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Unsolved Killings Haunt D.C. Detectives

 
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maryland missing



Joined: 08 Sep 2003
Posts: 86
Location: near Frederick

PostPosted: Tue Feb 15, 2005 8:14 am    Post subject: Unsolved Killings Haunt D.C. Detectives Reply with quote

Unsolved Killings Haunt D.C. Detectives
'John Doe' Cases Get a Fresh Look

By Del Quentin Wilber
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 14, 2005; Page B01

The man was slain in what appeared to be an
execution-style shooting, left for dead in the
pre-dawn darkness of a park in Northeast Washington.

With no eyewitnesses, D.C. police Detective Scott
Gutherie figured that he would solve the case by
working backward, questioning the victim's friends and
enemies.

The investigator never imagined that he would spend
the next five years simply trying to learn the
victim's name. He has visited tattoo parlors, reviewed
missing person reports and submitted photographs to a
Web site specializing in missing people. Yet the man's
identity remains a mystery, known in police files as
"John Doe."

"This guy's family, someone out there, loved this
guy," Gutherie said. "They deserve to know what
happened to him. He deserves a name."

Gutherie and other detectives are taking a new look at
that case and 21 others involving unidentified
homicide victims, dating to 1976. Half of them were
killed during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a
surge in violence afflicted the District and so many
other cities.

Police culled thousands of files to locate the 22
cases and are hoping that DNA and other newer
technology yield clues that finally identify the
victims. Because of forensic advances and other
factors, police get far fewer cases today of
unidentified victims. But the anonymous dead of years
ago haunt many detectives.

Authorities said their effort has two benefits: It can
bring comfort to families who never learned what
happened to their loved ones and helps detectives
solve the killings.

"It is definitely disheartening to know that there is
a family out there that doesn't know what happened to
their loved one," said Cmdr. Michael Anzallo, who has
been supervising the project. "If we can find the
identity of the person who is dead, it's easier to go
to the family, find associates. We are able to trace
back their history and maybe, possibly, get a break."

While Gutherie has continued to investigate the
killing in the park, most of the other files sat
untouched for years, set aside amid a crush of more
recent homicides. Many of the files were recently
gathered and placed in a cardboard box that sits on a
table in a cluttered office at police headquarters.

The files range in size and scope. Some are stuffed
with updated reports. Others contain papers describing
tips from witnesses, photographs of the victims and
composite sketches. Several hold nothing but a single
scrap of yellow paper with the barest details of a
person's death.

In 1976, for example, detectives determined that two
men found dead in an abandoned house in Southeast
Washington were homicide victims. Because the files
have long vanished from the archives, police have
nothing more than two case numbers, 76-233 and 76-234.

In a 1988 case, police have only a one-sentence
synopsis stating that "an unidentified woman was found
shot to death" at Holbrook and Levis streets NE. The
rest of the paperwork has disappeared.

Of the 22 unidentified victims, 15 were men. They died
like their named counterparts: shot, stabbed, beaten.
In several additional cases that police uncovered
during their review, detectives strongly believe that
the victims were slain but couldn't determine a cause
of death.

The dead were old and young, white, black and
Hispanic. Eleven were killed between 1988 and 1994, an
era when street feuds left more than 3,000 dead in the
city.

One was an infant discovered in a basement trash
compactor in September 1992 in Northwest.

Another was a young man whose decomposing body was
discovered in September 1993 in a basement hallway of
an apartment complex in Southwest. He had been shot.

A man clad in nylon running pants, long underwear and
a white collared shirt was found in a patch of grass
off the 1900 block of 12th Street NW in November 1998.
A trail of blood led from the street, where he
apparently had been beaten. Police believe that the
man, who was in an area frequented by immigrants, was
probably a recent arrival from Africa. His family may
not know he's dead, investigators said.

A few others probably were immigrants, adding another
layer of difficulty in locating relatives who can
identify them, police said.

Several D.C. homicide detectives said they continue to
think about deaths in which they couldn't perform one
of their most basic functions: notifying the victims'
families.

