Mistaken ID leaves police still searching

Jace Radke

Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2002 | 11:03 a.m.

Metro Police homicide detectives are starting over in their investigation to identify a woman found dead in a desert area in east Las Vegas earlier this year.

Police thought they had the case wrapped up when they identified the woman as Californian Kathleen Hatfield, but Hatfield has since turned up alive and is residing in Santa Rosa, Calif.

"It's unfortunate that the (false) match was made, but no matter how careful you are human error can happen," Clark County Coroner Ron Flud said. "It doesn't happen often, but sometimes mistakes are made."

The coroner's office and detectives thought they had matched a faxed copy of Hatfield's fingerprint to those of a woman who was found dead southeast of Hollywood Boulevard and Vegas Valley Drive on June 23.

The identification was made in August and Hatfield's mother was told her daughter had been found dead. Five weeks later it was discovered that Hatfield was living as a transient in Santa Rosa.

"You could put the fingerprints down, look back and forth at them, and say, 'That looks like a match,' " Metro homicide Sgt. Kevin Manning said. "It's unfortunate that this happened, but this is the first instance like this I can remember in the eight years I've been in homicide."

Manning said detectives have exhausted all leads in the case and are now back at square one. They don't have a cause of death or an identification of the dead person.

Hatfield, 46, was reported missing in May, and the remains of the body found in Las Vegas were sent to Hatfield's mother. The cremated remains have since been recovered and are being held in a crypt maintained by the county.

Detectives came across Hatfield's name in the National Crime Information Center database while searching for runaways who match the description of the body.

A rose tattoo found on the badly decomposed body was the key descriptive element that led investigators to Hatfield, who also has a rose tattoo.

"We asked the authorities in California to fax over a copy of the prints, but the fax was somewhat blurred," Manning said. "We had only been able to rehydrate one of the victim's fingers, so we only had one print."

Flud said investigators with the coroner's office sought the aid of Metro's fingerprint analysts to determine that there was a match.

"The Metro analysts are the best in the valley, and I wouldn't hesitate to take another set of prints to them," Flud said.

Fingerprints and dental records are the most common means of identifying a body because of the scientific nature of those qualifiers, Flud said. If that doesn't lead to a match, then X-rays of other parts of a body can be used.

"We always look at situations like this and talk about how we can prevent them from happening," Flud said. "Most of the time with fingerprints we get faxes or copies of original prints mailed to us.

"Hopefully by next summer we'll have the capability to e-mail prints. We'll give that a try and see how it works."

Flud also said that many times investigators have to rely on information provided by experts, and that can lead to mistakes. One example of that, Flud said, is the case of U.S. Marine Staff Sgt. Arthur Bennett.

Bennett staged his death in a 1994 fire so his family could collect government benefits. Bennett was later arrested in Utah and avoided facing murder and sexual assault allegations by hanging himself in July 1999 at the Clark County jail.

"We relied on the records of a military dentist and made the identification based on what he told us," Flud said.

The body originally believed to be Bennett is still unidentified.

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