A sixty-nine Chevy with a 396
Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor

Not gonna dwell on it. I'm not gonna get dragged down in the fact that Eve Carson's autopsy report was released today and she was shot five times, one with a shotgun to the head.

It's June 30th, I'm rollin' up the windows and driving right past that car crash.

Here's where I'm at: my new girlfriend is 24-inches with 2.8GHz and 4GB of memory. And I love her. She'll make running SPSS data a snap.

We all got the proof pages today for the Kim Rossmo book, Criminal Investigative Failures. This is the first I've seen my chapter together with all the other work. It's a little cool. I have to get my final edits in before July 10th. Then it goes to print for the release date of this Fall (November 6th). And Look! You can pre-order it on Amazon: How cool is that?

Cold Dead Hands

"In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment grants an individual, not just a "well-regulated militia," the right to bear arms. The ruling reinforced the rights of marksman, hunters and others, even in crowded or high-crime cities, to keep a gun in his or her home..."

And BLA-BLA-BLA!... Gun bans may seem morally appropriate, but it's bad public policy!

What good is it to ban guns in D.C. only to have someone drive 30 miles into Virginia and buy a gun? What is the point of a gun ban when most of the guns are bought on the black market?

Find another way.

Either regulate guns at the Federal level, or get accustomed to mass gun violence and (justified) support for the death penalty.

Deja Vu @ 1,200 Miles

This tickles me... I put my house on the market:


So have my parents:




So how can this yellow chair in New Brunswick...



... also be in North Carolina?



how can this bed in America...

also be in Canada?

------------------

Post Script: Ok, so there's a Who Killed Theresa? connection to all of this. The furniture belonged to my grand-parents. The picture of the bed in New Brunswick? That's Theresa's room. It hadn't been messed with in 30 years. This is a little personal, but it needs to be said... because I know there are families that struggle with this: It took real courage for my mother to watch that come apart. Four in the morning courage.

Let The Demon Go

Skeletal remains in Wilmington and the possible resolution of a Carrboro cold-case?

My friend Bill Wildman points me to a story in yesterday's Wilmington paper about skeletal remains of two women found in April along Carolina Beach road and the possibility that one set of remains may be those of Deborah Key. Recall that Deborah Key went missing in 1997 from a billiard hall / bar in Carrboro. Key was last seen next to her car in the Bank of America parking lot next to the billiard hall with Andrew Dalzell, the only suspect ever questioned in the case. In 2004 police extracted a confession from Dalzell who said he lost control, murdered Key and buried the body in Wilmington. Judge Wade Barber later threw out the confession and Dalzell walked free.

I guess it's also germane to the discussion - and since it has been a while that I've mentioned it - to say in 2000-ish I bought the house from the Dalzell's that Andrew was living in at the time Deborah disappeared. Not long after, police showed up and went through the place tooth-and-comb looking for any trace evidence of Key. They didn't find anything.

Now word from Wilmington, and another glimmer of hope for the friends and family of Deborah.

Let's begin by saying that law enforcement looking at the two sets of remains don't believe that one of them is Deborah Key. Police think more likely the decomposed bodies are those of Allison Jackson-Foy and Angela Nobles Rothen, who vanished almost a year apart in the summers of 2006 and 2007. We are told that "scattered remains" were found in and near a shallow grave, behind an abandoned Mexican restaurant, and that local forensics experts have positively identified them as women. Now the remains have been sent to Texas for positive DNA identification.

I won't beat-up on why our State police lab can't properly process the remains: The State Bureau is still working on lab upgrades: ya, I think we've been fed that one for the last 10 years.

Ok, so maybe I will beat-up on the SBI. Friends of Debbie Key? Remember back in the 90s when a local lab processed underwear that was found in Dalzell's car and came back with indeterminate results? You might wanna have that evidence retested by an independent, outside source.

