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[Music] in 1981 police found a partial Print near a door knob at a crime scene but without a suspect police had
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no way to compare the print to the 1 million prints on file 17 years later new forensic
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technology changed that breathing New Life into what was a very old crime [Music]
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[Music] [Applause] [Music] Charles Whitty was one of this country's outstanding architects in the early
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1900s he was the first to design poured concrete structures he designed and built all the
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train stations clear across the United States Albuquerque is one of his most famous and the next most famous I guess
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would be El trar at the rim of the Grand Canyon which he built in 1902 eltar is a hotel and resort overlooking
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the Grand Canyon Whitt's design was eclectic a combination of the Swiss Chalet and
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Norway Villa Styles Charles had four children but his oldest daughter Enid identified with her
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father's free spirit and creativity more than the others she was very stately
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very pretty woman slender tall beautiful hair a big white smile with her flashing
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teeth Enid shunned family pressure to attend college and instead headed to Vaudeville at age 17 she began her
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career as a Marian Morgan dancer she was also a singer performing with the San Francisco Opera Enid never
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married but she loved children as she grew older she eventually found work as a governance but by the
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1950s she retired and moved into a family home on simmeron street in Los Angeles she never owned a car but was a
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fixture in the neighborhood riding on her bicycle stopping to talk and sometimes play with the neighborhood
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children she would relate to them a lot more so than she would to adults she had kind of a almost a
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childlike quality about her the neighbors all called her the bicycle lady and uh everybody spoke highly of
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her she was pleasant she would talk to people even into her 80s she still rode her bicycle through the neighborhood but
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as she Grew Older something changed she was quite concerned about uh Intruders breaking into her house to the
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point where she had built kind of a Jerry rigged alarm system out of wires and threads and cans to alert her if
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anybody tried to come in a window or a door on March 13th 1981 one of the neighbors noticed Enid's
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front door was open inside the doorway was blot paramedics found 86-year-old Enid
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Whitty in her upstairs bedroom dead from multiple stab wounds Frank Bolan was the
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first detective on the scene the lady being of a small frame there just no way that I could believe that she offered
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much resistance uh there was no need for uh the amount of injuries you that this
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woman was subjected to the bedroom was ransacked the motive appeared to be robbery several of the drawers were open
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a lot of the items were pulled out there was blood on various items in and out of
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drawers Bolen also noticed blood drops leading down the left hand side of the stairs person leaving these blood drops
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was in fact leaving the area of the body going downstairs and going to the front
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door at the front door was a blood smear and print leading to area of the doorknob of the
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door investigators hoped that the fingerprints and the blood drops would lead to the
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[Music] killer the entire neighborhood including the children were shocked and saddened
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by the murder of 86-year-old Enid Whitty despite her cheerful disposition her friends knew she was particularly
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fearful of crime whether it be a premonition uh whether just a coincidence uh but uh there was
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something that um that did trouble her a lot she had always lived a very kind life that had never bothered anybody
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this was just not fair that someone so dear and sweet would have to end her days this way it was just was not fair I
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mean to be mutilated like she was inside the home was a wealth the forensic evidence which told the story
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of what happened during Enid's last moments alive we believed that the person had
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come up on the front porch open a window on the front porch had crawled in the open window stepped on the dusty piano
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had left the footprint a knife surfaced at some point we worked our way upstairs
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where she was in the bedroom it was just it's always very s the victim was severely cut um and stabbed in different
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parts of her body she had a defensive wound on the outside of her right wrist which to me showed that when the
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defendant was trying to stab her she was putting up her arm in defense and he got
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her wrist and at some point the suspect was also injured it's not uncommon when a
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knife is used that the attacker slides um because the blood is slippery they'll
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slide over the blade and cut themselves it appeared the suspect walked back down
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the stairs bleeding from his left hand the forensic evidence revealed that the killer left through the front door and
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stole Enid's beloved bicycle from the front porch to make his getaway it's
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especially sad to see someone all those years lived in their house and not to be
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even safe in their own home Michelle kler was assigned to collect the blood drops from the home
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she started with the grand piano because it was dry and Flaky I used a clean disposable scalpel and just collected it
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into a clean piece of white paper and made it into a Bendle and closed it so it could breathe and put it in a coin
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envelope Kesler used a different technique on the blood stains on the front door well in those days we used
