Homicide Investigator Quotes

Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, is of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.

Tolerance used to be the attitude that we took toward one another when we disagreed about an important issue; we would agree to treat each other with respect, even though we refused to embrace each other’s view on a particular topic. Tolerance is now the act of recognizing and embracing all views as equally valuable and true, even though they often make opposite truth claims.

Being a homicide detective can be the loneliest job in the world. The friends of the victim are upset and in despair, but sooner or later - after weeks or months - they go back to their everyday lives. For the closest family it takes longer, but for the most part, to some degree, they too get over the grieving and despair. Life has to go on; it does go on. But the unsolved murders keep gnawing away and in the end there's only one person left who thinks night and day about the victim: it's the office who is left with the investigation.

If skeptics were willing to give the Gospels the same 'benefit of the doubt' they are willing to give other ancient documents, the Gospels would easily pass the test of authorship.

Biased people are seen as prejudicial and unfair, arrogant and overly confident of their position. Nobody wants to be identified as someone who is biased or opinionated. But make no mistake about it, all of us have a point of view; all of us hold opinions and ideas that color the way we see the world. Anyone who tells you that he (or she) is completely objective and devoid of presuppositions has another more important problem: that person is either astonishingly naive or a liar.

In a culture where image is more important than information, style more important than substance it is not enough to possess the truth. [Christian] case makers must also master the media.

The question is not whether or not we have ideas, opinions, or preexisting points of view; the question is whether or not we will allow these perspectives to prevent us from examining the evidence objectively.

When we devote ourselves to this rational preparation and study, we are worshipping God with our mind, the very thing He has called us to do (Matt. 22:37).

THE ENEMY…We do refrain from using this term in reference to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as we count so many of their number as alumni.

While we are often willing to spend time reading the Bible, praying, or participating in church programs and services, few of us recognize the importance of becoming good Christian case makers.

Homicide investigations are about people,

As I have reminded you time and time again, playing detective is dangerous and not for amateurs, and you are exactly that: a goddamn amateur when it comes to homicide investigation.

The experience left me with a very strong sense of just how destructive this simple, seemingly mundane tool can be. A knife never jams. A knife never runs out of ammunition; you rarely see a gunshot murder victim who has been shot more than a few times, but any homicide investigator can tell you how common it is for the victim of a knife murder to bear twenty, thirty, or more stab and/or slash wounds. “A knife comes with a built-in silencer.” Knives are cheap, and can be bought anywhere; there used to be a cutlery store at LaGuardia Airport, not far outside the security gates. There is no prohibition at law against a knife being sold to a convicted felon. Knives can be small and flat and amazingly easy to conceal. Anywhere

The third possible explanation for the sex difference in actual homicides is linked to a surprising motive for much violent behavior: the tendency to act aggressively to impress others.

Another holiday, another murder. At least no one got murdered at Thanksgiving dinner! How did I end up, in the season of peace and goodwill toward men, investigating another homicide?” ~ Kay Driscoll Murder Under the Tree (A Kay Driscoll Mystery Book 2) - Coming November 14.

Tom gave him a suspicious look. “Stanley, you’ve never actually worked a homicide investigation, right?” “No, but how hard can it be? You collect all the clues and you put them together, and voila. I have read a lot of mystery novels.

When we smuggle our conclusions into our investigation by beginning with them as an initial premise, we are likely to beg the question and end up with conclusions that match our presuppositions rather than reflect the truth of the matter.

My friend J. Warner Wallace is one of the most thoughtful and winsome apologists for the gospel I know. Cold-Case Christianity is literally packed with insights to share with the skeptics in your life, and this book will give you the confidence to share it!” Dr. Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life and pastor of Saddleback Church

The apostles never described themselves as wealthy; instead, they warned those who were rich that their wealth could indeed threaten their perspective on eternal matters. Like

In fact, while other men within the culture often had more than one wife, the apostles allowed men to rise to leadership only if they limited themselves to one wife (1 Tim. 3:2).

Compared to eternity, this mortal existence is but a vapor, created by God to be a wonderful place where love is possible for those who choose it.

In the United States, 40,000 people die by suicide every year. By comparison, there are 18,000 homicides in the country annually.

I also investigated Jesus as if he were a person of interest in a no-body homicide case.

Objectivity is paramount; this is the first principle of detective

determine

First, if we live in a purely natural, physical world governed by the “cause and effect” relationships between chemical processes in our brains, “free will” is an illusion, and the idea of true moral choice is nonsensical. How can I, as a detective, hold a murderer accountable for a series of chemical reactions that occurred in his brain when he didn’t have the freedom to escape the causal chain of biological events?

