page_title: William Heirens
section_title: Doorjamb print
hierarchical_section_title: William Heirens / Claims of innocence / Fingerprint evidence / Doorjamb print
caption_attribution_description: English: Picture of a right loop fingerprint pattern. The bell shaped portion of the loop is leaning medially toward the body. Image source: NIST.
context_page_description: William George Heirens was an American convicted serial killer who confessed to three murders in 1946. Heirens was called the Lipstick Killer after a notorious message scrawled in lipstick at a crime scene. At the time of his death, Heirens was reputedly Chicago's longest-serving prisoner, having spent 65 years in prison.
  He spent the later years of his sentence at the Dixon Correctional Center in Dixon, Illinois. Though he remained imprisoned until his death, Heirens had recanted his confession and claimed to be a victim of coercive interrogation and police brutality.
  Charles Einstein wrote a novel called The Bloody Spur about Heirens, published in 1953 which was adapted into the 1956 film While the City Sleeps by Fritz Lang.
  On March 5, 2012, Heirens died at the age of 83 at the UIC Medical Center from complications arising from diabetes.
context_section_description: A "bloody, smudged" print of an end and middle joint of a finger was found on the doorjamb of a door between the bathroom and dressing room in Frances Brown's apartment. A photograph of the print was taken, but no match was made with anything on file. After Heirens was arrested on June 26, his prints were compared with the Degnan note. When Laffey claimed a match with Heirens and the prints on the Degnan note, an attempt was made to match him with the doorjamb print. It was unsuccessful, and the police declared him cleared of the Brown murder because the print at the crime scene was not his. Twelve days later, however, it was declared to match Heirens's prints to 22 points of comparison, well above the FBI standard.
  At Heirens's sentencing, Laffey testified that the end joint of the bloody print had an eight-point comparison to Heirens's and the middle joint a six-point comparison. The middle joint didn't live up to Laffey's personal standard of seven or eight points to make a positive identification match.
  Another source of contention is that the Brown crime scene fingerprint has the appearance of having been rolled, which is the practice of taking a person's inked finger and rolling it on an index card, and not the smudged, bloody and unreadable print as originally reported. Traditionally, after the fingertip is covered in ink from either the suspect's hand being pressed on top of an ink pad or an ink roller being run across it, the finger is placed on the card on one edge. It is rolled once from one edge to the finger's other edge to produce a large, clear print.
  Heirens's attorneys did not question the veracity of the prints, however.
caption: Fig.1 A rolled print from a fingerprint card
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