The Restless Sleep:

Bronx Cold Case Squad

There are over twenty detectives in the NYPD's Cold Case Squad, and unfortunately I couldn't write about them all. The book is pretty packed with people as it is. But this always bugged me, I met a lot of great detectives. In the Bronx Squad for instance, there's a detective named Mark Tebbens. I just read about one of his cases here.

It's an incredible story, and worth reading. They tracked down the murderer of a holocaust survivor.

I went back to my book to find my description of the Bronx Squad office. At the time there were five squads within the Cold Case Squad -- Queens, Brooklyn, Special Projects, Manhattan and the Bronx squad (the Special Projects unit has since been disbanded). I'm beginning to describe them here:

Every squad has its own personality. The Bronx squad is far away and ghost-like. Even within its own precinct it’s tucked away, and you have to walk through the warrant squad to get there. While all the Cold Case Squad offices are battered and worn, the Special Projects squad office has at least some fancy touches because of its proximity to 1PP. The office of Lt. Pollini, the commanding officer of Special Projects, is almost grand. The Manhattan and Brooklyn squads, which are both housed in the Brooklyn office, are less fancy, but they have a certain formality and tension because this is Cold Case Squad headquarters and the headquarters for the Fugitive Enforcement Division under which it operates. Spano and Ferrari, the commanding officers, are here. Detectives outside Brooklyn complain that the guys in Brooklyn get everything they want because they’re in Spano’s face every day. The Brooklyn detectives complain because they’re in Spano’s face every day.

Reading at Rocky Sullivan's 11/30

I'm reading at a bar called Rocky Sullivan's.

It's this Wednesday, November 30th at 8PM. Rocky Sullivan's is an Irish bar at 129 Lexington, between 28th and 29th.

"If you want something done , ask a busy person."

Interestingly, when the murder rate was at its highest in New York, so were the clearance rates. In the 1980’s, the percentage of murders that went unsolved in New York was 31.2%. Now it's up to 40%. (It's been hovering around 35% for decades, sometime a little better, sometimes a little worse.)

A Simpler Time

I love this shot. For it's improbability, and for the nostalgia it engenders. How would a kid get stuck in a tree with a glowing pumpkin (clearly a Halloween PR photograph)? Not that a cop wouldn't help him down if he did. I wonder where this was taken. Central Park?

It's a happy ending kind of shot. Something we all long for.

Undeclared Homicide and Missing Persons

Losing someone is hard. Not knowing what happened, or who killed them makes it harder. Then there is the unbearable pain of not knowing anything at all: the missings persons case. Someone disappeared. That's all the family and friends of this person know and in some cases that is all they ever will know. They enter a nightmare limbo of waiting. Will they hear their father's voice, or the police telling them they've found his body, or nothing at all until the day they die?

It could be a homicide, it's almost certainly a homicide in many cases, but without convincing evidence, in many cases it's almost impossible to get the case declared a homicide. Instead, the case will go to missing persons, where there are limits to what they can and will do.

As I learned writing The Restless Sleep, of all the things law enforcement does, finding people is often the most difficult. It's one thing to figure out who the murderer is, it's another thing to find him. There's a lot of failure in missing persons work.

It's a big subject, and I can't cover it all in one blog post, but I wanted to introduce the topic. I've gotten more than one email about these limbo cases.

There is an incredible group of volunteers who have set up something called The Doe Network. They help law enforcement solve missing persons cases and identify unknown murder (and other) victims. I don't know a lot about them yet, but they seem to be a creative and resourceful group. You can never sit back in life, waiting for someone else to do what needs to be done. But even if you're willing to do whatever's necessary, it can take a long time to get up to speed and learn how to be effective. And it's hard to accomplish anything alone. The accumulated and accumulating expertise in this wonderful organization addresses both issues, and I would love to see it grow.

Thank You, Panelists

Thank you, Vito Spano, David Feige, and Bob Shaler. You did a great job last night. Also, thank you CUNY and Pamela Weppner, for hosting our panel. Everything was so perfect and ready to go, you thought of everything.

Discussion became quite ... lively. One major area of disagreement arose between Spano and Feige. Feige thought District Attorneys are quick to go to trial for murder, too quick. They'll go forward with cases with an unreliable witness, and little physical evidence. Spano strongly disagreed. He said DA's are extremely cautious, and that's how it should be, although he acknowledged that can be frustrating, too.

Here are a couple of shots before things got started!

Why did this case go cold?

Find out tonight.

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.

The panelists who will tell you:

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).

Solving Cold Cases

They found an old murder victim. Now what?

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.

The panelists who will tell you:

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).

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.

Animal Rescue

I'm an animal lover, so these pictures of the police rescuing a horse are among the photographs I kept from the Photo Unit at One Police Plaza. At least, I hope they are rescuing a horse. They could just be pulling up a dead horse, I suppose.

Before

After

Update on a Cold Christmas

One of the Cold Case guys posted this in the comment section.

"Three homicides that happened on Christmas day (RoseMarie and Thomas Uva and Nickolas Guido) have been investigated by the Queens Cold Case Squad and arrests have been made."

Good work, Queens Cold Case!!

Why Do Cases Go Cold? Part 2

I looked at the unsolved murders between 1985 and 2003, and found that 54% of the cases that went cold happened in the street, on a subway, in a park, or in an abandoned building. Places where a witness, if there was one, most likely didn’t know or recognize the murderer or the victim, and evidence is harder to collect.

Later, at John Jay College I found a 1994 doctoral thesis about unsolved murder that said, “murder in residences not only accounted for the most frequent murder location but stood the greatest chance of being solved when compared to other locations.”