*pulls up a chair*
Hi. Finally up to date, after reading and reading and reading threads one to one hundred and sixty five since I joined in October. Definitely a marathon, not a sprint.
I don't know that I have much of use to add at this point except my impression of the investigation. That above everything, it most closely reminds me of that of the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper.
Their enormous lazy susan of index cards, the sheer weight of thousands of paper files that caused a structural engineer palpitations until they reinforced the floor.
And with all that 'revolutionary' organisation of astronomical amounts of information, they missed the killer over and over again, despite interviewing him multiple times, because the system was deeply flawed.
Even in a digital age, once the volume gets to a certain point, it's very, very easy for mistakes to creep in that lead to critical things being misfiled or overlooked. And whether you're analogue or digital, the saying 'garbage in, garbage out' applies. Just ticking the wrong box can consign something important to investigative Siberia, to languish there until someone goes back to the original information.
Their default here seems to have been to maintain that they hadn't been given the right information yet and to beg for more tips. The public obliged, and yet the investigation didn't progress. I don't know why they didn't visit and revisit every witness from those first days dozens of times over the course of the investigation, but for whatever reason, it didn't happen, because otherwise, we would have been here six years ago.
Fortunately, I do believe that they have the right person in custody. I just hope there haven't been any more victims in the intervening years.
MOO