http://www.vidocq.org/nyt971202.html
Sleuths in Armchairs Pursue Crimes That Baffle the Authorities
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Vidocq Society Case-File Notes
By RONALD SMOTHERS
PHILADELPHIA -- Amid the cherry wood paneling and 17th-century English-style elegance of the Grill Room of the Downtown Club here, about 80 men and women were gathered over lunch to discuss and dissect a brutal unsolved murder of 15 years ago.
The case involves a girl, between 14 and 18 years old, whose decomposing body was found in a ravine alongside a cemetery in Blairstown, N.J., in summer 1982. She was wearing a red V-neck pullover and a red, white and blue print wraparound skirt with a peacock motif along the borders. Around her neck was a gold-colored chain with tiny white beads and a 14-karat gold cross. Her face had been bludgeoned beyond recognition with a blunt object.
The girl has never been identified. No weapon was ever found and no arrest ever made in the killing, which became known as the Princess Doe case.
The lawyers, former prosecutors, current and former federal agents and forensic specialists had gathered to toss out ideas for new approaches in the case; suggest scientific tests that might shed new light; reorder the facts to challenge the obvious; and speculate on a psychological profile and possible motive of a killer in the slaying in rural Warren County.
It was a meeting of the seven-year-old Vidocq Society, a private group that meets every other month and takes on unsolved murder or disappearance cases from around the country. In many instances, the trail has grown cold. But in others, the group assists the local authorities who are still investigating or, at the request of victims' families, provide ideas for faltering investigations.
This is not a gathering of a ragtag bunch of Baker Street Irregulars playing dutiful amanuensis to Sherlock Holmes' genius. Nor are they a bunch of good-natured Archie Goodwins, filling the role of narrator and legman to the sedentary but brilliant Nero Wolfe in the mystery novels of Rex Stout.
It is a group that collectively has hundreds of years of crime-solving experience. Their gatherings are a busman's holiday for people who concede that they just cannot help taking their work home with them.
Already they have quietly assisted on about 100 cases, resulting in some arrests and convictions. More often, their involvement has prodded investigators into new ideas and approaches.
The group is named for Eugene Francois Vidocq (pronounced vee-DUCK), a rakish 19th-century criminal-turned-detective who helped start, and later headed, the first detective squad for the Paris police.
Vidocq was a master of disguise, a fan of scientific tools in crime solving and a devotee of strict organization. He has been credited with introducing undercover work, ballistics testing and extensive record keeping into police work, and is thought to have been the inspiration for the detective Dupin in Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue." He is so much a part of French popular culture that he was the subject of comic books and a television cartoon series in the 1960s.
The Vidocq Society was started by William Fleisher, a former police officer and FBI and Customs Service agent who is now a polygraph expert; Frank Bender, an artist and forensic sculptor; and Richard Walter, a nationally known forensic psychologist who works with the Michigan Department of Corrections. The combination makes for some odd chemistry in crime solving, as Fleisher's methodical approach and bulldog tenacity mixes with Bender's intuitive, artistic sensibility, and Walter's wide-ranging mind, which searches for underlying patterns.
"The three of us sat down for lunch one holiday and were kicking old cases, solved and unsolved, back and forth, and the next thing I knew it was dark outside," said Fleisher of the three men's first meeting. "I suggested that we get a bunch of other people with similar interests together and do this more often. I sent out 28 letters and 26 people wrote back that they were interested."
Today the society has 82 regular members, matching the life span of its namesake, and more than 100 associate members, a designation created to accommodate the wide interest in joining the group. The three co-founders recently optioned the rights to their lives and the society's story to a Hollywood production company that is developing a script for a movie.
For members like Jeffrey Miller, a local defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor, it is "an exciting, fraternal group, not your normal gray lawyers group." The society aids law enforcement agencies, he said, which are often too busy with new cases to focus on cold cases, and comforts families trying to come to grips with the fate of a slain or missing loved one.
"And because we aren't doing this as some competing law enforcement agency but as a private group, there is little resentment from other investigators when we get involved," said Joseph O'Kane, the group's executive director and a customs agent. "What we have found is that some cases can be solved rather easily with the concentrated expertise we can bring in."
