Whether he understood the scale of the search underway — with FBI resources, his photograph on national news, and a famous name driving coverage — is not something that can be established from the public record. What can be established is that the search found him quickly.
Reigh, when recovered, had lost weight. She appeared distressed, in the account available from reporting and trial testimony. She had been taken from the only stable daily environment she had known, from her school, from her mother, and brought to an unfamiliar city where she was living under circumstances that were neither explained to her nor stable.
She was seven years old.
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## Identification: How Four Fingerprints Connected Thirty Years
The fingerprint identification announced on August 15, 2008, was the result of a matching process that drew on records from multiple sources and multiple decades.
The print taken from Gerhartsreiter at his Baltimore arrest — standard booking procedure — was compared against available databases. The FBI Laboratory at Quantico conducted the analysis.
The first match was a latent print from a wine glass that Boston police had collected during an earlier search of a location connected to the case. This established that the man arrested in Baltimore was the same man who had been in that Boston location.
The second match was from his early-1980s immigration file, provided by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This was the key historical connection: a record that predated all of his American aliases, a document filed by Christian Gerhartsreiter or in connection with his early presence in the United States, bearing a fingerprint that matched the man arrested in Baltimore. It connected the 2008 arrest directly to the individual who had entered the country in the late 1970s.