Less than a year ago, the Escondido Police Department received the FBI's "Hit of the Year" award for a cold case solved with the help of latent fingerprint analysis.

Today, three part-time investigators who closed that 30-year-old homicide case are sidelined, waiting to see if there's enough money in Escondido's budget to reinstate them starting July 1.

Cutting the team would save the cash-strapped city about $80,000 in the coming fiscal year, officials said. Total proposed Police Department cuts for the next year amount to $438,815 and include the elimination of two other permanent positions and reductions in temporary part-time positions, according to a report released Wednesday by the City Council.

"Last month, we suspended most of our part-timers, which includes the cold case team," department spokesman Lt. Bob Benton said Thursday. "It's disappointing to suspend the cold case team because they've done such magnificent work."

Formed in 2007, the team quickly got to work on the 1977 slaying of an undocumented Mexican immigrant found dead at a construction site on Falconer Drive.

The 1977 detectives didn't even have the victim's name -- Liborio Landin-Vallin -- until a month after the killing.

But they did photograph a bloody partial fingerprint at the scene.

Thirty years later, the photograph of that partial print generated a "hit" in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System.

Actually, the FBI system generated 20 possible matches, and an analyst from the California Department of Justice found one that was a definite match, according to the FBI.

In December 2007, a parolee living in Reno, Nev., was arrested on suspicion of the Landin-Vallin killing.

Michael Keith Moon was on lifetime parole after serving a prison sentence for the 1978 murder of a Reno woman. He also had an attempted murder conviction on his record in Illinois.

In late 2008, Moon admitted -- as part of a plea deal in San Diego County Superior Court -- that he killed Landin-Vallin. He was sentenced to serve five years to life for second-degree murder.

That year, the Escondido cold case team's work was awarded the FBI's "Hit of the Year" award at the International Association for Identification conference in Tampa.

Whether the Escondido team will be able to reprise its performance on the Landin-Vallin case probably depends on whether the Police Department receives economic stimulus grants for law enforcement, Benton said.

The department is also looking into whether the investigators can volunteer to work cases, which Benton said they are willing to do, but that possibility raises a host of legal questions, he said.

There's plenty of work for the team if the money -- or approval to volunteer -- comes through.

Escondido has 21 unsolved homicides on its books, the oldest dating back to 1978, Benton said.

But just because the city is without a formal cold case team doesn't mean those older killings might not get some investigative attention, he said.

"If we get some new information about a murder, we do have a homicide unit, a crimes of violence unit, that could look into that," he said.

Call staff writer Colleen Mensching at 760-739-6675.