In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

53 6. The Power of Fingerprints H e was known in the small town of Eunice, Louisiana, in St. Landry Parish, as “the bicycle man.” He had appeared a few months prior and often could be seen riding his bicycle throughout the area. Sometimes he pulled a small cart on wheels behind the bike. He bothered no one and seemed quite friendly, but a loner to most. One evening in late spring near dusk, 2005, he was struck accidentally by a car as he rode along a highway near town. The woman who hit him was driving at a normal speed but had not seen him on the road. He died at the scene. No one knew for certain who he was. He lay in a parish coroner’s office for almost two months and still had no name. In a conversation with an investigator from Lafayette Parish one day at a conference, I found out about the case. Since it had been months since he was discovered, his body was about to be cremated as an unidentified person. I quickly called the coroner of St. Landry and told him we would be happy to take the body and try to get him identified, to please not cremate the victim. Unfortunately, in the past, in our state and in many states, bodies that could not be identified were cremated within a relatively brief period of time after discovery. This was due in no small part to lack of storage space in most morgues. The coroner’s office submitted the body to us, and we began the task of creating a profile on him and trying to get him identified. He was an older white male, we thought, somewhere between the ages of fifty and sixty-five. He had a copious amount of antemortem trauma across his skeleton which included what might have been a healed, broken shoulder and a healed, broken leg. Both of those regions had previously been sutured, and sutures were still visible near and around the injury sites. The injuries suggested that he had a medical history somewhere, perhaps from other bicycle accidents. 54 Bone Remains Also, he had incurred multiple perimortem injuries from the fatal bike accident. His fingerprints had been submitted locally, but they had not resulted in a positive identification. We felt that with our profile and a little extra inquiry he at least had a chance to be identified, a chance he never would have had if he had been cremated as previously planned. Papers within the man’s backpack that accompanied his body suggested a name. A Walmart ticket in the bag was traced to a local store where he was caught on tape purchasing supplies. With a potential name, we went to the Louisiana State Police Crime Laboratory and asked for assistance from their amazing fingerprint experts. They ran the prints and asked for the inquiry to include military prints. They called a day or so later and said, “Mary, we have a match. Your victim is a Vietnam veteran who was sixty-five years old when he died.” I thought our quest was over. It was not. We were in a dilemma because we could not find his family. Generally, we do not act as detectives in trying to seek out family members, though I have done so in the past in order to obtain information on previous medical records for positive identification purposes. This was different. We knew who the man was; we just did not know where his family was. In a last-ditch effort to associate his name with a family, I contacted an old friend in the FBI, and she was able to provide information on his family in a northwestern state. He had five children, all of whom loved him very much and had been concerned because they had been unable to locate him for several years. It seems that he had gotten a divorce from their mother and had decided to sell his home and see the country on his bicycle. They had last heard from him when he left home, saying he was heading for Florida to help with hurricane victims. If not for the fingerprints, we probably never would have identified him and located his family. They were most grateful for our help. If we had not heard about this case simply through luck, the victim would have been cremated and more than likely would never have been identified. His family never...

Share