by Billy Jensen
Addendum
So You Want to Help Solve a Murder?
“I am not the law, but I represent justice so far as my feeble powers go.”
—Sherlock Holmes
If you’ve gotten this far and want to keep reading, I’m guessing you may be interested in helping to solve a murder. You might be the type of person who walks down the sidewalk and spots a piece of paper with handwriting on it and picks it up because it might be a clue to a crime. Or you see a single flip-flop underneath a sixth-floor balcony, look up, and wonder when exactly its owner jumped.
You dig into every crime story you hear. You put pieces together and think you could deliver to the police the exact picture of what happened. Well, are you ready to get messy? Are you ready for long days of no answers? Ready to bite your tongue when you want to lash out?
Are you ready to shout into the abyss?
Did you answer yes to all these questions? Fantastic. You’ve taken your first step as a crimesolver.
Did you answer no? Well, ride shotgun with me, and maybe you’ll change your mind.
But if you’re looking for a casual hobby, this ain’t it. Attempting to solve a crime will consume a good chunk of your time. The intense nature of the subject and the stakes will take their toll on your relationships, your job, and your faith in humanity. But I truly believe citizens like you can help solve the backlog of unsolved murders, violent assaults, and missing persons.
And if you’re in any sector of law enforcement or public policy and you are scoffing at the idea that ordinary citizens can solve a crime, I’m asking you to suspend your disbelief and hear me out.
• • •
The professional detective has only been around for two hundred years. Police departments were formed in the early nineteenth century not to investigate but to control mobs and riots. Before that, serious crimes in most areas were solved by private citizens or the local doctor or judge.
In America, the clearance rate for murders dropped from 93 percent in 1960 to 62 percent in 2017. Stranger murders, a transient population, lack of public willingness to talk to the police, drugs, and a lot more guns are the main reasons for the decline.
Murders are much harder to solve today. That means investigations take longer and use more resources. And ask any police department why so many crimes go unsolved, and the answer you will receive more than any other is this: we don’t have the resources.
“What’s going to happen is that you’re going to have fewer police trying to solve just as much crime,” criminologist Jay Albanese of Virginia Commonwealth University told the Christian Science Monitor in 2008. “If that’s the scenario, you can’t just continue doing what you’re doing now, or you’ll continue to slowly slide backward.” We are in the middle of that slide.
But there is hope. The most talented and educated retirees history has ever seen—the baby boomers—are searching for a pastime with a purpose. So are their Gen X children and the millennials. Many are more than willing to donate their time and considerable skills to help clear cold cases. Law enforcement needs to use them. Set up a civilian liaison in your local police department, and get volunteers to digitize old handwritten police reports and locate newspaper clippings, giving your detectives the ability to locate particulars and suspects of older crimes with a database search instead of spending days thumbing through the files in the basement. We are not talking about ancient crimes here—there are some departments who have crimes from the late twentieth century still sitting in old boxes, waiting to be destroyed by a flood or thrown away during the next move of police headquarters.
Why should all the details of these old crimes be digitized? Every day, thousands of people are adding their DNA to public databases. But those third-cousin familial DNA matches we’re all chasing since the Golden State Killer opened the floodgates will only be as good as the post-match genealogy and background research of the family trees. Amateur genealogists know how to build family trees; they can connect that long-lost cousin from one part of the world to the killer you are looking for just a few miles away. The genealogist can then give their findings from the family tree to the detective, who can search the database for the names on that tree and potentially come up with a match, a suspect from a list of a hundred suspects that they had a hunch about a few decades ago but didn’t have enough evidence to make an arrest. From there, the detective can work to get a sample of the suspect’s DNA and match it to the sample from the crime scene. Then an arrest can be made.
That evidence sitting in evidence lockers and old files is a bonfire of hope, burning ridiculously bright now that familial DNA matches are in play. The needles in the haystack are now buzzing, glowing, bouncing up and down, screaming to be found. We just have to look for them using these new tools.
But why train citizen volunteers? Why not just hire an army of data entry personnel?
First off, many agencies don’t have the money to pay their detectives, much less pay a bunch of civilians to work on older crimes that were not committed under the current administration’s watch and aren’t included in their annual crimesolving reports.
That’s the practical reason—money. But there is also precedent for using volunteers in our criminal justice system.
Our entire criminal justice system is constructed on a foundation of crowdsourcing. It is put into practice thousands of times each day in America. Housewives and grocery clerks and IT workers and farmers are called upon to take part. It’s called the jury system.
And while the system can be manipulated, cajoled, twisted, pulled, and stretched every which way, after forty-four thousand years of civilization, it is the best humanity has come up with when it comes to determining someone’s guilt or innocence. Twelve ordinary people in a room, presented all the facts in the case by trained professionals, and then asked to render judgment. The jury system is a marvel, as inefficient as it is fair. Inefficient because in a case of murder, if eleven people say guilty and one says innocent, you have to start the whole thing all over again. And yet it has worked better than anything else.
