ETA: lenthy story at link includes interview with Kelsi German
Halfway Across: The Delphi Murders
2/1/19
David Lambkin is one of the nation’s foremost experts in cold-case homicide investigations. Now retired, he was the officer in charge of the Los Angeles Police Department’s first cold-case unit, a then-novel approach that has since become common in large police departments. Lambkin has analyzed thousands of murder cases in his career. When it comes to the murders of Abby and Libby, his view is concise.
“No way that’s a cold case; it’s continuing and ongoing,” he says. “In L.A., we defined a cold-case homicide as any unsolved murder committed more than five years ago that has no significant leads and is no longer being investigated by area detectives based on solvability and/or workload.”
By that metric, the case certainly doesn’t fit. Riley says there are currently between three and five state troopers working it on a daily basis, and that the Carroll County Sheriff’s Department, Delphi city police, and FBI remain actively involved as well.
“We’re always working new leads,” he says, dismissing the idea that the investigation has gone dormant.
That work has involved a tight-lipped approach, though. On Libby’s cellphone, a video and additional audio exist but haven’t been shared, despite the prolonged period without an arrest.
“We continually evaluate that,” Riley says when asked about the possibility of releasing more evidence from the phone. “We talk about it once or twice a week. But at this point in time, no, we won’t be releasing more. We don’t want to put all of our cards on the table.”
Police also requested that the autopsy results be sealed, leaving a situation where the cause of death is identified as homicide, but the manner of the killings in unknown. In Delphi—and around the world on social media—people have grumbled about this approach, arguing that the more information is released, the better the chances of a successful tip leading to a conviction.
Lambkin, the cold case expert, disagrees with such complaints.
“If it was up to me, I’d have every autopsy sealed, because there’s always something there that only the perpetrator will know,” he says. “The location of the wounds is really important. I don’t want people to know injury information on a big case, because you’ll get people confessing who had nothing to do with it. Why does the public need to know?”
One of the greatest potential aids for the case is a resource that wasn’t available at the time of the murders. A state law change effective January 1, 2018—nearly a year after the slayings—allows police to take DNA samples from anyone arrested for a felony offense. Those samples are then searched against national databases for matches, and recorded. Previously, DNA samples were taken only from those convicted of a felony. Within the first quarter of 2018, Indiana investigators got 72 hits from arrestee-sample DNA.
Lambkin credits this change to many successful prosecutions in California, which went to an arrestee-sample approach in 2009. “The case-to-case hits skyrocketed after we expanded who got into that system,” he says. Amid all of those hits was a startling realization to homicide detectives. “A lot of these serial rapists and killers float under the radar, and people always expect that if they’ve been arrested before, it’s for violent crime. That’s absolutely what we expected. But what we found out was that two-thirds of the matches we were getting on rapes and murders were people who had been arrested for property crimes, drugs, or white-collar crimes.”
Lambkin offers one other point of consideration for those who feel the pace of the case suggests hopelessness.
“There’s a chance they’ve got a suspect who is already in custody somewhere else,” he says. “I’m not saying that they do, but I can say from experience that if you believe that’s the case, then you don’t need to rush. Even if you’ve got DNA, you want to be able to prove your case independent of DNA. Prove your case and exhaust everything else.”
