I’d try not to judge the person, but questions like that really made me wonder about their inability to empathize. I suppose we all should be stronger, but everyone recovers at different rates, and some things you never quite recover from.

Lisa Kroeyr was murdered in 1985 in Saginaw, Michigan, and 27 years later her caring and loyal cousin still works tirelessly to find her killer.

Perhaps you know something that you were unable to share all those years ago, but maybe now you can. Imagine if it was your cousin, or sister, or daughter. Imagine how you’d feel about her killer going on to enjoy 27 free years of life after robbing your child of hers?

If you think you can help, please contact the Saginaw Crime Stoppers line at 1-800-422-Jail.

In fact, anyone reading this who knows something about any murder anywhere, make this the year you summon the courage to tell someone. Make this the year you bring even just a tiny bit of peace to the heart of someone who lost a person they cared about. You can be the good guys.

More information about Lisa’s case can be found here.

Many of the photographs come from a collection of glass plate negatives that are sitting in the basement of One Police Plaza. They sit in piles in a small caged room, cracking anytime someone steps too hard. They’re in bad shape and continually getting worse and eventually there will be nothing left if something isn’t done about them. (And maybe something has been done since the last time I was down there.)

This is one of the photographs from the collection. The caption reads: “Body Bessie Weils alias Dumont found in kitchen #5 Monroe Street 4-2-17″ “File #159.

When I was writing my book about the NYPD’s Cold Case Squad, I also interviewed the head of Missing Persons. I’ll never forget it. In my book, I wrote about how detectives keep their case files in brown, accordion-style folders that look like something school children might carry. Most cases take up only one folder. If it’s a complex case, and the folders start piling up, eventually they’re moved into a cardboard carton. As the case grows, the detectives start stacking cartons. A big case might ending up filling one to six cartons.

The cartons for Etan Patz filled an entire wall, front to back, and from floor to ceiling. It was a dramatic representation of just how hard they worked that case. They’d done everything they humanly could, and they were never going to give up on Etan Patz.

Here are a couple of shots of what’s happening down there right now. The blue canopy is covering the entrance to the building they’re checking.

The place is filled with media, neighbors and onlookers.

From their website: “Black and Missing Foundation, Inc (BAM FI) has been established as a non-profit organization whose mission is to bring awareness to missing persons of color; provide vital resources and tools to missing person’s families and friends and to educate the minority community on personal safety.

“Founded in 2008 by a veteran law-enforcement official and public relations specialist, BAM FI will create public awareness campaigns for public safety and provide parents and loved ones of missing persons with a forum for spreading the word of their disappearance, with pictures and profiles of missing individuals. BAM FI will use a variety of media, including print, television, and the internet, to help locate missing persons of color for this severely underserved population.”

For people interested in a fuller account of the case, Clarence Walker wrote an article about it last year which can be read here.

My own experience of this happened in 1990′s when my company’s computers had been hacked. Enough expensive damage had been done, so I wanted to report it even though I didn’t think the NYPD would be able to do much to track the hackers down (this was around 1995).

I called the 1st Precinct and was told they couldn’t take the report because “hacking is not a crime.” I cited the law, but he still refused to make an official report and his CO backed him up. “Okay, so if I were to hack into the NYPD’s computers right now,” I said in frustration, “and download everyone’s personal email, and all your case files and then publish everything I found on the internet, no one would arrest me?” That stopped him for a few seconds, but he still refused and I had to make a lot of phone calls before they would finally make a report.

There are of course, valid reasons for not making an official report. In any case, here’s to a better year, however good or truly bad this year was. I post this picture every December, and it’s a little sad, but I still love it.

“The Department of Justice, under its 5-year-old “Cold Case Initiative” and the 2007 Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, has combed through that dark period of American history, seeking any cases that could still be prosecuted. Isolating 111 incidents involving 124 deaths, investigators have sought to determine whether those who died were victims of racially motivated crimes — and then whether there’s anyone left to charge.”

“In about two-thirds of those cases, FBI agents have hand-delivered letters to next of kin, informing them that the government had taken things as far as they could.”
 
“In some cases, all of the suspects are dead; in others, suspect individuals have been acquitted in the past and cannot legally be retried. In a few, the agency can find no evidence that a crime was racially motivated — or even that the death resulted from foul play.”

The rest of the article can be read here.

The 1964 Mississippi State Highway Patrol file booking photo of James Ford Seale, one of the murderers mentioned in the article.

One of the early developers, Dr. Lawrence Kersta, later started his own company and the field of audio forensics was born. Kersta was involved in many famous cases in his lifetime, including the Kennedy assassination, the Clifford Irving Howard Huges hoax, and in 1969, when rumors spread that Paul McCartney was dead and had been replaced by a look and sound-alike, Kersta used the spectrograph to analyze recordings made after Paul was said to have died, and determined that Paul was still alive.

Audio forensics got a huge leg up when six scientists were brought together in 1973 to see if 18 1/2 minutes of White House Tapes had been erased in order to possibly cover-up White House involvement in the Watergate break-in. They were able to determine that the segment had been over-recorded five or more times.

It was CSI with headphones! I did a lot of research into forensic audio a couple years back and I thought I would go through my notes and do a series of posts about what I learned.

This is a snippet from a Bell Labs promotional film called “Science Behind Speech,” which includes a section about the spectrograph. The picture below is a screen grab of Kersta, who was working for Bell Labs at the time.

More to come!

The article begins: “A Brooklyn man who has waited nearly three decades for cops to solve his brother’s murder was stunned when he was told last month that police tossed the crime scene evidence 15 years ago.” You can continue to read the article here.

This picture of the victim’s brother is from the article and is credited to Egan-Chin.