GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- A forensic dentist used an ultraviolet scanner Wednesday to search for fingerprints and other clues invisible to the naked eye in apartments where five college students were slain.
Dr. Michael West of Hattiesburg, Miss., said he found several fingerprints in two of the three apartments where four young women and one young man were found stabbed to death early last week, but that 'the odds are these are prints that are going to be of the residents.'
West has pioneered the use of ultraviolet photography to match fingerprints and to match dental models with bite marks left on human flesh.
Detectives were trying to determine if bite marks left on at least one of the female victims could lead to a suspect, a technique used to help convict serial killer Ted Bundy, Gainesville police said.
Investigators reportedly were also awaiting genetic test results to determine whether body fluids found at one of the crime scenes matched the genetic material in blood drawn from a prime suspect, Edward Lewis Humphrey.
Humphrey, 18, a freshman at the University of Florida, was charged Tuesday in an unrelated 1988 sex attack in Indian River County. He was already held on $1 million bail on charges involving an attack on his grandmother.
Gainesville police have identified him as one of four prime suspects in the college student killings. But at a briefing Wednesday, police said they had no new information that could lead to an arrest in the student killings.
Humphrey was scheduled to appear at a bond hearing Thursday morning in the Brevard County Detention Center in Sharpes. His lawyer, James Russo, said he would ask the state to justify the bond set for his client on the aggravated assault charge in the attack on Humphrey's grandmother.
Humphrey has been jailed since Aug. 30 on that charge. His bond was raised to $1 million when Gainesville police identified him as a suspect in the student murders.
On Tuesday, Russo called the bond 'exorbitant' given the lack of charges in the Gainesville case and questioned why investigators had been unable to obtain a search warrant for Humphrey's Gainesville apartment.
Russo also said Humphrey's legal rights may have been violated by investigators who interrogated him in the Brevard County Jail without a lawyer present, even though Humphrey had requested one.
The victim in the 1988 incident identified Humphrey as her attacker after seeing his picture in news reports over the weekend, said Maureen Coogan, records clerk with the Indian River County Sheriff's Office.
Based on the victim's statement, Indian River authorities issued a warrant charging Humphrey with armed burglary and attempted sexual battery.
The sex attack occurred Sept. 6, 1988, when a man followed the woman into her home, tore her blouse and held a hunting knife to her throat. The woman pleaded with the man not to rape her, and the attacker agreed, but told her to take off her pants, Coogan said.
The victim escaped after struggling with her attacker.
Indian River detectives believe the same man was responsible for an attack 30 minutes earlier at the Vero Beach mall. No one has been charged in that incident, in which the attacker grabbed the woman's clothes, cut her finger with a knife, then fled when the woman began to scream.
Indian River investigators cited 'similarities' between the 1988 attacks and the Gainesville investigation, but would not release specifics.
Besides Humphrey, the only one of the eight suspects in the Gainesville case to be publicly identified by police is Stephen Michael Bates, 30, a short-order cook from Lakeland. He has been held in the Polk County Jail in Bartow since Aug. 29, the day after the last two bodies were found in Gainesville.
Bates was being held in lieu of $100,500 bond on charges of burglary, aggravated assault and battery. Authorities said he broke into a Lakeland home, threw water on a woman and her daughter while they slept and pointed a butcher knife at them.
Polk County police said they did not think Bates was a viable suspect in the slayings, but Gainesville police Lt. Sadie Darnell said his fingerprints had been sent to a task force investigating the deaths of the students.
All five victims were college students who lived within 2 miles of each other and within 2 miles of the University of Florida campus.
They were Christina Powell, 17, of Jacksonville; Sonya Larson, 18, of Deerfield Beach; Christina Hoyt, 18, of Gainesville; Tracy Paules, 23, of Palm Springs North and Manuel Taboada, 23, of Carol City. All five were stabbed to death and at least three of the bodies had been mutilated. Two of the students also were bludgeoned.
Hoyt was a student at Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville and the other four were University of Florida students.
