I came across this guide [the link to the guide has since been removed] for investigating cold cases. I haven’t seen it, but it’s a presentation given by Andy Rosenzweig, a former NYPD guy who is now the Director The Cold Case Forum, LLC. Maybe someone who has seen it can let me know how it is.

In other news, there’s a good article in the New York Times outlining some bills under consideration in New York.

More and more attention has been focused on evidence storage, by the way, which is a good thing. I’ve been meaning to write about what I’ve learned writing my book, and what I’ve discovered since. I’m on a deadline right now so it probably won’t happen until the summer, but legislation like the bills outlined in Michael Cooper’s article are a good thing I think.

I’m embarrassed that I didn’t think of this myself, but this is great idea and absolutely the way to go. From an [link no longer active] OpEd today in the New York Post by Roger Koppl.

“The time has come to free forensic science from the pressures of prosecutorial bias. To that end, crime labs should become independent of police and prosecutors, and public defenders should be given greater access to forensic advice and testing.”

What Koppl suggests is also the way to go with evidence storage. It would perfectly address the problems there.

(This is a detail from an old photograph of some NYPD police lab guys and their equipment.)

I recently got email from Detective Mark Pfeiffer of the Fairfax County Police Department’s Cold Case Unit. He was giving me some corrections to my list of cold case units. I became aware that Fairfax has a unsolved sex crime unit.

I am so glad to hear that unsolved sex crimes units are being created. Tom Jackman of the Washington Post wrote an article about the Fairfax squad on February 13. From his article. “Most police departments don’t have the resources or manpower to form a squad devoted solely to sex crimes. Phoenix started the first one in 2000; Baltimore, Charlotte and Dallas also have one or two full-time cold-case sex specialists.”

The other issue is the statute of limitations for sex crimes. It’s different from state to state, but in New York the statute of limitations is so short it’s immoral. Someone can rape a child and if they manage to allude capture for a few years, they’re free. Not that someone should be able to get away with raping anyone, but the argument for a statute of limitations is that it’s hard to prove consent years after the fact. It’s equally difficult to prove a lack of consent years after the fact, so that’s a wash, but for a child it doesn’t even apply. Sex with a nine-year-old child, for instance, is never consensual. Virginia doesn’t have a statute of limitations for rape.

Solving sex crimes could ultimately help solve unsolved murders as well. When detectives in New York look through unsolved murders for ones they think they can solve, they look for female victims first, because with a sex crime–often a component of a woman’s murder–there is likely to be more evidence. The murderer got closer to his victim, a savage intimacy that provides more serological evidence, fingernail scrapings, hair and fibers. Find the rapist, find the murderer.

Some states from the U.S. Department of Justice website:

– Convicted rape and sexual assault offenders serving time in State prisons report that two-thirds of their victims were under the age of 18, and 58% of those–or nearly 4 in 10 imprisoned violent sex offenders–said their victims were aged 12 or younger.
– In 90% of the rapes of children less than 12 years old, the child knew the offender, according to police-recorded incident data.
– Among victims 18 to 29 years old, two-thirds had a prior relationship with the rapist.
– Four datasets (the FBI’s UCR arrests, State felony court convictions, prison admissions, and the National Crime Victimization Survey) all point to a sex offender who is older than other violent offenders, generally in his early 30’s, and more likely to be white than other violent offenders.

Great work Det. Pfeiffer, and everyone else in your squad. If anyone else knows of other unsolved sex crime units, please let me know. I’d love to add them to my list.

People who have retired from law enforcement are an amazing resource. A lot of that must be due to the fact that they are finally free of all the politics that come with the job. I’ve been looking into a 1934 San Francisco case and I was referred to retired Deputy Chief Kevin J. Mullen. His website.

He couldn’t help me with that particular case, but he immediately came back with the fact that there were 39 homicides in San Francisco that year, then he explained how this particular case might have fallen through the cracks in the coroners records, and finally he gave me the number for the San Francisco Public Library. Since I could have easily looked that number up myself, it was a level of helpfulness that stood out for me. And I loved having that homicide total for the year.

But even better, when I wrote back with the number of homicides in New York in 1934 — 400, and 154 of them are still unsolved — he immediately and rightly pointed out that given the populations of the two cities, the murder rate was actually pretty much the same. He said their solve rate was probably better, which is almost certainly true. Not a dig against New York, the greater the population, the lower the clearance rate, generally. This is true nationwide.

He has written two other books in addition to the one pictured. He said, “My interest in this aspect of the justice system is mostly sociological,” which is also true for me, so all his books are of interest, but the one pictured is the most intriguing for me. (Although his book, The Toughest Gang In Town: Police Stories from Old San Francisco, looks great too.)

One of the blurbs: “Ex-cop Kevin J. Mullen investigates 150 years of lethal mayhem in San Francisco, and what he uncovers in the history of the city’s successive newcomers–Australian, Latino, Irish, Asian, Italian, African American–will no doubt prove as controversial as it is illuminating. Rigorously grounded and thoughtfully nuanced, Dangerous Strangers elevates the issue of urban homicide rates among America’s immigrant subcultures to a new level of discourse.” –Robert R. Dykstra, Emeritus Professor of History and Public Policy, SUNY Albany.

Someone wrote an article about volunteer cold case squads around the country made up of retired homicide detectives, but I can’t find it. It’s a good trend, although unless the retired detective doesn’t need the money they really should get paid. I have a few cold case organizations made up of retired guys in my list of cold case squads.