THE FINGERPRINT MOMENT
When FBI agents brought the man known as Robert Clark in for questioning on June 1, 1989, the visual resemblance to the Bender bust was evident. But a resemblance — even a close one — is not identification. It is a lead.
The fingerprint comparison was the step that turned the lead into identification.
John List’s fingerprints were on file from his military service. Every person who served in the United States armed forces was fingerprinted, and those records were maintained. When List had been commissioned as a second lieutenant during the Korean War mobilization, his prints had been taken and entered into military records.
Those records, nearly four decades old by 1989, were still retrievable. The comparison between Robert Clark’s fingerprints and the military records for John Emil List produced a match.
Fingerprint comparison at the level of accuracy required for criminal identification involves detailed examination of the patterns of ridges, whorls, and bifurcations in the print — the points of similarity that distinguish one person’s fingerprints from every other person’s. A match at the level that supports criminal identification requires finding a sufficient number of matching points, and the number required varies by jurisdiction and by the standards of the examining laboratory.
The match between Robert Clark’s prints and John List’s military records was unambiguous. The same ridges, the same patterns — the prints of the man in Virginia were the prints of the man who had enlisted in the United States Army in 1943 and been commissioned in 1950.