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| An Ingenious New Way of Solving Cold Cases |
| By slate.com- Leon Neyfakh |
| Published: 02/02/2016 |
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By the time the tip came in, five long years had passed since the night Derrick Comrie was killed. The 20-year-old from Hartford County, Connecticut, had been at a high school basketball game in January 2006, passing out flyers for a party he was throwing a few days later. After the game, Comrie was sitting in the passenger seat of a friend’s car when a man walked up to him and shot him in the face. Afterwards, all the police could say about the killer was that he had braids in his hair and was dressed in a puffy black coat with a fur-lined hood. Comrie’s murder remained unsolved for years thereafter. Then, one day at the end of 2010, authorities received a tip from someone who had heard about the case while serving time in a Connecticut prison. The inmate had been playing with an unusual deck of cards he had purchased from commissary when he saw Comrie’s face—printed, along with the basic facts of his case, on the nine of clubs. Realizing he had once heard a fellow inmate talking about shooting Comrie, the tipster called the free hotline number that was printed along the bottom of the card and told the authorities what he knew. Last July, as a direct result of that phone call, Comrie’s killer was sentenced to 37 years in prison. The playing card that set this chain of events in motion was produced as part of an experimental effort by Connecticut law enforcement agencies designed to generate leads in cold cases. Starting in 2010, the Department of Corrections has distributed thousands of these special decks to prisons throughout the state, with the hope that inmates will see them, experience a flash of recognition, and come forward with information. To date, the cards have generated some 600 tips, and while many of them have proved useless, enough have resulted in breakthroughs that the program is considered a success; last year, Connecticut Chief State’s Attorney Kevin Kane said the cards had “led directly or indirectly” to nine cold cases being solved since the program began. Read More. |
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