Righting Old Wrongs
Technology helps federal investigators revisit unsolved civil-rights-era cases and finally close some books on the past.
By Melissa Solomon
Federal Technology Magazine
November 2006
Keith Beauchamp came into this world long after Emmett Till left it, but Till’s image has haunted him since he was 10, when he first saw the infamous photo of Till’s battered corpse in an old issue of Jet magazine.
Nearly a half-century later, Beauchamp’s 2005 documentary, “The
Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,” revisited the case in
which the 14-year-old Chicago boy was murdered in 1955 for allegedly whistling
at a white woman while visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta.
Like other high-profile civil-rights-era cold cases, the Till investigation, which the Justice Department reopened after watching Beauchamp’s film, received a long-overdue jumpstart from today’s technology: tools as simple as a video camera and as sophisticated as DNA analysis. These types of technology, combined with the ability to amass information and run complex data analyses, are helping today’s investigators and prosecutors uncover truths that were believed to be buried years ago but still haunt the nation’s psyche.
“Every day brings something new in law enforcement’s ability to use technology to seek the truth,” says G. Douglas Jones, the former U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted Thomas Blanton in 2001 and Bobby Frank Cherry in 2002 for the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four girls in Birmingham, Ala. “Justice delayed doesn’t have to be justice denied.”
There has been such success in this area that even though the Justice
Department’s Civil Rights Division has reopened many of these
old cases, the House and Senate are considering a bill that would create
new Justice Department and FBI offices to focus exclusively on unsolved
cases from the civil rights era.
“More likely than not, because of technology, there’s a
greater chance today of solving” old homocide cases, says John
G. Raucci, special agent in charge at the Jackson, Miss., FBI office.
“When we open up any old homicide investigation, we recognize
that we have all sorts of tools available today that were not available
when the crime was committed,” says John G. Raucci, special agent
in charge at the Jackson, Miss., FBI office, which recently investigated
the Till murder and the slaying of three civil rights workers in 1964.
(An appeal of the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen is pending in that
second crime.) “More likely than not, because of technology,
there’s a greater chance today of solving the case.”
With 50 years’ distance from Till’s murder, Beauchamp relied on archival microfilm to piece together the basic facts of the investigation. Court documents, he was told, had long been missing. He used amateur filmmaking tools to interview witnesses who wanted to tell their stories.
Thanks to word-of-mouth via the Internet, Beauchamp caught the attention of the Justice Department, which subsequently decided to exhume Till’s body. Fifty years after Till was murdered, an autopsy helped FBI investigators determine the cause of death and locate bullet fragments. DNA was used to positively identify the corpse as Till’s, a fact that was disputed by defense attorneys in the 1955 trial. The Mississippi Delta district attorney is now considering whether to prosecute the case.
“Technology played a very significant role in getting this case reopened,” Beauchamp says. “If it wasn’t for the technology that kept these facts in existence after all these years, I never would have gotten this far.”
Time Travel
After the Birmingham church bombing, FBI agents gathered debris from
the crime scene, but their analysis provided few clues. Decades later,
investigators were sure that modern technology would provide leads
that their predecessors had missed.
Technology might have determined the type of explosive material used,
Jones explains. That could have dispelled rumors that it was a natural
gas explosion or provided insight into whether the bomb was produced
locally (dynamite was prolific in Birmingham because of a nearby plant)
or if it was a transported material, such as nitroglycerin.
Unfortunately, the evidence disappeared long ago. In 1963, no one dreamed
that a hair fiber would be that important, so evidence was often discarded
or misplaced, Jones says.
“Therein lies the real Achilles heel for a lot of these cases,” he explains. “There is always the hope that technology could shed some light on these old cases, but people have to be realistic at the end of the day.”
The bottom line in any cold case is what evidence has been preserved and in what condition. Advances in just the last couple of years have made it possible to analyze even the tiniest fragments of evidence, says Max Houck, a former FBI laboratory analyst who now directs the Forensic Science Initiative at West Virginia University.
Not long ago, investigators testing blood for DNA would need a coin-sized sample to analyze. In the past few years, the “detection limit” has reached the nanotechnology level, which means investigators only need a microscopic sample to find a potential DNA match.
Data Tales
Another major breakthrough in criminal investigative technology is
the ability to organize information into databases for everything
from DNA to automotive paint to fingerprints to firearms.
Data mining and analysis applications “allow for the correlation of information that would be almost impossible to sort through by hand,” Houck says. “That has revolutionized the way you can look at cases, especially old ones.”
