Sleight Of Hand

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Speaker 3 In 1981, police found a partial print near a doorknob at a crime scene.

Speaker 3 But without a suspect, police had no way to compare the print to the one million prints on file.

Speaker 3 17 years later, New forensic technology changed that, breathing new life into what was a very old crime.

Speaker 3 Charles Whittlesey was one of this country's outstanding architects in the early 1900s. He was the first to design poured concrete structures.

Speaker 4 He designed and built all the train stations clear across the United States.

Speaker 4 Albuquerque is one of his most famous, and the next most famous, I would guess, would be El Trevar at the rim of the Grand Canyon, which he built in 1902.

Speaker 3 Charles had four children, but his oldest daughter, Enid, identified with her father's free spirit and creativity more than the others.

Speaker 3 Enid shunned family pressure to attend college and instead headed to Vaudeville. At age 17, she began her career as a Marion Morgan dancer.

Speaker 3 She was also a singer, performing with the San Francisco opera. Enid never married, but she loved children.

Speaker 3 As she grew older, she eventually found work as a governess, but by the 1950s, she retired and moved into a family home on Cimarron Street in Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 She never owned a car, but was a fixture in the neighborhood, riding on her bicycle, stopping to talk talk and sometimes play with the neighborhood children.

Speaker 5 She would relate to them a lot more so than she would to adults.

Speaker 5 She had kind of

Speaker 5 almost a childlike quality about her.

Speaker 3 The neighbors all called her the bicycle lady,

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 everybody spoke highly of her. She was pleasant.
She would talk to people.

Speaker 3 Even into her 80s, she still rode her bicycle through the neighborhood. But as she grew older, something changed.

Speaker 5 She was quite concerned about intruders breaking into her house, to the point where she had built kind of a jerry-rigged alarm system out of wires and threads and cans to alert her if anybody tried to come in a window or a door.

Speaker 3 On March 13th, 1981, One of the neighbors noticed Enid's front door was open.

Speaker 3 Inside the doorway was blood.

Speaker 3 Paramedics found 86-year-old Enid Whittlesey in her upstairs bedroom, dead from multiple stab wounds. Frank Bolin was the first detective on the scene.

Speaker 3 The lady being of a small frame, there's just no way that I could believe that she offered much resistance.

Speaker 3 There was no need for

Speaker 3 the amount of injuries that this woman was subjected to.

Speaker 3 The bedroom was ransacked. The motive appeared to be robbery.
Several of the drawers were opened. A lot of the items were pulled out.
There was blood on various items in and out of drawers.

Speaker 3 Bolin also noticed blood drops leading down the left-hand side of the stairs. The person leaving these blood drops was in fact leaving.

Speaker 3 the area of the body, going downstairs and going to the front door. At the front door door was a blood smear and print leading to the doorknob of the door.

Speaker 3 Investigators hoped that the fingerprints and the blood drops would lead to the killer.

Speaker 3 The entire neighborhood, including the children, were shocked and saddened by the murder of 86-year-old Enid Whittlesey.

Speaker 3 Despite her cheerful disposition, her friends knew she was particularly fearful of crime.

Speaker 5 Whether it be a premonition,

Speaker 5 whether just a coincidence,

Speaker 5 but

Speaker 5 there was something that

Speaker 5 did trouble her a lot.

Speaker 4 She had always lived a very kind life that had never bothered anybody. This was just not fair that someone so dear and sweet would have to end her days this way.
It just was not fair.

Speaker 4 I mean, to be mutilated like she was.

Speaker 3 Inside the home was a wealth of forensic evidence, which told the story of what happened during Enid's last moments alive.

Speaker 3 We believe that the person had come up on the front porch, opened a window on the front porch, had crawled in the open window, stepped on the dusty piano, had left a footprint, a knife surfaced at some point.

Speaker 7 We worked our way upstairs where she was in the bedroom. It was just, it's always very sad.

Speaker 3 The victim was severely cut

Speaker 3 and stabbed in different parts of her body.

Speaker 8 She had a defensive wound on the outside of her right wrist, which to me showed that

Speaker 8 when the defendant was trying to stab her, she was putting up her arm in defense. He got her wrist.

Speaker 3 And at some point, the suspect was also also injured.

Speaker 6 It's not uncommon when a knife is used that the attacker slides,

Speaker 6 because the blood is slippery, they'll slide over the blade and cut themselves.

Speaker 3 It appeared the suspect walked back down the stairs, bleeding from his left hand.

Speaker 3 The forensic evidence revealed that the killer leapt through the front door and stole Enid's beloved bicycle from the front porch to make his getaway.

Speaker 3 Michelle Kessler was assigned to collect the blood drops from the home. She started with the grand piano.

Speaker 7 Because it was dry and flaky, I used a clean disposable scalpel and just collected it into a clean piece of white paper and made it into a bindle and closed it so I could breathe and put it in a coin envelope.

