Cold Case Files - The Fingerprint

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

In February of 1984 Susan Eigen and her 17-year-old son Richard are found murdered in their home. 18 Years later, the fingerprints found at the scene finally produce a hit, but it is the previously erroneous DNA that proves to be the linchpin in case. IQBAR - Get 20% off all IQBAR products plus free shipping by texting COLD to 64000 Progressive - Progressive.com  Rosetta Stone - Cold Case Files listeners can get Rosetta Stone’s lifetime membership for 50% off when you go to RosettaStone.com/coldcase SimpliSafe - Right now, get 20% off any new SimpliSafe system with Fast Protect Monitoring at SimpliSafe.com/COLDCASE There’s No Safe Like SimpliSafe. 

Hi, Cold Case listeners. I'm Marissa Pinson, and I want to thank you for joining me each week to hear stories about the investigators who dedicate their careers to bringing resolution to cold cases and the families affected by them. I'd also like to let you know that Cold Case Files is not only available where you're listening right now, but it's also available ad-free in the newly launched A&E Crime and Investigation channel on Apple Podcasts and Apple+. The channel features the hit A&E podcast, Cold Case Files, I Survived, American Justice, and City Confidential, all included in the one bundle without interruption from commercials. So you can binge these true crime classics ad-free for $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year, only on Apple Podcasts and Apple+. Just search for the A&E Crime and Investigation Channel in Apple Podcasts or Apple. And now, on to this week's episode. From A&E, this is in Oceanside, New York. At around 6.30 p.m., a patrol car is taking the corner at Lawson Boulevard when its radio crackles to life.

A dead body, discovered by a family member, inside a local home. Officers Ed Carter and Otto Kohlmeier head to 3412 Ocean Harbor Drive, home of 41-year-old Susan Eigen. What we saw was one hysterical person, another woman off to, you know, in the kitchen, kind of out of it, and a man that was fairly calm for the situation who told us that someone was dead upstairs. It was Susan Eigen laying in the doorway between the bedroom and the hall. She was in a fetal position. She had a look like a collar made out of a belt around her neck. Police walk across the hallway and into the master bedroom where they discover Susan's son, 17-year-old Richard, also dead. He was bound by the wrists to the railing, and he was suffocated and strangled.

He had wires around his neck, a plastic bag over his head, and the bag was covered by a gray coat. Kohlmeier and Carter secure the house and call in backup. Detective Herb Daube arrives and begins to work the scene. Of course, she was found in a hallway outside the bedroom, and then, of course, there was a scene in the bedroom. So there was activity in at least three different places. Blood splatter is collected off a bed sheet near Susan Eichen's body. Forensics also collects hair strands from the bandana used to strangle Susan Eichen. One latent print is lifted off the plastic bag used to suffocate Richard Eichen.

And a single unknown print is lifted off a bank receipt found in Susan Eigen's purse. The evidence is tagged and sent downtown for processing. Meanwhile, detectives take note of the overall condition of the house. Specifically, several dresser drawers pulled open and a pocketbook upturned. It appears to have been a burglary gone bad. That was probably our first theory. Detectives speculate the intruder encountered Susan Eigen inside the house and a simple burglary turned into a rape,

then murder. As for the 17-year-old Richard, detectives believe he came home at the wrong time, thereby sealing his fate. My theory is that he walked in while his mother was being beaten or raped or attacked or whatever. And maybe he's screaming, maybe he's yelling. He put a bag over his head to quieten him.

Now the kid's still yelling or he could see his face through the bag. He put the coat over top of him to muffle the sounds. And then he went back and did whatever he had to do with Mrs. Eigen and eventually murdering her. The theory plays pretty well. Now detectives need some facts to support it. They begin with a trip to the crime lab, where evidence from the scene is getting a careful once-over. In 1984, DNA is nothing but a theory.

The heavy lifting of criminal forensics is usually done inside the fingerprint division. In August, Detective Charlie Costello is given latent lifts from the Eichen crime scene. One from the bag tied over Richard Eichen's head, and one from the bank receipt pulled out of Susan Eichen's purse. Police believe that the prints belong to their killer. The best print of the three was the print on the bank receipt. You could see pattern area in the print on the bank receipt. You could see pattern area in the print on the bank receipt, whereas the other two prints that we had on the case, there was very little

pattern area that could visually be seen. Costello initially runs the prints through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS, but fails to come up with a match. Detectives then begin to collect prints from locals with a history of burglary, hoping they might get lucky. And we started looking into burglary patterns in the neighborhood, people that had been involved in the police in the general area. Our hope early on was that the fingerprint evidence

would lead us to a particular person. Any prints that I saw that came across my desk on other cases I was working on, if it had a similar pattern to the print that I knew was on the Eigen case, I would compare the Eigen print against that case. Month after month, Nassau County detectives bring in possible suspect prints.

