
When a cold case is solved, why can't internet sleuths move on? - akudha
https://theoutline.com/post/4994/when-a-cold-case-is-solved-why-cant-internet-sleuths-move-on
======
ClintEhrlich
I once unsolved a murder I discovered online, causing very unwelcome
consequences for the victim's family. So I can relate to some aspects of this
story.

First, trying to solve a cold-case can utterly consume you in a way that is
impossible to truly comprehend unless you've lived it. It haunted my dreams
and waking hours, even ones when all I wanted to do was think about something
else for long enough to relax.

Second, no matter how good your intentions or how just your cause, there will
be people who resent your work. It could be law enforcement or forensic
experts, who don't want an "amateur" to expose their mistakes and oversights.
It could be the victim's family, who don't want to revisit the loss of their
loved one, even if the reality they've made peace with is built on falsehoods
and errors.

I was fortunate that my work freed an innocent man who was serving life in
prison, which retroactively validated my otherwise bizarre decision to start
obsessing over a 15-year-old murder.

It would be really, REALLY difficult to develop a similar obsession, feel like
your time and effort produced a breakthrough, and then not get any closure.
That doesn't excuse their behavior, but I understand the emotional
frustration.

~~~
akudha
_my work freed an innocent man who was serving life in prison_

If you are allowed to, can you share the story?

~~~
ClintEhrlich
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply the story was a secret. It was the murder of
Michelle O'Keefe, for which Sgt. Raymond Jennings was wrongfully convicted.

I wrote about Ray's exoneration in the Washington Post:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-jeff-sessions-
ca...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-jeff-sessions-can-offer-
justice-to-the-wrongfully-
convicted/2017/04/12/ea3b3a3e-0e42-11e7-ab07-07d9f521f6b5_story.html)

There's more details in a prior post on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010760)

NBC News also did an episode of Dateline about it:
[https://www.instagram.com/p/BMnDkslA3wi/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BMnDkslA3wi/)

~~~
minhazm423
How did you train yourself to solve cases? I cant help but let the hacker
mindset speak for all of us and ask how did you "disrupt" this case, how did
you learn, self teach? yourself what's necessary to solve a case? What were
the legal channel you took to get someone exonerated? What hunch inspired you
to investigate in the first place? And why that case? Surely there are many
cases where the evidence just isnt compelling? What steps did you and your
father take to go about getting this man out? How did you convince the DA?

~~~
ClintEhrlich
These are great questions, but I feel awkward hijacking a thread that isn't
really about my experience. The Dateline NBC episode does a great job telling
the whole story, including how I got involved. My Washington Post article
explains how we persuaded the DA's office.

I am an autodidact, so diving into new subjects is something I naturally enjoy
doing. The obsessive focus and intellectual flexibility that helped me in
other areas, like computer programming and missile-defense research, worked
just as well for forensics and criminal-profiling.

One example that sticks out is how I was able to refute the opinion of the
FBI's top criminal profiler by going through and reading the reference text
that is the equivalent of the DSM, but for behavioral analysis. He was listed
as a co-author, so it would have been easy to assume that he was applying the
standards correctly, but I was able to show that his thesis did not match the
evidence.

The hardest question to answer is "why this case?" It is as close to a miracle
as I've ever experienced ... some force I can't explain caused me to stay up
late one night and watch an old TV-special about the murder on my computer,
even though I don't watch TV and had zero prior interest in the true-crime
genre.

The words of the accused professing his innocence before God were so powerful
that, even as an atheist at the time, I felt compelled to look into the case
more.

Being used as an instrument to correct a horrible injustice made me reconsider
my belief in a higher power.

~~~
minhazm423
Well congrats man.

That's impressive and im glad it was such an intellectual as well as spiritual
journey for you.

Teach me, or share with me some of your self lerning tips. You seem to be a
high functioning autodidact, whats your method? Where do you get your
knowledge? sources?

Also, what is DSM?

Missile-defense research? That sounds impressive, how would someone even get
started on that??

And now forensics And criminal profiling. Now that you have a working
proficiency in these subjects, what would you recommend others use to learn
these subjects?

~~~
arwineap
DSM is the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders [0]. This is
the reference text that describes and classifies mental disorders

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Man...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders)

------
donutte
This is really interesting:

 _It was then that the realization set in in the subreddit: after all these
years, after hundreds of thousands of hours of theorizing and plotting and
thinking and organizing, they might never find out the true identity of Lyle
Stevik. His identity was known to the police, and to DNA Doe, but it was never
revealed to the subreddit. And it might never be; as of press time, the family
has declined to share the information._

It seems like there’s two ways to look at this. The first is... the subreddit
didn’t materially contribute to solving the case, apart from putting up $1500
for DNA sequencing. The critical research was done by a specialist volunteer
org, and law enforcement located and contacted the family.

It seems like being able to identify folks using genetic ancestry is a really
valuable service; it also seems like a good thing that, to the average
redditor, this service is a black box that produces a single bit of output. If
the person (family, in this case) who has been identified doesn’t want their
name to be public, that should be their choice.

So, that all is working as intended. But at the same time...

In 20 years, nobody ever put up the money for DNA testing. Why would they?
There must be millions of cases like this, and for most of that time
sequencing cost a lot more than $1500.

The price is still going down, so _eventually_ someone would have done this.
Maybe once the cost of sequencing hit $50, or $1. I don’t know, at what point
do we start DNA testing every single cold case Doe, since forever? Probably
not for a long, long time. Maybe long enough to be forgotten entirely.

