Dawn Fehring Murder: Palm Print Evidence and Frye Hearing

The Dawn Fehring murder was solved by a bloody palm print left on the victim’s bedsheet. On May 12, 1995, Fehring, a 27-year-old former missionary and Bible student, was raped and strangled inside a Kirkland, Washington, condominium where she was house-sitting. Her upstairs neighbor, Eric Hamlien Hayden, was convicted of her killing after forensic examiners used a then-new digital imaging technique to strip the fabric weave out of photographs of the print and expose enough ridge detail to match him.

Who Dawn Fehring Was

Dawn Rene Fehring was born on April 27, 1968, in Olympia, Washington, the second of four children of Carl and Dottie Fehring.¹ She graduated in the top ten percent of her class at Olympia High School in 1986 and earned a bachelor’s degree from California Lutheran University. She had studied in Paris and Vienna, spoke French and German, and played violin with the Capitol Youth Symphony Association.

Before her death she served as a missionary and taught English in Japan. By the spring of 1995 she was pursuing a certificate in cross-cultural ministries at the Lutheran Bible Institute in Issaquah and house-sitting at the Salish Village Condominiums in Kirkland.²

What Happened on May 12, 1995

Fehring was last seen alive at a Fred Meyer supermarket on Friday, May 12, 1995.¹ Her body was found two days later, on Mother’s Day, after a firefighter neighbor noticed her door standing open.² She had been sexually assaulted, struck in the back of the head, and strangled with a bedsheet. An autopsy confirmed the sexual assault as the source of blood at the scene.³

There were no signs of forced entry. Investigators believed Fehring had left the door open for ventilation while baking chocolate chip cookies for Mother’s Day.¹ Senior Deputy Prosecutor James Konat later described the apartment as immaculate, with vacuum lines still visible in the carpet.⁴ The attacker left cigarette ashes and a burn mark on a table but no usable DNA, no witnesses, and, at first, no fingerprints anyone could read.

The Bloody Palm Print on the Bedsheet

The only physical evidence tying anyone to the crime was a set of bloody prints on the fitted sheet covering Fehring’s mattress. Kirkland police sent the sheet to Daniel Holshue, a latent-fingerprint examiner for King County, who spotted faint discolorations shaped like handprints.⁵ Holshue cut five sections from the sheet and treated them with amido black, a dye that reacts with blood proteins and turned the stains navy blue. He then rinsed the fabric in methanol and distilled water to lighten the background.

Even after that treatment, the weave of the sheet cut through the ridge detail. Holshue could not reach the minimum eight points of comparison needed for a positive identification.³ At that point he had used the technique in murder work only about half a dozen times in the country.⁵ He turned to Erik Berg, a forensic imaging specialist with the Tacoma Police Department.

Berg used custom software he had written, called More Hits, together with Adobe Photoshop to filter the woven fabric pattern out of photographs of the prints. The process was subtractive: it removed interfering background detail without adding anything to the image or altering the original evidence.³ Once the weave was gone, the ridges appeared. Holshue found twelve points of comparison on one fingerprint and more than forty on a palm print. Both matched Eric Hayden.⁴

Identifying Eric Hayden

Eric Hamlien Hayden was a 32-year-old mill worker who lived in the same Kirkland condominium building as Fehring, one floor above her unit.² The two were not acquainted. His prints were on file from a prior failure to appear at a DWI hearing, which is how a database search could return a match at all.⁵

Officers had already interviewed residents of the building shortly after the killing. Hayden drew suspicion then because he could not account for his whereabouts on the Friday night of the murder and appeared nervous. He told police he had been drinking with friends but could not name them, and told his girlfriend he had been too drunk to remember where he was. When the palm print match came through, police arrested him roughly two hours later. On June 5, 1995, the state charged him with one count of felony murder in the first degree, alleging he had committed rape that caused Fehring’s death.³

The Trial and the Frye Hearing

The trial ran eight days in King County Superior Court, and the prosecution’s case rested almost entirely on the enhanced palm print. Before the jury heard anything about the technique, the court held a hearing under the Frye standard, then the Washington test for whether a scientific method is generally accepted in its field and therefore admissible.³ Holshue and Berg both testified. The court admitted the evidence, finding the enhancement process had “a reliability factor of 100 percent and a zero percent margin of error” and produced results that were “visually verifiable and could be easily duplicated.”⁶

Defense attorney Andrew Dimmock attacked the technology as too new and never before applied to woven fabric, telling jurors there was “no other evidence to suggest Eric Hayden had ever been there.”² Prosecutors answered that Berg had built an authentication system that logged every keystroke and mouse click, so any other analyst could reproduce his work step by step.⁴ On January 10, 1996, the jury convicted Hayden of first-degree felony murder after less than two hours of deliberation.

Sentence and Appeal

On February 9, 1996, Judge Marilyn Sellers sentenced Hayden to more than 26 years in prison, the top of the standard range for the offense.⁷ Konat had asked for an exceptional sentence of more than 41 years, but the judge found no basis to go above the range. At the hearing, Dottie Fehring played a recording of her daughter singing the hymn “I’ve Been Blessed.” The court also ordered Hayden to undergo a mental health evaluation and complete any recommended treatment as a condition of community placement after release.³

Hayden appealed on two grounds: that the digitally enhanced print should not have been admitted, and that the mental health condition was improper.⁸ He argued the technique had not gained general acceptance in the forensic community, though he had offered no expert witnesses or contrary literature at the original Frye hearing. On February 17, 1998, the Washington Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction, holding that the underlying science of digital imaging was not novel and traced back to NASA research in the 1960s and 1970s, and that the enhancement method was generally accepted.³ The published decision, State v. Hayden, 90 Wash. App. 100, 950 P.2d 1024 (1998), was the first appellate ruling in the country to directly address the admissibility of latent prints processed through enhanced digital imaging.

Why the Case Still Matters

The Hayden ruling became the template cited elsewhere when courts confronted digitally enhanced fingerprint evidence. In 2001, the Supreme Court of Ohio pointed to it in State v. Hartman, 754 N.E.2d 1150, when accepting the technique under Ohio’s own standards.⁹ Berg’s More Hits software was later adopted by 215 U.S. police departments.¹⁰ The International Association for Identification issued Resolution 97-9 recognizing electronic and digital imaging as a “scientifically valid and proven technology” for recording, enhancing, and printing forensic images.

Where Hayden Is Now

Based on the 26-year sentence, Hayden would have been eligible for release around 2021. The Washington Department of Corrections does not currently list him as a prisoner, and he appears to have finished his sentence.¹¹ The case was profiled in the Forensic Files episode “Nice Threads.”¹

1
Forensic Files Now. Dawn Fehring
2
Seattle Times. Neighbor Is Found Guilty in Slaying of College Student
3
FindLaw. State v. Hayden
4
CBS News. The Hidden Clue
5
Seattle Times. High-Tech Corners Kirkland Murder Suspect
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CaseMine. State v. Hayden
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Seattle Times. After Hearing Victim’s Hymns, Judge Gives Killer 26 Years
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vLex. State v. Hayden
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Crime Scene Investigator Network. Admissibility of Digital Evidence in Criminal Prosecutions
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CRN. Digital Photos Pose Issues in Court
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Forensic Files Now. Eric Hayden