Ashley Flowers

Photos.

We know the fingerprints are gone.

The blood samples gone.

Police had sent some of it off for testing.

Some, I guess, went to the FBI.

But detectives were calling around and they just could not track this stuff down.

Obviously, that 1988 investigation didn't get anywhere.

And knowing that evidence was now mostly gone, destroyed, missing, whatever, it's not like there was much to go back and test over the years like we see with so many other cold cases.

All they had were a couple of OK fingerprint cards.

But Officer Elliott saving those cards from the trash would turn out to be one of the most important moves in this whole case.

Because more than 40 years after he pulled them out of the bin, thanks to new technology, one of the prints got a match.

For decades, some cold cases have been reduced to files in a cabinet, but not anymore.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and me and my team on the deck have been traveling across the country to report on these forgotten cases.

And in some instances, it's resulted in these cases being solved after decades.

Join me every Wednesday as we revive these stories one card at a time.

Listen to The Deck now, wherever you get your podcasts.

By 2008, the FBI had an automated system to quickly match even low-quality prints against a national database electronically.

And when cold case investigators in Louisville asked the FBI to run prints in Alberta's case again...

After more than four decades, they finally got some good news.

One of the prints hit on a match, and it belonged to a man in California named Arthur Porter III.