Last Wednesday the House passed a bill that will provide $10 million for the next ten years to go towards clearing close to 100 civil rights cold case murders. The bill includes $2 million per year for state and local law enforcement agencies.

76 of the cases came from the Southern Poverty Law Centre, which has been compiling information about these cases as part of a list they call “The Forgotten.” I found one editorial in the Tuscaloosa News that was not in favor of the bill, but the arguments are not convincing, especially given the Hate Group Map on Southern Poverty Law Centre’s website (although I wonder about all the groups that are included — on the one hand it’s good that it’s so broad, hate should not be tolerated regardless of where it’s coming from, but on the other hand … it’s so broad!).

This picture is of Emmett Till and his mother. Emmett Till was a 14 year old who was murdered in 1955. Not that they weren’t all horrible, they were, but Till’s murder is just so brutal and ugly and so haunting. I can’t forget it.

In other cold case news, state DNA labs and law enforcement in Detroit are making excellent use of $370,000 from a federal DNA grant to go back and do testing for unsolved crimes. They’ve got hits on 72 cold cases going back to 1976. Good work, Detroit!

I was reading a number of people on an NYPD blog make a common mistake about women and suicide. They were saying that women don’t use guns to kill themselves as much and use other methods more. This was an unofficial NYPD blog, I should add, so their comments do not represent the collected knowledge of the NYPD. The only reason I bring this up is because it was in the context of a murder investigation and I thought it was important to try to clear up this common misconception.

The truth is the number one method of suicide among women IS shooting themselves. I believe I know how this mistake got started. It’s a combination of a persistent stereotype about women reinforced by a select representation of statistics that supports this bias.

Whenever you read articles about suicide you always hear “women use poison more than men.” That’s true. They do. But that said, they still use guns more than poison when they kill themselves. I’m going to simplify the numbers in order to explain how I think the confusion arose.

Take a 100 male suicides and 100 female. Say 90 of the men shot themselves and 10 took poison. Among the women, 80 shot themselves and 20 took poison. In this example, you can accurately say that women used poison more than men. But, as you can see, they still used a gun more than anything else.

I researched this a while back, that’s how I know. I also learned that men jump off buildings and other high places more than women. Anyway, the point was being made that this female gunshot victim was more likely a homicide because when women kill themselves they don’t use guns and that’s wrong. It’s the number one method of suicide among women.

UPDATE: Now I’m seeing that women do use poison more than guns to kill themselves! I wonder if I was researching this during a year when women used firearms more, but I have to correct my post. Women still use guns a lot (in the year I’m looking at now 32% used guns and 37% used poison) but they do kill themselves with poison more.

Last year I posted about a little boy named Bruce Kremen who went missing in California in 1960, and I just realized I never posted an incredible update to this story. Another writer, Weston DeWalt, who was investigating another boy who went missing in California, Tommy Bowman, actually came across new evidence and now the LAPD Cold Case Squad is investigating a serial killer named Mack Ray Edwards for murdering Tommy. They’re considering Edwards for the murder of up to 13 other children including Bruce Kremen.

I had originally called the Missing Person’s department of the LAPD to ask where the case was left, expecting to be told something along the lines of, “the last lead in the Bruce Kremen case was over forty years ago.” But then Missing Persons told me the Cold Case Squad had the case. I knew that meant a new lead.

Weston DeWalt, wrote a book with Anatoli Boukreev called The Climb, which was written as a rebuttal to Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air, is working on a book about this investigation. Here’s an article about the story [the article I linked to is no longer there].

The NYPD just put out an RFP (request for proposal) to computerize and overhaul their current evidence storage system. Before embarking on this huge, expensive, time-consuming project–it will probably takes years to complete–the responsiblity for storing evidence should be handed over to an independent group. I posted about this recently in response to a New York Post editorial.

Evidence should not be stored by an organization that has a vested interest in the outcome of the trial. As I said before, I’m embarrassed that this never occurred to me before, but 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?

The NYPD shouldn’t start. They shouldn’t spend the money. This is not an accusation by the way, this is just common sense. I have to think of a likely organization to take something like this over. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is run under the Department of Health. Would it make sense for them to take it? Who else?

Here’s a Staten Island Advance article about the news.

(The picture was taken at one of the NYPD’s property clerk warehouses. Those barrels contain evidence from homicides.)