information they had would be immeasurably useful to the detectives in solving whatever crime they happened to be investigating.
Others really were crackpots. Or addicts of true-crime television.
A study within our own Homicide Division in late 2010 showed that only 2% of all leads garnered from the public bore any fruit whatsoever. That’s right. For every one hundred tips our division received, on average only two provided any reasonably true information about the case (and the impact of said information was normally nominal). Yet here was the conundrum:
We had to follow every lead we got .
The bottom line? The investigating cops couldn’t take the chance that one call was the case breaker they’d been waiting for and they dismissed it. In Homicide, particularly, we were talking about an investigation where we were trying to find the person responsible for taking away the most personal, coveted, irreplaceable possession any of us would ever have:
A life.
You didn’t take chances with that. You couldn’t. The responsibility was just too high.
I’d been part of the Denver Metropolitan Task Force “3J” for the past seven months. Our team was formed after the third murder perpetrated by the killer known as “Judas”—a collection of twenty-five elite law enforcement personnel from a dozen surrounding Metro police departments, two County Sheriff offices, and several Special Agents of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. I had friends in each of those departments but Garvey—Special Agent Bum Garvey of the CBI—was about the closest thing I had to a best friend. Beyond my wife, Amanda, that was, who had not retired as expected from the FBI upon moving from New York to Denver to marry me, become my second (and last, I swore) wife, and give birth to our three perfect daughters. Amanda, because of her heroism in the massacre in Idaho, had been given a cushy job in Financial Affairs which was mostly desk-bound, not inherently dangerous, and offered her flexibility in hours, including working from home over an encrypted network connection.
The flexibility to work from home was almost a necessity with triplets and I appreciated the sacrifice my loving wife had accepted happily for me and for us. For our family. She was as good a field agent—as fine a cop—as I’d ever known. It was in her DNA, too.
So she was more or less homebound, and in a little over half a year since the task force’s formation, I would have felt more useful at home than on the job. We had documented over two thousand one hundred and twenty-two dead-end leads regarding the identity of Judas. None useable (which bucks even the terrible odds I mentioned earlier). A few of the leads were circumstantially relevant; in other words, they were substantially legitimate as applied to the events in question but did not provide enough detail to flesh out a viable direction (an example might be a citizen who witnessed a delivery truck in the vicinity of a murder scene around the time of the homicide but the van and its presence there checked out completely). The majority of the leads, however, went nowhere because there was nowhere for them to go; they were phoned in, walked in, emailed in, faxed in, and in one case even mailed in via registered mail.
By THEM.
The terminal helpers.
The well-meaning crackpots.
I really shouldn’t be so jaded; I was allowed to play a part in making the lives of real people better. We’d never be able to stop the killing that went on in the world, but in being a part of the justice machinery that brought those guilty of such terrible crimes in to face punishment for what they’d done, I felt my existence was somehow worthwhile. The news media—and even the police department spokespeople—referred to the deceased as “the victim”. However, when a murder was committed there was a lineage of victims that went on and on.
Parents, siblings, spouses, significant others, children.
And almost no one
Others really were crackpots. Or addicts of true-crime television.
A study within our own Homicide Division in late 2010 showed that only 2% of all leads garnered from the public bore any fruit whatsoever. That’s right. For every one hundred tips our division received, on average only two provided any reasonably true information about the case (and the impact of said information was normally nominal). Yet here was the conundrum:
We had to follow every lead we got .
The bottom line? The investigating cops couldn’t take the chance that one call was the case breaker they’d been waiting for and they dismissed it. In Homicide, particularly, we were talking about an investigation where we were trying to find the person responsible for taking away the most personal, coveted, irreplaceable possession any of us would ever have:
A life.
You didn’t take chances with that. You couldn’t. The responsibility was just too high.
I’d been part of the Denver Metropolitan Task Force “3J” for the past seven months. Our team was formed after the third murder perpetrated by the killer known as “Judas”—a collection of twenty-five elite law enforcement personnel from a dozen surrounding Metro police departments, two County Sheriff offices, and several Special Agents of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. I had friends in each of those departments but Garvey—Special Agent Bum Garvey of the CBI—was about the closest thing I had to a best friend. Beyond my wife, Amanda, that was, who had not retired as expected from the FBI upon moving from New York to Denver to marry me, become my second (and last, I swore) wife, and give birth to our three perfect daughters. Amanda, because of her heroism in the massacre in Idaho, had been given a cushy job in Financial Affairs which was mostly desk-bound, not inherently dangerous, and offered her flexibility in hours, including working from home over an encrypted network connection.
The flexibility to work from home was almost a necessity with triplets and I appreciated the sacrifice my loving wife had accepted happily for me and for us. For our family. She was as good a field agent—as fine a cop—as I’d ever known. It was in her DNA, too.
So she was more or less homebound, and in a little over half a year since the task force’s formation, I would have felt more useful at home than on the job. We had documented over two thousand one hundred and twenty-two dead-end leads regarding the identity of Judas. None useable (which bucks even the terrible odds I mentioned earlier). A few of the leads were circumstantially relevant; in other words, they were substantially legitimate as applied to the events in question but did not provide enough detail to flesh out a viable direction (an example might be a citizen who witnessed a delivery truck in the vicinity of a murder scene around the time of the homicide but the van and its presence there checked out completely). The majority of the leads, however, went nowhere because there was nowhere for them to go; they were phoned in, walked in, emailed in, faxed in, and in one case even mailed in via registered mail.
By THEM.
The terminal helpers.
The well-meaning crackpots.
I really shouldn’t be so jaded; I was allowed to play a part in making the lives of real people better. We’d never be able to stop the killing that went on in the world, but in being a part of the justice machinery that brought those guilty of such terrible crimes in to face punishment for what they’d done, I felt my existence was somehow worthwhile. The news media—and even the police department spokespeople—referred to the deceased as “the victim”. However, when a murder was committed there was a lineage of victims that went on and on.
Parents, siblings, spouses, significant others, children.
And almost no one
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