When a cold case is solved, why can't internet sleuths move on?
theoutline.com
theoutline.com
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.
If you are allowed to, can you share the story?
I wrote about Ray's exoneration in the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-jeff-sessions-ca...
There's more details in a prior post on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010760
NBC News also did an episode of Dateline about it: https://www.instagram.com/p/BMnDkslA3wi/
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.
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?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Man...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
This is a rare success story. It is much more common for charities to essentially do counterproductive things that help keep the problem alive so they will continue to have a reason for being.
This is something I have learned to be incredibly leery of. Programs to "help the homeless" are often programs that help keep people stuck. If you really care, you should be aiming at policies that reduce the incidence of homelessness, preferably via prevention, rather than big feels squee-worthy approaches where you expect some pathetic soul to grovel and be effusively grateful while their life probably remains in the toilet.
A (partial) summary of the term reverse adaptation is here by someone else: https://anarcho-primitive.blogspot.com/2012/08/reverse-adapt... "Technology structures our lives in ways that accommodate its own operative requirements. Langdon Winner called this reverse adaptation. Technologies start out serving specific human ends or addressing a highly circumscribed set of problems. But once they come into being, they shape human thought and activity in ways that conform to the structure and organization of the technology itself. The technological solution becomes a way of reframing the original problem, and features of the original problem that do not correspond to the technological solution are ignored or redefined."
But that summary doesn't quite capture everything Langdon Winner talked about -- since he does go into how most institutions become self-perpetuating (or try to).
To me, it is also an evolutionary issue -- that we tend to only come across institutions with some sort of equivalent of a survival drive and the means to carry out that drive. I rambled further on that theme in this post: https://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/01... "Evolution can be made to work in positive ways, by selective breeding, the same way we got so many breeds of dogs and cats. How can we intentionally breed "nice" corporations that are symbiotic with the humans that inhabit them? To what extent is this happening already as talented individuals leave various dysfunctional, misguided, or rogue corporations (or act as "whistle blowers")? I don't say here the individual directs the corporation against its short term interest. I say that individuals affect the selective survival rates of corporations with various goals (and thus corporate evolution) by where they choose to work, what they do there, and how they interact with groups that monitor corporations. To that extent, individuals have some limited control over corporations even when they are not shareholders. Someday, thousands of years from now, corporations may finally have been bred to take the long term view and play an "infinite game". "
The late Prof. James R. Beniger (lucky to have had him as a professor in college) had an interesting book that explores an example in the area of self-perpetuating professional networks: "Trafficking in Drug Users" https://www.amazon.com/Trafficking-Drug-Users-Professional-S... "Examines the way in which the complex network of organizations and professions required for the control of social deviance coordinated their activities to solve the "drug problem" of the 1960s. Beniger demonstrates that incentives used to encourage law enforcement officials to control deviance actually fostered a desire to perpetuate drug abuse in return for various rewards."
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.
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)
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.
The formula for a healthy online community is
(0) you must base the community on something objective, a skill like "we are great at (video game)", not something like an idea or opinion.
(1) An actual, real threat of exclusion that's acted on. You cannot include people who don't express the community goals, such as being helpful to each other and growing skills together. (Some great small communities are based around the game Rust, the last place you'd expect to find them)
(2) Excluded people must lose something. Whether it's losing the ability to play with high quality players, or losing advice on knitting patterns
I would also recommend small communities. You can pretty much never create a large healthy online community. Some outliers like Day[9] exist, but as a rule, they don't.
/s