| Author | Message | ||
     Webmaster |
The answer to your first question: "How do I obtain fingerprints from a letter?"is that you must turn the evidence over to your local police for processing by their supporting forensic laboratory, or hire your own private consultant. Although technical procedures for harvesting latent prints from porous surfaces are publicly available (such as http://onin.com/fp/fbi_2000_lp_guide.pdf) you may "miss" most of the identifiable latent prints unless you are a Latent Print Examiner trained to competency (to SWGFAST standards). Regarding your second question "And once I obtain them, how do I find out who they belong to?"is that even the forensic science laboratory supporting your local police may or may not have access to a database containing known prints of persons who touched the letter. In some instances police may collect fingerprints from suspects and other persons for comparison with latent prints developed on evidence. However, as you hinted in your posting, there is NO public database of fingerprints for you or a private consultant to access and search. I have heard of persons spending thousands of dollars for private consultants to process numerous items trying to link latent prints developed on a threat letter with "known" prints of a "suspect." Sometimes items from the "suspect's" trash, old love letters, etc., may be processed in an attempt to locate "known" prints. This is a hit and miss process and one may spend thousands of dollars with zero progress toward meaningful results. | ||
| Ed |
How do I obtain fingerprints from a letter? And once I obtain them, how do I find out who they belong to? Thanks, Ed |