Now back to the skeletons in the Wilmington closet. Though my interest is peaked, I have a hard time rationalizing one of them is Key. For me to go there; one of them is Deborah, the other is probably Jackson-Foy or Rothen, and Mr. Dalzell is responsible for both their deaths. So, in 1997 Mr. Dalzell goes to Wilmington and buries Key behind the restaurant (I would want to know what that restaurant was in 1997, and what it was to Mr. Dalzell, if anything). Cut forward nine years... Dalzell has endured the arrest and the case gets thrown out, he is off the hook. Nevertheless, he returns to Wilmington, murders again and buries the second body in the exact same place he left Key nine years prior. Then in the Spring of 2008, he agrees to go on the record on television's NC Wanted and cool-as-a-cucumber talks about it all and the duress he has suffered.

Andrew Dalzell, you are quite a tweaker.

It's a plot lifted from Bones, but I don't find that probable.

Now maybe I'm operating under some personal bias here. The Key case messed me up bad. Some of you know about some of this, I wrote about it in a piece called Bad Dream House , but there's more I've never discussed (at least I think I've never discussed? What-the-hell, I'll discuss it again). The billiard hall, Sticks and Stones where Deborah was last seen? In early 2001 my ex-wife took over that space and ran a retail childrens' clothing store called Chicken Noodle Soup out of it. I would pull into the parking lot every day, right up to the spot where there were flowers placed where Deborah was last seen. I would work in that store on weekends. I used to carry a photo of Debbie in my car, I finally worked up the courage to throw it away (sorry Deb, but I think you'd get the reason).

So you can see why I might have finally had enough of the Deborah Key case.

It gets worse. It's been some time, but I'm not going to embellish the following, just the facts. So we're living in the house. Early one morning my ex-wife and I are awoken by a pounding on the front door about 5:00 am. Bam-bam-bam! I go to the front door and I can see out the window the red and blue flash of a police cruiser. Bam-bam-bam! I open the door. A County deputy is shining a Maglite in my eyes, "Everything alright in here?"

Yes, everything's alright, what's the problem?

We got a 911 call from your house.

911? No one called 911, we're all asleep.

Sir, we got a 911 call from inside this house.

Officer, my wife and I are asleep, my kids are four and one, they didn't make the call.

Alright, sorry to disturb you.

That's a true story. I don't know what that meant. I don't know what that meant to the police... some sort of process error? I don't know what that meant for Deborah Key. I do know what it meant for me and my family; we had to sell the house, and within six months we were gone.

Concerning the bones in the woods in Wilmington? Deborah's family and friends are smart people, over 11 years they have learned to play this game. So I will say this: it is very wise - it is imperative - to keep Deborah's case in the news. I would go to any length to keep the media informed of all possibilities, however unlikely. Let the public and law enforcement judge whether the theory has any merit. And if one of those sets of remains turns out to be Deborah? That's The Probable Impossible.

The Power of Profiling

S.T.A.L.K., INC. (System To Apprehend Lethal Killers) is a profiling team of professionals whose mission is to aid law enforcement in the apprehension of serial killers through a comprehensive profiling process. The team includes an MD—Dr. John Kelly; Dr. Edward Merski, the team's head psychologist; John Lewkowicz, a sex addiction specialist; Ruth Moore, a psychiatric nurse specialist; and homicide detective Frank Adamson, who worked on the Green River Killer case in the Pacific Northwest. Together, they have developed a pro bono profile for a Worcester, MA, serial killer (see below) as well as one for an Atlantic City serial killer.

The “Woodsman” profile, detailed in the newspaper article below, is particularly chilling—mostly because it resembles one that I’ve had floating around in my mind for quite some time now in connection with Theresa’s case. (FYI…The Woodsman is NOT Theresa’s killer. He wouldn’t be old enough. Police have named 38-year-old Alex F. Scesny as a suspect in the Massachusetts murders.)

STALK’s website, www.stalkinc.com/index.html, invites people to contact them to discuss a case. They promise to reply in five days.

====

Sunday, October 22, 2000
By Chris Echegaray
Worcester Telegram & Gazette

A team of profilers from New Jersey has also shown interest in the disappearance of Molly (Bish). John J. Kelly, 50, an M.D. and president of New Jersey-based STALK, which stands for System To Apprehend Lethal Killers, has kept abreast of the case.