Speaker 3 Kessler used a different technique on the bloodstains on the front door.

Speaker 7 Well, in those days, we used cloth squares dampened with water, and disposable tweezers, or cleaned the tweezers in between with alcohol.

Speaker 3 Fingerprint specialists lifted three partial prints from a window. A fourth print was discovered on an archway leading to the front door.
They thought it might be a partial of a palm print.

Speaker 3 Investigators photographed the footprints using oblique lighting.

Speaker 7 It's when you take a flashlight and you shine it on an angle, on an oblique angle.

Speaker 7 It's kind of like at home when you can't see handprints on your furniture, but you turn on the light and you're looking sideways and there's the fingerprints.

Speaker 3 The forensic evidence told police how the crime was committed, but the evidence couldn't identify the killer. This was 1981.
five years before DNA was first used in a criminal case.

Speaker 3 Police could find no witnesses to the crime. None of the neighbors had seen anything suspicious.
Detectives then looked to other areas for leads.

Speaker 3 I was conversing with other detectives and we were comparing notes.

Speaker 3 We were comparing prints.

Speaker 3 But as far as a specific suspect, we had none.

Speaker 3 Comparing the fingerprints in Enid Whittlesey's home to others arrested for similar crimes in the area wasn't difficult.

Speaker 3 But comparing them to everyone in the file was impossible.

Speaker 9 You would have to search just over a million cards. If there was a known suspect, we can easily pull a card and then do the comparison.

Speaker 9 But without a known suspect, it would be very difficult without a full pattern type.

Speaker 3 And without a fingerprint match, the case remained unsolved.

Speaker 3 All investigators knew was that the killer had type B blood and was left-handed. It would take another 16 years before a new technology gave police their first solid lead.

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Speaker 3 All homicide cops would like to solve their crimes, kind of take it personal, you know, and

Speaker 3 they usually have put a lot of time and effort into it. Enid Whittlesey's murder case was one of several unsolved cases that languished in Frank Bolin's cold case file.

Speaker 8 I remember him telling me that during his 30-year career, there was a handful of cases, maybe three cases that haunted him that he wanted to solve before he retired. And this was one of them.

Speaker 3 He had the killer's blood from the crime scene and some of his fingerprints, but little else.

Speaker 3 But in in the years since Enid's murder in 1981, there had been more technological advances in forensic science than in any other time in history.

Speaker 3 In this age of personal computers, it's hard to remember that in the 1980s, very few people had even seen a computer, let alone used one.

Speaker 3 Large, expensive mainframe computers were the standard.

Speaker 3 With an eye to the future, the FBI and the Lockheed Martin Company experimented with using computers to analyze and compare fingerprints.

Speaker 3 When scanners were developed to capture the prints and the files could be compressed and formatted, the AFIS was born.

Speaker 9 APHIS is actually an acronym for Automated Fingerprint Identification System, and it's a computer system.

Speaker 9 And what it does is it photographs a latent print, it scans it, and then it'll give us a candidate list, usually of 10 people who have similar characteristics to the one that we entered into the system.

Speaker 3 This new technology revolutionized fingerprint analysis, not only for new cases, but for old ones.

Speaker 3 I would occasionally revisit a lot of my old cases and ask for a recheck of the prints.

Speaker 3 So Detective Bolan sent the four prints found in Edith Whittlesey's home back to the forensics lab.

Speaker 3 AFIS found no match for the three prints taken from the window, but the AFIS had better luck with the partial palm print.

Speaker 9 The partial print was such a small area that you weren't sure if it was actually from a fingerprint or if it was from a palm area of the hand.

Speaker 3 In this case, The AFIS determined that the print was a partial fingerprint and not a palm print.

Speaker 3 And the computer identified 10 individuals whose prints needed to be examined further.

Speaker 9 We're then able to pull the cards of those candidates and do a comparison. And we do a side-by-side comparison using a special magnifying glass.

Speaker 3 The latent print examination identified the owner of the print. Carl Stewart.

Speaker 3 I immediately began a background search and found him to live live within a half mile of the victim.

Speaker 3 He had a lengthy record within the Wilson Division, having been arrested several times for theft and things of that nature.

Speaker 3 Ironically, Carl Stewart was sitting in the Los Angeles jail following an arrest on domestic abuse charges. I went and found the spouse that had filed the charges on him.

Speaker 3 I sat down and I interviewed her. Through her, I had learned that he was a person that didn't really care for elderly people,

Speaker 3 that he had been a burglar.

Speaker 3 She also told police that Stewart targeted seniors in Beverly Hills, Culver City, and Wiltshire near his home. And she said one more thing: that Stewart was left-handed.

Speaker 3 On December 26, 1996, Detective Bolan and two others interviewed Carl Stewart. And this lady was hurt to the point where she died.
Okay.

Speaker 3 I didn't do that.

Speaker 3 I didn't do that. Does he know all that? No.