Even though criminal databases have been around for years, their growing use has improved their effectiveness since more suspects are in the system. All 50 states require that DNA samples be entered into CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System database.
The technology behind the databases also is growing in sophistication, he adds. For instance, the algorithms used to analyze prints in the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) are far more complex than in the past.
That said, fingerprint technology still has room for improvement, says Dr. Jay Siegel, director of the forensic and investigative sciences program at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis. IAFIS can narrow a pool of suspects based on prints, but a manual comparison is required for a positive match. There are efforts to develop digital methods of comparing fingerprints that would allow computers to generate final matches, Siegel says.
Even old tools, such as polygraph tests, are “leaps and bounds” more sophisticated than in the past, Siegel says.
But, Houck says, in the end, the “technology is just a tool. What really matters is how it’s applied.”
From the Past to the Future
Not only does technology help today’s investigators sift through
evidence, it also provides an entirely new category of evidence for
them to investigate. Crimes of all types now involve computer evidence — files
that suspects believed were erased but can be recovered by computer
forensic analysts, even with just a fragment of a hard disk.
“This is a huge area,” says Dr. Jay Siegel, director of the forensic and investigative sciences program at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis. “That won’t help in cold cases, but today’s cases are tomorrow’s cold cases.”
The area of personal identification, such as iris scans, which let investigators pick suspects out of crowds, is improving greatly, Siegel adds. As are communication tools. “The day isn’t too far off when an officer can pull someone over, take a DNA sample, and get an answer back within minutes,” he says.
Bringing the Past to Life
From his perch on the witness stand, the Rev. John Cross brought the
courtroom back to the sad day in 1963, nearly four decades earlier,
when four girls died from a bomb that ripped through the church he
ministered. As he sifted through old photographs, describing the
events in each, the packed audience watched the images on courtroom
monitors.
“That was important because we had a whole series of photographs,” explains G. Douglas Jones, the former U.S. Attorney who successfully prosecuted the cases against suspects Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton, both of whom later died in prison.
When investigators reopened the 1963 Birmingham church bombing case,
they hit an instant roadblock. The evidence collected from the crime
scene was missing, so they couldn’t use
new technology to reanalyze the evidence as they had hoped.
But technology played a major role when the case went to trial, Jones
says.
“We had very little new evidence in the Blanton case, but we put it together and presented it in a new way,” Jones says.
PowerPoint presentations were used throughout the trial to present evidence, list major points in the case and drive home the prosecution’s key messages. “Those are things that are just critical to today’s courtroom,” Jones says.
Before the case even went to trial, prosecutors and investigators
used basic technologies, such as word processing software to cross-reference
interviews, and spreadsheet and database tools to organize and analyze
the evidence, Jones says. They went a long way toward bringing the
past into the present, he adds.
“I don’t think there’s any question that these cases
have had a tremendous impact on the community,” he adds. “Those
were scars that people were living with for a long time. The scars
are still there, but at least you’ve put some salve on them.”
Online Exclusive: New Insights On Old Crimes
It’s not just the increasing sophistication of technology that
has helped in cold case investigations, says John G. Raucci, Special
Agent in Charge at the Jackson, Miss., FBI office. Law enforcement
skills are expanding dramatically.
“People coming into law enforcement are so much smarter than in the ’70s,” he says. They’ve been schooled in 21st century law enforcement, so it’s natural for them to incorporate high-tech tools into their work.
Ground-penetrating radar, metal detectors and excavation tools regularly help unearth clues that would otherwise have gone undetected. Electronic interception and cellular telephone tracking have become standard surveillance tools, Raucci adds.
Technology also helps investigators by allowing them to collect, analyze, organize and transfer enormous volumes of data, Raucci says. When he attended law school, he had to dig through stacks of books to research cases. Now he can type a query into Lexis Nexis and e-mail the information to another investigator.
The FBI’s Evidence Response Team, which assists federal and local investigators with cases, uses tools such as alternate light source equipment, which puts out varying degrees of light beams to locate hairs and fibers, explains Paul Daymond, a spokesman for the FBI’s Birmingham field office. Electrostatic dust print lifters are used to locate faint prints by shooting rays of electricity off the surface and lifting the dust onto a piece of paper so the print can be seen clearly, he adds.
“Cold case investigators are a particular breed, says former FBI laboratory director Max Houck, who now directs the Forensic Science Initiative at West Virginia University. “They have to have a certain energy because the cases are very difficult to sort out.”