Representative Boggs. How much would that be?
Mr. Latona. He would literally have to draw blood. He would have to get down and just slice that off completely. He did that with five fingers. Then he taped the five fingers to the side of his chest and he kept them there for about 2 weeks. The same procedure was gone through with the other hand, and at the end of that time they were taken down and bound up individually. When they finally healed, all he has now is scar tissue for his pattern areas; but all we did in order to identify him was to drop down to the second joint. We made the identification from the second joint.
Now, at that particular time——
Representative Boggs. After all that business.
Mr. Latona. It didn't do him any good. Literally, the easiest person in our files to identify is Roscoe Pitts. He is the only one that has scar patterns like that. As soon as they see anything like that, everybody that knows anything about our files knows—Roscoe Pitts.
Representative Boggs. Develop, if you will, please, that point that no two human beings ever have similar prints. Why is that, in your opinion?
Mr. Latona. Well, earlier we went through a case which we have in the FBI, in which we literally have compared millions, millions of single prints with a fragmentary latent print which we developed on a demand note in a kidnapping case, one of our major kidnapping cases which occurred back in 1937, and we have compared this fragmentary print.
Now, ordinarily in fingerprints there are four basic pattern types. You have an arch, tented arch, a loop, and a whorl.
Now in making a comparison, naturally if you can tell the type of pattern you are going to restrict your comparison to the particular type.
In this instance we cannot tell what type of pattern this fragment that we developed is. We know that it is from a finger. And in attempting to identify the subject of this kidnapping case, we have compared it literally with millions of cards.