Dr. Kelly, who has profiled several serial killers, including a serial murderer in Columbus, Miss., said once he read of Molly's disappearance he knew that it was an abduction. “When women run away, they usually take a purse,” he said. “When I read that her purse was left behind, I knew this girl did not run off.”

Dr. Kelly, who is part of a six-member profiling team, said that in all likelihood Molly was being watched. “He did not stumble upon her. He knew his stuff. He was watching her,” Dr. Kelly said. “This person is visually oriented. He enjoys the outdoors, more of a fisherman, and probably does not work. He'll probably have a background of female abuse, lewd behavior, has exposed himself when he was younger and he may be known as a Peeping Tom.”

Dr. Kelly said there has been a bizarre pattern of attempted abductions and attacks on women near ponds and waterways throughout the state. He said women from Wales, Walpole, Westwood, and Weymouth have been attacked or killed in the past several years.

“Most recently a woman was assaulted in Wales. She fended him off with a hammer and her dog,” Dr. Kelly said of a recent assault on a 34-year-old woman.

“All these incidents were out by the woods near a pond in a secluded section,” he said. “All of them start with W's. Too many coincidences. Police may be dealing with some kind of outdoors, schizophrenic type of person.”

====

Maritime Missy

Chaos Theory



Chaos Theory has largely been a realm occupied by physics geeks and mathematicians. Our popular introduction to this phenomena of ordered-randomness was Jeff Goldblum's Doctor Ian Malcolm from the film Jurassic Park who so seductively demonstrated the theory's unstable properties by watching a droplet of water slide down the wrist of Laura Dern. Michael Crichton largely lifted the Malcolm character and his theories from James Gleick's 1987 Chaos: Making a New Science, which first popularised Chaos Theory for the layman.


An early pioneer on the subject, Edward Lorenz elegantly diagrammed variable sensitivity to initial conditions in 1972 as the "butterfly effect". A meteorologist, Lorenz wrote an early paper entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas? The flapping of the butterfly's wings sets off a chain of events in a non-linear system, a small change in the initial condition, leading to a large - and seemingly random - disaster. The trajectory of change would have been quite different had the butterfly not flapped its wings.


Chaos Theory has slowly migrated from pure science to the social sciences. Though the subject has occasionally comes up for me in statistics and economics, my first academic introduction to Chaos Theory was in a class on organizational behavior. In it the professor boldly characterised chaos as responsible for not only the first space shuttle disaster, but as a potential predictor of the second shuttle crash. In this scenario NASA, its engineers, and its contractors are all variables in the disordered, non linear system. The poor weather, individual behavior, poor communication skills are all elements - though seemingly random "noise" - that are actually deterministic, with well defined statistical properties. Though there was certainly some randomness that acted in the event, a large amount of apparent randomness was actually predictable chaos that if properly identified, may have lead to an alternate outcome for the Challenger shuttle


Though Chaos Theory is slowly being embraced by the behavioral sciences, I have yet to see any practical application in criminal investigation. There should be. Variables in the non linear system would include the offender, the victim, police investigations, the environment where they all come in contact. The initial conditions: the offender's predisposition, victimology, everything leading up to the event. We know the outcome; so what could have changed the trajectory - the offender and the victim's path - had initial conditions been different? And what in all of this is randomness and "noise", those elements we can't control. And what is chaos, the seemingly random that we need to better understand to perfect techniques of crime prevention?

Some Thoughts on Cold Case Investigations

Remember in cartoons when the Road Runner would be on the edge of a cliff in one of those desert landscapes? The Coyote would chip away the last remaining connection to Terra Firma, but instead of the Road Runner falling, it was the Coyote that would zip out of sight?

This is a well known principal in animation, something Walt Disney termed The Probable Impossible; it doesn't seem to make sense, but somehow it has its own intuitive logic. The Probable Impossible is what allows Mickey Mouse to walk on the ceiling, it's why Bugs Bunny always narrowly avoids destruction, and what leads Daffy Duck to so many ignoble endings.

I suggest that the Probable Impossible is what keeps so many cold cases alive, and what leads - in some cases - to their ultimate resolution. And by that I mean ultimately it takes a little douse of creativity to solve these crimes.

