Then vs. Now
Forensics
What investigators in 1918 could not do — and what a modern lab could do with the same evidence today.
Crime Scene Integrity
Scenes routinely contaminated. Family, neighbors, reporters, and curious officers walked freely through the rooms before any examination. Evidence was handled bare-handed.
Strict perimeter control, PPE, sequential entry logs, photographic and 3D scene documentation before anything is moved.
Fingerprints
Fingerprinting was a novelty in U.S. policing in 1918. New Orleans had no working database. Latent prints from the back-door panels were never reliably lifted.
AFIS / NGI databases match latent prints in minutes against tens of millions of records. Chemical developers (ninhydrin, cyanoacrylate) recover prints decades old.
Biological Evidence
Blood was identified only as 'human or animal.' Typing (ABO) was new and rarely applied to criminal cases. Trace material was discarded.
Touch DNA can recover full STR profiles from a single chiseled door panel, an axe handle, or a doorknob — even after a single brief contact.
Suspect Identification
Eyewitness testimony and confession-under-pressure were the primary tools. Rosie Cortimiglia's coerced statement convicted two innocent men.
Investigative Genetic Genealogy (IGG) — the same technique that identified the Golden State Killer — could match a partial DNA profile to a distant cousin in a public genealogy database and triangulate the killer's family tree.
Pattern Analysis
No coordinated case-linkage analysis. Parish lines, language barriers, and Italian-immigrant distrust of police fractured the investigation.
ViCAP and geographic profiling software cluster behavioral signatures (back-door chisel, victim-owned weapon, grocer targeting) across jurisdictions instantly.