The folks on the subreddit _cared_ , is my point, when no one else did. They
picked this person to care about, out of all the unsolved mysteries to choose
from. I don’t think there’s any particular explanation; he just happened to
catch their fancy, and then they spent a lot of time thinking about him. In a
weird digital-era way, he was kind of their friend.

And it makes a lot of sense that there would be some shock and isolation at
having their care rejected, having their “friendship” invalidated. I can get
that. And I kind of think that if the family grokked how much these folks
cared about their person, and how little anyone else did, their response might
be a little different.

~~~
sverige
What you say makes sense, but no one asked them to care. Further, those
feelings do not in any way give them the right to intrude into the life of a
family they've never even met. It's a classic case of "none of your business."

But perhaps some still feel otherwise. What happens if some stranger starts
"caring" about their depression and anger over their "loss"? There's a real
problem when people cannot recognize that some boundaries should not be
crossed.

~~~
donutte
That seems stronger than what I’m saying. The folks who can’t let it go, who
are still trying to circumvent the family’s privacy, they obviously are
motivated by something besides concern for the victim and his kin. I don’t
have any sympathy for them.

But I think the point I’m trying to make is that there’s a lot of distance
between “right to intrude” and “none of your business”. The fact is that the
identity of this person _was_ their business, for a decade, simply because it
wasn’t the business of anyone else.

Of course there’s no right to know the name of a stranger. But I am glad they
made it their business — I’m glad _someone_ cared — and I’m sorry the outcome
hurt them. It’s not any more complicated than that.

~~~
sverige
In hindsight, I think my strong reaction is directed more toward those who
want to intrude than toward you.

I get that a lot of people invested a lot of time into this, but there's a
suggestion in TFA that implies that this effort merits some special
privileges, whether that inlcudes knowing the identity of the suicide or some
other kind of recognition. It doesn't.

It was a voluntary act, perhaps a kind act, perhaps not from the perspective
of the family. The implication is that the family either _wanted to know_ or
_ought to have_ wanted to know. We have no information to evaluate those
judgments, and there's enough gray there that it's irritating as an
assumption.

The reality is that it is morally no different than participating in a
subreddit on cats or submitting articles and commenting on them on HN. We're
all voluntarily spending time on the internet rather than doing something
else.

~~~
donutte
I hear where you’re coming from, and we seem agreed that there’s nothing
internet sleuths are _entitled_ to. I do think we’re going to have to agree to
disagree on this:

 _The implication is that the family either wanted to know or ought to have
wanted to know. We have no information to evaluate those judgments, and there
's enough gray there that it's irritating as an assumption._

I think if someone has died — even if it was a fairly long time ago — it’s
safe to presume that there are people somewhere who still care about them,
still think about them, would like to know what happened. From a state of
ignorance about who those people are, I think it’s compassionate to try to let
them know, especially when no one else is trying.

And naturally, the same compassion instructs one to respect their wishes after
that point. Again, all working as intended.

------
Analemma_
I don't know if there's a word for it, but this is a common problem with any
group, institution, or organization: it is very difficult for them to
voluntarily shut down once they have achieved their purpose, even if the
mission ended in total success.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
I don't know if there's a single word, but a closely related concept is
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic
organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization.
Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many
of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some
agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective
farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples
are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of
education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff,
etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep
control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions
within the organization."

------
Dylan16807
> And, probably most, they want to know why he did what he did — hole up at a
> hotel in the middle of nowhere, and end his life. And that is almost
> certainly an impossible question, one that no amount of internet sleuthing
> will answer.

That's a strange statement. Outside of "can you ever really know another
person, man?" there are plenty of suicides and attempts that are very
straightforward to explain.

------
21
Anyone watched the recent cluster-fuck that was internet sleuths solving the
murder of XXXTentacion?

~~~
defen
I heard about the murder but not the cluster-fuck. Was it another Boston
Bomber situation?

------
davidkuhta
For all the legal scholars:

1\. Aren't death records public?

2\. Would anyone else have a claim to knowledge of the deceased's real name?
(ex: if "Lyle Stevik" didn't pay his hotel bill)

~~~
ubernostrum
Records are public, but the problem is one of searching for a small needle in
a large haystack: ~7k people die in the United States every day.

I can think of a couple ways to narrow that down and get to a _probable_
answer, but they all would take money, manual effort, or both.

To your second question, any debts owed by the deceased would be paid out of
his estate. There's no guarantee that creditors would actually bother, this
long after the debts were incurred, or that an inquisitive third party would
be able to usefully find records of the debt being pursued.

~~~
davidkuhta
Interesting, thanks for the info.

------
paulie_a
People like to be know it alls. The internet amplifies it.

------
krallja
pored over _

~~~
sverige
One of the more common (and grating) errors in contemporary writing -- twice
in this article alone. I always envision the subject pouring something
disgusting over the object.

------
dec0dedab0de
That was interesting, but could it be a disguised ad for DNA Doe?

------
jcroll
Mobs of internet people with too much time on their hands will never be a
force for good, ever.

~~~
mcphage
Weren’t they, in this case? Somebody died and wasn’t identified, and they
helped get this person identified.

~~~
jcroll
If you had a missing loved one would you invite them to solve it?

~~~
mcphage
I wouldn’t even have to—they volunteered, and even paid the money for the DNA
test themselves.