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claw squares dampen with water and disposable tweezers or clean the tweezers in between with
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alcohol fingerprint specialist lifted three partial prints from a window a fourth print was discovered on an
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archway leading to the front door they thought it might be a partial uh of a palm
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print investigators photographed the footprints using oblique lighting it's when you take a flashlight
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and you shine it on an angle on an oblique angle it's kind of like at home when you can't see handprints on your
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furniture but you turn on the light and you're looking sideways at there's the
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[Music] fingerprints the forensic evidence told police how the crime was committed but
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the evidence couldn't identify the killer this was 1981 5 years before DNA was first used
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in a criminal case police could find no witness to the crime none of the neighbors had seen
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anything suspicious detectives then looked to other areas for leads I was conversing
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with other detectives and we were comparing notes we were comparing Prints but as far as a specific suspect
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we had none comparing the fingerprints in Enid whitty's home to others arrested for
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similar crimes in the area wasn't difficult but comparing them to everyone in the
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file was impossible you would have to search just over a million cards if there was a
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known suspect we can easily pull a card and then do the comparison but without a
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known suspect it would be very difficult without a full pattern type and without a fingerprint match the
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case remained unsolved all investigators knew was that the killer had tipe B blood and was
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left-handed we knew that there was an ongoing investigation that it was quite thorough
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and we were a little bit surprised that uh time went by and it didn't result in
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anything it would take another 16 years before a new technology gave police their first solid lead
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[Music] all homicide cops would like to solve their crimes kind of take it personal
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you know and uh they usually have put a lot of time and effort into it Enid whitty's murder case was one of several
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unsolved cases that languished in Frank bolan's Cold Case file I remember him
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telling me that during his 30-year career there was a handful of cases maybe three cases that wanted him that
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he wanted to solve before he retired and this was one of them he had the Killer's blood from the
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crime scene and some of his fingerprints but little else but in the years since Enid's
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murder in 1981 there had been more technological advances in forensic science than in any
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other time in history in this age of personal computers it's hard to remember that in
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the 1980s very few people had even seen a computer let alone used one large expensive mainframe computers were the
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standard with an eye to the Future the FBI and the Lockheed Martin company experimented with using computers to
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analyze and compare fingerprints when scanners were developed to capture the prints and the
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files could be compressed and formatted the afis was born a this is actually an acronym for automated fingerprint
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identification system and it's a computer system and what it does it photographs a Laten print it scans it
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and then it'll give us a candidate list usually of 10 people who have similar
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characteristics to the one that we entered into the system this new technology revolutionized fingerprint analysis not
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only for new cases but for old ones I occasionally revisit a lot of my old cases and ask for a recheck of the
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prints so detective Bolan sent the four prins found in Enid whitty's home back
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to the forensics lab afis found no match for the three prints taken from the window but the
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afis had better luck with the partial palm print the partial print was such a small area that you weren't sure if it
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was actually from a fingerprint or if it was from a palm area of the hand in this
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case the afis determined that the print was a partial fingerprint and not a palm
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print and the computer identified 10 individuals whose prints needed to be examined
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further we're then able to pull the cards of those candidates and do a comparison and we do a side by-side
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comparison using a special magnifying glass the latent print examination identified
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the owner of the print Carl Stewart I immediately began a background search and found him to live within a
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half mile of the victim he had a length the record within the Wilshire division having been arrested several times for
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theft and things of that nature ironically Carl Stewart was sitting in the Los Angeles jail
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following an arrest on domestic abuse charges I went and found the spouse that had filed the charges on him I sat down
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and I interviewed her through her I had learned that he was a person that didn't
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really care for elderly people uh that he had been a burger she also told police that Stuart
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targeted seniors in Beverly Hills Culver City and Wilshire near his home and she
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said one more thing that Stuart was left-handed on December 26th 1996 detective Bolan and two others
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interviewed Carl Stewart I basically started off with asking him about the area he lived and some of his background
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of his life then I kind of got into the crime and this lady was hurt to the point where she died okay I didn't I
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didn't I didn't do that me I didn't do that you know it no at first Carl
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Stewart claimed he knew nothing about the robbery or Enid Whitty then he changed his
