September 30th, 2005
Cold Case Squad detectives love going back to the crime scene, even when there’s nothing left. ADA’s are baffled by the practice, and there hasn’t been a time in anyone’s memory where detectives have recovered any valuable evidence, but this is one of the ways they psych themselves up to begin. They are mustering with the past before resuming the battle.
Besides, if there’s even the remotest possibility that something remains, the detectives have to try. If it’s still there, with the right tools they can recover it, and use it as one piece of physical, irrefutable evidence, bringing at least some measure of peace to a family that has been waiting so long for resolution.
The pictures here were taken at a dig. The Cold Case Squad was following up on a lead about someone who was murdered elsewhere, but dumped here. That’s a cadaver dog in the first shot (cadaver dogs were explained thoroughly in an earlier post).
Depending on what the detectives are trying to find, they might bring teams of personnel and equipment, like a device called a surface penetrating radar, pictured above. “We’re looking for shadows,” one guy said, describing how it works. They’re so poetic sometimes.
Tags: Cold Case Investigation Facts ·
September 27th, 2005
When my book went to press there were 8,894 unsolved murders in New York since 1985.
Los Angeles, the next largest city in America, had 8,000 going back to 1960.
Fairfax, VA, had 75 going back to 1964.
If you want to try to figure out how many cold cases are in your city, go to the Tags: Homicide Facts ·
September 24th, 2005
As an amateur historian, I was fascinated with the NYPD’s Property Clerk Division. I wanted to see what they had saved. What I learned was: not much. Before I go any further, as far as I can tell they have their act together now, which I detail in the book. They got serious about storage when they starting using DNA forensically.
Prior to that, things were thrown out or lost in various ways. For almost 100 years, weapons were taken out to sea and sunk. In 1933, 3,816 guns, knives and swords were dumped into the sea at the Scotland Lightship station off the New Jersey coast. A couple of years later 1,575 phony token slugs were dumped into the Long Island Sound at Eaton’s Neck in Huntington Bay, along with 500 slot machines and 4,000 weapons. Two years after that the Property Clerk poured 10,000 gallons of wine, whiskey and beer into the Lower Bay. As of the 70’s they were still throwing what they could into the various bodies of water in New York, but in the 80’s they began melting handguns down in a foundry in Pennsylvania. Rifles and knives were put in a metal shredder.
One day, while going through photographs at One Police Plaza, I found a shot of them destroying the slot machines they would shortly throw into the water at Eaton’s Neck (not far from where I grew up, coincidentally).
Tags: Police History ·
September 21st, 2005
DNA was used in less than 2% of the cases the Cold Case Squad cleared. At the time The Restless Sleep went to press, the total forensic DNA hits in New York was 1,529. 7% were for murder cases, 72% were for sex crimes.
‘In most state or federal systems, for every crime solved with DNA, we solve 26 with fingerprints,” according to Ed German, a recently retired Chief of Intelligence for the Army Criminal Investigation Command.
Tags: Cold Case Investigation Facts ·