Almost a year after the Eigens were first found murdered, homicide is running out of Prince to run, and the investigation goes cold. It was certainly my hope and everyone else's hope at that time, because the other leads had sort of gone cold, that somehow we'd be able to identify the individual that committed those crimes. I was going to do everything I could to identify the individual that killed those people. Almost two decades have passed, and Charlie Costello is still at it, working with a fingerprint pattern he now has memorized, still hoping to find its match.

On January 22, 2002, Costello runs the prints another time through APHIS. This time, he registers a hit. I got the return back. It was chilling because I knew right then and there I had him. Costello matches the eigenlift to print submitted on a school bus driver application. The applicant's name? Louis Talese. Costello gets on the phone to homicide and cold case detective Jim McGinn. I had just finished reviewing the entire case, and we were going to try and form a game plan when Detective Costello came to us with the fingerprint hit. And naturally that sent us in a specific direction. Louis Talese is 42 years old with a record for drug possession. Cold case detectives are interested but not yet ready to move on their suspect.

Instead, they decide to find out a little bit more about the would-be bus driver. They set up a stakeout in an unmarked van outside his house and are in place less than an hour when the operation begins to go sideways. He then comes out of the house walking his dog unbeknownst to us, he had called the police on us.

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slash cold case today. In 1984, Susan Eigen and her son Richard were murdered inside their Nassau County home. 18 years later, prints from the crime scene have been matched to a bus driver application submitted by a man named Louis Talese. For cold case detectives, the print match is good news, but not nearly enough to support a case for murder. When you get a fingerprint hit, you don't want to just run out and arrest the person because you want to know what their background is. Is there any reasonable explanation for his prints to be there? McGinn orders bedsheets stained with blood and found at the crime scene pulled from storage and sends them to the Forensic Evidence Bureau. The investigators hope new technology might provide a second forensic

link to their suspect. In a darkened corner of the Forensic Evidence Bureau, Detective Kevin McCarthy examines bedsheets from the Eigen crime scene. At first glance, the sheet appears to be of little evidentiary value, containing only the blood of murder victim Susan Eigen. McCarthy, however, views the sheet literally in a different light. Using an ultraviolet beam, McCarthy identifies what appear to be bodily fluid stains invisible to the human eye. McCarthy isolates a sample and runs chemical tests to see what it is. There was definitely urine staining on the bedding.

And in this instance, the urine staining might also have seminal fluid in it. The analyst is able to extract a partial DNA profile from the stain. Cold case detectives are anxious to compare it against their suspect. But first, they need to get a sample of his DNA. To do that, investigators decide to go undercover. On March 15, 2002, Detective Jim McGinn sits in the back of an unmarked van, just a few doors down from the home of Louis Talese. Parked the surveillance van several houses down the block here so that the back of the van was facing Louis Talese's house. McGinn is trying to get a handle on Talese's daily routine,

hoping eventually to recover a discarded sample of the suspect's DNA. Talese makes his first appearance at 7 a.m. Almost immediately, McGinn senses a problem. And as he was getting out of the car, he gives the van a very, what we call a very hard eyeball. He then comes out of the house walking his dog. Unbeknownst to us, he had called the police on us. The squad car that shows up knows nothing about the undercover surveillance

and stops directly in front of the van. We were sitting in the back of the van, just holding our breath, hoping that the police would notice that there's somebody in the van, because we knew Louis Talese was on the street. And if we had come out and talked to the local cops, it would have kind of blown everything. Eventually, the patrol car leaves. McGinn, however, is forced to pull the plug on his undercover operation after a single day. The team, however, does pick up one valuable piece of information.

The major thing that we learned about him was that he was a smoker. That was the one thing that we knew, so we always felt if we needed a DNA sample, that maybe somehow we'd be able to get a cigarette butt from him. Two weeks after the aborted surveillance, Louise Talese again changes the dynamics of the investigation. The suspect puts his home up for sale, sparking fears he might be ready to flee the area. If cold case detectives are going to get a DNA sample,

they need to move quickly. Detective Tony Graziano works undercover for the Nassau County Police Department. On May 10th, he is given the job of obtaining a covert sample of Luis Talese's DNA. We devised a plan where I would go to Luis Talese's home with Detective Sergeant Lucy Guido posing as my wife,

and we would be prospective purchasers of the home. At 11 a.m., Graziano and Guido begin a walkthrough of Talese's home. Graziano immediately works on building a rapport with Talese. I knew I was going to approach him like Tony from the Bronx is going to meet Louis from Brooklyn. And basically, I knew I connected with him. We were talking like two, you know, city guys. You know, we were fast buddies.