These twelve people are not required to pass a test on forensics or police procedure or the constitution, nor do they have any skills or background in the subjects presented to them. In fact, having knowledge and skills—being a former police officer or journalist, for instance—will often get you tossed out of the jury pool before they ask if you’ve read any news about the case in question.
Most every murder case that goes to trial ends with crowdsourcing via the jury system. And yet coming up with excuses for not participating in the process has become a tired punchline in an America filled with people who are too busy to go participate in this system but wonder why the murder clearance rate is at an all-time low.
If you’ve ever avoided jury duty, here’s what I’d like you to do. Close this book or press stop on your phone or tell Alexa to pause, turn it on its side, and hit yourself square in the nose with it. Then come right back to this location.
I’ll wait.
Nothing is more important than making things right—or at least as right as they can be righted. Remember that sting the next time you get that jury summons. And the government should treat jury duty like short-term disability—no one should ever lose salary or be threatened with the loss of their job by doing their public duty.
The person out there with information about a murder or missing person who refuses to say anything is a sibling of the jury dodger. You cannot rely on the next person to do it.
• • •
Now then, where were we? Ah, yes. You want to solve a crime.
First, let me ask you. What is your call to adventure?
The question I get the most—after “Do you think you can find the Zodiac Killer now?”—is “Why do you do this?”
I never think about it, except when people ask. The best answer I can give is a question.
I simply cannot fathom that one person believes they can have such dominion over another that they can take away a life. And I cannot fathom that person living life free of consequence. If people didn’t kill each other, I would go build playgrounds and theme restaurants or invent the Happy Meal of the future or something. But I do this. Because how can I not?
There are a lot of people like me, both professionals and amateurs, invested in solving crimes. And every one of us has that one case. You probably have one. That one case that grabbed you by the throat one day and still hasn’t let go. We have different names for that case. “My obsession.” “My favorite murder.” “My white whale.”
Okay, I’ll admit, I have a few. The Rainbow Murders. The Humboldt Five. The Allenstown Four.
But since I’ve started the crowd-solving endeavor you just read about, my white whale has been the Owl’s Head Park murderer.
I didn’t just wake up one morning and get obsessed with the case. It built with every sentence I read about it. With every frame I watched of the suspect. Every pause. Every screen grab. Every enhancement.
This guy walking the streets after allegedly killing a woman, not a care in the world.
But all the time and effort and hate and money spent isn’t the reason. The reason Owl’s Head Park is my white whale came in the form of that four-word Facebook comment the campaign received one day.
That was my mom.
That little boy lost his mom to a monster. When I saw that, I knew I was going to be looking for that monster for the rest of my life.
Your white whale is different from your origin story. Michelle’s white whale was the Golden State Killer. But her origin story can be traced back to her childhood, when she knelt down in an alley in her hometown and held in her hands the pieces of a shattered Walkman that a murder victim had left behind.
My origin story goes back to my dad showing me the front page of the newspaper with the word CAUGHT! over the photo of Son of Sam and him telling me, “They got him.”
Your origin story is tucked somewhere in the recesses of your mind. Go ahead and think about it. Ask your parents about events you might have forgotten. If you bought this book, you probably have an origin story that’s implanted within you.
Then you have your call to adventure. The moment that pulled you out of your regular life and thrust you into a whole new world.
You can have more than one. The death of Michelle, fueled by my search of the villain with a thousand faces, coupled with seventeen years of writing stories with no endings, all shook me out of place. They stood on top of each other to reach the light bulb above my head when I came up with the idea of merging my day job and my night passion and using social media to solve the crimes you just read about.
You are going to be thinking about your origin story. Your call to adventure. And eventually, you will have a white whale. God help you. ’Cause they can all lead to obsession.
You might want to go down the familial DNA/genealogy road on your own. You will find information on how to sign up for the pilot programs I am working on creating in various police departments on my website, billyjensen.com. If you cannot find a local program, try to start one, volunteering to do everything from data entry to hand-digitizing old police reports. Each department will have their own rules and requirements—you may have to be sworn in, undergo background checks, etc. Or you can also try some of the techniques I’m going to show you to try to solve a murder yourself.
But we need to lay down some rules.
Crowdsourcing can be the most powerful tool next to DNA to help solve cold cases. But all it will take is one mistake to destroy the opportunity.
If you want to be a hero, you have to have a code.
Rule Number 1: Never Name Names in Public
When you’re investigating potential suspects, never name names on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or blog posts. Under no circumstances should you name someone or provide a link or a photo of a person you “think” might be the man or woman who committed the crime you are trying to help solve. This is the biggest rule. If you don’t follow it, you are not only going to hamper an investigation but also potentially ruin an innocent person’s life.
