Cummins concluded that the central areas with significant damage would indeed be difficult to classify using standard fingerprint classification systems, which rely heavily on the core pattern elements that the central area contains. Full classification of the altered prints was problematic.
But he also concluded that the outer regions bore sufficient ridge detail — enough individual minutiae — to allow identification through direct comparison with a known record. The classification difficulty did not translate into an identification difficulty, because identification can be established through minutiae comparison in any available portion of the fingertip surface.
This distinction — between classification difficulty and identification impossibility — was important for the technical record. Critics of fingerprint evidence, or defenders of an alternative identity theory, might point to the damaged central areas as evidence that identification was impossible. Cummins’s analysis demonstrated that those two things were not the same.
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## The Turbeville and Hallisey Modern Comparison
More than eight decades after the original identification, two forensic investigators revisited the Dillinger fingerprint evidence using modern comparison methodology.
Terry Turbeville, a retired North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation fingerprint examiner, and Robert Hallisey, a forensic consultant with Forensics Unlimited, examined the available fingerprint record in 2019 — the same year that Dillinger’s relatives were seeking an exhumation order for a potential DNA test.
Their examination used modern ACE-V methodology — the standard contemporary framework for fingerprint comparison that involves Analysis, Comparison, Evaluation, and Verification. The methodology is designed to systematically document the basis for an identification finding and to separate each stage of the comparison process.