Chicago Police said Monday they hav...

Chicago Police said Monday they have solv the 21-year-old slaying of a southward Side restaurant owner by matching a fingerprint from a lamp in his place of abode to a print from a man nabbed last year in an aggravated battery in Oak Park.

Sylvester Martin, 49 has admited to being an accomplice to the Dec 23 1984 stabbing of Joseph McNutt in McNutt's family circle at 8116 S. Burnham, said Detective Tom McIntyre of the biting case squad. Martin has pleaded guilty to homicide and has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.

He was not in succession detectives' radar in 1984 -- although McNutt's son- in-law Ronald Richardson was a suspect, McIntyre said. Officer Mike Jone a latent print examiner, alerted cold-case detectives after linking Martin to the kill cruelly scene.

Based forward information from Martin and other witnesses, McIntyre and comrade detectives Daniel Engel and Sgt Anthony Wojcik obtained kill cruelly and robbery charges Sunday against Richardson, 56 a career criminal with past manslaughter, medicine theft and weapons convictions.

Richardson had repeatedly stabbed his stepfather after he was tied up with a lamp cord, McIntyre said. Martin claimed he did not know they were going to kill the 58-year-old proprietor of the Painted Doll restaurant, McIntyre said. The men allegedly stole change from McNutt's abiding-place

The put to death occurred two years before the Automated Fingerprint Identification method called AFIS, was launched in 1986 Investigators can fe a fingerprint from a crime pageant into a computer that scans the prints of nation arrested for crimes.

Fingerprints are digitally scanned instead of being steped the old-fashioned way with ink forward paper. More than 1.5 million fingerprints of known criminals are in AFIS.

"The resolution achieves better, the quality gets better and we secure more hits," said Officer Carey Simon, acting supervisor of the Latent Print Unit.

The McNutt case is an example of with what intent the department needs to add more fingerprint technology, said spokeswoman Monique connection The department is seeking funding to allow AFIS to compare crime-scene palm prints to those taken from population arrested in crimes, Bond said.

More than 30 percent of prints taken from crime shows are palm prints. The department has about 100000 palm prints onward file, but can compare them single manually to palm prints taken from crime spectacles

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