Concord (US): Thanks to an old-fashioned fingerprint-matching technique, the remains of a shooting victim found alongside a New Hampshire highway 50 years ago have been identified as a Vermont man who had been released from prison three months earlier, authorities said.
The body of Winston “Skip” Morris was discovered by a work crew in a water-filled pit off Interstate 93 in Salem on August 7, 1969.
Morris, 30, of Barre, Vermont, had been shot at least six times in the head. Fingerprints were taken at the time, but there were no state or national databases to search.
After exhuming the body in 2012, investigators obtained new fingerprints and submitted them to regional databases and to FBI system multiple times, most recently in July.
But they didn’t get a match until a criminalist at the New Hampshire State Police Forensic Lab manually plotted the characteristics from one of Morris’s fingers.
“I chose to play old school, I’m not a youngster, so I went back to plotting the minutiae or individual characteristics myself,” said Timothy Jackson, who is scheduled to retire in June.
“When you’re looking at a finger that’s been in the ground since 1969, the epidermal layer of skin is gone. What we’re truly looking at is the inner layer,” he said in a phone interview Monday.
“It was off enough that the system couldn’t make the correct comparison. When I did it myself, I knew what I was looking at.”
The attorney general’s Cold Case Unit had been trying to identify the remains for years. (PTI)