Graziano walks through the house with Talese and out onto the street. There, the suspect lights up and eventually drops his cigarette butt to the ground. Graziano's partner, Lucy Guido, moves in to collect the sample. They were both on the street and I was back on the driveway. And when I saw Talese walk back towards the lawn, Detective Graziano pretty much gave me like the sign, come over by me. Told Sergeant Guido to bend down like she was tying her shoe and pick up that cigarette butt because I had seen Lewis take it from his hand, throw it directly to the ground. So I had the continuity that that's directly evidence from him.

Guido hands the butt off to Graziano, who slips it into an evidence bag. The couple says goodbye to Luis Talese and head directly to the police crime lab. Saliva and epithelial cells from the filter are isolated and stripped of their DNA. The profile is then compared against DNA found at the Eigen crime scene. As cold case detectives suspected, Louis Talese is a match. On June 5th, 2002, Nassau County detectives arrest Louis Talese and take him downtown for questioning. If you're like me, you're constantly thinking about the safety of the people and things you love most. We had another incident in our neighborhood recently with a drunk man kicking in a neighbor's door at 3 a.m.

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At first, Talese claims he doesn't know the Eigen family. Then McGinn tells him about the forensic evidence. Each time that we confronted him with that, you know, his head would go down. You could see he was thinking. He was trying to come up with some kind of reasonable explanation as to how this physical evidence could be in the house. Talese grasps at the only straw available to him. An admission that, yes, he knew Susan Eigen. And that the two had a sexual relationship,

which would explain away his DNA inside the house. While they don't buy his story, cold case detectives are concerned that a court might. They do, however, have one last evidentiary card. If played correctly, it should leave Louis Talese with no wiggle room when he tries to make his case before a jury. On July 3rd, 2002, DNA analyst Terry Melton takes custody of two strands of hair collected from a bandana used to strangle Susan Eigen 18 years earlier. Melton is able to extract a profile from the samples provided and compares it to Louis Talese's genetic signature. We had hairs from several known individuals, including Louis Talese, who was the suspect in the case. And what we found was that one of the hairs

matched the type of Louis Talese. For cold case detectives, it is the final piece they have been looking for. The case against Talese is handed over to the Nassau County DA and put on the docket for trial. On February 23rd of 2004, 20 years after the murder of Susan Eigen and her son Richard, Louis Talese's trial begins. Prosecutor Robert Biancavilla presents fingerprint and DNA evidence tying Louis Talese to the double homicide. Just as important,

Bianca Villa paints a picture of Talese and the death he fashioned for Susan and Richard Eigen. He thought nothing about the manner in which he strangled and killed Susan. He thought nothing about taking a plastic bag and tying it in a knot over the head of a 17-year-old boy and then strapping him to a banister and essentially watching him suffocate to death. All right, this is a person that is never going to accept responsibility for what he did and deserves, as far as I'm concerned, absolutely no mercy. A jury agrees, finding Louis Talese guilty of both murders and sentencing him to two consecutive terms of 25 to life. From the fingerprint examiner who spent years searching for the right set of prints

to the homicide detectives who assembled the forensic case piece by painstaking piece, Louis Talese's conviction helps with the memories of a mother and son who died in their own home, within a few feet of each died in their own home within a few feet of each other and without being shown a shred of mercy by their killer everybody involved every detective involved with this case remembered details that you just don't remember on most cases and it was the severity of this crime that really had a very deep impact on everyone that knew about it. I don't think there's any better satisfaction than solving a case that's been open for 18 years.

It's a fantastic feeling. Cold Case Files is hosted by Marissa Pinson, produced by Jeff DeRay, and distributed by Podcast One. The Cold Case Files TV series was produced by Curtis Productions and hosted by Bill Curtis. Check out more Cold Case Files at ANETV.com. It's summertime, and with Pluto TV's Summer of Cinema, the streaming is easy. Stream hundreds of free movies on all your favorite devices all summer long. Chill out poolside with Mission Impossible and Transformers. Or stay cool inside watching Indiana Jones

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