The rumour that was started by the Murder Sheet was that an FBI agent misfiled the tip in the system which caused it to be lost for years. Somehow “finding” this tip “solved” this case.
A surname of a random person shouldn’t matter and isn’t misfiling. That would be an data entry error and not really affect the tip becoming “lost” within the system.
If there was a civilian tip, they would get RAs real name.
They also said they were combing over every tip. Why didn’t they “find” the tip then?
It’s all strange and unbelievable. MOO
They got tens of thousands of tips. Once you get that much information coming in, unless there is a very, very good management of that information, it collapses under its own weight and crucial information gets missed, not just once, but sometimes many times.
I mentioned the Yorkshire Ripper earlier with good reason. The system created for that investigation was literally destroying the building with the weight of paperwork (no, really, they had to reinforce the building to prevent a collapse). They had thousands of tips, tens of thousands of actions, and still, the victims kept being attacked and/or killed.
They interviewed Sutcliffe no fewer than nine times. None of those interviews led to his arrest, despite many, many things suggesting he was a strong suspect.
In the end, he was arrested by a suspicious uniform cop who found him parking with a sex worker and thought the situation was weird. Once he'd dropped Sutcliffe at the station, he returned to the location and found the weapons Sutcliffe had tried to hide.
The investigation in the first months of this case reeks of the same desperation as the Ripper investigation, but also, the same disorganisation. How often was it said that they had mumblety eleven tips, but they hadn't got the RIGHT one yet? I think a lot of things from early on got glanced at, filed, then they'd call for new tips. How often were those early tips pulled out and combed over? I suspect not as often as they ought to have been.
MOO