So this brief piece caught my eye. Police are asking the public to help identify a man whose body was pulled from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania in 1998. It’s such a distinctive face and shape of head, maybe someone will recognize him.

And then there is the story of a, coincidentally, Pennsylvania woman who went missing in 2002 and just returned. I feel for everyone in this case.

I have some links to missing persons organizations, but relatively few as the focus of this site is homicide investigation. If there are any particularly great links I should have, please let me know.

The second on is Homicide Watch DC. From their site: “Homicide Watch is a community-driven reporting project covering every murder in the District of Columbia. Using original reporting, court documents, social media, and the help of victims’ and suspects’ friends, family, neighbors and others, we cover every homicide from crime to conviction.” There should be something like this in every city.

This is a detail from an undated NYPD photo with the caption, “Lost children.”

“When the cold cases aren’t included, the NYPD solved 57% of the year’s 419 homicides, said Paul Browne, chief spokesman for the NYPD.”

He’s referring to the practice of including homicides from previous years that have been cleared this year in the current numbers.

But the percentage of unsolved murders could be even higher than that. A case is cleared when an arrest is made. (There is also something called exceptional clearances. A case is “exceptionally” cleared when the murderer has been identified definitively—by a substantiated confession for example—but the murderer has since died, or is in a country that refuses to extradite him.) But of the cases where an arrest has been made, if it turns out later that they arrested the wrong person, or if the case goes to trial and the person isn’t found guilty, the police department doesn’t go back and adjust the clearance rates. So they will add in murders that were solved, but they do not take others that weren’t.

Also, I studied the numbers very carefully (my book came out in 2005, so the numbers I looked at were 2003 and earlier) and I found that an unsolved murder has up to 5 – 10% chance of being cleared within one year after it goes cold. After two years, that chance decreases to less than 1%. Not a lot of cold cases get solved, ultimately. If I did the math right, they’re saying they cleared 75 cold cases. That sounds high to me, given the fact that the Cold Case Squad is about a quarter of the size it was when I wrote my book, but plausible. Also, the cold case detectives are not the only ones working unsolved murders, and I don’t know which cases they are including in that number.

A case folder from an unsolved murder.

“On a hot July day in 1977, one of New York’s ugliest summers, my 23-year-old cousin, Ellen Hover, left her Third Avenue apartment. She had an appointment with a young photographer who had asked to take pictures of her. His name, he’d told her, was John Berger …” The full story is here. It’s worth reading. She makes it very clear why it matters to prosecute these old, cold cases.

This is a screenshot of the news from two years ago, when it was announced that Rodney Alcala would be extradited to New York.

I want to thank the Manhattan District Attorney’s Forensic Sciences/Cold Case Unit, Assistant District Attorneys Melissa Mourges, Chief of the Forensic Science/Cold Case Unit, Martha Bashford, Chief of the Sex Crimes Unit, Alex Spiro, and Detectives Wendell Stradford, Robert Dewhurst, and (ret.) Stefano Braccini of the NYPD’s Cold Case Squad. There’s more information in the DAs press release here.

I know there’s no such thing as closure, but if one of the things we can do for the friends and family of the victims is to allow them to see at least some justice served, then you all have certainly done the best that could be done for them.

As always, I’m posting this very old picture of someone from the NYPD coming out of a helicopter dressed as Santa. Yes, it’s a little sad with the World Trade Center towers in the background, but come on. This is pretty cool. I wonder where they were off to.

More recently, I read about the all the evidence that was destroyed at the Property Clerk warehouses as a result of Hurricane Sandy. It’s not that I doubt anyone’s word, but they had plenty of time and warning to move the barrels so just to be on the safe side (and this is probably already being done):

I strongly suggest that a third party immediately request to see and to document all the barrels (and everything else) that may or may not be damaged.

This picture of Detective Darren Norris was taken by Gregg Matthews for The New York Times.

New evidence emerged and “Detective Wendell Stradford of NYPD’s Cold Case Squad reinvestigated the case, along with Assistant District Attorneys Wanda DeOliveira and Ann Thompson.” The complete article is here.

September 24. New York City Police Department, Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and Innocence Project Awarded Federal Funds to Identify Wrongful Convictions

Grant Will Enable the NYPD to Catalogue Evidence That Can Be Subjected to DNA Testing

The New York City Police Department, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and the Innocence Project have been awarded a National Institute of Justice grant to catalogue evidence to improve access for those seeking to prove their innocence through DNA testing. The $1.25 million in grant funds will be distributed over two years.

You can read the rest of the press release on the NYPD’s website. Here’s an earlier post of mine about the Property Clerk Division, which I believe illustrates the need for this grant. But as I’ve said many times now, the responsiblity for storing evidence should be handed over to an independent group.

Evidence should not be stored by an organization that has a vested interest in the outcome of the trial. If I wanted to put you in jail, for instance, would you be comfortable with me holding onto all the physical evidence that will decide your fate? This is not a comment on the NYPD by the way, this is just common sense.

Barrels of evidence at the Property Clerk warehouse.

And, as long as I’m on the subject, a book called Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York, by Richard Zacks, chronicles Roosevelt’s attempts to clean up the mess depicted in Copper. From the Amazon review, where it was listed among the Best Books of March 2012:

“Those living in New York City today may be surprised (or not!) to read about the state of their city in the 1890’s; overrun with prostitution, gambling, boot liquor and Tammany Hall, NYC was known as the “Island of Vice.” Enter the ever-ambitious Theodore Roosevelt, years before he became president, who stepped-in as the NYC Police Commissioner and made it his mission to clean up the city. Richard Zacks’ enthusiastic account of this period is a fun read—an adjective rarely used to describe history books. It would be difficult to invent a cast of characters as exuberant and flawed as those involved here, and Zacks brings them all to life with ease. He clearly enjoys the subject, elevating this well-researched book into something memorable.”

A detail from a photograph in Jacob A. Riis book, How the Other Half Lives. The caption for this photograph reads: Police station lodgers waiting to be let out.

I wanted to learn everything I could about murder in NYC over the years. This was from a section in the 1887 annual report called “Miscellaneous Statistics.” It’s one of many sad lists I came across.