 In 1973, Ronald Duane Carnes escaped from a North Carolina prison and stayed free for the next 40 years. He was in prison for armed robbery, but he was also unusually good at forging IDs. He collected names from children who had died decades earlier, building a new life for himself as William Henry Cox and Louis Vance. He moved from city to city, Chicago to Georgia to Washington State, before finally settling in Waterloo, Iowa. With no paper trail, police had no way to follow him. Forty years later, something changed. The Iowa Department of Transportation instituted a facial recognition system. Now when the department takes a driver's license photo, it also runs a scan of the subject's facial geometry, measuring the distance between the eyes and the width of the chin. The final scan will run dozens of those measurements, which can be compared against a database to see if there's a match. Forty-three different states run some kind of facial recognition system on driver's license photos, and seven of those states compare with federal databases to see if any of those photos matches a fugitive. Crucially, all of the photos are taken from the same distance and the same straight-on angle, which makes them easy to compare. It's a simple process, but it's become an incredibly powerful tool for catching international fugitives. You need the same kind of straight-ahead photo for a passport, and it gets scanned anytime you cross an international border. If you're on the run from the police, chances are they have a mugshot of you, and now they have an easy way to use it. Anytime you cross an international border or submit an ID, that agency will be able to run a scan to see if there are any outstanding warrants for someone with your face. It's made it much harder to drop off the grid, especially as that system has expanded internationally, catching U.S. fugitives as far away as Nepal. For Karnes, that global system wasn't even necessary. His photo raised a flag because he was in the Iowa driver's license system twice, once as William Henry Cox and once as Louis Vance, and both men were collecting a monthly Social Security check. As soon as that hit came in, police knew they had a case of Social Security fraud. But when they paid him a visit, they realized they had something else, too. This was the same man authorities had been trying to track down for decades. Karnes was arrested, and on September 4, 2014, he was sent back to North Carolina to serve out the remainder of his sentence. The Social Security charges were dropped. The Social Security charges were dropped, were dropped, were dropped, were dropped, like, good for him. Okay, we're dropped. Okay.