Cold Cases and Cold Fusion

Sometimes the answer to a question is implicitly obvious. Those who must later determine the answer by forensically accepted means and establish facts to a standard of beyond a reasonable doubt may have difficulty proceeding in a rigorous manner when right from the start they know the answer. They may also have difficulty proceeding in a rigorous manner if when right from the start they focus on the obvious answer that happens to turn out to be the wrong answer. Perhaps a brief dip into the altered reality of Las Vegas would help us understand criminal investigations better. Dealers in the various casinos often hear comments such as "I'm playing with their money". Such comments indicate that the player is ahead and is therefore happily risking the casino's money because he does not view it as his money if he loses it. Dealers inwardly laugh at this but outwardly maintain their professional smiling face. A player walks into a casino and risks his money. If he wins, then his bet and its payoff are his. He can take them and leave. Its no longer the casino's money, it is the players money. His winnings were his reward for the risk he undertook. He may have enjoyed that risk and he may have obtained a free drink from an attractively clad young lady while he was taking that risk, but he subjected himself to that risk and that risk of loss is the price he paid for his winnings. His original bet and his winnings are now his money, not their money. Yet, players don't realize this. They will happilly play with "the casinos money" if they win their first few bets and will be dour and depressed if they lose their first few bets because then they are risking their own money. The players behavior varies with the views of the situation right at the beginning. I think it may just be the same way with criminal investigations, the views of the situation right at the beginning is the important part, the rest is just a matter of luck.


Consider Cold Fusion. Ooops, sorry about that! I forgot. One must never use the term Cold Fusion these days. There are a variety of cumbersome elegant euphemisms for what was previously known as Cold Fusion. Yes, folks, its true. Cold fusion is indeed still around. It lurks under different names and it gets a good bit of indirect, off the books funding but it is still around. And don't get me wrong, it is indeed a fascinating subject. Much ballyhooed, oft pooh-poohed, but still around nevertheless. Its fascinating you know. Not much question that the comparison of Cold Fusion to the man's discovery of fire was an apt one. It is indeed just as profoundly earth shaking to have limitless free energy as for a caveman to have discovered fire. I find Cold Fusion to be fascinating and awe-inspiring. I just wish it actually existed.

All those investigators who try to duplicate a scientists work or try to examine his apparratus with ultra sensitive equipment might do well to consider the original excess energy event the cold fusion scientists detected. Or to be more precise, they might do well to consider who was on duty in the laboratory the night before the detection of the event. A lowly paid person with a history of attention seeking behavior is present in a laboratory without any supervision or safeguards being in place. An event takes place and the next day the scientists who review the data are all agog at the momentous event. None of them ever question the nocturnal employee. After all, the scientists are scientists who deal with electrochemical energy processes and are not psychologists who deal with behavioral problems that show a person to be lacking in a reputation for truthfulness. Billions spent, promising careers shunted into oblivion, these things are acceptable. Having an inquiring nature right at the start and focusing on veracity of low level employees is not acceptable. Oh don't get me wrong. Cold Fusion is still fascinating. Maybe it will some day be proven to be real. Its just that I happen to think that the only way this will ever take place is to hire additional unreliable employees with a reputation for dishonesty and assign them to boring, low-level tasks while on unsupervised night-duty. Then the scientists will begin to detect cold fusion once again and we will start on a whole new cycle of press releases about exciting discoveries. Perhaps its futile for me to think that at some point in time investigators will take a more jaundiced view at the beginning and be less accepting of outrageous but awe-inspiring claims.

Its not necessarily wrong to fault the scientists. Consider perhaps the epidemiologists who studied the disease patterns in Oregon. Not one of the medical personel involved in the investigation ever considered that the diseases were being spread by intentional actions of persons involved with a local cult that wanted everyone in town sick on an upcoming election day. Tracing outbreaks to salad bars is fine and dandy but it was beyond an epidemiologists thinking to even consider intentional dispersion of a biological agent despite the known friction between the commune and the town it was trying to take over. We all have various biases and we all have certain fields of primary focus. We expect an epidemiologist to think first of a diseased individual rather than an intentional dispersal of an infectious agent. Often doctors are fond of saying that when you hear hoofbeats think of horses not zebras. Its just that sometimes the correct answer is indeed zebra. The problem really then comes down to knowing when to withhold decision making until the hoofbeats of zebras and horses can be definitively differentiated.

Consider the beach community cops near Los Angeles. They are summoned by a man who found his wife stabbed near the front door of their home. The husband makes a point of telling the police that he was upstairs asleep as was his custom and that he called 911 without having touched his wife's body so that evidence would not be disturbed. The cops take note of what they consider to be his unusual behavior and the cops also take particular note of an apparent blood stain on the husband's sneakers since such a stain is obviously inconsistent with his version of the events that he claims to have taken place. Ofcourse the cops make a nearly immediate arrest and proudly take the sneakers to the crime lab so it can be proven that the blood stain was made by the wife's blood. The cops being so enamored of their great detective skills do not bother with a prompt canvass of the neighborhood for witnesses since the cops now know that he got drunk and stabbed her. Then the data starts streaming in: the county coroner reports that the obvious stab wound the cops noted has a bullet inside it and the county crime laboratory reports that the blood stain instead of being type A-positive is type strawberry-jam. The teenage son reports that his father is an even-tempered man whose normal routine would indeed have placed him upstairs and sound asleep at the time of the murder. The son also reports that neither of the parents ever drinks and that since the son was five years old he had only heard his father so much as raise his voice but once. So now the cops have to start again at step one, but its a week later and that is a bit late to start questioning people on the street. They've all left by now. A killer's trail is now cold simply because the police processed the initial evidence with a fixation on what they thought was an expected and obviously correct answer. Now it is possible to debate forever whether their thought processes were reasonable. After all, most of the domestic deaths they encounter do involve alcohol and irate spouses. The cops are not forensic technicians much less scientists. When cops see a red stain on footwear at a murder scene, the cops quite reasonably conclude that it is blood and hope that it is the victim's blood that is on their suspect's apparel. Their actions were not necessarily unreasonable but they surely did turn out to be wrong and to have hampered the investigation.