Do you read crime fiction?” “I dote on it. It’s such a relief to escape from one’s work into an entirely different atmosphere.” “It’s not as bad as that,” Nigel protested. “Perhaps not quite as bad as that. Any faithful account of police investigations, in even the most spectacular homicide case, would be abysmally dull. I should have thought you’d seen enough of the game to realise that. The files are a plethora of drab details, most of them entirely irrelevant. Your crime novelist gets over all that by writing grandly about routine work and then selecting the essentials. Quite rightly. He’d be the world’s worst bore if he did otherwise.

Any faithful account of police investigations, in even the most spectacular homicide case would be abysmally dull. I should have thought you'd seen enough of the game to realize that. The files are a plethora of drab details, most of them entirely irrelevant. Your crime novelist gets over all that by writing grandly about routine work and then seleting the essentials. Quite rightly. He'd be the world's worst bore if he did otherwise.

all of us have a point of view; all of us hold opinions and ideas that color the way we see the world. Anyone who tells you that he (or she) is completely objective and devoid of presuppositions has another more important

No one has been able to aggregate more intention data on what consumers like than Google. Google not only sees you coming, but sees where you’re going. When homicide investigators arrive at a crime scene and there is a suspect—almost always the spouse—they check the suspect’s search history for suspicious Google queries (like “how to poison your husband”). I suspect we’re going to find that U.S. agencies have been mining Google to understand the intentions of more than some shopper thinking about detergent, but cells looking for fertilizer to build bombs. Google controls a massive amount of behavioral data. However, the individual identities of users have to be anonymized and, to the best of our knowledge, grouped. People are not comfortable with their name and picture next to a list of all the things they have typed into the Google query box. And for good reasons. Take a moment to imagine your picture and your name above everything you have typed into that Google search box. You’ve no doubt typed in some crazy shit that you would rather other people not know. So, Google has to aggregate this data, and can only say that people of this age or people of this cohort, on average, type in these sorts of things into their Google search box. Google still has a massive amount of data it can connect, if not to specific identities, to specific groups.

If the case isn't plea bargained, dismissed or placed on the inactive docket for an indefinite period of time, if by some perverse twist of fate it becomes a trial by jury, you will then have the opportunity of sitting on the witness stand and reciting under oath the facts of the case-a brief moment in the sun that clouds over with the appearance of the aforementioned defense attorney who, at worst, will accuse you of perjuring yourself in a gross injustice or, at best, accuse you of conducting an investigation so incredibly slipshod that the real killer has been allowed to roam free. Once both sides have argued the facts of the case, a jury of twelve men and women picked from computer lists of registered voters in one of America's most undereducated cities will go to a room and begin shouting. If these happy people manage to overcome the natural impulse to avoid any act of collective judgement, they just may find one human being guilty of murdering another. Then you can go to Cher's Pub at Lexington and Guilford, where that selfsame assistant state's attorney, if possessed of any human qualities at all, will buy you a bottle of domestic beer. And you drink it. Because in a police department of about three thousand sworn souls, you are one of thirty-six investigators entrusted with the pursuit of that most extraordinary of crimes: the theft of a human life. You speak for the dead. You avenge those lost to the world. Your paycheck may come from fiscal services but, goddammit, after six beers you can pretty much convince yourself that you work for the Lord himself. If you are not as good as you should be, you'll be gone within a year or two, transferred to fugitive, or auto theft or check and fraud at the other end of the hall. If you are good enough, you will never do anything else as a cop that matters this much. Homicide is the major leagues, the center ring, the show. It always has been. When Cain threw a cap into Abel, you don't think The Big Guy told a couple of fresh uniforms to go down and work up the prosecution report. Hell no, he sent for a fucking detective. And it will always be that way, because the homicide unit of any urban police force has for generations been the natural habitat of that rarefied species, the thinking cop.

The teeth are the hardest, most durable material in the human body. They can tolerate decomposition or submersion in water, withstand temperatures over 1,000°C (up to 2,000°F) and survive explosions and extremes of physical forces.

If there are good reasons why God might permit evil in this life (such as the preservation of free will and the ability to love genuinely), concerns about His failure to act are simply unreasonable. Doubts about God’s existence based on the problem of evil may have emotional appeal, but they lack rational foundation because reasonable explanations do, in fact, exist.

For example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span, but receive much less social support from friendships and extended families. My motive for investigating these geographic differences in human societies is not to celebrate one type of society over another but simply to understand what happened in history.

