This text belongs to ‘Dossier Negro’, a newsletter inspired by the podcast of the same name, which Enrique Figueredo will send on Wednesdays on a biweekly basis. If you want to receive it, sign up here.
For more than 100 years, fingerprints have been an eminently human trace that has allowed law enforcement to find certain criminals and bring them to justice. Its inclusion in a general file is what allows, for example, the identification of a suspect, as long as the criminal has some previous problem with the law that has forced him to put his fingers in ink. That is what happened with Pedro Lozano Jiménez, better known as Rambo de Requena; a highway robber who roamed the mountains of Valencia in 2020 and whose affiliation was discovered thanks to the fact that he left his fingerprints on certain objects in one of the country houses that he raided to eat and sleep. We tell it in Dossier Negro.
The case of the parking lot murderer, Juan José Rangel, who caused panic in Barcelona in 2003, is somewhat different. After one of the two crimes he committed in the parking lot on Bertrán Street, he left his palm print. Obviously, that was not recorded in the files, but once he was arrested, it was possible to compare his hand with the trace left in a plastic bag.
Pioneers. Although the first studies on fingerprinting began around 1880, it was not until 12 years later that in the city of La Plata, in Argentina, a first crime was solved with the evidentiary support of a fingerprint. Francisca Rojas killed her children, although she initially blamed a man she had rejected as a husband.
Imprint. Disparate sciences such as archeology or forensic medicine sometimes collaborate, especially in the identification of bodies that have been hidden for a long time. A 5,000-year-old fingerprint discovered in the Orkney Islands appears to be a great challenge for both disciplines.
AI aids. Experts from Columbia University, in the United States, have demonstrated with the help of artificial intelligence that the fingerprints of the same individual, contrary to what was thought, are not actually so different but rather have a certain relationship. The discovery is a new step in forensic sciences.
False magic. Some television series have brought closer the reality of scientific police and fingerprinting areas in particular, but in a distorted way. You cannot put a fingerprint into a computer and find the complete history of an individual who has never been arrested. One of the most popular fiction series in this sense has been the classic C.S.I., which is now seen on Movistar.
