Representative BOGGS. Cut your finger off, that is right?
Mr. LATONA. Sure, you can cut your finger off. You can resort to what
is known as--they can be transferred. You can slice off a pattern from
one finger and place it on another but you will see the scar. They can
have what is known as surgical planing.
Representative BOGGS. That is what I was thinking about.
Mr. LATONA. That can be done, too.
Representative BOGGS. What happens then?
Mr. LATONA. What happens is that you lose the ridge area and you will
simply have a scar. There will be no more pattern. Now, the pattern
is formed by what are known as dermal papilla, which is below the
epidermis or outer layer of skin. As long as you only injure the outer
surface the ridge formation will grow back exactly the same as it was
before. If you get down to the dermal papilla, which lay like this----
Mr. EISENBERG. You are drawing an illustration on the board which shows
short, broad, downward strokes.
Mr. LATONA. If you destroy or injure these to the extent that there is
actual bleeding, you will get a permanent scar.
Fingerprints can be destroyed or scarred in such a fashion that we
would not be able to successfully classify them.
Mr. DULLES. Do criminals do that?
Mr. LATONA. Yes; they do. We have had one case, probably the most
successful was known as the so-called Roscoe Pitts case. This was a
fugitive who in order to avoid identification went to an unscrupulous
doctor who performed an operation and he did so by virtue of first
cutting five slits on one side of his chest. Then he removed the
pattern areas, what we call the pattern areas, which would consist of
removal of the whole core area down to the delta area, sliced that off.
Representative BOGGS. How much would that be?
Mr. LATONA. He would literally have to draw blood. He would have to get
down and just slice that off completely. He did that with five fingers.
Then he taped the five fingers to the side of his chest and he kept
them there for about 2 weeks. The same procedure was gone through with
the other hand, and at the end of that time they were taken down and
bound up individually. When they finally healed, all he has now is scar
tissue for his pattern areas; but all we did in order to identify him
was to drop down to the second joint. We made the identification from
the second joint.