FIGURE 3–18. Homicide rates in the United States, 1950–2010, and Canada, 1961–2009 Sources: Data for United States are from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports 1950–2010: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2009; U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2010b, 2011; Fox & Zawitz, 2007. Data for Canada, 1961–2007: Statistics Canada, 2008. Data for Canada, 2008: Statistics Canada, 2010. Data for Canada, 2009: K. Harris, “Canada’s crime rate falls,” Toronto Sun, Jul. 20, 2010.

Then you can go to Cher's Pub at Lexington and Guilford, where that selfsame assistant state's attorney, if possessed of any human qualities at all, will buy you a bottle of domestic beer. And you drink it. Because in a police department of about three thousand sworn souls, you are one of thirty-six investigators entrusted with the pursuit of that most extraordinary of crimes: the theft of a human life. You speak for the dead. You avenge those lost to the world. Your paycheck may come from fiscal services but, goddammit, after six beers you can pretty much convince yourself that you work for the Lord himself. If you are not as good as you should be, you'll be gone within a year or two, transferred to fugitive, or auto theft or check and fraud at the other end of the hall. If you are good enough, you will never do anything else as a cop that matters this much. Homicide is the major leagues, the center ring, the show. It always has been. When Cain threw a cap into Abel, you don't think The Big Guy told a couple of fresh uniforms to go down and work up the prosecution report. Hell no, he sent for a fucking detective.

In October 2004, seven Milwaukee police officers sadistically beat Frank Jude Jr. outside an off-duty police party. The Journal Sentinel newspaper in Milwaukee investigated the crime and published photos of Jude taken right after the beating. The officers were convicted, and some reforms were put in place. But the city saw an unexpected side effect. Calls to 911 dropped dramatically—twenty-two thousand less than the previous year. You know what did rise? The number of homicides—eighty-seven in the six months after the photos were published, a seven-year high. That information comes from a 2016 study done by Matthew Desmond, an associate social sciences professor at Harvard University and New York Times bestselling author of Evicted. He told the Journal Sentinel that a case like Jude’s “tears the fabric apart so deeply and delegitimizes the criminal justice system in the eyes of the African-American community that they stop relying on it in significant numbers.” With shootings of unarmed civilians being captured on cell phones and shared on the internet, the distrust of the police is not relegated to that local community. The stories of the high-profile wrongful death cases of Tamir Rice in Cleveland or Eric Brown in New York spread fast across the country. We were in a worse place than we were twenty years earlier, when the vicious police officer beating of Rodney King went unpunished and Los Angeles went up in flames. It meant more and more crimes would go unsolved because the police were just not trusted. Why risk your life telling an organization about a crime when you think that members of that organization are out to get you? And how can that ever change?

But even in Gavle I went on digging into the case." "I don't suppose that Henrik would ever let up." "That's true, but that's not the reason. The puzzle about Harriet still fascinates me to this day. I mean... it's like this: every police officer has his own unsolved mystery. I remember from my days in Hedestad how older colleagues would talk in the canteen about the case of Rebecka. There was one officer in particular, a man named Torstensson - he's been dead for years - who year after year kept returning to that case. In his free time and when he was on holiday. Whenever there was a period of calm among the local hooligans he would take out those folders and study them." "Was that also a case about a missing girl?" Morell looked surprised. Then he smiled when he realised that Blomkvist was looking for some sort of connection. "No, that's not why I mentioned it. I'm talking about the soul of a policeman. The Rebecka case was something that happened before Harriet Vanger was even born, and the statute of limitations has long since run out. Sometime in the forties a woman was assaulted in Hedestad, raped, and murdered. That's not altogether uncommon. Every officer, at some point in his career, has to investigate that kind of crime, but what I'm talking about are those cases that stay with you and get under your skin during the investigation. This girl was killed in the most brutal way. The killer tied her up and stuck her head into the smouldering embers of a fireplace. One can only guess how long it took for the poor girl to die, or what torment she must have endured." "Christ Almighty." "Exactly. It was so sadistic. Poor Torstensson was the first detective on the scene after she was found. And the murder remained unsolved, even though experts were called in from Stockholm. He could never let go of that case." "I can understand that." "My Rebecka case was Harriet. In this instance we don't even know how she died. We can't even prove that a murder was committed. But I have never been able to let it go." He paused to think for a moment. "Being a homicide detective can be the loneliest job in the world. The friends of the victim are upset and in despair, but sooner or later - after weeks or months - they go back to their everyday lives. For the closest family it takes longer, but for the most part, to some degree, they too get over their grieving and despair. Life has to go on; it does go on. But the unsolved murders keep gnawing away and in the end there's only one person left who thinks night and day about the victim: it's the officer who's left with the investigation.

