These two men, Frederick R. Bieber, a medical geneticist:

And Charles H. Brenner, a forensic mathematician:

… led a study which found that we’d find more bad guys if we start collecting the DNA profiles of relatives of known criminals.

From a Washington Post article by Rick Weiss about the study:

“In one recent case, for example, a specimen from a 1988 murder scene was found to have a DNA pattern similar to that of a 14-year-old boy whose DNA was on file with the police. Investigators obtained a sample from the teenager’s uncle, which perfectly matched the crime scene specimen and led to his conviction.”

I want to catch murderers as much as the next guy, but I don’t know. What are the dangers of misuse here, and what controls could be put into place to mitigate them?

There’s a new cold case organization called the Cold Case Forum [the link I had is no longer working]. From their website:

“The Cold Case Forum, LLC has been founded to provide training to police departments and other law enforcement agencies whose personnel are asked to carry out the serious job of solving oen or unsolved homicides. They are most often asked to do this with little, if any, training that could enhance their skills.

I see they have a seminar coming up on June 5th in Rhode Island, where they’re based.

The director, Andrew Rosenzweig, in his younger days (love old police photos, which is NOT the same as calling you old, Andy, if you’re reading this):

Perhaps clearance rates are going down slowly because police departments are also slowly improving their crime reporting practices? (Am I stating the obvious here?)

By the way, there was a great piece about “New York Killers” in the Times recently. Good work, Jo Craven McGinty. The section about clearance rates had some problems, which I’m going to address in the next couple of weeks, hopefully, but still. Good job.

When my book went to press, 25,062 murders had been committed since 1985. Roughly a third of those murders are still unsolved. (I say roughly, because that figure is a moving target.)

For better or worse, I’m curious about the oldest unsolved murders.

The NYPD’s Central Records Division has a warehouse in Brooklyn where they store, among other things, 187 boxes full of case records for unsolved homicides spanning the years 1921 to 1973. Some boxes have a few cases, some have thirty or more. They may be falling apart from age, but there are probably 4,000 to 7,000 case files there. The box marked “1921” has several cases from the early twenties including the following four cold cases: Cecil E. Landon, a 19 year old from Portland who was murdered just after returning from military service in France, 12-year-old Virginia Walker who was murdered on her way to buy cream, 17-year-old Ream Constance Hoxsie who was hit in the head with a hammer eight times, then posed on a bed, and the severed head of an unknown Italian man that was found in Bronx Zoological Park by two boys looking for fresh water crabs. Several days later, two women searching the same area for mushrooms found the torso.

Ream Constance Hoxsie was murdered on February 2, 1920. The last mention I can find of her was on August 4th that year, in a New York Times article about all the unsolved murders in New York. They say that there’s been a murder in Manhattan every four days for the last seven months, most unsolved. Topping the list are Ream Constance Hoxsie’s murder, and the murder or a gambler/bridge player named Joseph B. Elwood. As far as I can tell, his murder was never solved either, although they got a number of false confessions.

This is from the movie, “The Murder of Marie Roget,” which was based on a Edgar Allan Poe story, which was based on the real murder of Mary Cecilia Roger. Her 1841 murder has never been solved. She was very beautiful and the case got enormous attention. (That reminds me, the Municipal Archives has notebooks of photographs made from glass plate negatives of crime scenes taken around 1905. There’s one picture of a man so horribly deformed he doesn’t even look human. He looks more like a monkey. I am haunted by that photograph. He was so awful looking, and he lived in a shack with a dirt floor — you have to see it. It was one of the most miserable existences I have ever seen in a photograph. And then, the final insult to life and humanity, he was murdered. It’s a sad, sad, picture and I wish I had never seen it.)