Dutch Crime Expert At Murder Trial Has Forensics Community’s Interest

Like snowflakes and fingerprints, a Dutch crime expert says human ears are unique.

Cor van der Lugt, 43, has told jurors hearing a Clark County murder trial he is “100 percent certain” that an earprint left at the crime scene belongs to defendant David Wayne Kunze

The use of earprints is so unusual, Kunze’s case may be just the second in the United States in which a print is key evidence. In 1986, a murder defendant was convicted based on earprint evidence in a California case.

Such cases have been few, in part, because earprint identification is not well known here. And there are skeptics. A Florida judge recently barred an earprint in a murder case, saying it didn’t meet Florida standards for evidence.

But van der Lugt’s testimony last winter convinced Superior Court Judge Robert Harris that ear identification, while not scientific, was legitimate enough to be considered by jurors in Kunze’s aggravated first-degree murder trial.

Kunze is charged in the December 1994 beating death of James W. McCann at his home in nearby Hazel Dell. McCann had been engaged to marry Kunze’s ex-wife, Diane.

Van der Lugt, an instructor at the Dutch National Police College in criminal investigations, testified for more than three hours in the case Thursday and Monday.

He has been studying ears since 1987, after an earprint helped convict a suspect in the 1986 kidnapping of a prominent Dutch couple.

“It sparked my boss’ interest and we began to study body marks in general,” van der Lugt said. “At that time, nobody knew anything about earprints.”

He began collecting photographs and earprints from visitors to the police academy and noticed that all appeared to be different. He concluded earprints are as individual as fingerprints

“In nature, everything is unique. It never duplicates,” van der Lugt said. A chart he displayed in court shows 15 different features of the ear. The theory that body marks are different is widely accepted in Holland, where valuable cows are nose-printed for identification.

Van der Lugt had worked on only six cases involving earprints when he first lectured Dutch crime scene experts on the technique in 1994. By 1995, he had reviewed 200 cases. He has now examined earprints in 600 to 700 cases.

Van der Lugt concedes he probably knows more about earprints than anybody on the planet. He told jurors his work is credited with solving as many as 250 crimes.

“I’m not obsessed with ears,” he said Monday. “But it offers a good possibility to solve more crimes.”

There are two categories of people who leave earprints, van der Lugt said: Those who want to be sure nobody is home and those with violence in mind who “want to know the position of a victim before they enter the room.”

The latter is alleged in the Clark County case. A Washington State Patrol investigator found an earprint on the victim’s bedroom door. Authorities believe he was attacked while sleeping.

Prosecutors searched extensively before discovering van der Lugt’s research, which is not well known in this country.