Lou and I talked and ate for close to an hour and found out that we thought similarly about everything. We’d seriously consider teaching someone else the ropes of a homicide investigation, just in case we wanted to be free to go and do whatever we wanted to do whenever we wanted to do it, whether we moved away or not. And both of us knew that we weren’t getting any younger, so we’d better get in better

Jake’s body was found hung from the old piping on Floor Four. He, like the contract worker, was hung by a chain. But, unlike the worker, Jake’s throat was slit, with the sickle lying below him. It was not the trademark killing of The Mangler—with the sickle lodged in the chest. After a long investigation, the case was unsolved and considered a homicide. Everyone from the party was a suspect, interviews were done, with no leads found. Brandon was interviewed, after he came forward about being there that night, but no one knew that he saw The Mangler. Being young and scared, he never told the whole story. He was afraid that The Mangler would come after him since he was the last one to see him, and know the truth. He knew who murdered Jake.

in Canada, Hawaii, Chicago, or Washington, D.C., police are unable to point to a single instance of gun registration aiding the investigation of a violent crime. In a 2013 deposition, D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier said that the department could not “recall any specific instance where registration records were used to determine who committed a crime.”1 The idea behind a registry is that guns left at a crime scene can be used to trace back to the criminals. Unfortunately, guns are very rarely left at the scene of the crime. Those that are left behind are virtually never registered—criminals are not stupid enough to leave behind guns registered to them. In the few cases where registered guns were left at the scene, the criminal had usually been killed or seriously injured. Canada keeps some of the most thorough data on gun registration. From 2003 to 2009, a weapon was identified in fewer than a third of the country’s 1,314 firearm homicides. Of these identified weapons, only about a quarter were registered. Roughly half of these registered guns were registered to someone other than the person accused of the homicide. In just sixty-two cases—4.7 percent of all firearm homicides—was the gun identified as being registered to the accused. Since most Canadian homicides are not committed with a gun, these sixty-two cases correspond to only about 1 percent of all homicides. From 2003 to 2009, there were only sixty-two cases—just nine a year—where registration made any conceivable difference. But apparently, the registry was not important even in those cases. Despite a handgun registry in effect since 1934, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Chiefs of Police have not yet provided a single example in which tracing was of more than peripheral importance in solving a case. No more successful was the long-gun registry that started in 1997 and cost Canadians $2.7 billion before being scrapped. In February 2000, I testified before the Hawaii State Senate joint hearing between the Judiciary and Transportation committees on changes that were being proposed to the state gun registration laws.2 I suggested two questions to the state senators: (1) how many crimes had been solved by their current registration and licensing system, and (2) how much time did it currently take police to register guns? The Honolulu police chief was notified in advance about those questions to give him time to research them. He told the committee that he could not point to any crimes that had been solved by registration, and he estimated that his officers spent over 50,000 hours each year on registering guns. But those aren’t the only failings of gun registration. Ballistic fingerprinting was all the rage fifteen years ago. This process requires keeping a database of the markings that a particular gun makes on a bullet—its unique fingerprint, so to speak. Maryland led the way in ballistic investigation, and New York soon followed. The days of criminal gun use were supposedly numbered. It didn’t work.3 Registering guns’ ballistic fingerprints never solved a single crime. New York scrapped its program in 2012.4 In November 2015, Maryland announced it would be doing the same.5 But the programs were costly. Between 2000 and 2004, Maryland spent at least $2.5 million setting up and operating its computer database.6 In New York, the total cost of the program was about $40 million.7 Whether one is talking about D.C., Canada, or these other jurisdictions, think of all the other police activities that this money could have funded. How many more police officers could have been hired? How many more crimes could have been solved? A 2005 Maryland State Police report labeled the operation “ineffective and expensive.”8 These programs didn’t work.

