July 31, 2005
The Police Laboratory
I love old police photographs, particularly any that show antiquated forensics. I got this shot of some old police lab guys and their equipment from the photo unit at One Police Plaza, aka 1PP. There was no date - can anyone guess when this was taken?
I displayed it at my book party and then after the party gave it to Lisa Faber, a criminalist who works at the Police Laboratory. The New York Post recently wrote about Lisa Faber and Wendell Stradford (both in my book) in an article called: Secret Weapons - Meet the Elite Supercops of the NYPD.
Aside from serology and DNA tests, which are done at the OCME, anything else that needs to be tested—ballistics, narcotics, and fingerprint lifting—are done in Police Laboratory in Queens. I keep meaning to ask Lisa if she’d be willing to help out with forensic questions here. She’s extremely smart. Among other things, Faber makes determinations about trace evidence found at crime scenes, ie, if hairs are animal, human or fibers.
This is Lisa Faber at my party.
July 25, 2005
Jean Sanseverino Murdered March 8, 1951
The case that affected me the most was the March 8, 1951 murder of Jean Sanseverino. She came to New York from Alabama to be with the husband who had left her a year before and had returned to New York, where he was from. It didn’t go well. He wanted to send her back to Alabama, but she said, “No. I’m going to stay in New York and have fun.” A month later she was dead.
She was only 26. Before she was murdered she spent the last month of her life making the same stupid mistakes young women everywhere make in their twenties, especially at the end of a marriage that wasn’t everything a young girl dreams. Jean never got the chance to stop, grow up, and pull her life together. She wasn’t around long enough to discover there are a lot worse things than loneliness.
In 1951, they couldn’t measure alcohol levels as exactly as they can now. They used a scale of 1 to 4. Jean measured at 3+. She must have been plastered the night she died, but she probably sobered up quickly. “Being strangled—having your neck grasped and crushed until the blood stops flowing, and the air gets trapped in your throat and the small blood vessels in your face and eyes start to pop—hurts,” Dr. Jonathan Hayes, a Senior Medical Examiner at the OCME explains. “Eventually, the victim will lose consciousness, but her struggling can prolong her own suffering, as she repeatedly pushes away the killer's hands, briefly letting the breath flow and the blood circulate again, before they are abruptly cut off as the hands go back around her neck and the choking continues.”
The medical examiner estimated that Jean died at roughly 5:30 that morning. A little while later, the sun rose. It was chilly that morning, 38 degrees, and it felt like it was going to rain.
When I found her case sitting in a closet, no one had so much as even looked at it in decades. And why should they? The killer is likely dead. The detectives want to save lives, they want to catch killers who might kill again. Still, I thought, maybe somewhere in Alabama she has family who are still alive and who think of her and wonder from time to time, ‘you send your daughter up to New York, she comes back in a box and nothing happens? Nobody pays?’
July 20, 2005
7/23 Museum of the City of New York Presentation
This is Vito Spano, the former commanding officer of the Cold Case Squad, at the beginning of his career. (He looks like a young Al Pacino, doesn't he?) He will be with me this Saturday at the Museum of the City of New York to discuss the history of cold case work. The details:
Saturday, July 23rd, 2PM
Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street.
(Take the #6 to 103rd, or the #2 or #3 to 110th Street.)
July 15, 2005
7/18 - Slide Show at Barnes & Noble
I put together a slide show about unsolved homicides and I'm giving it for the first time at the Barnes & Noble on 6th Avenue at 22nd Street, at 7PM on Monday, July 18th.
July 10, 2005
Book Launch Party July 7th
Det. Wendell Stradford just said something very nice to me. (It looks a little like I've wandered into The Land of the Giants, doesn't it?)
These three photographs were taken by Ben Rosengart, photo@narcissus.net. Thank you, Ben!
Book Launch Party July 7th
Retired Deputy Inspector Vito Spano and retired Detective Chuck Harrison, both from the Cold Case Squad.
Book Launch Party July 7th
I'm giving a speech, thanking everyone who helped me. My hands are shaking and I'm trying not to cry.
July 04, 2005
The First Cold Case Squad
The first Cold Case Squad was in Florida. In 1979, the Metro-Dade Police Department (now the Miami-Dade Police Department) created the first cold case squad in the United States. They called it the Pending Case Squad. There were some problems, and the squad was disbanded. They tried again in 1983 and solved a 1982 murder of a little girl. By 1984 they decided to formally give it another go, this time calling it the Cold Case Squad.
http://tinyurl.com/cfjuw