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> She was able to match a palm print recovered from the elevator control panel, and lifted during initial crime scene processing, to those taken from Wypych in

• JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > why didn't they attempt this kind of matching in the first place? There is no palm print database.
  • mkl 7y ago
    But there was reason to suspect him, so could they not have looked at the evidence from his other crimes?
    • IshKebab 7y ago
      That crime was several years later.
      • mkl 7y ago
        Yes. I guess the earlier case was cold. The link was there to find, but they only found it much later.
• sparky_z 7y ago
  Is it really easier, though? I don't know if there's a palm print database (like I think there is for fingerprints), and even if there were, there's no guarantee the murderer would be in it. So pursuing this would involve opening up a lot of old physical records, looking at a complex whirling pattern and trying to see if there's anywhere in it that lines up with the print found at the crime scene. Not feasible at scale. I don't know if palm prints even have an easy classification system like fingerprints do (loop, whorl, etc) to help organize a search. So this really only works if you already have a name and are trying to confirm it. Also, it's not like palm prints follow mathematical heredity patterns. DNA worked here because they didn't need a hit on the guy, just somebody, distantly related to him. Much lower bar for success. Any they didn't even have to spend time and money building a searchable database and populating it with samples. It was handed to them on a silver platter.