America has the highest gun homicide rate, the highest number of guns per capita,” recites Charles Blow of the New York Times.3 In another story, the New York Times quotes researcher David Hemenway as saying: “Generally, if you live in a civilized society, more guns mean more death.”4 Bloomberg’s Businessweek also makes similar claims.5 Like most international comparisons of gun ownership rates, all of these claims make use of something called the 2007 Small Arms Survey, a group that receives funding from and often works closely with George Soros’s Open Society Institute.6 The UN provides homicide data for 192 countries, but the Small Arms Survey only lists gun ownership and homicide data for 116. All of the countries that are missing are countries that have homicide rates higher than the U.S. rate. The Small Arms Survey makes it look as though there are only twenty-five countries with higher homicide rates than the U.S. In fact, there are 101 countries with higher rates. So how do homicide rates compare across all 192 countries for which the UN provides data?7 For 2008, the U.S. rate was slightly less than 5.4 homicides per 100,000 people. The worldwide rate was 10.5 (about twice the U.S. rate), and the median was six per 100,000. Yet there is one important caveat to realize when looking at these numbers—they are provided by the countries themselves, and you can’t always trust their numbers. Politicians and dictators like to give the impression that they are doing a better job than they actually are. This is a problem in some United States jurisdictions such as Chicago, where what look like murders are reclassified as “noncriminal death investigations.”8

Police investigations is often times where Good and evil collide.

Daylight slanted in through the bars making his eyes glint like polished steel. Motes of dust frenzied in his atmosphere as if drawing energy from the electric force of his presence. A thin ring of gold glinted in his left ear, and sharp cheekbones underscored an arrogant brow. He’d look stern but for his mouth, which was not so severe. It bowed with a fullness she might have called feminine if the rest of his face wasn’t so brutally cast. Mercy hadn’t realized she’d been staring at his lips, gripped with a queer sort of fascination until they parted and he spoke. “You were quite impressive back there.” “What?” Mercy shook her head dumbly. Had he just complimented her? Had they just been through the same scene? She’d never been less impressed with herself in her entire life. Would that she could have been like him. Smooth and unaffected. Infuriatingly self-assured. And yet…he’d only been that way after breaking the nose of the officer who'd struck her, and possibly his jaw. Lord but she’d never seen a man move like that before. “I listened to your deductions,” he explained. “From where you were hiding in the closet?” she quipped, rather unwisely. Something flickered in his eyes, and yet again she was left to guess if she’d angered or amused him. “From where I was hiding in the closet,” he said with a droll sigh as he shifted, seeming to find a more comfortable position for his bound hands. “You’re obviously cleverer than the detectives. How do you know so much about murder scenes?” Mercy warned herself not to preen. She stomped on the lush warmth threatening to spread from her chest at his encouragement, and thrust her nose in the air, perhaps a little too high. “I am one of only three female members of the Investigator Eddard Sharpe Society of Homicidal Mystery Analysis. As penned by the noted novelist, J. Francis Morgan, whom I suspect is a woman.” “Why do you suspect that?” His lip twitched, as if he also battled to suppress his own expression. “Because men tend to write women characters terribly, don’t they? But J. Francis Morgan is a master of character and often, the mystery is even solved by a woman rather than Detective Sharpe. His heroines are not needlessly weak or stupid or simpering. They’re strong. Dangerous. Powerful. Sometimes even villainous and complicated. That is good literature, I say. Because it’s true to life.” He’d ceased fighting his smile and allowed his lip to quirk up in a half-smile as he regarded her from beneath his dark brow. “Mathilde’s murderer now has one more person they’d do well to fear in you.” She leveled him a sour look. “Does that mean you fear me?” He tilted toward her. Suddenly—distressingly—grave. “You terrify me, Mercy Goode.

Doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs, tinkers, tailors, soldiers, spies - everyone was busier and more important than a mere homicide investigator. People did so hate to be bothered by sordid stuff like crime.

For the last 20 years, America’s elites have talked feverishly about police racism in order to avoid talking about black crime. On March 11, 2015 – only hours before two police officers were shot at protests in Ferguson, either targeted directly or the unintended casualties of a gang dispute – a six-year-old boy named Marcus Johnson was killed by a stray bullet in a St. Louis park. There have been no protests against his killer; Al Sharpton has not shown up to demand a federal investigation. Marcus is just one of the 6000 black homicide victims a year (more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined) who receive virtually no attention because their killers are other black civilians.

Vernon J. Geberth, M.S., M.P.S., Former Commander, Bronx Homicide, NYPD’s “Homosexual Serial Murder Investigation,” summarizes “gay” sexual murders. “Homosexual related homicides [involve] acts of sexual perversion, and serial killings.

Cody,” Larry said, “what the hell are you doing?” “Investigating,” Cody said. “We’re investigators, remember?” “Fuck you. I’m saying accident and you’re not. You’re treating this as a homicide.” “I’m crossing every t and dotting every i,” Cody said. “You know, like they teach us.” “Bullshit,” Larry said, his voice rising. “You’re trying to show me up.” “Not at all,” Cody said, opening his case and finding the extra-large can of superglue Fume-It. In a closed room, the aerosol glue would fog up the space and collect on any latent fingerprints on the surfaces of the walls, counters, or mirrors. Fingerprints would show on the flat surfaces like floral flocking on wallpaper.

