Tag Archives: fingerprint

Bredemarket’s Biggest Accomplishments in 2025 (So Far)

I’m jumping ahead in the year-end post ridiculousness to cite Bredemarket’s two most notable accomplishments this year. Not to detract from my other accomplishments this year, but these two were biggies.

The first was my Biometric Update guest post in May, “Opinion: Vendors must disclose responsible uses of biometric data.” I discussed elsewhere my reasons for writing this, and created a Bredemarket-hosted video summarizing my main points.

Biometric vendors…

The second was my go-to-market effort for a Bredemarket client in September, which I discussed (without mentioning my participation) here. And there’s a video for that effort also.

Recent go-to-market.

I’ve accomplished many other things this year: client analyses, blog posts (both individually and in series), consultations, presentations, press releases, proposals, requirements documents, sales playbooks, and many more.

And I still have three more weeks to accomplish things.

“The Woman in Pink” Identified via INTERPOL’s “Identify Me”

It’s challenging enough to identify a unknown deceased body found in the person’s home city.

It’s more challenging to identify one somewhere else in the person’s home country.

And when the body is found outside the person’s home country…that’s when organizations such as INTERPOL step in.

“Identify Me is a public appeal to identify women whose bodies were found in six European countries, many of whom are believed to have been murdered.

“Most are cold cases; women who died 10, 20, 30 or even 40 years ago. They were found in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, or Spain.

“Despite extensive police investigations, these women were never identified, and evidence suggests that some of them could have come from other countries. Who they are, where they are from and why they were in these countries is unknown.”

INTERPOL issues a variety of colored notices to its member countries, including the “Black Notice” to seek information on unidentified bodies. The “Identify Me” program is a public appeal for a small subset of these people.

Source: INTERPOL.

Here’s one of INTERPOL’s success stories, “The woman in pink“:

“On 3 July 2005, the body of a woman was found at the 84 km mark on the Vila road in the town of Viladecans (province of Barcelona). The woman had been dead for less than 24 hours; the cause of death was suspicious….

“A breakthrough came in 2025 when police in Türkiye ran the fingerprints associated with ‘The woman in pink’ through a national biometric database, resulting in a match with Russian national Liudmila Zavada, aged 31 at the time of her death. The match was subsequently confirmed through kinship DNA analysis using the DNA of one of Liudmila Zavada’s close relatives.”

So follow the trail:

  • There was a woman from Russia.
  • A deceased woman’s body was found in Spain.
  • Decades later, the deceased women was identified as the Russian woman via biometrics (fingerprints) in Türkiye.
  • The identification was confirmed via DNA analysis.

A true case of cross-national collaboration.

A Fingerprint Identification Story: Bobby Driscoll

In early 1968, two boys found a dead body in New York’s East Village. There was no identification on the man, and no one in the neighborhood knew him. He was fingerprinted and buried in a mass grave, identified by the NYPD nearly two years later.

Potter’s Field monument, Hart Island. From Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0.

In the 1960s, fingerprint identification of deceased persons—a laborious process in those days—often happened because the deceased had a criminal record.

And Bobby Driscoll did. 

His first arrest was in 1956, but he was not convicted of any crime until 1961.

“On May 1, 1961, he was arrested for attempting to cash a check that had been stolen from a liquor store the previous January, and at the same time was also charged with driving under the influence of drugs. He pled guilty to both charges and was sentenced to six months of treatment for drug addiction at the California Institute for Men at Chino.”

Driscoll reportedly cleaned up (his drug of choice was heroin), went east to New York City, and even achieved some fame.

“[H]e purportedly settled into Andy Warhol’s Greenwich Village art community known as “The Factory.” During this time, he also participated in an underground film entitled Dirt, directed by avant-garde filmmaker Piero Heliczer.”

But this was not Driscoll’s first film. He had been in a few films earlier in life.

From Wikipedia. Fair use in this form.

Here he is (in the upper right corner) playing Johnny in the Disney movie Song of the South.

From Wikipedia. Public domain.

And he provided the voice for the lead character in the later Disney movie Peter Pan.

Yes, Bobby Driscoll was a child star for Disney and other studios before appearing in Dirt.

But right after Driscoll’s voice became famous in Peter Pan, Disney declined to renew his contract. The reason? Acne…and the fact that he wasn’t a cute kid any more.

AI generated by Grok.

This led to his tailspin, which eventually led to his fingerprinting.

And his positive identification after his death.

Fingerprint Product Marketing Expert (17 posts)

I’m sharing some of my “biometric product marketing expert” posts on Facebook and LinkedIn.

But why should the social media folks have all the fun?

For Bredemarket blog readers, here are 17 posts that I wrote about fingerprints.

Remember Hygiene?

When I first worked with (then) MorphoTrak’s MorphoWave in the mid-2010s, speed and convenience were the selling points.

A few years later, hygiene was all the rage for (now) IDEMIA and other companies.

As COVID recedes (for now), speed and convenience take center stage again.

Grok.

Reminder to marketing leaders: if you need Bredemarket’s content-proposal-analysis help, book a meeting at https://bredemarket.com/mark/