One case struck Detective Ralph Durant as particularly
tragic: a woman who was fatally stabbed and beaten in
August 1990. Wearing fashionably frayed jeans and a
multicolored blouse, her body was found in a trash bin
in the 5100 block of Sargent Road NE. Police made
sketches of the victim and numerous public appeals for
help. But no one came forward with information about
her.

The woman was brutally killed, Durant said, and "just
thrown away, like a piece of paper."

The District has had no new "John Doe" cases since
2000. Investigators attributed the drop-off to a sharp
decline in homicides, stricter identification
standards for many residents and better forensics and
DNA testing.

The city has the most unidentified homicide victims in
the area. Montgomery County reports no such cases.
Fairfax County police said they had three unidentified
victims going back to 1972, including a teenage girl
whose remains were discovered in September 2001. A
construction crew found her bones in the Tysons Corner
area, and police said she died from a shotgun blast.

James Trainum, a longtime D.C. homicide detective, is
helping to oversee the city's effort to bring closure
to the Doe cases as part of a broader project
examining old homicides for new forensic clues.

For the most part, Trainum said, detectives did
everything they could to identify the bodies. They put
details in national databases and had fingerprints run
through FBI computers. They canvassed neighborhoods
and followed up on reports and teletypes describing
similar people who had vanished.

Trainum said police might get lucky by harnessing the
power of new technology or even just revisiting an old
case.

Police plan to enter or reenter victims' fingerprints
into the FBI's fingerprint database, which did not
exist when some of them were killed. It has grown
exponentially over the years as more police
departments have made use of it.

Trainum said police also hope to add information about
the victims to another database that contains records
on 5,797 unidentified bodies and 102,000 missing
people in North America. Police routinely use that
database -- which contains such details as a person's
eye color, height, weight, scars, tattoos and dental
work -- to get clues about unidentified bodies.

"Everything else hasn't worked," Trainum said one
morning as he flipped through the old files. "Many
appear to be stranger-on-stranger crimes, making it
more difficult to solve. . . . These databases are our
last option."

Gutherie recently recalled the many steps he took to
try to identify the man found shot execution-style
Feb. 16, 2000, about 50 feet from a path in a park
next to the Fort Totten Metro station in Northeast.

At first, when police did not recover any
identification, Gutherie thought he would get a hit in
the FBI fingerprint database, because the shooting
suggested that the man was involved in criminal
activity. Surely, the victim had a record, Gutherie
thought.

When he failed to find a match, Gutherie and his
partner, Detective Elbert Griffin, visited a dozen
tattoo parlors in the area to see if anyone recognized
the victim's distinctive artwork, which included a
panther on one arm and a half-finished demon on his
back. The artists said the designs were done by an
amateur or by someone in prison. Police thought the
latter theory highly unlikely because the victim's
fingerprints were not found in any criminal database.

Gutherie submitted enhanced photos of the man --
including close-ups of the tattoos -- to
www.doenetwork.org, a Web site that helps connect
unidentified victims to missing people. He has not
received any tangible tips, he said.

Even while holding out hope for forensic testing,
Gutherie concedes that he might never track down what
has become the most elusive quarry of his 15-year
career: a name.

Anyone with information about the unidentified victims
can call police at 202-727-5037.

Staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this
report.
_________________
Maryland's Missing persons
www.marylandmissing.com
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rd



Joined: 13 Sep 2002
Posts: 9273
Location: Jacksonville, FL

PostPosted: Tue Feb 15, 2005 2:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for this article, mm. I am jaded somewhat by all the people that the DC police did not question in Chandra's disappearance unless they were publically humiliated in the Post. Then they would follow up and at least call back the person.

In the comments from police I read throughout 2001 on her case, my take was that the DC police wait for "street talk" to give them a clue what happned. When there is no "street talk", they have no answers.

That's my take on it anyway as far as the DC police go, including Durant mentioned above in the article who was lead on Chandra's case.

I hope some info to help identify one of these many unidentified victims will help the police through the efforts of the www.doenetwork.org and their fine work.

rd
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