Standing in on autopsies is tough, but it’s part of my job. Bereaved family members go to funerals. They remember the dearly departed in eulogies and they start the process of saying good-bye. For homicide cops, autopsies are a way of saying hello. What the M.E. uncovers in an autopsy is usually a starting point. By learning everything we can about the victims at the moment of death, we begin trying to find out what happened to them and why. And with unidentified victims, it’s even more basic than that. Before we can find out who killed them, we have to know who they are. And in this case, once we established the victim’s identity, we needed to ascertain if her death was related to the others we were investigating.

She’d called Baldwin’s office, had a brief, nasty tête-à-tête with him. He dumped her into the lap of his acting director, who in turn touched base with the Nashville homicide office and set up an appointment with the head of Metro’s Criminal Investigative Division, Captain Mitchell Price. Everything was in place. She knew the Snow White Killer inside and out. And she knew she could catch him. It was just a matter of timing. Charlotte

The Small Arms Survey makes it look as though there are only twenty-five countries with higher homicide rates than the U.S. In fact, there are 101 countries with higher rates. So how do homicide rates compare across all 192 countries for which the UN provides data?7 For 2008, the U.S. rate was slightly less than 5.4 homicides per 100,000 people. The worldwide rate was 10.5 (about twice the U.S. rate), and the median was six per 100,000. Yet there is one important caveat to realize when looking at these numbers—they are provided by the countries themselves, and you can’t always trust their numbers. Politicians and dictators like to give the impression that they are doing a better job than they actually are. This is a problem in some United States jurisdictions such as Chicago, where what look like murders are reclassified as “noncriminal death investigations.

We have to be careful, however, to distinguish between evidence and artifacts. The testimony of an eyewitness can be properly viewed as evidence, but anything added to the account after the fact should be viewed with caution as a possible artifact (something that exists in the text when it shouldn’t). The Gospels claim to be eyewitness accounts, but you may be surprised to find that there are a few added textual artifacts nestled in with the evidential statements. It appears that scribes, in copying the texts over the years, added lines to the narrative that were not there at the time of the original writing. Let me give you an example. Most of us are familiar with the biblical story in the gospel of John in which Jesus was presented with a woman who had been accused of committing adultery (John 8:1–11). The Jewish men who brought the woman to Jesus wanted her to be stoned, but Jesus refused to condemn her and told the men, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” When the men leave, Jesus tells the woman, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more.” This story is one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture. Too bad that it appears to be an artifact. While the story may, in fact, be absolutely true, the earliest copies of John’s gospel recovered over the centuries fail to contain any part of it. The last verse of chapter 7 and the first eleven verses of chapter 8 are missing in the oldest manuscripts available to us. The story doesn’t appear until it is discovered in later copies of John’s gospel, centuries after the life of Jesus on earth. In fact, some ancient biblical manuscripts place it in a different location in John’s gospel. Some ancient copies of the Bible even place it in the gospel of Luke. While there is much about the story that seems consistent with Jesus’s character and teaching, most scholars do not believe it was part of John’s original account. It is a biblical artifact, and it is identified as such in nearly every modern translation of the Bible (where it is typically noted in the margin or bracketed to separate it from the reliable account).

Workers new to the job, rookie cops and ambulance drivers, struggle with the mess. Their eyes reel at ripped distortions that blur a formerly human identity. Experienced death workers throw a professional switch in their brains and see the face more clearly. Their eyes methodically link dismembered limbs, realign a rictus grin, and separate identity from wreckage. Cooly. As connoisseurs. For the investigators a dead body is not so much victim as evidence, the ultimate clue to the workings of the perpetrator. Banked

And then there was punishment. Hundreds of machines were being used not just by police forces and homicide detectives for investigative purposes but also by prisons and mental-health systems for rehabilitation. At any moment in America, there were dozens of murderers, rapists, and domestic abusers having their crimes pumped into their skulls from their victims’ points of view. The feeling of a punch that breaks a nose, the sledgehammer impact and burn of a bullet, the indescribable feeling of one’s neck being opened like a zipper. They smelled the blood and cordite, felt the pheromones of fear. They heard the screams, the cries, the unanswered pleas for mercy. A Clockwork Orange had nothing on the machine, and Barnes had experienced all varieties of its punishments.

