Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

All The Suspects Are Dead Anyway

So earlier this week, police in Hollywood, Florida closed the Adam Walsh case. 27 years after the six-year-old was abducted from a shopping mall and murdered (though only his head was found, a couple of weeks after the kidnapping), which eventually transformed his father John into a criminal justice advocate and TV host, police claim that the killer was their primary suspect all along, Ottis Toole:

[Police] declined to be specific about their evidence and did not note any DNA proof of the crime, but said an extensive review of the case file pointed only to Toole, as John Walsh long contended.

"Our agency has devoted an inordinate amount of time seeking leads to other potential perpetrators rather than emphasizing Ottis Toole as our primary suspect," said Hollywood Police Chief Chadwick Wagner, who launched a fresh review of the case after taking over the department last year. "Ottis Toole has continued to be our only real suspect."

Toole had twice confessed to killing the child, but later recanted. He claimed responsibility for hundreds of murders, but police determined most of the confessions were lies. Toole's niece told the boy's father, John Walsh, her uncle confessed on his deathbed in prison that he killed Adam.

In other words, to quote the Broward-Palm Beach-area blog The Juice, "This is either some great detective work... or it's a police chief eager to close an infamous, mangled, 27-year-old child abduction case." Because the question that must be asked is: Why now? There's no anniversary tie-in, there's no new physical evidence, and there's no reported information that something compelling may have happened off-camera to warrant such a definitive announcement. How, exactly, is naming the primary suspect as a killer "closure" when there's more than a speck of doubt someone else could have done it?

As for that someone else, I have my qualms about Jeffrey Dahmer as a viable suspect, but they are the same doubts I have about Toole: neither struck me as likely candidates to murder little children. But both were situational opportunists whose victims did not adhere to narrow categories (though Dahmer did not kill women.) And it seems odd that Hollywood police would ignore evidence, even though circumstantial, that raises some degree of doubt on what might have happened.

Then again, if Dahmer - or anyone else -  had been named Adam Walsh's "official" killer, critics would be screaming that they should have considered Toole a more likely suspect. But putting a false lid doesn't mean the case is really closed, and no matter what the Walsh family says publicly, I can't really see them believing in the mythical beast named closure.

This Must Be a Movie

It even has third-act plot twists:

PORTLAND, Ore. - When Susan Kuhnhausen returned home from work one day earlier this month, she encountered an intruder wielding a claw hammer. After a struggle, the 51-year-old nurse fended off her attacker by strangling him with her bare hands.

Neighbors praised the woman for her bravery, and investigators said they believed the dead man — Edward Dalton Haffey — was burglarizing Kuhnhausen’s home.

But after an investigation, police now say the intruder Kuhnhausen strangled was apparently a hit man hired by her estranged husband — Michael James Kuhnhausen Sr. — to kill her.

Although if it was a movie it would turn out the hitman and the woman actually knew each other previously, but right, this is real life...

Questioning the Reliability of DNA Testing

The LA Times runs what it wants to think of as a serious investigative piece on the reliability of current DNA testing practices. And while there's plenty of investigation, it's also plenty alarming:

State crime lab analyst Kathryn Troyer was running tests on Arizona's DNA database when she stumbled across two felons with remarkably similar genetic profiles.

The men matched at nine of the 13 locations on chromosomes, or loci, commonly used to distinguish people.

The FBI estimated the odds of unrelated people sharing those genetic markers to be as remote as 1 in 113 billion. But the mug shots of the two felons suggested that they were not related: One was black, the other white.

In the years after her 2001 discovery, Troyer found dozens of similar matches -- each seeming to defy impossible odds.

As word spread, these findings by a little-known lab worker raised questions about the accuracy of the FBI's DNA statistics and ignited a legal fight over whether the nation's genetic databases ought to be opened to wider scrutiny.

But here's the thing: A nine-loci "match" (because forensic scientists don't use those terms in court and are cautioned against ever using those terms) is not and can never be as statistically significant as a 13-loci match. And the way Troyer ran her searches created results that don't tell the whole story:

Bureau officials say critics have exaggerated or misunderstood the implications of Troyer's discoveries.

Indeed, experts generally agree that most -- but not all -- of the Arizona matches were to be expected statistically because of the unusual way Troyer searched for them.

In a typical criminal case, investigators look for matches to a specific profile. But the Arizona search looked for any matches among all the thousands of profiles in the database, greatly increasing the odds of finding them.

As a result, Thomas Callaghan, head of the FBI's CODIS unit, has dismissed Troyer's findings as "misleading" and "meaningless."

