Posted on 07/27/2009 1:04:02 AM PDT by ruination
Detective Diane Webb was determined. The Grim Sleeper, an anonymous killer who’d stopped murdering for 13 years, had resurfaced, and she had a plan for tripping him up. It was the fall of 2008, and she happened to show Detective Lauren Rauch, one of 33 officers who work for Webb monitoring the city’s vast population of registered sex offenders, a recent L.A. Weekly news story headlined, “The Grim Sleeper: The most elusive serial killer west of the Mississippi took a 13-year break. Now he’s back, murdering Angelenos, as cops hunt his DNA.”
Webb, a hardcore number-cruncher and sex-crimes expert, floated an idea to Rauch and a few other cops in Parker Center.
What if she designed a special database search of the city’s 5,212 registered sex offenders — enough bad seeds and creeps to populate a small town — that could pinpoint those men who fit the Grim Sleeper profile, and from that list try to determine whether any had avoided the required DNA test? What if a DNA match to the Grim Sleeper was, in essence, hiding in the data?
Rauch remembers how resolutely Webb told him, “We have to ID this guy. He is still out there somewhere. We need to ... collect samples from everyone.”
She also ran her idea by a familiar LAPD figure, Dennis Kilcoyne, who is supervisor of the special task force that has been searching for the Grim Sleeper. “It was her belief that our guy could be one of those,” lurking undiscovered in the files, says Kilcoyne, who told her he heartily backed her plan.
(Excerpt) Read more at laweekly.com ...
Eight frikking pages long AFTER going to the link, to tell us an old story.
Yet the lamestream media doesn’t understand why it’s dying.
My local rag has decided to drop the Monday edition as of the first of July. No reduction in our subscription rate, but hey, they gotta survive, right? (/s)
Nowadays great detective work means gathering DNA.
This piece was not supposed to a breaking-news AP-style brief, but in in-depth story on how the detectives caught this ahole. This is exactly the kind of journalism we need more of.
bookmark
You mean the cops didn’t act stupidly?
You didn’t read the story.
If you just want headlines, turn on the TV.
This was meant to be an in-depth account, which requires the ability and willingness to read more than just the lead paragraph.
Good job for the LAPD! A very interesting story. And to think it could probably all have been stopped if this guy had gotten the proper kind of charge and sentencing to begin with. “Leniency” of justice rarely comes to a good end.
Bookmark for later reading
Incredible story! Thanks for posting that. Great read.
Would be nice if it were a synopsis, not a novel. Sorry I read the first page.
read later
Good read, enjoyed it thanks, hope they fry the creep.
The writer really rambles, what does this mean "he had snapped her ankle to the bone"?
The story is interesting but it is about 2/3rds too long.
Depends.
"Her number-crunching peek into the database quickly determined that 1,500 sex offenders fit the rough description of the Grim Sleeper: a black man who now would be middle-aged or older. Most importantly, deep in data, Webb confirmed a troubling anomaly that her gut had told her to expect: Ninety-two of the 1,500 had never been cheek-swabbed for DNA, as required by law.
If any of the 92 were killing or raping Angelenos, and leaving behind their sperm, saliva, blood, hair or other traces, they were doing so with impunity, invisible to the vast DNA-tracking system."
So much for the myth that only white guys are serial killers.
I should point out that the mystery was solved when someone said ‘how those 92 registered sex offenders that we forgot to take their DNA sample as mandated by law’?
‘Since we already checked all the other ones in the data base, what if a genius looked within those bureaucratically skipped 92, could we stop the serial killer then after all these years and unnecessary deaths’?
They swabbed them, found the match and solved the decades old killing spree of white elderly ladies by a black man that was already a registered sex offender since 1978, end of story, no one lost their job or retirement, and some old ladies died terrible deaths though.
I found it fascinating......
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