Beginning in the late 1800s, New York Criminal Court judges could, at their discretion, appoint a lunacy commission to evaluate the sanity of a defendant charged with homicide. Each commission consisted of three “disinterested men”: an attorney, a physician, and a layman, almost always a businessman. After conducting a lengthy investigation, the members would offer an opinion as to whether the defendant was mentally fit to stand trial. In later years, the commissioners were also expected to assess the defendant’s state of mind while committing the crime. The role of the commission was strictly advisory—the court was at liberty to approve or dismiss its findings.10

Some days, the supply of curse words available is insufficient to meet my demands.

How is my freedom at stake and everything is still all about Lila?" I froze, my own dessert spoon halfway to my mouth. "What? The only reason we're all gathered here tonight is for you. You're the one who asked me to investigate." "Yes, to help me. And instead you're twisting it into some quest your beloved suitors need to fulfill in order to win you over. Spoiler alert, Lila: Nobody likes love triangles. Nobody.

The most shocking revelations about Dr. Fauci’s systemic conduct would emerge after Lauritsen finally obtained some five hundred pages from the FDA investigators’ trove of documents, using the Freedom of Information Act. Those papers clearly demonstrated that the Fauci/Burroughs Wellcome research teams had engaged in widespread data tampering, which some have viewed rose to the level of homicidal criminality.

Kit Darling has become a celebrity. An underdog’s hero. Everyone is rooting for her.” “Charge her with what?” asks Ben. “Fraud? Extortion? Obstruction of justice? Staging a false scene—isn’t that a criminal offense?” Renata says, “Usually a false scene relates to falsifying evidence in order to obscure or obfuscate a real homicide investigation.

Ivan Law’s name was added to the homicide file by LAPD who will be solely responsible for solving the murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace (Notorious B.I.G.)1. According to a source, LAPD robbery homicide detective Lieutenant Thompson said "I am Adding your name Ivan Law to the Biggie Homicide file. I have Dr Dre’s address I’m going to interview him for the murders of Biggie,"2 which suggests that Dr. Dre is being investigated for the murder of Christopher Wallace.

Ivan Law’s name was added to the homicide file by LAPD who will be solely responsible for solving the murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace (Notorious B.I.G.)1. According to a source, LAPD robbery homicide detective Lieutenant Thompson said "I am Adding your name Ivan Law to the Biggie Homicide file. I have Dr Dre’s address I’m going to interview him for the murders of Biggie,"2 which suggests that Dr. Dre is being investigated for the murder of Christopher Wallace.

liked taunting them during early morning drills. “Sleep is overrated,” he’d say. “You will learn to do without.” He’d lied. Sleep was like sex. The less you had, the more you craved it, and Tracy Crosswhite hadn’t had much of either lately. She stretched her shoulders and neck. With no time for a morning run, her body felt stiff and half-asleep, though she didn’t remember sleeping much, if at all. Too much fast food and too much caffeine, her doctor said. Good advice, but eating well and exercising took time Tracy didn’t have when investigating a homicide, and giving up caffeine would be

They met in the conference room. The official investigative team. Quincy thought. Two profilers one sheriff, a homicide sergeant, a volunteer tracker, and a thirteen-year-old girl. Definitely the most interesting team Quincy had ever seen assembled.

Homicide investigation. Those were the words I was waiting for. Inside me, the fire catches and erupts. No one can see it, but I'm standing in the middle of Main Street, burning alive.

While we are often willing to spend time reading the Bible, praying, or participating in church programs and services, few of us recognize the importance of becoming good Christian case makers. Prosecutors are successful when they master the facts of the case and then learn how to navigate and respond to the tactics of the defense team. Christians need to learn from that model as well. We need to master the facts and evidence supporting the claims of Christianity and anticipate the tactics of those who oppose us. This kind of preparation is a form of worship. When we devote ourselves to this rational preparation and study, we are worshipping God with our mind, the very thing He has called us to do (Matt. 22:37). Section 2 Examine the Evidence Applying the principles of investigation to the claims of the New Testament

All of us ought to be willing to argue the merits of our case without resorting to tactics unbecoming of our worldviews.

All evidence can be divided into two broad categories: direct and indirect. Direct evidence is simply the testimony of eyewitnesses. Indirect evidence (also called 'circumstantial evidence') is everything else.

This is America’s most famous child abduction case, perpetrated by America’s most infamous serial killer, investigated by America’s most clueless homicide detectives.