If you know anything about criminal investigation you have heard of the importance of the First 48. The initial 48 hours after a crime is committed is critical to the investigation, statistically it is within this time frame that most cases are solved. Beyond the First 48, the laws of diminishing returns suggest you have an increasingly limited chance of solving the crime as the hours stack up to oblivion.

The statistical significance embedded in the First 48, has lead to a reliance, if not a dependence, on the investigator being ultra-methodical and regimented in his or her investigative practices. We all know this from television; someone is murdered and the immediate response is to interview the family (statistics suggest that in roughly 80% of cases, a family member was responsible), rookie officers are sent to comb the streets, go house-to-house interviewing everyone in the neighborhood. All this is a low-lying fruit approach to investigation, and it makes good intuitive sense; work out from the center and cover all the logical bases.

Statistics would be against me, but I might also argue that this is the lazy approach to investigation. It is always good to be thorough, but at a certain point a good shot of creative thinking just might be the remedy to an investigation that is going nowhere. And here is the nut of my argument concerning crime solving and crime policy.

Public policy making goes like this: You have an academic hypothesis, let's say you think low-income Americans are more prone to eating exotic fruits and vegetables during the good times, and apples and oranges during hard times. You get a data set. You test your theory in good and bad times. You add a control variable (say high earning Americans, or Canadians). You get your answer. Indeed, with a 95% confidence level (meaning 5% of your test sample may be dead wrong, or prone to random error) low-income Americans eat apples and oranges when times are hard. You present your research, if you're lucky some Senator takes interest and introduces a bill subsidizing exotic fruits and vegetables, or giving exotic fruit food stamps to low-income Americans.

My point is it is always very broad, obvious, indefatigable research that gets the interest of policy makers. How could it be otherwise? They are elected officials and there's too much at stake for them to waste their reputations on half-baked ideas.

But the problem is, as time passes, cold cases and their potential resolutions are counting on an idea from left field. Cold cases lie on the margins, the fringes of reason, they are the dominion of the half-baked.

Remember that 5% that resided in the land of error or improbable? That's the kingdom of Gary Ridgway, Robert Pickton and Lee Boyd Malvo. It appeared statistically improbable that Ridgway could kill so many in such a small space over so many years, Green River must be several killers. How could Pickton go unnoticed for so long? Black snipers driving around DC, one of them a kid with a rifle in the trunk? Impossible. Today's outliers are tomorrow's trends.

When Theresa Allore disappeared, the conventional wisdom of the time suggested she was anywhere but the village of Compton where she lived. Check the border because she's made a run for the States. Interview students in the town of Lennoxville where she studied, research the city of Montreal where she came from. So where did she turn up? Dead in a ditch in Compton. At that point what was required was a radical re-adjustment of conventional wisdom and a reassessment of core assumptions. That never happened. And everyone associated with the investigation has suffered the worse for it in the ensuing 30 years.

Don't throw out logical crime-solving techniques. Statistics, confidence intervals, standard deviation; these all suggest that a methodical approach, in most cases, will lead to a successful resolution. But don't become a slave to them either. At a certain point in an investigation, the scales tip, you enter an alternate world where different rules apply. Increasingly you are at the mercy of the Probable Impossible, and you would be wise to re-evaluate everything you've done and reinvestigate under a fresh set of assumptions. You may ultimately find that what you were looking for was right under your nose, but how you will find it might require a spark of creative thinking.

Who is Craig Offman? And what is the purpose of this pointless rambling on Paul Bernardo?

For something more substantive, check out this piece via Anon on Pierre Boisvenu, my brother with whom I was speaking last week. (FYI: I got $600 for Theresa's funeral after-the-fact: I was surprised to get even that):

Families of murder victims treated unfairly: rights group
$3,000 compensation too little. Cites Rhode Island, which pays $25,000
JASON MAGDER, The GazettePublished: Monday, June 09

When his 27-year-old daughter Julie was murdered in 2002, the Quebec government dished out $600 to Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu and his family.

Then when his second daughter, Isabelle, 26, was killed in a car crash three years later, the family received $50,000.

