The Killer Book of Cold Cases Read Free

serial number on the gun, and then two of them traveled 1,600 miles to a Sears Roebuck store in Shreveport, Louisiana. Records showed that the gun had been purchased there three years earlier for around thirty dollars by someone who signed the name “G.D. Wilson” in wide-spaced handwriting.
    Surprisingly, the young clerk remembered the man, a big guy with a pompadour who spoke in a Southern drawl and seemed anxious to leave the store quickly. But that’s as far as the cops could go, and the case went cold again. For each of the next forty-two years, it got colder until it was ice. But, of course, it had not been forgotten, particularly by cops and the families of the slain officers. It was a bleeding, open wound in their minds.
    While the case went nowhere for all of those years, forensics had advanced, particularly DNA, which could be extracted from hair, blood, and semen. In Los Angeles, two people had been appointed to try to clear as many cold cases as possible using this new science. One person was Lisa Kahn, head of the District Attorney’s Forensic Science Division, and the other was David Lambkin of the Los Angeles Cold Case Division, which used DNA and computerized fingerprint and ballistic records to try to identify perpetrators.
    But there was no DNA from the double cop-killing. The rape victim’s dress had semen on it, but following procedure in those days, the cops had returned the dress to the victim after they finished examining it, and the dress was long gone.
The Case Opens Up
    After a false lead in 2002 awakened interest in the case, investigators decided to run the partial fingerprints through the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or IAFIS. Federal law enforcement agencies and those from every state send criminal offenders’ fingerprints to IAFIS, forming a national database of more than 40 million prints.
    What Is CODIS?
    The Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) is an electronic database of DNA profiles administered through the FBI. The system lets federal, state, and local crime labs share and compare DNA profiles. Through CODIS, investigators match DNA from crime scenes with convicted offenders and with other crime scenes using computer software, just as fingerprints are matched through IAFIS.
    CODIS uses two indexes: the convicted offender index, which contains profiles of convicted offenders, and the forensic index, which contains profiles from crime-scene evidence.
    The real strength of CODIS lies in solving cases that have no suspects. If DNA evidence entered into CODIS matches someone in the offender index, a warrant can be obtained authorizing the collection of a sample from that offender to confirm the match. If the offender’s DNA is in the forensic index, the system allows investigators—even in different jurisdictions—to exchange information about their respective cases.
—From the National Institute of Justice
    Investigators working the 1957 case had the prints cleaned up and reprocessed digitally. Then they ran the prints through the database and waited. Lt. Craig Cleary, head of El Segundo’s detective unit, was speechless when the results came in. A crime-lab analyst said there was a “hit.”
    Cleary reacted the way many people would react: “I thought he was kidding. But when I asked him if he was sure he said, ‘Yes.’”
    Now with a suspect, police focused on him “like stink on shit,” as one cop crudely put it. They expected to find a hardened criminal, but that’s not what they encountered. The person who matched the prints was a family man and had a successful business. Gerald Mason lived in Columbia, South Carolina. His prints were available because he had been arrested for robbery in 1956, the year before the killings. That was the only time he had been charged with a crime. But the FBI’s IAFIS wasn’t established until 1999, and Mason’s prints took a long time to make their way into the database.
    The cops did not consider the