Are these vignettes contradictory? In the cold fusion situation, there was an immediate and joyous acceptance of the initial reports. In the situation of the dead wife there was an immediate decision to utterly reject the initial report and to view it as a somewhat ordinary spousal killing involving alcohol and flared tempers. In reality, the two vignettes are not at all contradictory. The two seemingly contradictory vignettes are actually identical in that they represent the exact same mistake being made. In one, the overly trusting scientists fail to even consider improper behavior on the part of a rather low paid employee with a rather low reputation for veracity. In the other vignette, the cops instantly jump to a conclusion that would make a Hollywood script writer proud. Each vignette really illustrates the same principle. Initial assumptions and initial actions are critical. And those who jump to embrace a certain viewpoint should bear in mind that there is indeed a possibility of error no matter how correct their initial assumptions appear to be.

We all know that in any aviation incident the magic words of "pilot error" will arise quite promptly. Often it is indeed pilot error though such pilot error is often modulated by fatigue, crew interactions, design errors or computer glitches. The accident investigation professionals know not to jump to conclusions. Separate teams are assigned different systems and each team plods along doing their job irrespective of initial impressions or obvious irrelevence. The formal report is delivered two years or more after the incident and ofcourse it is often ignored since by then the public is no longer clamoring for information and those with liability issues are happy to see that public interest has ebbed and cable tv now features some other issue in the headlines.

Delay leads to public apathy and public apathy leads to a lack of accountability. Ofcourse the police would just love to plod along without any reporters breathing down their necks just as the police would also love to be able to plod along without any calls from an irate mayor. The cops expect praise when they turn out to be right but wish to avoid condemnation when they happen to be wrong. What the cops most want, however, is lack of oversight. An aroused public is often the only real protection we have from police who are either overly zealous or overly lazy. Its also the only protection we have from police who are competent in doing their job. The cops may love to issue a press release about their cold case squad but the cops are not supposed to have any cold cases. In reality we know that there are cold case squads. The squads are plum assignments since its largely cushy headquarters work to wade through boxes of old records than to wade through dark alleys dealing with humanity's worst elements. Talking to a woman who provides her boyfriend with an alibi can be a difficult task for a police detective but talking to that same woman years later after the no-good jerk has run off and left her, now that can be a simple and highly rewarding task.

The problem is not really the initial rejection or acceptance of the early reports. The problem seems to lie in the unchallenged whims of the unskilled investigators. Consider, once again, the latched door in the Ramsey's basement. There is absolutely nothing that prevents a fleeing intruder from taking a few moments to manipulate a simple latch behind him in such a manner as to delay discovery. The lack of thoroughness on the part of the police is astounding. And it is not the least bit redeeming for us to recall that the police officers who searched and photographed the basement were acting on vague instructions and were not really reporting to anyone. It may not be proper for us to fault them for not looking for a body earlier, after all a ransom note, even a weird one, does tend to make people think that someone has been kidnapped. We don't fault the police for not looking for a corpse, we fault them for not looking at all. A corpse, a place of temporary concealment, a point of forced entry, an usual footprint, whatever. It would have all been potential evidence. We know that latch was not really going to be a daunting task despite the many jokes we now make of the BPD's ineptitude. We know there were many areas that were not checked. I'm not saying that anything major would have been noticed in all those nooks and crannys, its just that if you don't even look there then ofcourse you are not going to notice anything at all.

The first reports were of a kidnapped child. The existence of a ransom note certainly buttressed the belief that the missing child was some distance away. Yet that is no reason not to search the house and seal off the critical areas such as child's bedroom, points of probable entry and exit, etc. The first responding officers don't know what the forensic team will find but the officers do know that what the forensic team wants to find is an intact crime scene. The uniformed officers were sent to the basement with vague instructions and there was ineffective reporting and follow up. The discovery of the corpse was made solely because Linda Arndt gave Fleet White and John Ramsey a "make work" project to keep them out of her hair. She did not anticipate their finding anything of the slightest interest to her, indeed the only thing that interested her at the time was some peace and quiet.

So does Cold Fusion actually exist? I don't know. Perhaps it does but a great deal of time and money has been spent searching for something that is known to have taken place only on the night that a person of known dishonesty was on duty. Should scientists have been more skeptical? Scientists are supposed to be skeptical by nature and by training. At what point in time should the focus shift from the inexplicable excess energy to the character of the person on duty when this elusive burst of energy is supposed to have manifested itself.

We know Dr. J. B. Rhine presented two of his star pupils to the media to demonstrate the existence of paranormal abilities. At the press conference, the two star pupils revealed themselves to the reporters to be ringers who, having no paranormal skills whatsoever, were nothing but people who cheated at the tests given them by professor Rhine. Should the professor have guarded against known ringers or should he simply have been a bit more guarded in general. We can not have experts being so narrowly focused that they miss the obvious. The police officer who takes a complaint concerning malicious damage to a lawn ornament should follow the tire tracks and find the wrecked car rather than impose a week's worth of burden and worry on the family of the driver. The police officer who returns a stolen car should not impose on that owner the burden of finding her daughter's corpse on the back seat. A certain minimal competence has got to exist at the early stages of an investigation. I understand that many investigations do indeed get off to a very good start. As is proper, we tend to hear more about those that do not. I just wonder if a bit more police oversight might be needed as well as a good bit less of just trusting to luck.