automobile like the one a witness saw in the hotel parking lot on the night of nancy ludwig s murder. and there was another surprise. gorton worked for a water sprinkler company that serviced the sprinkler system in margarette eby s yard. that same company had been to margarette eby s residence several days before her death in order for them to blow out the sprinkler lines for the season. but that could have easily explained why his fingerprint would have been found inside eby s home. you re working with metal sprinkler equipment and maybe there s a sharp edge and you slice your finger. you come in, you wash your hands, you leave a bloody fingerprint. it s not a reason to go to jail. you haven t done anything. you just left a bloody fingerprint. gorton s fingerprint was in the florida database because of numerous arrests for attacks on women. he actually had assaulted
shortly after his wife was brutally murdered in a detroit hotel room, art ludwig received a curious letter. it was from a man who had read about nancy s murder in the newspaper and said her death sounded strikingly similar to his own mother s murder five years earlier. and i read the letter, and yes, it did seem like there were some similarities. insofar, they were both women about the same size, same appearance, so on and so forth. the victim was 55-year-old margarette eby, a music professor living in flint, michigan, about an hour s drive from detroit. she was found stabbed to death in the bedroom of her home.
after several years, the cold case unit of the michigan state police decided to take a second look at the murders of margarette eby and nancy ludwig. they thought that perhaps the original investigators might have missed something. dna testing revealed the same man killed both women. but they had no idea to whom the dna belonged. so they concentrated on the partial fingerprint from the faucet in margarette eby s bathroom. the crime lab was able to identify a small print on the faucet knob in the sink of that bathroom. the faucet knob was actually taken off, taken back to the crime lab, where the fingerprint was photographed, and the knob
underwear, as well as footage he took of women without their knowledge. he was just very strange. very strange. you kind of wonder what went wrong with him that made him behave like that. when police brought gorton in for questioning, they asked him about his interest in stealing women s underwear. is there one particular item of clothing that you were fond of? is it be it hose or bras or panties? um, sleepwear? is there any one particular item that you re attracted to? mostly just the hose, i guess. do you still feel those strong fetish desires to this day? i mean, is that something that s yeah, i ve been seeing a psychiatrist for it for a little while while i was on my own. gorton denied he was ever inside margarette eby s home. when he did, investigators confronted him with fingerprint evidence. do you know where that fingerprint came from? no.
was stored as evidence. back in 1986, flint police could only compare the prints to others in michigan and the search turned up no matches. but improvements in computer technology led to the creation of an automated fingerprint identification system that compares thousands of fingerprints in seconds. when the print from the water faucet was placed into the new nationwide fingerprint database, the computer identified a matching print in florida. it matched the right thumbprint of 39-year-old jeffrey gorton, who was now living in a suburb of flint, michigan. he was a married man, wife and children. would appear from all the outward signs to be perfectly normal, your next-door neighbor. gorton lived just a short distance from margarette eby and owned a gold monte carlo