In other words, Troyer wasn't looking for one needle in a haystack, but searched all haystacks for all possible needles and then was "shocked" to discover the presence of more than one needle in a haystack. Which isn't to say that DNA testing standards should remain at the status quo, especially as techniques improve and detection levels grow ever smaller, and the FBI (and other state and local crime labs) figure out how to improve interpretation and minimize what are often catastrophic errors with forensic evidence. But there is an easy, albeit time-consuming from a validation standpoint, way to get around this: bump up the number of loci required for statistical significance.

The Case of the Fake Fed

The town of Gerald, Missouri was one of many small towns struggling to overcome the scourge that is methamphetamine. So when a stranger with a Federal badge came to town, the higher-ups welcomed him with open arms and the arrest rate went up. WAY up. Then everything came crashing down, as the NYT reported yesterday:

Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood — mainly from television — to be the law.

They said the agent, a man some had come to know as “Sergeant Bill,” boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.

But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald’s antidrug campaign abruptly fell apart after less than five months. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding minister and a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.

Mr. Jakob, 36, is now the subject of a criminal investigation by federal authorities, and he is likely to face charges related to impersonating a law enforcement officer, his lawyer said.

There are a ton of questions, like why Jakob would go to such lengths to impersonate a federal agents, how so many were taken in, and who gets first dibs on turning this into a novel. (Thanks to SP for the link)

And how many crime novels ended with this particular plot twist? Exactly

But lo, it happens in real life, too:

SKOPJE, Macedonia (AP) -- A Macedonian journalist jailed on suspicion of murdering at least two women in crimes he wrote about for his newspaper has been found dead in his cell, police said Monday.

Vlado Taneski, 56, had been charged with two murders and was being investigated for the death of another woman and the disappearance of a fourth. He was jailed Sunday after a court ordered him held for 30 days pending the conclusion of the investigation.

Police became suspicious after Taneski published articles about the crimes in a national daily newspaper that contained details police had not released to the public.

Police spokesman Ivo Kotevski said the journalist is believed to have committed suicide early Monday, but an investigation was being conducted.

"He was found dead with his head in a bucket of water," Kotevski told The Associated Press.

More on the killings from Sky News and, for those who can read Macedonian, Utrinski Vesnik.

While She Slept

The Washington Post Magazine's Laura Wexler has written an excellent profile of Jody Arlington, an accomplished DC career woman whose childhood trauma, under her birth name Jody Gilley, is being laid bare to the public as a result of Kathryn Harrison's new book WHILE THEY SLEPT: AN INQUIRY INTO THE MURDER OF A FAMILY:

Arlington is a communications strategist specializing in festival and entertainment public relations. She managed publicity for the Sundance Institute in 2006 and 2007 and has been Silverdocs' public relations manager since 2004. Her contacts in the documentary film world run deep. She types an e-mail on her BlackBerry and hits send. Problem solved.

Leaving the theater after the meeting, Arlington sets a pace so rapid that it borders on a run. "I feel like if I slow down, I'll lose my balance," she says. It's an observation that also applies to the way she's lived since she ended one self and determinedly set out to create another.

Her re-creation has been successful. She has been a manager at public affairs firm Burson-Marsteller and a vice president at communications firm Fleishman-Hillard, as well as chief of staff of President Bill Clinton's National Campaign Against Youth Violence. She is now building a thriving entertainment division at communications firm Weber Merritt and is one of the founders, and the director, of the Impact Film Festival, which will, for the first time, present films dealing with key social issues to lawmakers, candidates and delegates at the Democratic and Republican national conventions this summer.

Arlington has also created a satisfying personal life in Washington. She is married to Franck Cordes, director of marketing and administration for the Foundation for the National Archives, and has a circle of loyal and loving friends who make up what she calls her "found family." On weekends, she wears her auburn hair in pigtails and knocks around Georgetown. She drinks Starbucks lattes, reads trashy novels as well as serious literature, watches movies in bed on a jumbo-size, flat-screen TV. She is both ambitious and goofy. She laughs often. She is, as she says, "shockingly normal."

The odyssey of Harrison's book began when Jody wanted to write of her survival after the murders, and it's something she still hopes to write. "Even if she risks fracturing her carefully constructed life," Wexler writes, "Jody Arlington may still, one day, give voice to her own story." And if she does, I want to read it. (via)

Department of Twisted Logic

The Joseph Fritzl case in Austria is a horrifying train wreck that I can't stop reading about. But today's story takes the cake, what with Fritzl complaining about poor media coverage from jail:

His criticism of the international media's reporting was published in the German tabloid Bild Zeitung.

"I could have killed them all," reads the front page headline of today's Bild Zeitung. And Fritzl, dubbed a monster by the Austrian media, told his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, "I'm not a monster," according to today's report.

Fritzl is sharing his prison cell with another man who is serving time for taking part in a shooting incident. The men have a TV set and a radio available to them in their cell.

Ah, the delusions of psychopathic grandeur...

