Thursday, October 07, 1999
Fingerprints at '85 death scene called link to man
BY STEVE KEMME
The Cincinnati Enquirer
HAMILTON — Two fingerprint experts testified in court Wednesday that prints lifted from the home of Ann Zwiefelhoefer the day after she was stabbed to death in 1985 matched those of Kevin W. Walls.
Jacob Holmes, a fingerprint specialist with the FBI, said 13 fingerprints lifted from the 83-year-old Hamilton woman's home matched Mr. Walls' prints.
Sheryl Mahan, a fingerprint examiner of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation (BCI), testified that she matched five of those 13 prints with Mr. Walls' prints.
A new state computer system for identifying fingerprints led to Mr. Walls being charged with Mrs. Zwiefelhoefer's murder last year.
Mr. Walls, 30, of Hamilton is standing trial in Butler County Common Pleas Court on charges of aggravated murder and aggravated robbery. At the time of Mrs. Zwiefelhoefer's murder, he was a 15-year-old student at Garfield Junior High School in Hamilton.
With no eyewitnesses to the crime, the fingerprints are the prosecution's key piece of evidence in this case.
Ohio began using the new computerized fingerprint identification system in June of last year, Ms. Mahan said.
Hamilton police submitted to BCI last year prints that had been lifted from Mrs. Zwiefelhoefer's house on March 8, 1985, the day after her slaying.
Ms. Mahan said she scanned the prints into the computer and asked it to generate 10 possible matching candidates.
After comparing the prints of those 10 people with the prints from the crime scene, she said, she concluded that they matched the prints of Mr. Walls. Mr. Walls has been in prison for the past four years, serving a three- to 15-year prison sentence for robbery.
BCI sent photos of the crime-scene prints to the FBI. Mr. Holmes said he found 13 matches with Mr. Walls' fingerprints.
He said he found more than BCI had because the quality of his fingerprint cards was better.
Mr. Holmes and Russell McSeveney, now a retired fingerprint examiner with BCI, said the prints from Mrs. Zwiefelhoefer's house did not match the prints of a Hamilton man who had been considered a prime suspect in this case.
Fingerprints identified as those of Mr. Walls were found on several objects in the murder victim's house, including a money jar, Mr. Holmes said.
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