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story I've seen her in the neighborhood I remember and she would wave at the
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kids playing when we was little like when you you would see her rideing the bike she would wave at you and stuff and
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you know everybody would pretty much weave back at her or something like that as my partner and I would
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release some information on bits and pieces of evidence he would rethink his statement and make it work around the
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evidence that was obtained and how it got there when told his fingerprint was near
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Enid's front door steuart said he had once been inside her home briefly but had nothing to do with her
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murder did district attorney Hayden Zaki would make the decision on whether to take this case to trial the crime
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happened on March 11th of 1981 when I was Stone High School and uh I thought to myself boy this is an old case um you
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know are we still going to have witnesses available for instance uh did we preserve all the evidence
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properly even with the print zachi knew it wasn't enough to convict Stewart for
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Enid's murder all he had is a a fingerprint I mean I guess in theory we could have prosecuted with only a
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fingerprint but I mean he could have explained the fingerprint away pretty easily all of the other evidence had
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been in the police property room for the 16 years since the murder but one important piece was
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not the coroner's reference sample of Enid's blood was missing it would take another forensic
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breakthrough not available in 1981 to solve that problem and bring Carl Stewart to
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[Music] Justice and Carl Stewart was taken to the dispensary at the county jail and
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blood was drawn that blood was labeled and given to me for uh typing purposes investigators wanted to make
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sure that it was Carl Stewart's blood inside Enid whitty's home to do that scientists needed a sample of
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Stewart's blood as well as Enid Whitty but the Swatch of Enid's blood taken at her autopsy was missing from
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the evidence file so what we did in lie of the Corner's blood Swatch we used
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Enid whitty's pajama top that was what we were hoping would serve as her reference blood sample cuz it was
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heavily Blood Stained small dried samples of that pajama top were placed in sterile water
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water dissolves the stain and it also causes any cells that are present for example white blood cells which contain
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DNA to lice they break open spilling of their contents including the DNA out into the
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water The Next Step was to clean the DNA I had to pass it through uh something called a centricon tube it's basically a
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filter and what it does is it accomplishes two things it cleans the DNA and it also concentrates it into a
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smaller volume of of water the DNA is then replicated multiple times into a workable sample
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through a polymerase Chain Reaction or PCR six genetic markers were typed and illuminated by a blue color attached in
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the PCR process I had one stain that actually matched the genetic profile of Enid whittles SE on the remaining items
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I believe there were eight other blood stains from throughout the residence that matched Carl Stewart's genetic
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profile the evidence finally proved that Carl Stewart left the blood trail inside
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Enid whitty's home Carl Franklin Stewart left his blood at that crime scene it's
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his blood what's the defense going to do on May 17th 1999 Hayden zachi presented presented
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the forensic evidence of Enid whitty's murder to a jury Zachy believes that Carl Stewart
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first noticed Ena during one of her bicycle rides through the neighborhood later Stuart broke into
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Enid's home through her front window leaving his footprint on the dusty piano
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underneath the motive was robbery [Music] upstairs Enid confronted Stuart a fight
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ensued causing the defensive wounds to Enid's arms and hands during the encounter Stuart cut
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his left hand which left the trail of blood down the left hand side of the steps Stuart left his partial Print near
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the front door as he left the scene a print originally thought to be a palm print but later identified as a
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partial fingerprint by the automated fingerprint identification system we knew he got our man we knew that Carl
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Franklin stur was in that house because he left a fingerprint and he left blood so that's how we knew we had our
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man it took the jury just 2 hours to find Carl Stewart guilty of first deegree Murder She certainly didn't deserve to
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die as she did he was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole this was the first homicide
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investigation assigned to Frank Bolan despite taking 17 years he refused to give up he will give 110% to every
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investigation that he participates in sometimes he's a little bit of a pain but you know it's all for a good cause
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and uh um I I enjoy working with him I can't say it's a happy thing but I did take a person off the street
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that was responsible for horrendous vicious crime and I would say that the world uh elderly people females whoever
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in general is a little bit safer today because this person is behind bars so many disappointments so many cases that
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gone unsolved that you couldn't do you couldn't do anything with and then Along
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Comes new technology I think it is so wonderful to think that after all these years that
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they would go back when they got better equipment and uh new technological things and try to solve these unsolved
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crimes and put these people where they belong I think it's marvelous [Music]
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w [Music] [Music]