Boisvenu, the chairperson of a victim rights groups, said his case illustrates how unfairly Quebec treats families of those who have been murdered.

"Whether you're killed on the job, in a car or from a crime, everyone should be treated the same way," Boisvenu said yesterday at the annual general meeting of the Murdered or Missing Persons' Families' Association held in the Marie-Léonie Paradis room of St. Joseph's Oratory.
The government's compensation package to families of violent crimes was boosted last year from $600 to $3,000 and additional funds are given to pay for a maximum of 20 sessions with a psychologist. Still, Boisvenu said that doesn't cover many of the necessary expenses.
He said funerals cost at least $5,000, and then the family is burdened with many other costs, including cleaning up a crime scene and expenses to travel or to miss work to attend court sessions.

For families of missing children, the government doesn't pay any benefits until the person has been gone for seven years.

"It's our association that pays for much of the support that's needed for the families," Boisvenu said. "The government should pay for this."

His group, which represents about 400 families, is pushing Quebec to come up with a comprehensive package for victims' families, similar to what exists in the U.S. The approximately 100 people in attendance yesterday heard the state of Rhode Island pays up to $25,000 to victims or their families.

Doreen Haddad-Drummond, a warden of the association, said many families of victims need money just to make ends meet, since many take time off from work after a family tragedy.
She is pushing for the federal government to amend the employment insurance law to allow families to take a year off and receive 55 per cent of their salaries. Currently, family members can claim illness and receive Employment Insurance cheques for up to 15 weeks.

"It's not enough," said Haddad-Drummond, whose daughter Kelly-Anne Drummond was murdered by her boyfriend in the couple's Pierrefonds home.

"You need to take care of your other children, your relationships, your health. You need to go to court, deal with police. It's so much that it's overwhelming, and the last thing the family needs is to not have any money coming in."

Haddad-Drummond herself, who works as a health and safety worker, returned to work three weeks after her daughter died.

"Going to work for me was good therapy, but everyone's different," she said. "I know some mothers who have had trouble getting out of bed for weeks."

Last week, Bloc Québécois MP France Bonsant tabled a private member's bill in the House of Commons, outlining changes to Employment Insurance to benefit victims and their families. Haddad says she's hopeful the bill will get the support of the other parties in the House of Commons and be enacted into law by the end of the year.
jmagder@thegazette.canwest.com

Open Thread - Please talk about 60s and 70s tv shows to your hearts' content

We (Theresa, Andre and I) liked The Flinstones at lunch, The Banana Splitz, The Bugs Bunny Road Runner Hour Saturdays at 5:00 pm (sometimes postponed due to a curling special), The Rat Patrol (an improvement to the inferior Garrison's Guerrillas... Theresa had a crush on Troy and Moffit).

An Ebayer asks me:

Question:
hi, i bought a couple of fp toy sets today and am now bidding on your new ones. where on earth did you get these incredible toys, if you don't mind my asking? i haven't been collecting long but i've never seen a seller have so many. i really want this beauty salon so i hope it doesn't go too high, but i am sure you do :) do you have any more salons you will be selling in the future? well, hopefully you can answer most of my questions. thanks,

My answer:
I only have one of each: Here's what happened. I had Fisher Price Little People as a kid. In the late 80s when they decided to discontinue, I started to buy everything so my (future) kids would have them. At that time I was living b/w Texas and NC so I remember in particular picking them up at Woolworths' there. They all ended up in boxes in my parents' basement in Canada where they remained untouched for 20 years. 2 weeks ago my parents were downsizing to a condo and I went to Canada to help them... and found boxes of this stuff. I had forgotten about them.

Of course the story is that my children are by now grown and have no interest in FPLP (they want me to use the Ebay money to buy a new MAC.) SO that's why I have so much.

I will have one more week of auctions for a the McDonals's set (box in bad shape, toy perfect), School House (again, bad box), and the Garage (mint all round)) Then I have some Tyco trains (again in boxes) to unload. And the Planet of the Apes stuff seems really popular.

Thank you for bidding and good luck,

And to see my other auctions go to: View seller's other items

(no, I haven't sold anything of Theresa's... yet)