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Dissecting a Criminal Investigation

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Abstract

Despite the considerable attention criminologists devote to the study of policing, they tend to ignore one of its most important functions. Detectives comprise approximately 16% of law enforcement personnel and play a major role in the public’s image of the police through their successes or failures. This scholarly lacuna is even more surprising given the gateway position held by police investigators; unless a crime is solved and an individual arrested, the entire remainder of the criminal justice system—prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, juries, probation, prisons, parole, rehabilitation—fails to come into play. What research that has explored this function has been primarily interested in organizational and technical aspects of detective work. Here, I take a different approach by dissecting criminal investigations to expose their underlying structure—what they involve, how they fail, and ways they might be improved. Specific areas of interest include the functional phases of an investigation, the definition and nature of evidence, and the systemic structure of criminal investigative failures. The Gail Miller-David Milgaard murder investigation in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, is used as a case study.

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Notes

  1. As Sherlock Holmes explained to Dr. Watson in A Study in Scarlet, “There is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps.” This novel also fictionally debuted the magnifying glass as an investigative tool. In later stories, in addition to human footsteps, the famous detective followed horse, cow, hound, carriage, and bicycle tracks.

  2. While such cases are typically murders, the investigative issues discussed here are general in nature and apply to most crime types. The term detective is used throughout this article, but it is recognized that investigative work is done by a variety of police ranks and positions (such as patrol officers), depending on the specific law enforcement agency and its jurisdiction.

  3. Evidence is considered here in the context of investigative information and police decision-making; the various types of legal evidence, while related, are not always directly equivalent (Ho 2015).

  4. Equation 1 defines the positive likelihood ratio, which is applied when evidence is present. The negative likelihood ratio is used when evidence is absent. The two ratios are related as follows: LR+  = sensitivity/(1 − specificity), while LR− = (1 − sensitivity)/specificity.

  5. A likelihood ratio is a measure of evidence diagnosticity. During the trial of Guy Paul Morin for the murder of his neighbor, Christine Jessop (see below), Crown counsel argued that Morin’s failure to attend Jessop’s funeral was evidence of consciousness of guilt. However, his attendance could have equally been regarded as indicative of guilt; police commonly monitor—as they did in the Jessop case—those who attend a murder victim’s funeral in case the killer shows up. A provincial inquiry later noted, “Mr. Morin’s failure to attend the funeral or funeral home was worthless evidence and ought not to have been admitted” (Kaufman 1998, p. 34). As the numerator and denominator probabilities for the strength of this evidence were similar, it had no diagnosticity.

  6. Ignored crimes are those police fail to recognize as such despite the extant evidence due to incompetence or negligence. Theresa Allore, a 19-year-old student, disappeared in November 1978 from the small rural village of Compton in the Eastern Townships of Québec where she had been attending college. Five months later, Allore’s body, clothed only in her underwear, was found lying face down in a creek far from the road a mile outside of Compton (Allore and Pearson 2009). Concerned about protecting the reputation of the local college, police wrote off the 19-year-old’s death as an accidental drug overdose, despite a lack of pathological evidence to support their theory. Her death is now considered a murder, possibly linked to other similar homicides of young women in the region. However, the case remains unsolved because of the failure to properly collect and retain evidence from the original scene. In the mid-1990s, a large number of street sex trade workers reported missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside were written off by the police department’s major crime inspector as simply a matter of the women leaving town. The Vancouver missing women investigation eventually metastasized into the Pickton Pig Farm serial murder case, the worst in Canadian history (Oppal 2012).

  7. While some jurisdictional differences exist in investigative procedures (mainly legal in nature), their underlying structures, the nature of their failures, and how they might be improved are similar.

  8. A rush to judgment, if accurate, does not necessarily lead to failure by itself; however, it can become a problem if it results in confirmation bias because the detective is now less willing to change his or her opinion; consequently, case evidence may not be properly evaluated.

  9. Confirmation bias in a criminal investigation can be tested for by altering the temporal order of evidence discovery; if doing so influences any of the case conclusions, there is likely a problem with the investigative logic (Rossmo 2016).

  10. Imperial measurements were used in Canada in 1969; − 42 °F is equivalent to −41 ° C.

  11. The following discussion focuses on only key parts of the investigation; for more detail, see “Investigation into the Death of Gail Miller” (Chapter 8), Commission of Inquiry Into the Wrongful Conviction of David Milgaard (2005).

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Acknowledgements

A condensed version of this article was previously published in French in Criminologie. The current version includes updated and additional material.

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  1. Center for Geospatial Intelligence and Investigation, School of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Texas State University, 601 University Drive, San Marcos, TX, 78666, USA

    D. Kim Rossmo

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Correspondence to D. Kim Rossmo.

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Rossmo, D.K. Dissecting a Criminal Investigation. J Police Crim Psych 36, 639–651 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-021-09434-1

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