Speaker 3 At first, Carl Stewart claimed he knew nothing about the robbery or Enid Whittlesey. Then, he changed his story.

Speaker 5 I've seen her in the neighborhood.

Speaker 3 As my partner and I would release some information on bits and pieces of evidence. He would rethink his statement and make it work around the evidence that was obtained and how it got there.

Speaker 3 When told his fingerprint was near Enid's front door, Stewart said he had once been inside her home briefly, but had nothing to do with her murder.

Speaker 3 District Attorney Hayden Zaki would make the decision on whether to take this case to trial.

Speaker 8 The crime happened on March 11th, 1981, when I was still in high school. And I thought to myself, boy, this is an old case.

Speaker 8 You know, are we still going to have witnesses available, for instance? Do we preserve all the evidence properly?

Speaker 3 All of the evidence had been in the police property room for the 16 years since the murder, but one important piece was not.

Speaker 3 The coroner's reference sample of Enid's blood was missing.

Speaker 3 It would take another forensic breakthrough not available in 1981 to solve that problem and bring Carl Stewart to justice.

Speaker 3 Investigators wanted to make sure that it was Carl Stewart's blood inside Enid Whittlesey's home.

Speaker 3 To do that, scientists needed a sample of Stewart's blood as well as Enid Whittlesey's. But the swatch of Enid's blood taken at her autopsy was missing from the evidence file.

Speaker 6 So, what we did in lieu of the coroner's blood swatch, we used Enid Whittlesey's pajama top.

Speaker 6 That was what we were hoping would serve as her reference blood sample because it was heavily blood stained.

Speaker 3 Small, dried samples of that pajama top were placed in sterile water.

Speaker 6 Water dissolves the stain and it also causes any cells that are present, for example white blood cells which contain DNA, to lyse.

Speaker 6 They break open, spilling up their contents, including the DNA, out into the water.

Speaker 3 The next step was to clean the DNA.

Speaker 6 I had to pass it through something called a centracon tube. that's basically a filter.
And what it does is it accomplishes two things.

Speaker 6 It cleans the DNA and it also concentrates it into a smaller volume of water.

Speaker 3 The DNA is then replicated multiple times into a workable sample through a polymerase chain reaction or PCR.

Speaker 3 Six genetic markers were typed and illuminated by a blue color attached in the PCR process.

Speaker 6 I had one stain that actually matched the genetic profile of Ian Whittlesey.

Speaker 6 On the remaining items, I believe there were eight other bloodstains from throughout the residence that matched Carl Stewart's genetic profile.

Speaker 3 The evidence finally proved that Carl Stewart left the blood trail inside Enid Whittlesey's home.

Speaker 8 Carl Franklin Stewart left his blood at that crime scene. It's his blood.
What's the defense going to do?

Speaker 3 On May 17th, 1999, Hayden Zaki presented the forensic evidence of Enid Whittlesey's murder to a jury.

Speaker 3 Zaki believes that Carl Stewart first noticed Enid during one of her bicycle rides through the neighborhood.

Speaker 3 Later, Stewart broke into Enid's home through her front window, leaving his footprint on the dusty piano underneath.

Speaker 3 The motive was robbery.

Speaker 3 Upstairs, Enid confronted Stewart. A fight ensued, causing the defensive wounds to Enid's arms and hands.

Speaker 3 During the encounter, Stewart cut his left hand, which left the trail of blood down the left-hand side of the steps.

Speaker 3 Stewart left his partial print near the front door as he left the scene.

Speaker 3 A print originally thought to be a palm print, but later identified as a partial fingerprint by the automated fingerprint identification system.

Speaker 8 We knew we got our man.

Speaker 8 We knew that Carl Franklin Stewart was in that house because he left a fingerprint and he left blood.

Speaker 8 So that's how we knew we had our man.

Speaker 3 It took the jury just two hours to find Carl Stewart guilty of first-degree murder.

Speaker 3 She certainly didn't deserve to

Speaker 3 die as she did.

Speaker 3 He was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.

Speaker 3 This was the first homicide investigation assigned to Frank Bolin.

Speaker 3 Despite taking 17 years, he refused to give up.

Speaker 6 He will give 110% to every investigation that he participates in. Sometimes he's a little bit of a pain, but, you know, it's all for a good cause, and

Speaker 6 I enjoy working with him.

Speaker 3 I can't say it's a happy thing,

Speaker 3 but

Speaker 3 I did take a person off the street that was responsible for horrendous, vicious crime and I would say that the world, elderly people, females, whoever in general is a little bit safer today because this person is behind bars.

Speaker 7 So many disappointments, so many cases that have gone unsolved that you couldn't do, that you couldn't do anything with and then along comes new technology.

Speaker 4 I think it is so wonderful to think that after all these years that they would go back when they got better equipment and new technological things and try to solve these unsolved crimes and put these people where they belong.

Speaker 4 I think it's marvelous.