Their conclusion was that the postmortem prints still showed more than ten matching identifiers per finger. One anonymous retired special agent who had also examined the evidence separately reportedly found more than twenty-one matching identifiers on the right thumbs and more than sixteen on the right third fingers.
The significance of these modern findings is not that they establish anything about whether Dillinger survived — they do not, and were not intended to. The significance is methodological. They demonstrate that the surviving ridge detail in the postmortem prints is sufficient to meet the documentation standards of modern forensic comparison — not just the standards of 1934.
Modern fingerprint comparison standards, while they vary somewhat by jurisdiction and professional organization, generally require a minimum threshold of matching identifiers before a positive identification can be declared. The numbers reported by Turbeville and Hallisey substantially exceed common minimum thresholds. The 2019 comparison confirmed, using contemporary methodology, what the 1934 identification had concluded using the methods available at the time.
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## Jimmy Lawrence and What the Alternative Requires
The alternative theory — that the man killed at the Biograph was James Lawrence rather than John Dillinger — requires, at minimum, a credible account of how postmortem fingerprints from Jimmy Lawrence’s body could have matched the known Dillinger fingerprint record.
Fingerprints are individual. Lawrence and Dillinger were different people. Their fingerprints were not interchangeable. If the postmortem prints matched the Dillinger record, then the body was Dillinger’s.
The alternative theory does not, in any surviving published version, propose a mechanism by which Lawrence’s prints could have matched Dillinger’s. Jay Robert Nash’s *The Dillinger Dossier* focused on the autopsy discrepancies, the father’s reaction, and circumstantial claims about Lawrence’s disappearance. It did not engage with the fingerprint identification in a way that accounted for the specificity of fingerprint evidence.