on the latest threats and trying to figure out how to get out of the horrific mess.
The least Dave could do was give Liz her day.
CHAPTER TEN
ON THURSDAY, JANUARY 10, 2013, Deputy Phyllips asked crime scene technician Katie Pattee to process the recovered vehicle. With degrees in Criminal Justice Administration and Forensic Science, she was also a Certified Crime Scene Analyst with hundreds of hours of training in crime scene processing, photography, and fingerprint identification. Though the Explorer had been found in Douglas County, Nebraska, and towed to the Omaha Police Department impound lot, it had been reported stolen in Iowa, so the theft was under the jurisdiction of Pottawattamie County.
As the sole crime scene technician for the Pottawattamie County Sherriff’s Office, Pattee was busy investigating everything from criminal mischief to burglary to homicide. On this day she was not investigating a homicide. She was assigned the task of examining a recovered stolen vehicle. She had never heard of Cari Farver nor the worried mother who had reported her missing seven weeks earlier.
As far as law enforcement in Iowa was concerned, Cari was an unbalanced woman who had shirked her responsibilities to take off on a thoughtless adventure, leaving a paranoid mother behind to fret. From the perspective of the Nebraska police, Cari was a malicious stalker, obsessed with Dave Kroupa.
It was not Pattee’s job to know about any of that. She had more than enough responsibility just examining evidence. She did her job well, and now she meticulously followed the procedural steps to process the recovered car. First, she verified that the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) matched the one in the theft report. Since 1981, each new on-road vehicle in the United States has been assigned a unique code of seventeen digits used to track ownership and accident history. Just as people have only one Social Security number, vehicles have just one VIN, etched or printed on various parts of a vehicle and also displayed on stickers, usually found inside the car’s door jam on the driver’s side.
Next, Pattee photographed the exterior, noting a scratch on the side. She dusted the exterior for fingerprints and found none. When she moved to the inside of the car, she was immediately struck by how clean it appeared. The cloth seats had recently been vacuumed and still bore the telltale marks of a vacuum attachment tool. She noticed a faint, pink stain in the middle of the front passenger seat. It looked as if someone had spilled a strawberry-flavored drink. She photographed every inch of the Explorer’s interior, including that stain. It was not unusual to find stains from spilled food and beverages in recovered cars.
The floor was not nearly as clean as the seats. There was some light debris, apparently tracked in by shoes, but nothing out of the ordinary. She dusted the car’s interior, paying attention to the windows, door handles, and other smooth surfaces that are conducive to retaining fingerprints. The Explorer held very few contents. A parking permit for West Corporation was tucked into the visor on the driver’s side, and that, too, was dusted for prints. The glove compartment was empty, but the rear cargo area held jumper cables and empty grocery bags. Pattee painstakingly documented all of it.
Sometimes she found cigarette butts or cups with straws that could be tested for DNA that might lead to the car thieves, but there was nothing like that here. She couldn’t find a single fingerprint on the car itself. The Explorer had been wiped clean. She found no fingerprints on any of the contents except for an empty mint container left in the cup holder between the front seats. After dusting the tin, she observed fingerprint ridge detail on the top of the container as two fingerprints emerged. She carefully placed lifting tape atop the prints, peeled the tape away, and secured it to lift cards that she labeled with the subject, date, and time.
Pattee later used a magnifier to examine the prints to determine if there was enough ridge detail to warrant running them through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). A national computerized database of fingerprints maintained by the Criminal Justice Information Services Division of the FBI, the AFIS contains the palm and or fingerprints of over fifty million subjects—people arrested for a variety of crimes but not necessarily convicted. With their distinctive patterns of arches, loops and whirls, fingerprints are unique to individuals, and prior to recent discoveries about DNA, were the most damning of all