Cheng Ching-sung (
Cheng said the importance of a fingerprint databank was highlighted by the way police found the suspects in the murder of Hsinhu Elementary School (新湖國小) teacher Wu Hsiao-hui (吳曉蕙), which occurred eight years ago.
He said officers who were investigating this case were almost desperate because they didn't have sufficient evidence from the crime scene. The police didn't even know how many suspects they were looking for.
"We only discovered two unclear fingerprints and one clear palmprint on Wu's car and they belonged to the same person. That's all," Cheng said.
Cheng said police were not able to carry out a palmprint match due to the lack of equipment, despite the fact that they had one from one suspect. Also, because the suspect didn't have any criminal record, police didn't find anything through a fingerprint match-up, either.
The CIB received a secret tip sometime last month that Huang Chi-feng (
Huang happened to be involved in another rape case last year and left fingerprints, a palmprint and blood sample for DNA matching at a court.
Cheng said that Huang accidentally told his friends at a get-together that he was the murderer of the teacher. The police immediately began to investigate Huang's relationship to the case after they received the secret tip and discovered that Huang lived in the neighborhood where the elementary school is located. The results of Huang's DNA match-up, fingerprint match-up and palmprint match-up all showed that Huang is the murderer.
"If we have data for everybody, all we have to do is just look it up in the databank and the answer will pop up within few seconds. The victim's family members wouldn't have been suffering for such a long time, either," Cheng said. "I also believe a fingerprint databank will help us solve many mystery cases as well."
Despite being upset over losing his daughter but glad to catch the murders, Wu's father, Keelung City Police Headquarters Director Wu Chen-chi (吳振吉), echoed Cheng's statement. "My daughter's murder, for example, wouldn't have been a mystery for so many years if we had a fingerprint databank," he said.
The 25-year-old Wu was found dead in Hsinhu Elementary School's garage on the afternoon of Oct. 15, 1994. Evidence showed that she was raped and suffocated.
Investigation in this case hadn't made any progress for the past eight years, since the police couldn't find any suspects from the related evidence they collected at the crime scene.
According to a secret tip, the police finally identified Huang as the main suspect on Wednesday night. He cooperated and told the police that his friend Wang Yu-chuan (王鈺銓) is another suspect. After being arrested, Wang admitted to the police of what he did right away as well.
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