Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Nabbed

You really have to appreciate the string of events that led to this alleged jewel thief being nabbed in a case that was unlikely to ever be solved. First, a citizen followed the debonair crook as he dashed from the jewelry store with the $27K Rolex he had been examining. Second, the good citizen sees a road atlas fall from the open door as the thief made his getaway. Next, Dave Sobatka in the LPD Forensic Unit was able to both develop and identify a latent fingerprint from one of the dog-eared pages of the atlas.

Then Bill Gumm, the police chief in Columbus, NE, reading the daily newspaper, notes the similarity between this case and one in Salina, KS that he had read about in the Nebraska Information and Analysis Center's most recent bulletin. He sends me an email with the heads-up (he reads those bulletins more thoroughly than me!). Finally, Investigator Chris Milisits runs the suspect's criminal history, and learns (buried on page 16) that our suspect was just picked up on a traffic charge in Lee County, SC the day before we made the ID. As luck would have it, he is still in custody in the neighboring Florence County Jail, which has a very nice web interface to it's booking information available to the general public--and quite helpful in creating photo lineups.

Sometimes the stars and the planets align, and everything just comes together. Felony warrants have now been issued in Lincoln and Salina, so the South Carolina authorities will hang onto the suspect.  Too bad the Rolex wasn't among Mr. Quincy Taylor's effects when he was booked. Good work one and all!

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow. Looks like thehy may take first place in web dev this year. the book in page is light years better than Lincoln.

Anonymous said...

Maybe some of those CSI shows are paying off. Not sure that the average person would have recognized the importance of an atlas otherwise

Herb said...

...and I can remember when it was such a startling revelation to the bad guys that they couldn't drive faster than a police radio...

Anonymous said...

A question for you Chief: Is there some kind of central monitoring site operated by a government agency that keeps a database of daily arrests and information on offenders in custody? I remember a lot of high profile cases that were solved and resolved from information sharing. Timothy McVeigh and Ted Bundy are two notorious cases that come to mind.

Gun Nut

Anonymous said...

Chief-This arrest came from a traffic stop for following too closely. As we've often agreed, you never know what you'll find when you pull over a car.

256

Anonymous said...

May 4, 2010 8:48 AM"

See, it is true,
The closer you get the slower you go.

Anonymous said...

In TV-land, even the most obscure forensic evidence is processed, results returned, all the bad guys (and gals) caught within 44 minutes, not including commercials. All with tight close-ups and out-of-focus backgrounds so they can go cheap on set decoration and do re-shoots without caring about set differences.

I wish more TV and film writers would read a book like this one, with heavy emphasis on the chapter titled "C S...I don't think so!".

Steve said...

6:30 a.m.

Wake, drink coffee, type.

Tom Casady said...

Gun ut-

No, not really. In this case, the offender was booked into jail for a traffic offense, and fingerprinted due to lack of ID--quite rare--but causing him to show up on a Triple I. See last week's post on Criminal Histories.

256-

Absolutely! Good traffic enforcement often leads to many other things.

Anonymous said...

Didn't Borsheims in Omaha have a similar theft recently?