I hear you, loud and clear. Just yesterday I was watching Investigative Discovery cover a Cleveland, Ohio case about a 15 year old girl who left the house after a fight with her father, and went to a friend's house. Two days later the father reported her missing. Without going into the long, drawn-out details of this case, there was a tipster who reported a suspicious looking vehicle very close to where her body was found during the time frame when she was missing but not yet found dead. Instead of taking the report seriously, and trying to track down the red station wagon ( the tipster gave a very detailed report of the car, make, model, year, etc) the tipster was treated like a suspect by LE. When he passed a lie detector test, and was cleared, the manila envelope with the tipster's information was placed in the file with no identifying label. LE never pursued finding the car and its owner.
Fast forward 9 years later. A task force was going over cold cases and this case was one of them. The head of the task force started from the beginning, and was going over everything in the case file. She found the manila envelope, opened it, and decided to follow up on finding the owner of the car. No easy task since 9 years had gone by. But, she did track down the info. It turned out that an RSO had owned the car, and had been released from prison on parole just before the girl was found murdered. Although the car had long been sent to the junk yard, the man was found in prison. After a series of interviews, charges were brought. Before the trial date he confessed. Nine years later - and all because a tip brought in was not explored. I found myself wondering how many of these cases we follow here has some item of information that was not explored by LE; and how many of those cases would those unexplored items of info result in solving with a little research??? This poor girl's father was an alcoholic, and the focus was on him, and the older brother's friends for years. I only wish every LE officer would see that ID episode, and learn from it. JMO