AFIS Stops a Serial Killer

Carl Voelker (dates unavailable), Raymond Moore (dates unavailable), Joseph

Wegstein (b. 1922)
In the late 19th century, law enforcement realized they could use fingerprints
to determine if a person convicted of a crime was a repeat offender or a first-
time offender (first time caught, at least). So in 1924, the US Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) created its Identification Division, and by the early 1960s it
had fingerprints from 15 million criminals. The Identification Division was
drowning in its success: each day it received 30,000 new 10­print cards to
search the database, a task that took a technician approximately 18 minutes
for each card.
FBI Special Agent Carl Voelker went to the US National Bureau of Standards in
1963 to see if there was a way to create an Automated Fingerprint
Identification System (AFIS) using information technology. There he met with
Raymond Moore and Joseph Wegstein. Moore and Wegstein realized they would
have to create a new scanner to read the fingerprint cards, develop software to
extract the characteristic points of a fingerprint used for identification, and
finally develop software to match the prints. The first two tasks were put out
for bid and developed at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory and the
Autonetics division of North American Aviation; the matching software was
developed personally by Wegstein. Five years later, Rockwell Autonetics was
tasked with creating five high-speed card readers that the FBI used to scan its
15 million criminal fingerprint cards, making them electronically searchable for
the first time.
Similar systems were developed in the United Kingdom, France, and Japan,
although these systems were designed primarily to match partial prints left at
crime scenes against fingerprint cards, rather than for identity verification.
NEC Corporation (formerly the Nippon Electric Company) designed a system for
the Japanese National Police; similar systems were installed in San Francisco
and Los Angeles, both of which saw burglary rates drop as prints left behind at
break-ins could finally be used to identify a suspect. Then in 1985, the Los
Angeles AFIS system identified the “Night Stalker” serial killer, Richard
Ramirez, from a fingerprint he left on the mirror of a car he had stolen, ending
his murderous crime spree.
SEE ALSO First Digital Image (1957), Algorithm Influences Prison Sentence
(2013)
The Los Angeles Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) identified
the “Night Stalker” serial killer from a fingerprint on the mirror of a stolen car.