Killer Smiles

This week's big true crime story is highly speculative: could a nationwide gang of psychopathic serial killers, linked by a "signature" of smiley face graffiti, be responsible for the deaths of up to 40 young, college-age men assumed to have died from drowning? That's what retired NYPD investigators Kevin Gannon and Anthony Duarte, working in concert with Prof. D. Lee Gilbertson of St. Cloud State University, believe, though they've now run out of money to continue their investigation further, according to news reports.

Steve Huff is skeptical, as am I, for the same reason: it sounds way too pat to be real and more like a thriller narrative. But we also agree on why the story, however far-fetched, has a hint of plausibility:

One thing that made earlier theories of bands of killers using similar methods seem untenable was the lack of easy, fast communication. Were they burning up the phone lines, chatting about the next kill? Were they passing coded messages through classified ads? Possibly, but common sense really said no.

That's one element in favor of the theory of the Smiley Face Gang -- communication:

If this theoretical gang of killers exists and they began working in 1997, they had a still-new tool to work with: the Internet. People had been dialing into online bulletin boards since the 1980s by 1997, and the message board format was already hopping. Kansas serial killer John Robinson started seeking victims online in 1993, and he did it with chat rooms and message board posts.

Robinson could draw victims into his web from California and Indiana, and do it in relative anonymity.

The Web's capacity for instant communication across great distances (chat rooms, forums) would permit the formation of a gang of killers. That doesn't mean it has happened, yet.

However this story turns - my vote is for a mix of murders and accidents and perhaps some distant communication or copycat behavior - I expect to see some variant of the suggested plot in fictional format around 2010 or so.

The Plight of the Unidentified

The AP has an extended piece on the Doe Network, whose mission since its inception in 2001 is to highlight missing and unidentified persons and do their best to resolve such cases:

Today the Doe Network has volunteers and chapters in every state. Bank managers and waitresses, factory workers and farmers, computer technicians and grandmothers, all believing that with enough time and effort, modern technology can solve the mysteries of the missing dead.

Increasingly, they are succeeding.

The unnamed dead are everywhere -- buried in unmarked graves, tagged in county morgues, dumped in rivers and under bridges, interred in potter's fields and all manner of makeshift tombs. There are more than 40,000 unnamed bodies in the U.S., according to national law enforcement reports, and about 100,000 people formally listed as missing.

The premise of the Doe Network is simple. If the correct information -- dental records, DNA, police reports, photographs -- is properly entered into the right databases, many of the unidentified can be matched with the missing. Law enforcement agencies and medical examiners offices simply don't have the time or manpower. Using the Internet and other tools, volunteers can do the job.

40,000. That is a ridiculously large number that has no business being so high. The Doe Network does its part, and eventually the linking of both databases in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUS) should as well, but still. Think about that number. Think long and hard.

The Mystery Man of Eastlake

Three years ago I blogged about "Joseph Newton Chandler III", an elderly gentleman who shot himself in 2002 and left behind a slew of troubling questions when the name he lived under for close to 25 years turned out to be a sham.

Now the Cleveland Free Times makes "Joe" their cover story this week, and the portrait that emerges is of a man with serious idiosyncrasies and something very much to hide:

Joe Chandler was quite peculiar. He wore factory-style protective eyeglasses, even outside of work. He stood about 5-foot-8 and looked to be in his 60s, although Mike noticed that whenever someone asked how old he was, Joe always gave a different age. He had larger-than-average hands, with thick fingers. He smelled kind of funny, too, like he didn't bathe often. And he was always making little gadgets.

Joe built himself a white-noise machine that piped static through headphones which he wore at all times. He kept it turned up so loud, you could hear it if you were standing close to him. Joe also wired his TV so that it shut off during commercial breaks and clicked back on when the program started up again; he hated advertisements of all kinds. As a favor to another coworker named Mark Herendeen, Joe once rigged the Madison Fire Department's alarm system so that it turned on the lights in the sleeping area whenever it sounded.

Joe also had a habit of disappearing. Occasionally, he would call [his friend and eventual executor] Mike and explain that he wouldn't be coming to work for awhile. "They're getting close," Joe would say. Usually, he was only gone for a few days, though once he was gone for months.

"I should have suspected something," says Mike, thinking back. "But I didn't. I just thought he was a paranoid schizophrenic or something."

So who was "Joe," really? As much as I still like the idea of him being the Zodiac, it's a longshot possibility that still doesn't really lead to any conclusions. Odds are decent that he could have been the federal fugitive Stephen Campbell, though the "easily explained away" discrepancies (like a six-inch height differential) aren't necessarily so in my mind. It still troubles me that there was no way to extract DNA from any item "Joe" was known to handle, and that his cremated remains wouldn't reveal much even if they were exhumed. So unless someone knows something, the fictitious Mr. "Chandler" seems destined to remain a cipher.