Adventures in Armchair Profiling

I thought I'd piggyback on ShockProf's post about the still-unsolved Natalie Holloway murder with a story about an unsolved murder in metro Detroit.

First, a brief history: Last year, 5-year old Neveah Buchanan was abducted from her apartment complex in Macomb, Michigan. Her body was later discovered in a shallow, concrete-covered grave along the River Raisin. Though police initially identified three "persons of interest" -- including a man named James Easter -- no suspect has ever been arrested in Neveah's slaying and her murder remains unsolved.

To commemmorate the one-year anniversary of Neveah's murder, the Detroit Free Press is running a three-part series about the case. (You can read part one and part two now; part three will appear tomorrow.)

For this series the Freep has posted a 9-minute video containing excerpts of interviews with James Easter, whom police questioned at length but who was ultimately released without being charged.

This video is generating some interesting comments from readers, many of whom are analyzing it for clues as to Easter's guilt or innocence. Particularly disturbing for many people is a passage of the video (which is transcribed in the first article) in which Easter describes in detail how Neveah's killer might have carried out her burial. A glimpse:

He suggests the killer might have needed more concrete to finish the job and cover Nevaeh's body."Maybe, you have a second bag and you get some water from the river and start mixing some more and put it," he says...

Equally unsettling for some are the...unsavory aspects of Easter's life: he was convicted of indecent exposure some years ago; from his home police confiscated X-rated videos, among other items; he has been methodically pulling out his own teeth; he collects newspaper articles about Neveah's death. If the reader comments are any indication, those facts alone are enough to convict him, but to date the police have not had enough evidence against Easter -- or anyone else, for that matter -- to make an arrest in the case.

Scrolling through the reader reactions to the video of Easter's interview, I was reminded how familiar the general public is (or thinks it is) with criminal profiling and homicide investigation. For example, some readers wondered whether Easter revealed details of the murder not publicly available in the autopsy report, while others questioned whether he removed his teeth to avoid dental record matching. Still others have speculated that by advocating for the hanging death of the perpetrator, Easter is deflecting his own guilt. All of this gleaned from a rambling, 9-minute video on a newspaper website.

Though homicide investigation -- especially of violent, unsolved child murders -- constitutes such a small percentage of police work, it captures the public imagination and invites ordinary citizens to apply what they've learned from the movies and true crime TV to real life. I guess this explains why when I tell people that I'm a criminologist, they often ask, "Do you work for the FBI?" or say, "Oh, like on CSI?" Thank you, Truman Capote.

Detroit PD Murder-Suicide: More on Lethal IPV

A Detroit Homicide detective, Edward Williams, shot and killed his wife (and fellow Detroit police officer) Patricia Williams yesterday in the parking lot of the public library near their suburban Canton home:

A woman's lifeless body lay on the cement. The man who had shot her was down, too, a self-inflicted gunshot to his head, his breathing too shallow to detect.

"Someone's shooting in our parking lot ... please hurry, hurry, hurry!" a caller pleaded with a 911 dispatcher. "Come on, hurry!"

The pleas were useless: Canton police said that 33-year-old Patricia Williams, a Detroit police officer, was already dead, and her killer and husband -- Detroit homicide Detective Edward Williams, 36 -- had fatally turned the gun on himself.

The Tuesday morning deaths were a marriage of two endemic problems plaguing police departments nationwide, experts said: domestic violence and suicides.

I was just lecturing on lethal IPV in my Women & Crime class on Monday, explaining that male-to-female intimate partner homicides are much more likely to involve either filicide and/or suicide than female-to-male intimate partner homicides.

This tragic case also raises issues of intimate partner violence among police officers:

"Police officers have unique jobs where they're instructed to keep their family life separate from their work life," said Eric Lambert, a professor with Wayne State University's department of criminal justice. "In reality, that's impossible."

According to data compiled by WSU, Detroit officers face a higher suicide rate than most police, at 28 per 100,000 police officers, nearly twice as many as New York City police.

Also, marriages involving police officers are two to four times more likely to involve domestic violence.

Finally, a sort of morbid tidbit about this story: Edward Williams had appeared on A&E's homicide-investigation reality show "The First 48". It's strange to think about someone who investigated murders for a living and who routinely interacted with victims' devastated families and friends actually killing another person (let alone his wife). Inexplicable, senseless, and truly sad.

