"So I might look at it and say, 'Oh, there just isn't enough there,'" she said. There is no agreement within the community of tread or footwear examiners that there have to be so many individual characteristics (present), Moriarty said. "They don't have any database that tells you that. "I mean, how many people step in gum?" she asked. She said there are no rules governing how many individual characteristics must be present before a match is declared. "This is completely subjective," said Mary Moriarty, the chief Hennepin County public defender and an expert in forensic evidence. An exact match rests in the eye of the beholder. Then, they have to find the tire with that very nail in it or the shoe with the matching wear pattern. ![]() The police must identify a tread pattern, as well as a set of unique or individual characteristics within the track or tread, such as markings left by a nail stuck in a tire or signs of a shoe that's worn at the heel. There are millions of Nike and Reebok shoes and just as many Michelin and Goodyear tires. That's the reality now, as it was in 1989, the year the World Wide Web was invented and Apple introduced its first portable computer, which weighed 16 pounds.įor an investigator to declare a match, a print or track has to contain more than just the general characteristics created by its manufacturer. An investigator can't simply upload an image of a tire track to a computer, hit a button, and expect a readout containing the make, model and owner of the car that created it. They are also tricky to document through casting, difficult to interpret, and even tougher to match to a potential suspect. The problem with tire tracks and shoe prints, which, like fingerprints, fall into the forensics category of "pattern evidence," is that they're difficult to identify. And there was whatever could be discerned from the long gravel driveway, which had been driven and walked on by an unknown number of people. There were the bikes and scooter the children were riding, which lay in a ditch. "We just have no evidence," Stearns County Sheriff Charlie Grafft said at the time. He and the gunman had vanished, virtually without a trace. It was dry and unseasonably warm on the night Wetterling was kidnapped by a man wearing a mask and holding a gun. The police needed the gravel to tell them a story. ![]() Figuring out which, with no idea of the kind of shoe he was wearing or the type of tire on his car, if he even had a car, was the objective. Presumably, some of the tracks and prints were made by the perpetrator. But trying to read the scribble of markings on the road was like trying to get meaning from the creases on someone's palm. The police walked the edges of the loose gravel, where a bloodhound had traced the 11-year-old's scent. 23, 1989, investigators gazed down at the myriad tire tracks and shoe prints crisscrossing the rural driveway near where Jacob Wetterling was last seen the night before.
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