MANSFIELD — The Mansfield Police Department has found a match to a fingerprint collected at the scene of a 1981 homicide.
The print belongs to a dead man, who police have declined to identify.
Lieutenant Robert J. Scropits of the MPD said the Federal Bureau of Investigation matched an unidentifiable fingerprint with a person of interest.
“Once a year, we are required by general orders to review all the cold-case files.” Scropits said. “To see if there is anything new because technology has come such a long way since (1981).”
On April 29, 1981 Deborah Lee Miller, 18, was discovered, naked and dead in her apartment at 151 W. Third Street by the building owner, according to authorities. The waitress at Mr. T’s coffee shop was beaten to death by a burner grate off a gas stove, according to then Richland County prosectuor John Allen.
Authorities called it one of the most gruesome local crime scenes they had encountered.
The murder has remained cold, Scropits said, but recently a piece of evidence has come back into the case — and authorities have attached a name to it.
“In this case, there must have been a fingerprint that was lifted at the scene,” Scropits said. “(Originally) they sent the print to the FBI and the print was not on file.”
Scropits said the FBI has a bank of unknown fingerprints and every so often, the bureau runs them again through the system.
“If it hits on somebody that may have been out of the system in 1990 but if they run it every five years and he was arrested in 1995, now the fingerprints are on file. So the unidentifiable fingerprints would hit.”
The FBI’s data bank of unidentifiable fingerprints, Scropits said, is a national bank.
“When you get your fingerprints (recorded,) it’s all going to the FBI,” he said. “It’s a collection point for all fingerprints. If you had done something in Ohio and got your fingerprints taken and they were sent to the FBI, then you went and did something in Texas and they had your fingerprint, they could send that in and it would hit you out of Ohio.
“That may have happened in this case, I’m not sure where that fingerprint was picked up. I just know it hasn’t shown anything for a long time, and it wasn’t until recently that they matched it.”
Scropits said because person associated with the matched fingerprint is now deceased, there is not a lot of new information to gather.
“In terms of trying to contact this person, we’re not going to be able to,” he said. “Could it helps us in looking at where it was found, was there someone this person knew — maybe we could talk to them; maybe they (the deceased person of interest) talked.
“But we just know the fingerprint that came back — that person is deceased.”
Scropits said because the case is still open, he was unable to comment on if this print belonged to a suspect.
“If it was something that we could say, ‘Yes, that person did it’ and being a case we could close,” he said. “We would be able to put it out and say, ‘Hey, we believe this and this. This is who did it.’”
The case could stay frozen until someone speaks or new evidence is uncovered in the crime lab, he said.
“Like the DNA that is done in the lab — back in 1981 they may not have had anything — but now that we do, when we run that stuff like fingerprints, it can turn cases,” he said.
Call Skropits at 419-755-9742 with any information about the case.
