SAN DIEGO — Crime scene technicians searching David Westerfield's recreational vehicle found two fingerprints matching Danielle van Dam's, but not one print belonging to the vehicle's owner, a fingerprint examiner testified Wednesday in Westerfield's capital murder trial.

Jeffrey Graham of the police department's crime lab offered several explanations for the lack of prints, but prosecutor Jeff Dusek zeroed in on two. In pointed questions to Graham, the prosecutor suggested that Westerfield either wore gloves in his RV the weekend Danielle vanished or thoroughly cleaned the vehicle afterward.

Jeffrey Graham

"A damp rag will wipe it right off," Graham said when Dusek asked about the fragility of any print. "Even casual brushing will wipe it off."

Prosecutors allege Westerfield, a 50-year-old engineer who lived two doors from the van Dams, did much more than a casual cleaning. Westerfield admitted vacuuming and wiping down his RV after police questioned him about Danielle's abduction and police witnesses have testified that there was an empty bleach bottle and a strong odor of bleach in his garage.

Westerfield maintains he had nothing to do with the 7-year-old's kidnapping and murder last February and instead spent a typical weekend touring southern California in his RV.

Graham testified Wednesday that Danielle was in the RV at some point and left a print from her left hand on a bedroom cabinet. The handprint was about a foot above and to the side of the bed's headboard. Although part of it was smudged, two fingers —Ê the ring and middle fingers — were clear and matched Danielle's, Graham said.

"How certain are you," asked Dusek.

"Absolutely certain," said Graham.

The prosecution bolstered his account with the testimony of Pat Wertheim, a fingerprint examiner from Arizona's state crime lab. Wertheim gave jurors a computer slide show on fingerprint analysis and showed them ridge by ridge how the prints from the RV matched identically Danielle's.

"There is complete consistency," Wertheim repeated each time he compared the ridges, creases and points. Westerfield seemed rapt by Wertheim's colorful Powerpoint presentation. He turned his chair and stared intently toward a projection screen on the courtroom wall.

Defense lawyer Steven Feldman questioned Graham about the validity of fingerprint evidence, a field recently attacked in some quarters as an unreliable pseudo science, but seemed to concede that the prints belonged to Danielle. His questions for Graham focused on the fingerprint examiner's inability to say when nor under what conditions prints were left and he barely cross-examined Wertheim.

The handprint was first disclosed in a March preliminary hearing. In his opening statement, Feldman hinted that Danielle and other children in the neighborhood were often around Westerfield's RV and she may have left her prints while playing in the vehicle.

"You can't really tell us how it got there," Feldman asked Graham.

"The print has been identified as Danielle van Dam's which means she touched the cabinet," he said.

Graham also testified about the many unidentified fingerprints in the van Dam home. More than 300 were lifted from surfaces in the two-story house, but Graham said after testing them against Danielle's parents and brothers only 122 were positively identified. None matched Westerfield.

ÊGraham specifically mentioned a backward palm print on the handrail of the family's staircase. It did not match the van Dams, nor Westerfield nor the four friends the couple had as guests the night Danielle went missing.

Danielle's parents, Brenda and Damon van Dam, sat in the back row through some parts of the fingerprint evidence, but left court as Graham began to describe the extraordinary steps he took to get prints from Danielle's badly decomposed body. Her mummified hands were removed and rehydrated with chemicals, he said.

Brenda van Dam left the courtroom crying Tuesday during graphic autopsy testimony, and Judge William Mudd mentioned her emotional departure to jurors Wednesday. He said "television pundits" claimed some jurors were noticeably upset by Brenda van Dam's tears, but that he hadn't seen anyone on the panel react.

"If any of you become concerned that you are being compromised, please let me know," he said.

The judge also ordered one female juror to stop conversing with a female relative during breaks in the trial. Mudd noted that the relative had become a "regular" in the spectators' gallery and their conversations had aroused the suspicion of some in the media who wondered if they were discussing the case. The female relative also chats with the van Dams in the court and in the hallway.

"The media assumes the worst — that you are talking about the case, not about family matters," said Mudd, who told them "because of the appearance of impropriety" they should cease communicating at the courthouse.