From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 238-239: AT THE FBI Crime Lab in Washington, the fingerprint expert George Bonebrake spent the early-morning hours of April 5 poring over the contents of the package that had been couriered up from Memphis. A slight, fastidious man, Bonebrake was one of the world’s foremost authorities on dactyloscopy, the study and classification of finger and palm prints. Bonebrake had worked as a fingerprint examiner for the FBI since 1941. His was an esoteric profession within the crime-fighting universe—more art, it was said, than science, a closed world of forensic analysis predicated on a foundation of facts so incredible that a thousand bad TV detective shows over the decades had done little to diminish the essential mystery: that the complex friction-ridge patterns on human fingertips and palms, unique to every individual on earth, carry trace…
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