◆ SpookStack

tL 4 enter the picture for the first time. A shrewd, local Kansas law enforcement officer went over the doctor's car looking for fingerprints. The criminals were equally shrewd and knew that fingerprints can hang you, as fingerprints often da.. They thought they had obliterated all fingerprints from the car eof the murdered doctor. However, the Kansas law enforcement officer found a ‘latent fingerprint impression on a window of the car, photographed it and sent a copy of it to the Bureau where it was received July 19, 1928, and given to the Bureau's fingerprint experts with instructions that the print, which was a very unusual one, should be fixed clearly in their minds. In the meantime, four individuals were arrested in various sections of the country, returned to Lamar, Colorado, and identified as the bank rob- ‘haremurdearears by numornavad individualte White thay were aysaitinge trial in thea Bere MMrOere rs MUMOTOUS WIV aGuUa.~s. wmiiat whey Were GWaLrvink wriai 2m tne state courts and thirteen months after the bank robbery and murders, a set of fingerprints was received from Stockton, California, on a man who had been ar- rested on the rather trivial charge of vagrancy and released. One of our fin- gerprint experts was searching this incoming set of fingerprints when suddeMly his memory clicked - where had he seen the peculiar pattern of one of the fin- gerprint impressions on the incoming card? Thon he remembered - the print on the murder car. He went to the cabinet where the aiurder car print was filed, It matched perfectly with one of the prints on the incoming fingerprint card. To make a long story short, the incoming prints were those of the notorious Jake Fleagle who had been arrested under another name and released. Jake Fleagle was subsequently shot to death resisting arrest and his brother, Ralph, and the two other bank robber-murderers were. captured, returned to Lamar, Colo- rado, tried, convicted and hanged for the murders. Four guilty men killed as the result of one accidental fingerprint left on the window of the murder car and carried in the mind of one of our fingerprint expéfts in Washington for | more than thirteen months! But what about the four men positively identified as the bank robber-murderers? They were innocent of those particular crimes. The charges against them were dropped, but they were found to be involved in other offenses and subsequently committed to penitentiaries in other jurisdic- tions to serve varying terms for felonies. This particular case, which is a matter of record, illustrates an important point in connection with finger- print identification - tnat fingerprints serve to ~aequit the innocent as well as to convict the guilty. In August, 1926 a man walked into the Farmers National Bank of Pitts- burgh, Pennsylvania, grasping the handle of a small black bag firmly in his right hand. He pushed a scrawled note through the teller's cage, in which he demanded $2,000 undor threat of blowing up the bank if his demand was refused. The teller summoned a bank guard who cautiously approached the bandit. The bandit made good his threat and in the resulting explosion thirty individuals were seriously injured,’ and the bank building damaged to the extent of $150,000. The brave bank-officer was killed and the unknown bandit blown literally into a thousand bits. The force of the explosion had blown his right hand, still grasped firmly around the handle cf the little black bag, upward and caused it to stick to the ceiling of the bank. The fingerprints of a dead man, or as in this case, of tho hand of a dead man, can be taken as well as the fingérprints of a living man. This was done and a photograph of the fingerprints of the one hand of the dead bandit was forwarded to our Fingerprint Bureau in Washington. It happens that a fingerprint expert, if he has the fingerprints of one hand