With respect to what information investigators were able to get about cell phones in the area at the time of the crime, an excerpt from this interview with Robert Ives conducted with the producers of Down the Hill was revealing:
ANDREW: You mentioned that, especially in the early days, you were involved with drafting a lot of affidavits for search warrants. Can you put some sort of number in how many you were involved in?
ROBERT IVES: Dozens. I mean,
a lot. There were a few search warrants. There weren’t so many search warrants, but there were
lots of subpoenas. In this case, we were trying to get cell phone locations or numbers of cell phones, or identities of cell phone numbers, things like that, and similar things during that period of time. We cranked out a lot of that, but it didn’t lead to anything significant.
NARRATOR: Let’s talk cell phones. For a lot of people who follow this case, the locations of cell phones– specifically the ones near The Monon High Bridge at the time of the murders– is a meaty topic of discussion. Whose phone is pinging where, and why? That was a major point of interest for investigators, too. And how that all works? There’s more to it than you might think.
ROBERT IVES: A frustrating thing… this is probably difficult to explain in the course of podcast… but the law on searches with relation to cell phones and cell phone locations was evolving right at the time this was going on, and I think some of the people discussing it didn’t always understand. Like, they would say “Well if you want to know a cell phone location, why don’t you get a search warrant?” And the problem with that is, let’s take this case, it’s a perfect example: There’s a tower near the crime scene and cell phones pinged off that tower around the time of the crime. We would like to know who they pinged off. Say, “well why don’t you get a search warrant?”. Because there is
no probable cause to believe that any particular phone is going to tell us anything about the crime. There is no probable cause.
People act like a search warrant is easy to get. No! Because we don’t think any particular phone is a criminal, but if we want to get a pool of 25 people who were in the area and therefore could possibly have committed the crime, you have to find out. And this is the difficulty of the modern electronic world. Of course, to look in your phone? I think clearly that’s a search warrant situation, that’s your private property. That’s like opening your house or going in your car in your person. But the location of your phone? I certainly understand people’s concerns about their privacy. ‘Why can the government figure out where I am?’ Then on the other hand, when your two little girls are dead and you want to find out who was nearby in the last 2 hours, it’s terrible not to be able to get that information. And the idea is,
well, I’ll just get a search warrant. That’s not logically or legally practical. And so, this is something society has to think about more. Because cell phone location data for a case like this, which is a lot of what I was doing at that time, could potentially be really valuable. Because, you know, Carroll County: 380 square miles, 20,000 people. Very few people were out near that crime scene at the time. It’s not like…
BARBARA: –it’s a Monday afternoon.
ROBERT IVES: You aren’t going to ping on 500 phones at that period of time.
The bolding was done by the site that transcribed this interview:
Delphi Murders 3 Signatures: Robert Ives Interview Transcript from 'Down the Hill' Podcast - CrimeLights
