The letter writer could easily have left a decent DNA sample if he wanted to supply proof. Or just turned himself in to great hoopla and acclaim (very doubtful they’d send an ancient dying ex-con back to the slam, and in any event he’d have the medical care he claimed to need).
Except that these prisoners did not have triathlon training or proper swimgear and were trying to make the crossing at night under highly stressful circumstances.
Hey, maybe they’re all still alive and planning a new heist with D.B. Cooper.
There’s a big difference between looking at someone’s fingerprints and seeing if they are a match for person X, and taking someone’s fingerprints and matching them with every known set of fingerprints in the database to see if they match anyone.
Yeah, if they have a guy in custody, and they think he’s Clarence Anglin, they can take his prints and see if they match the records for Anglin’s prints.
But if some random guy gets picked up for drunk and disorderly, and they take his prints at the jail, they’re not going to try to match his prints to all known escaped felons. The ability to do such a search does not exist. And especially not as a routine matter for every random guy who gets booked into county overnight for disturbing the peace. And especially not back in the 60s, when fingerprint records were literally just cards sitting in various locked filing cabinets all over the country.
I wonder how far away that is. If my iphone can recognize my fingerprint, and if all know fingerprints could be digitized in an FBI database, that would be a very useful tool.
It seems that this technology is used most often on the streets to decide whether to even take the person to jail. For somebody stopped for a minor violation, who claims to have no ID with him, is he:
an identifiable person, whom we can just issue a ticket to and then we get back on patrol, or
somebody wanted (warrants, probation violation, etc.) who we need to arrest and take to be booked into the jail and held for those charges.
I believe most of them are checked against a local database; all the digital fingerprints recorded by that local jurisdiction. While they could go back and digitize all the old paper fingerprint cards, or add in FBI records from all over the nation, including decades-old escapees, I suspect most police departments are too busy to do such work.
But even just a local database seems to work well for identifying people, because 1) most criminals stay within a local area, and 2) most people stopped by police have had prior encounters with local law enforcement, so their prints will be on the database.
It seems like the FBI or the Justice Department would have the money and experience to gather the local databases together and build a database searchable by cell modem nation wide.
I’ve volunteered on Alcatraz since 2003. I’ve met former Correctional Officers and former inmates who were there at the time and I also met Marshal Dyke who is the U.S. Marshal on the case. Here is some of the information I have:
The letter has been examined by historian Michael Esslinger who has samples of John Anglin’s writing. There is nothing at all to suggest a match. The handwriting is not John Anglin’s.
The photograph of the alleged escapees has been known about by some historians since the '90s and there is an original that came from the actual negative. That means it was not digitally altered by Photoshop or any other software. This does not prove the photograph is actually of the Anglins but it’s not a forgery. Marshal Dyke is now of the opinion that the photo is not the Anglins because some of the body proportions are off. Esslinger is adamant that the photograph was not altered in any way but is not totally convinced that it’s of the Anglin brothers.
Marshal Dyke believes that it’s possible that one or more escapees made it, though it’s not certain. In other words, the government doesn’t know either way. One interesting thing that Marshal Dyke told me is that someone was using Frank Morris’s social security number in the Los Angeles area back in the mid-1980s.
Practically every inmate who was there in 1962 claims to have helped the escapees in some way. Take anything a former inmate says with many grains of salt.
All three men were career criminals who had never held legitimate jobs nor been able to stay out of trouble. They were also penniless at the time of the escape.
As to the OP, it is procedural for the U.S. Marshal Service to keep the case open for a specific amount of time. Inmates Ralph Roe and Ted Cole got into the water and vanished back in 1937. Despite almost no chance for survival, the U.S. Marshal Service was following up leads for several decades. And no, Morris and the Anglins were not killers.
Also, for those who do have jobs that require fingerprinting, they update them periodically. Partly because they slightly change over time and although it won’t confuse one person with another, it can reduce the probability of a positive match.
Now, let’s backtrack to when these guys had their fingerprints taken. Pretty much on a card that was filed somewhere and maybe photographed to be disseminated. There is no point in talking about current fingerprinting techniques and technology as none of that existed then. You’d also have to convert that old print to work with whatever back-end is used today to store them. Not as easy as it sounds.
A guy found a way to lift prints with Scotch sup[/TM] tape from your phone button and use it to open your phone. I imagine they could digitize old fingerprint cards.
For fingerprint matching, they don’t digitize it like we would a digital photo. They identify & quantify certain standard features of the fingerprint to generate a numeric code that is stored. That code is much more compact than a digital photo, and much easier to be used in a computer match search.
But that code is not unique to every person, like an actual fingerprint. For testifying in a court, the actual fingerprint images have to be verified by a fingerprint expert. But for a beat cop trying to identify the person he has detained, the 90-99% accuracy of the devices using this code is good enough.
I’m sure they could use this on an old fingerprint card to produce such a digital code for searches. The accuracy would depend on the quality of the original fingerprint card, and, in this case, how much it had deteriorated in storage of these many decades.
No, if I meant ‘they don’t have cell phones’ then I’d say that. Cell phones aren’t set up to take hundreds or thousands of complete sets of fingerprints and pass them on to law enforcement for background checks. Taking an image of a single or small number of fingerprints and storing them locally in a format that’s good enough to act as a screen lock is just not the same thing as taking hundreds to hundreds of thousands of complete sets of fingerprints, storing them all, and cross-checking the fingerprints with multiple law enforcement fingerprint databases.
So you spend a whole paragraph talking about specialized fingerprinting equipment, then sneer at the idea that fingerprinting needs specialized equipment? I’m not sure what language you’re speaking, but in English a special device just for taking fingerprints is literally ‘specialized equipment’ for taking fingerprints. This stuff just isn’t standard at places that print off IDs, at least not in the US, and pretending that fingerprinting gear is common and/or isn’t actually fingerprinting gear is just silly.