but when I was in the role of supervisor, I honestly felt that very little we did made the community any safer. It only gave them a false sense of security.

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