The key to figuring out whose body parts had lain in the wilderness for the better part of the past year was at the victim's fingertips.
Someone didn't want John D. Mayo, a convicted sex offender, found. His various body parts, some of which exhibited saw marks, were strewn over a 5-mile stretch of I-80, and until the Utah Department of Public Safety's crime lab got involved, all investigators knew was that the victim was a man about 6 feet tall with brown hair — not a lot to go on.
Enter two criminalists with the state's crime lab, Trent Grandy and Elisa Macken.
Grandy and Macken were in charge of trying to get fingerprints from Mayo's severed hands, which they called the worst decomposed hands they had ever seen.
Macken recently thumbed through a photo album documenting how she and Grandy figured out who belonged to the hands that appeared dirty, blackened in areas and gnarled.
"We determined . . . that this would be a tough case," Grandy said.
The criminalists decided that since the chance to identify someone from severed hands is a rare one, they wanted to have a teaching experience for some of the crime lab's new employees.
To retrieve the fingerprints, criminalists tried to restore the mummified skin as best they could by rehydrating it.
The hands spent the night in a bath of glycerol and water. Glycerol is a moisturizer found in some hand soaps, Grandy said. And only in extreme cases of deterioration is it necessary to rehydrate. Sometimes the lab receives hands of unidentified people who have drowned, and the skin is hydrated to the point it sloughs off. In those cases, the skin needs to dry out before criminalists can work with it.
In Grandy's six years at the crime lab, he has probably seen five sets of hands, he said. Only two sets needed rehydration.
The next day Grandy took the right hand, Macken the left, and they set out to try a different process on each hand, hoping one would work.
Grandy, a longtime hunter skilled at skinning animals, is handy with a scalpel. The photos showed the delicate process of removing the leathery skin from three of Mayo's fingers to make prints. The rehydration seemed to work, he said. The skin gained a feel of something close to normal, but it was still difficult to remove the skin, he said.
"I thought we had no chance at all."
Meanwhile, Macken kept the hand whole. She coated the curled fingers of Mayo's left hand with Mikrosil, a putty casting material, to make an identifiable mold of the fingerprints. Mikrosil is designed to release easily from the object it is molding. It worked.
"That left little finger was amazing," she said, holding up a close-up photo of the cast. In perfect detail, one sees the ridges that make each fingerprint unique.
After getting clear fingerprints from the hands, which are now back in storage, the criminalists needed to find out who they belonged to and if the hands belonged to the same person.
The crime lab has a subscription to a fingerprint database service in Sacramento, Calif., which contains digital scans of 40 million fingerprints in nine western states: Alaska, California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and Utah.
Grandy and Macken sent digital scans of their work over a dedicated line to the database's secure server with a request for matches in Utah. Automatically, the database returns possible matches.
It's a process that can take five minutes. But, depending on how many people are accessing the database, it can also take up to an hour for possible matches to be sent back.
Once results arrive in a type of inbox, the criminalists can check them side-by-side against their original scan. If they have a match or one that looks close, they put in a call to Utah's Bureau of Criminal Identification, which maintains fingerprint cards of the state's criminals.
If the database search fails for Utah, they expand their search to the other eight western states. When a hit is returned, they call the state agency and request a copy of the 10-print card, on which a set of fingerprints is impressed whenever police make an arrest.
If that doesn't work, they access a national database of fingerprints.
Grandy said the database is used only in cases of major crimes.
Luckily, Utah investigators didn't have to go that far.
It turned out John D. Mayo had fingerprints taken after he was arrested on investigation of forcible sex abuse and sodomy in 1991. Later that year, he was convicted in Salt Lake City of one count of forcible sex abuse.
So a match was an easy find.
Dave Booth, Summit County chief deputy, called Macken and Grandy lifesavers.
"They did something we didn't think could be done," he said. "We couldn't have made this case without them."
Though perhaps that's being a little modest.
For a week, hundreds of investigators combed a 5-mile crime scene. They found trash, receipts, clothing and pornography, and they searched a nearby makeshift landfill. From that evidence they were able to get names. An identification card in the area gave them the idea it could be Mayo's body out there.
But it could have been anyone whose name happened to be on a littered receipt.
The confirmation of Mayo's identity couldn't have happened without the criminalists, Booth said.
And now Summit County investigators are a step closer to finding Mayo's killer. Right now, they are looking for fugitive Mark Allen Carlson, an Aryan gang member who absconded March 21 this year. They think Carlson may know something about Mayo's death.
The Salt Lake Metro Gang Unit named Carlson its Public Enemy No. 1 for this week.
"We really need to get him scooped up," Booth said.
And even though not every print examination works out quickly or perfectly, Macken and Grandy both enjoy their work with crime solving.
It's not a job they can talk about with everyone.
Grandy's wife works in a cardiology department, and even though she deals with live blood on a regular basis, Grandy's job sometimes gives her the willies. It's OK for him, though.
"I'm not a big fan of live blood," he says.
"It seems like it should be weird," Macken said about her job, which involves working with human body parts from time to time.
But Grandy concluded: "We have such a passion for the work that it overrides any weirdness."
E-mail: jdougherty@desnews.com