Jenny Hall & Meghan Blackburn

Investigators Jenny Hall and Meghan Blackburn from the Austin Crime Lab in Texas won the 2017 prize, which was given out for a creative solution that was more appropriate for a CSI episode than a real-world situation.

Again, this is not a murder case; rather, we are dealing with a heinous child predator who shared pictures of a nine-year-old girl within a Dropbox account in 2015. The Texas Department of Public Safety, or DPS, was alerted to his internet conduct but was having trouble identifying him. The detectives indicated above discovered that even though there were no overt identifiers in the images, the criminal's hands were frequently visible. In actuality, the crisp visuals allowed them to

Since they could really see the ridges in his fingerprints due to the great image quality, they speculated that they would be able to recreate his fingerprints just from the photographs. The hands' scale and dimensions were then determined by a series of meticulous calculations, measurements, and "filling in the blanks."

Composites of the fingerprints displayed in the images were the end result, but they were good enough to quickly register as hits in the FBI's NGI System. Robert Bossick Jr. was named as the suspect; he eventually admitted to the crime and had hundreds more of the same recordings and photos. He received a 50-year prison term.

• Year: 2017