The Restless Sleep:

Murder Billboards

As a last resort, some families put up billboards asking for information and offering rewards. I'm collecting pictures of these kinds of billboards for a presentation. If you have pictures to share, thank you, and please email me.

Below is a more homemade version. Five children went missing from the West Virginia home of the Sodder family in 1945. I'm working on a story about this. The family kept the billboard up for 44 years, and only took it down when both parents were dead. People who grew up in the area still talk about what happened. The Sodder children are the West Virginia version of Etan Patz, a 6-year-old boy who went missing in New York in 1979. If you grew up seeing the signs asking for information, you never forgot it.

A police poster for Etan Patz (still missing, presumed dead).

Getting Tickets for the CUNY Panel

You can register in advance for the "100 Years of Unsolved Murder" panel by calling: 212-817-8215. The program number is 6048.

Or, you can go here: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/cepp/courses/history.html#11

Find the listing for "The Restless Sleep," click on the name, and then chose one of several options offered there. The event is $15, $10 for students.

November 16, Unsolved Murder Panel at CUNY

I've been hard at work preparing the following event. This is the one to go to -- I got four incredible people to agree to participate.

Wednesday, November 16, 7:00PM
100 Years of Unsolved Murder in New York
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Public Programs, 365 Fifth Avenue (between 34th and 35th). $15, $10 for students.

I'm the moderator, and the panelists are:

Vito Spano, former Cold Case Squad Commanding Officer, now a Chief Investigator for the Office of New York State Attorney General.

Dr. Robert C. Shaler, former head of Forensic Biology, Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, New York City, now the director of the Forensic Science Program at Pennsylvania State University, and author of Who They Were: Inside the World Trade Center DNA Story (Free Press).

W. Mark Dale, former Director of the New York State Police Laboratory System and the New York City Police Department Laboratory, now the Director of the Northeast Regional Forensic Institute at Albany.

David Feige, former Trial Chief of The Bronx Defenders, and now on the faculty of the National Criminal Defense College, David is currently at work on the forthcoming book, Indefensible (Little, Brown & Co., 2006).

The Coldest Christmas

I was just posting about the holidays on my personal blog, and it reminded me that 59 of the murders that went cold in New York (since 1985) happened on Christmas Eve and Christmas day, and 18 on New Year's Eve.

Happy holidays.

Why Cold Case Squads Matter - Part 2

Based on the number of homicides in America, I estimate that 6,000 murder cases are going cold every year.

(My computer is in the shop, by the way. That's why I am posting less, and will be posting less for the next week. Hopefully it will only be a week.)

Bill Miller - Person of Interest

This is Bill Miller, the last person to see Jean Sanseverino alive in 1951. (I wrote about Jean in the book.) For the longest time I didn't know who this was. The picture was in the case files without a caption or explanation. Then, a year into my research I read a witness statement that described Bill Miller as missing three teeth and part of his thumb.

The 1951 detectives narrowed their search down to four persons of interest (these are people detectives are not ready to call suspects). Bill Miller was one of their favorites.

Lead, Follow or Get Out of The Way

I'm going to institute a policy.

If you want to trash someone you're going to have to display some courage. Taking anonymous cheap shots will not be not allowed. Someone calling himself Dick Long recently posted vague, disparaging comments about a cold case detective without facts or explanation. Dick Long, perhaps. No balls -- definitely.

To post here, you're going to have to be a man (or a woman) and use your real name.

That said, please don't come here to post that kind of thing. I already know that the perfect detective without faults, like the perfect person, doesn't exist. If you're a better detective, a better person, let's see it. Help us. This blog is here to help law enforcement and the family and friends of someone who was murdered and whose case went cold. Let's see what you've got. Help someone here.

Why Do Cases Go Cold? Part 1

Someone posted this comment today:

“My Father was murdered in 1994. To date nothing has happened. I read your statistics and wonder WHY!?! Is it a matter of money, time, interest,WHAT is necessary for this to stop? Unsolved murders are rampant in our country, again, WHY?”

I hear you. I was pretty shocked when I learned just how many cases go cold. It's not that the police are doing a bad job. Although sometimes it is. But decades of advancement in forensic science, DNA analysis, more sophisticated techniques for lifting fingerprints, and analysis of fibers and other trace evidence haven't made a difference in solving murders either, it seems.

You know, I think the mistake detectives make most often in cold (or going cold) cases is not communicating to the family enough and not telling them the hard truths. The first part is a time issue, but the issue in the second part is this: they want to be your knight in shining armor. They want to be your hero. No one wants to be the bearer of bad news, or to kill hope. But I think they need to lay it all out realistically for the family. If they’ve let you down (usually through no fault of their own) they have to step up to the plate and tell you and explain why. But they’re human and they put it off. Time goes by, and more time, and then too much time goes by to pick up at the phone.

The truth, as bad as it is, is better than not hearing anything at all. Without it, families are left thinking either the police don’t care, or they’re covering something up. I hear that second one a lot.

Going back to the woman who commented today, one thing is clear: she doesn't know why her father's case went cold. It's horrible enough that her father was murdered, and then it went cold, but on top of all this she doesn't even know why.

I’ve said this many times. The one thing law enforcement can do about these unsolved murders is establish a Cold Case Squad, and if they already have one, fully support them. The degrading murder clearances rates are never going to change unless police departments start getting serious about the cases that are responsible for causing them in the first place: the cases that are going cold.

