• The original fingerprint examination of 5 Buffs Lane revealed forty-five sets of impressions.
  
  
• Thirty-four sets of fingerprints were identified as belonging to people with legitimate access to the house.
  
  
• John’s fingerprints were not found, but ten of the impressions contained insufficient detail for positive identification.
  
  
• The remaining fingerprint has never been identified. It was found on the inside of the bedroom window frame below the transom window with the tip pointing downwards.
  
  
• In the opinion of the police fingerprint expert a person standing in the bedroom placed it there.
  
  
• When Mrs. Bolshaw’s body was found the transom window, which was in the ground floor bedroom, was open. (See appendix 4)

Mrs. Bolshaw was very security conscious, and the window had to have been opened some time after she returned home from work on the 8^th October. The position of the fingerprint indicates that the person it belonged to had pushed the bar of the window in order to open it. Who, then, does this fingerprint belong to and why has that person never come forward or been identified?

Although no evidence had been presented that the scene had been ‘wiped clean’, at the end of summing up the prosecuting barrister asked the jury to consider why John’s fingerprints had not been found on the coffee cup or the brandy glass. In fact, photographs of the scene show a coffee cup on the draining board in the kitchen, and there was a broken spirit glass in the waste bin. This was probably how Mrs. Bolshaw sustained a cut to her finger, which she covered with a sticking plaster. There was blood stained kitchen paper in the kitchen. The probable explanation was that she had washed the coffee cup and the brandy glass, which is when it was broken. But, this question must have put doubt in the minds of the jury although it wasn’t based on any fingerprint evidence presented.