The group is credited by a Lubbock, Texas, assistant district attorney, Rusty Ladd, with buoying demoralized investigators in the 1991 disappearance of a car stereo installer, Roger Scott Dunn, and providing the expert help that led to a murder conviction in the case.
Theresa Baus, the sister of a Little Rock, Ark., restaurant manager murdered in 1991, said the society's work helped acquit a suspect who she and other family members felt was innocent, thereby assuaging their fear that "the conviction of the wrong person would forever prevent the capture of the right person." The killer remains at large.
The society suggested eight years after the 1984 murder of a shoeless and sockless Drexel University student that the police consider foot fetishists. That led to the arrest and conviction of a former security guard who had been dishonorably discharged from the military for stealing women's sneakers.
Over coffee and dessert at the lunch, Bender, the sculptor, recalled what was known about the Princess Doe case, presenting vivid slides of the battered and decomposed head, and showed a picture of a bust he made, for which he reconstructed her appearance. He also introduced several tidbits of evidence that might contribute to a profile of a suspect.
Joining the presentation was another member of the society, Dr. Haskell Askin, a forensic odontologist who has sought to match the body's teeth with the dental records of more than 30 missing girls. Even the experts were stumped; two found a match with a missing California teen-ager named Diane Dye, but two other odontologists insisted that there was no match. Askin's own determination was that it was inconclusive.
Walter, the forensic psychologist, called the crime "power assertive" rather than sexual, based largely on its brutal nature. It was "about dehumanizing her, taking away her face," he said, adding that he thought that killers of this type consider themselves "super John Wayne types and see themselves as superior to others."
Throughout the meeting, members commented from the floor as others made presentations. Some went with the momentum of Walter's analysis and built upon it. Others, like Donald Weinberg, a humanities professor at Community College of Philadelphia, challenged Walter's often neat constructions and tried to rein in Bender's intuitive leaps.
"Our client is justice here," Weinberg said. "We're not here to nail any one person."
Seated in the audience was an invited guest, the Warren County prosecutor, John J. O'Reilly, who took notes throughout the presentation. Afterward he said he was surprised at some of what he heard. He said that the case was very much alive and that as recently as September he had sent two investigators to Ocean City, Md., to pursue a tip on the possible identity of Princess Doe. But nothing came of it, he said.
As for the society members' speculation, O'Reilly said that he "may have heard a few things here that I might want to go back and double check."
More than an hour after the lunch ended, O'Reilly was huddled in a corner in whispered conversation with Walter.
Vidocq Society Case-File Notes
PHILADELPHIA MURDER, 1984
Victim: Deborah Lynn Wilson, Drexel University student, found beaten and strangled in a basement hallway without her shoes or socks ... Case was unsolved for eight years ... Vidocq Society called into the case in 1992 by Philadelphia Police Department and a private investigator hired by victim's family ... Vidocq members suggest that police check their files for known foot fetishists as well as look for such a fetish among possible suspects ... The cross-checking turns up a former Drexel security guard who had been court-martialed for stealing women's sneakers and socks ... The guard, David Dickson Jr., is arrested and convicted of murder in 1995.
LUBBOCK, TEXAS, MURDER/DISAPPEARANCE, 1991
Victim: Roger Scott Dunn disappears from his apartment ... At the scene are signs of a struggle, a blood-soaked carpet and blood spatters, all matching Dunn's blood type, but no body ... Vidocq Society called into the case by the victim's father after police are stymied and unable to press a case without a weapon, body or body part, as required by Texas law ... Vidocq members arrange for detectives and prosecutors to talk with Scotland Yard experts on blood spattering to establish that there had been a violent crime, and with other forensic pathologists, who established that death had to result from the amount of blood found in the apartment ... Disposition: Two persons are arrested; one person is convicted in July 1997; second trial pending.
LITTLE ROCK, ARK., MURDER, 1991
Victim: William Huey Cox, a restaurant manager found dead in his apartment ... The police initially theorize a suicide, but an autopsy shows he was beaten to death with what appeared to be a golf club ... A fellow worker implicated in another crime is arrested, but victim's relatives raise doubts that he is the murderer... Society members get access to detailed files in the case and work with the lawyer for the man arrested in the crime, providing questions to the lawyer to be put to prosecution witnesses ... Disposition: Defendant acquitted ... Case remains open.