Police Chicks!

Recently I have been debating which is worse: TLC's shameless pandering to viewers' voyeurism and morbid curiosity in its summer programming lineup (I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant, Obese and Pregnant, The Girl Who Never Grew, et al.)...or the fact that I keep tuning in. (True confession: I watched an IDKIWP marathon in the hospital shortly after Leah was born, and I have actually spent time researching primordial dwarfism, the congenital disorder affecting TGWNG.)

Anyway, last night I was flipping through the channels and paused (yet again) on TLC after the show's title caught my eye: Police Women of Broward County. Yes!! Another true crime reality TV show for me to become obsessed with!

My snap judgment is that the show rocks. It's like COPS, but focuses specifically on four dynamic (and telegenic, natch) women deputies. (Read their bios here.) Three of the four women are mothers, so some of the drama stems from the tension that exists between their careers (long hours, ever-present threat of harm) and their family lives. The rest of the drama (and much of the humor) stems from the routine duties of police work -- including aspects of the job that the deputies uniquely experience as women (like being called to a scene to search a female suspect's private parts for drugs).

If you're teaching a women and crime course (like I am in the fall), the show would be a great tool for an in-class discussion of women in law enforcement. Be sure to tune in next time it airs!

New True Crime TV Show

Those of you who are, like me, obsessed with true crime TV shows (The First 48, Locked Up Abroad, et al.) may be interested in a new A&E show premiering tomorrow at 10:00 p.m.: Manhunters: Fugitive Task Force. ("They are the best of the best, hunting down the worst of the worst....") You can check out the show's website here. Let us know what you think if you tune in!

Another True Crime TV Obsession in the Making

I've written before about my obsession with the A&E program The First 48. (It's a really, really good show, and you should totally watch it.) But now I'm afraid that another true crime show might be slowly working its way into our DVR queue: Locked Up Abroad on the National Geographic Channel. This show -- which uses a combination of documentary-style interviews and dramatizations of real events -- features the stories of people who for one reason or another ended up incarcerated in foreign prisons.

Some of these folks got locked up after making colossally stupid decisions while overseas. Like the couple from the UK who agreed to smuggle a few kilos of marijuana out of Costa Rica and into Amsterdam in exchange for a nice sum of money. Turns out that the heavier-than-expected briefcases they were given by the Costa Rican drug lords actually contained -- whoopsy! -- seventeen kilos of pure Colombian cocaine. Or the dude who swallowed sixty-seven cocaine-filled condoms, duct-taped the rest of his stash to his torso, and waltzed into Sydney Airport hoping to smuggle the drugs back into the UK. (Spoiler alert: He got caught, and was subsequently rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery to remove the condoms, some of which had begun to rupture. In his words, getting caught literally saved his life.)

Other folks, though, were kidnapped by various guerrilla or rebel forces while working overseas and were detained, incarcerated, and -- at times -- tortured.

It remains to be seen whether this show will become a full-fledged addiction for me like the First 48...but I have a sneaking suspicion that it might!

We Want Our Students To Learn From Us, But...

...I don't think this is what anybody hopes for in terms of students' retention of our course material:

"Confessed serial killer had law enforcement degree"

In his early 30s, fresh off his release from prison on rape charges, Timothy Krajcir enrolled in college to study psychology and the criminal justice system.

Like other students, Krajcir was seeking self-enlightenment, a detective said.

But over the next six years, Krajcir murdered at least six women in two states, covering up his crimes in part by using what he learned at Southern Illinois University, authorities said.

Authorities say Krajcir is a rare specimen -- smart enough to elude police during his crime spree, and apparently private enough to keep his deeds secret in the ensuing years. He eventually graduated from Southern Illinois with a degree in law enforcement...

"If he was studying criminal justice and law enforcement, he definitely would know what police were looking for and how to avoid detection," Smith said.

Obviously this case is an anomaly; needless to say, the vast majority of criminal justice students do not go on to use the knowledge they've gained in class to avoid detection in their careers as serial rapist-murderers. And, though I understand why the media have seized upon this story (headlines doesn't get much more tantalizing than "confessed serial killer had law enforcement degree"), I have to admit to being somewhat annoyed. It doesn't take a criminal justice degree to become reasonably familiar with police homicide investigations. A marathon viewing session of The First 48 would accomplish the same thing. (Not that I'm obsessed with that show or anything.)