CRIMINAL MIND > FORENSICS & INVESTIGATION

Beverly Hills Cop

Lucky Break

In September 2002, a woman contacted the El Segundo PD regarding "a deathbed admission." She said she knew who had committed the murders in El Segundo in 1957. It was her uncle. He wanted to confess to the crimes before he died.

It was an incredible moment—at least it seemed as much after cops got the call. But like so many times throughout the investigation, this lead would ultimately end up going nowhere.

Although the call wouldn't amount to much (apparently, the guy wanted to die in infamy ), what had become the most famous cold case within the Los Angeles law enforcement community, one that generations of cops talked about, was now back on the desk of two detectives—incidentally, both of whom had not even been born when the case began—who had only heard stories about the case from fellow officers and retirees.

The new detectives contacted Howard Speaks first. They asked him to dust off his investigator's cap and participate in the new investigation. Speaks had been retired for years. He was overwhelmedand overjoyed.

In no time at all, the name the woman had given cops, after another exhaustive investigation effort, was eliminated.

The two murdered officers' family members, their wives and adult children, were crushed. Fellow cops were saddened that a murderer who had gotten away with rape and murder for forty-five years was once again escaped justice.

That one tip, however, invigorated homicide detectives Kevin Lowe and Dan Macelderry. They decided that since the case had been dusted off once again, it was time to take a fresh look. Why not dig in and review the entire case file again? What did they have to lose? Maybe everyone had missed that one clue.

The LA County Sheriff's Criminalistics Laboratory soon re-examined the fingerprints Howard Speaks had lifted from the vehicle back in 1957. Since the murders (and solely because of the events of Sept. 11) a new fingerprint database containing over forty-four million fingerprints was now available. Known as AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) a database of fingerprints from criminals arrested for everything from car theft to armed robbery to murder were now available in one computer. It was a long shot, of course, but if the suspect had been arrested before or after the 1957 murders and rape, his fingerprints would now be part of that database. Due to new advances in fingerprint technology, El Segundo PD forensics was able to stitch together—like two pieces of cloth—the two partial thumbprints Howard Speaks had originally collected (which in and of themselves were not identifiable) from the steering wheel of the stolen vehicle. So, like a scene out of the television show CSI, investigators had one digital composite thumbprint. Because the original print was so old and brittle, it couldn't be used. So a digital duplicate had been manufactured.

Composite Fingerprint

Detectives Lowe and Macelderry figured what the heck, it was worth a shot. After getting the fingerprint back, they sent it for inclusion in the database and sat back and waited.

To their utter amazement, some time later, the computer spit out an exact match. The man's name was Gerald Fit Mason. Gerald Mason and George Wilson sounded an awful lot alike. Mason lived in South Carolina, which would account for the Southern accent the victims had described.

Could it be after all this time?