This is America’s most famous child abduction case, perpetrated by America’s most infamous serial killer, investigated by America’s most clueless homicide detectives.

him. He realized that the memories had not so much faded and disappeared, but had instead been warehoused. Stored away and slowly covered by the dust of life—the accumulation of years and the distractions that accompanied them. But as he flipped through the pages of the file now, he was transformed back into that twenty-eight-year-old kid who had found himself in the middle of a homicide investigation that was about to capture the attention of the nation.

He was certain that his mistress was investigating the right clues, yet something bothered him about the case. Too bad he just couldn’t quite put his paw on what it was.

Hollis asked me, “How’d the meeting with the editor at the Daily News go?” “About like you’d expect. It’s very clear to me that they’re only interested in the number of papers they sell or clicks the story gets online, not in helping out our homicide investigation. I swear, sometimes it feels like there are some awfully bloodthirsty people in the media who want more murders so they can have juicier stories that sell more papers.

particular conclusion because I started with it as my premise. This

supernatural being exist?” after first excluding the possibility of anything supernatural. Like Alan, I came to a particular conclusion because I started with it as my premise. This is the truest definition of bias, isn’t it? Starting

Billy Jensen is an investigative journalist. He focuses on missing persons and unsolved murders, first in his writing and later as an active investigator solving crimes. His skills as a digital executive translated into his investigative work, and he has been integral in solving ten homicides as well as locating missing persons. Mr. Jensen is the author of Chase Darkness with Me: How One True Crime Writer Started Solving Murders.

Agent Shelan wondered if it would really hurt diplomatic relations with the Klingon Empire all that much if she tossed Korath, Son of Monak, into an antimatter reactor. Surely if anyone would recognize homicide as a valid response to intolerable annoyance, it would be the Klingons.

The deaths of Peter, Paul, James, and John are very well attested, and the remaining martyrdom accounts of the apostles (with the possible exception of Matthias

The Investigation of the Tupac Amaru Shakur and Christopher Notorious BIG Wallace murders has taken a decisive turn with the addition of Ivan Law's name to the homicide file by LAPD. From now onwards, Ivan the Great will be solely responsible for solving the murders that were considered to be unsolvable for more than two decades.

Meerkat culture is tense and homicidal. A study investigating lethal violence in more than one thousand different mammals unmasked the meerkat as the most murderous mammal on the planet – beating even humans to the brutal top spot.

But what was the right thing? Letting the show go on, as written? Or stepping in, hoping that I could—in a respectful way—point out how things could be different? It would be a mistake to remind producers what they already knew—that a TV series has an unspoken agreement with its audience to be what it has been from the beginning. A sitcom shouldn’t become a drama. Nobody wants to see a homicide investigation on Mr. Belvedere. (On Murphy Brown, maybe.) A show about a middle-class suburban family shouldn’t suddenly focus on illegal immigrants and their struggle to cross the border. My inner voice kept reminding me that I was just a kid, while the producers were authority figures—albeit odd authority figures. As a child actor, I had learned early that I wielded more power than most adults, yet my parents instilled within me a respect and a desire to submit to authority. My parents never put up with the typical child-star behavior.

Brittany Gomez, only six months old, was left blind and retarded after being brutally shaken by her baby-sitter, who drew only probation and ninety days in a halfway house after pleading to felony child abuse. Then Brittany died, the case was ruled a homicide, and murder charges were filed. The baby-sitter again pled guilty in exchange for no prison time. She killed a child and never spent a day behind bars.

He left government briefly, taking a $400,000-a-year job with a Boston-based law firm in 1993, but was deeply unhappy and two years later called U.S. attorney Eric H. Holder Jr., who later became attorney general under President Obama, and asked for an assignment he found far more gratifying—prosecuting Washington, D.C., homicides. “I love everything about investigations,” he said years later. “I love the forensics. I love the fingerprints and the bullet casings and all the rest that comes along with doing that kind of work.

We all sat there, silently looking out over an expanse of floating clothes, body parts, and an occasional length of twisted metal trapped in between some weeds, as jet fuel trailed gently across our nostrils. It was so starkly unfamiliar that it was disorienting. Silently, we surveyed it all and then, as if someone had flipped a switch, we went to work.

Burnout is more than an occupational hazard in the homicide unit, it is a psychological certainty. A contagion that spreads from one detective to his partner to a whole squad, the who-really-gives-a-shit attitude threatens not those investigations involving genuine victims -- such cases are, more often than not, the cure for burnout -- but rather those murders in which the dead man is indistinguishable from his killer. An American detective's philosophical cul-de-sac: If a drug dealer falls in West Baltimore and no one is there to hear him, does he make a sound?