If Matthew West was convicted, as it says, surely his fingerprints would be on file?
thank you. I was expecting fingerprints to be raised as the first response to my enthusiasm for a wanted felon as a potential match, now I needn't wait in suspense for that shoe to drop.
I don't have an answer to that, really. Carter Katt has pointed out some possible circumstances under which a comparison to Grateful Dead fan might have been missed by a generic mass database search, and there could be others, but I think the only way to be certain would be to have GD fan's prints and this specific wanted felon's prints compared.
I should have been more clear, when I raised the possibility of misinformation interfering with resolution of this case, that I'm not directing that concern solely at the base info for unidentified GD fan.
For example, misinformation can also appear in suspect or wanted felon summaries. Is Matthew West's hair really blond? Was he weighed & measured, or are those numbers self-reported and possibly deliberately inaccurate? If he had been wearing colored contact lenses when he was picked up, would that have been detected?
The same applies to other missing persons info summaries - could a match have been missed because misinformation on the right missing person's summary caused people to immediately dismiss that person as a possibility? Two well-known cases of unidentified remains in Canada had been incorrectly identified as female when they were actually male, a mistake that wasn't corrected for decades in both cases. Of course, this line of thinking can be taken to absurd extremes - with enough "what ifs" I could end up proposing that GD fan is actually DB Cooper! I understand that.
What I'm trying to say is...something is not right, about the lack of resolution in this specific case. Something is blocking, here, perhaps unintentionally as in misinformation or perhaps deliberately as in a calculated deception. I suggest that the responsible authorities ought to be a bit more liberal as to whom they consider for potential matches than they might otherwise be, at this point.