From my book: “There are three reasons a case goes cold. Either they couldn't solve it (no evidence or witnesses), they didn't want to solve it, or someone screwed up.”

I asked Vito Spano, the former commanding officer of New York’s Cold Case Squad to elaborate.

Vito Spano. “I would categorize the reasons why a case goes cold into three basic components.

1) “In all investigations, but particularly in homicide investigations, there has to be "case management." You hear this term a lot, but with proper case management we know that the work on the case was performed.

“What the heck am I talking about? You have to do a canvass on homicides. Sometimes when you knock on someone's door they’re not home. Who makes sure that the people who were not spoken to are spoken to? The supervisor. Is the supervisor doing their job and making sure the detectives re-canvassed? For instance, was a canvass performed to check for CCTV cameras in the area? Is there a bus route or delivery route by the crime scene -- could they have seen something? Without a thorough canvass it’s very easy to overlook potential witness. There must be proper oversight on the operation.

“Then, is the material properly memorialized? When the supervisor is conducting oversight, do they use a check off list? Do they use a case review sheet? There are many variables to each case, and it’s essential to use check off and review documents, to make sure nothing was missed. How are questions being asked? I like to ask people on a canvass, "What was going on at that time and place?" Then expand my questioning from there. Not just , “did you see any suspicious people.” You’re more likely to get a potential suspect or witness when you ask a broader question. I also like to go to the media for help, i.e. crime stoppers programs like America’s Most Wanted, or the TIPS poster program, etc. I think these are all overlooked when you are stuck for leads.

2) “Technology that is not used or not repeated. Some crime scenes are processed more thoroughly than others. This is not done with the intent to not catch the bad guy, it has to do with the skill of the crime scene detective, time restraints, and other factors that might be beyond the detective’s control. In addition, forensic technology is a rapidly changing science. What was once impossible, is now possible, and cold case investigators should be applying these changes in technology, i.e. fingerprint recovery, fingerprint database searches, DNA, database mining of data storage.

“In 1993, when I was the commanding officer of a detective squad in Queens, an unidentified man was found on the highway, duct taped, and dead with gun shoot wounds to the head and body. His fingerprints were taken at the morgue, but no match was found on AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System). Because he couldn’t be identified the case went cold. 10 years later I was notified that AFIS had a match.

“My point is that fingerprints should be run through the AFIS system repeatedly and by different operators because the AFIS system is quirky and may not recognize a fingerprint sometimes, even though that print is in the system. The case detective should make sure this redundancy is performed.

3) “Over time, sometimes homicide perpetrators, associates of homicide perpetrators, or witnesses, may want to talk about an unsolved homicide. This is common in the cold case business. It’s getting unknown or unidentified witnesses to come forward that’s difficult.”

Thank you, Vito.

Catherine the Great's Pistols

The history of the Property Clerk Division of the NYPD isn’t pretty. I go into this in my book. They have their act together now though, and I found one story about them that I just loved.

In 1982, Property Clerk personnel took a second look at two guns that were seized in a raid in the South Bronx in 1971. The weapons weren’t like anything they’d recovered before, so they took them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see what they could find out about them. The Museum had seen the pistols before, in 1933, when they were lent to the Museum and displayed that summer. They turned out to be handmade flintlock hunting pistols that were made for Empress Catherine the Great in 1786.

The police department didn’t smelt them, they didn’t throw them into the Hudson River, and they didn’t sell them at a police auction (typical fates for property in their possession). They lent them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art who put them on display for the second time in fifty years. The New York Times ran a piece about the pistols which were then recognized by the family of John M. Schiff, who were able to document their purchase in 1939, and their theft in 1970. In 1986, John Schiff donated the pistols to the Museum in memory of his wife, Edith Baker Schiff. After strongly expressing the difficulty in placing a value on items of such artistic and historic importance, Peter Finer, an English arms and armour dealer, estimated that the ivory, gold, steel and brass pistols were worth a million dollars.

Is This Ray Kelly?

This is one of the uncaptioned photographs I got from the Photography Unit at One Police Plaza. I had it up on the wall at the launch party and one of the detectives insisted it was Ray Kelly, New York's Police Commissioner. I can't tell for sure. Could be. What do you think? Here he is now:

Good lord, does this man have an impressive resume. You can read it here. I have a lot to say about murder in New York City, and the reality of crime stats, and the ambivalent support given the Cold Case Squad, (and I will) but my sense is that between Bloomberg and Kelly, they're doing a better job protecting New Yorkers (and hence the rest of America) from terrorists than the federal goverment is protecting the entire country from the same threat. I'm glad they're on the front lines. (Sorry federal government. It's not your fault. You are hampered by your leadership.)

10/4 KGB Reading Rescheduled for 11/15

My reading tomorrow night has been rescheduled!! It's now set for November 15. I'm sorry for the short notice. This is all the notice I got, too.

Once again, I'll be reading with another writer, Nate Blakeslee, who will be reading from his new book, Tulia. From his starred review in Publisher's Weekly, "Those familiar with the travesty of justice that led to multiple bogus drug arrests in the small Texas town of Tulia only from newspaper accounts will be outraged anew at this eye-opening narrative that bears comparison to such courtroom and litigation classics as A Civil Action."

Tuesday, November 15, 7:15PM
KGB Bar
85 E. 4th Street, 2nd Floor