The police have many ways of catching criminals. One way is to identify them by fingerprinting.
Early on the morning of 19 September 1910, Clarence Hiller’s wife noticed that a light which they usually left on was off. When Clarence went to investigate, he came across a stranger who had broken in and was about to burgle the house. Then, they started to fight. The stranger shot Hiller twice and ran away. Hiller was dead. Soon after, the police arrested a man named Thomas Jennings not far from Hiller’s house.
The only problem was that there were no witnesses. However the police found some fingerprints in the wet paint which Clarence had painted before his death that belonged to Jennings, and he was convicted