Say you’re working a murder case. You have a surveillance video of a man who killed a woman in an alley behind a liquor store. You set up a campaign and get a tip with a photo of someone who looks a lot like the suspect in the video. I mean, he’s a dead ringer. You see on the man’s Instagram account that he had tagged a photo from a bar near the crime scene the very night of the murder. You take screen grabs of the video and compare them with his Facebook profile pic. You look at more pics, watch the video again and again, and each time, you get more and more excited. This is the guy! you say to yourself. You want to yell it to the world.
Don’t. Take all the information, write it up in a clear and concise manner, and deliver it to the detective in charge.
Say two weeks pass, and there is still no arrest. Check back in with the detective and inquire. But do not post anything about the person you think may be the suspect. If you are right, they might run. If you are wrong, you might be ruining a life, possibly your own.
Say you are running a social media campaign, and a commenter posts a link to a profile of a person. “Could it be this guy?” they ask atop the link. Take a screen grab of the post, delete the post, and message the commenter directly. Take the conversation off-line.
If the police don’t make an arrest, there is usually a reason. If months and months go by and they have not even verified that they got your information, you could go to a journalist. Or email me, and we can strategize.
Naming names in public—or worse, actually messaging the person you suspect is responsible for the crime—crosses the line into irresponsible and dangerous vigilantism. And there is a clear line between what we want to do and being a vigilante.
Even though the vigilante and the establishment are after the same aims (peace and justice), the establishment rejects people taking the law into their own hands. Self-policing could work in a smaller society in which every member is educated and trained and has a common belief system. But in a large society, it invariably leads to chaos. Look at any comments string below a crime story on Facebook and that will become tragically clear:
Kill him, no trial!
It’s a mental health issue.
You don’t know what your talking about.
Learn how to spell “you’re.”
You see? Chaos.
“But aren’t a lot of our superheroes vigilantes?” you ask. “Batman is always called a vigilante. And I want to be Batman.”
Yes, we all want to be Batman. But you can’t be the rogue Batman who plays by his own rules. You have to be the Adam West Batman. The Batman who is a stickler for the laws laid out by the society he serves. If you don’t like the laws, then vote to change them. But if this is going to work, he’s the example we must follow, old chum.
In the last five years, people have become more analytical and more detective-like than ever before while digging into real-life crimes. Information on the cases, along with the contact information for the people involved, is spread across the internet. You can snoop from afar, but you can’t insert yourself into anyone’s lives, because it can lead to pain and danger.
In that crowdsourcing panel Michelle and I delivered at SXSW in Austin, we talked about the most notable crowdsourcing failure. In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, members of Reddit created the subReddit group /findbostonbombers, tossing a dragnet across the internet and catching both good and bad information in the process. The crowdsourcing effort was able to identify some clues even before the FBI, but it also faltered when members started publicly naming names. A web search had revealed a Facebook page and YouTube video of a family desperately searching for their loved one, a Brown
University student named Sunil Tripathi who had gone missing a month earlier. When the FBI released photos of the suspects that Thursday after the bombing, one had a passing resemblance to Tripathi. Users started typing their suspicions out loud that Tripathi was the bomber. Mainstream media picked up on the conjecture and published the name. Tripathi’s body was found on April 23, floating in the Seekonk River in Providence. No foul play was suspected. He had nothing to do with the bombing.
Whenever someone attempts to start a debate on the merits of crowdsourcing investigations, a detractor tosses in the Boston bombing as a conversation ender. Only positive examples of real results can change that. A bunch of people reading this book and repeating those mistakes will only keep more cases in the cold—and a hurt a lot more people.
By 2014, the public was ready to wrap their arms around true crime, which led to readers and listeners and watchers no longer being content with just sitting on the sidelines. They wanted to solve the crimes themselves.
The podcast Serial told the story of nineteen-year-old Hae Min Lee, a high school student in suburban Baltimore who went missing one day in 1999. Her body was found a month later in a haphazardly made grave. Suspicion was leveled at her ex-boyfriend, fellow high school student Adnan Syed. Syed was arrested, tried, and convicted of her murder. He was found guilty not with an abundance of physical evidence but rather on the damning testimony of his friend, Jay, who said he helped Syed dispose of the body after Syed murdered Lee over a breakup.
Once-passive listeners had morphed into detectives, plotting the routes from the library to the park where Lee’s body was found, investigating if the local Best Buy really did have a pay phone, the billing patterns for a 1999 potential butt dial, and how it could have affected the Nisha call.
The seed was planted. By the time Making a Murderer hit Netflix in 2015, the citizen sleuth was addicted. Thousands of people scoured the internet for every sliver of evidence they could find. The Jinx. The Keepers. My Favorite Murder, Case File, Last Podcast on the Left… The public knows a lot more about crime and investigative techniques than they did before the Boston bombing. But we need to harness that skill and not make any mistakes.