http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/20...amateur_internet_detectives_catch_a_long.html
Can a Group of Amateur Internet Detectives Catch the Golden State Killer?
DIY detectives congregate at the online message boards for a television show called Cold Case Files, an A+E program that was cancelled in 2006.
Others flock to The Doe Network (“There is no time limit to solving a mystery”, a website devoted to identifying missing persons and investigating cold cases, or another site called websleuths.com.
While their methods may be unorthodox, they occasionally get results—the Doe Network claims that its members have solved or helped solve more than 66 cases, most recently helping to identify the remains of Peggy Sue Houser, who went missing in 1981.
There’s nothing new about amateur detectives. They’re everywhere in fiction: Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, the kid from Cop and a Half. The real-life Vidocq Society is a mystery-solving club comprised of prosecutors, coroners, criminal profilers, and other subject-matter experts; they’ve helped solve numerous cold cases over the club’s 23-year history. The common thread here is that the amateurs are somehow smarter or more perceptive than their professional counterparts. That’s the value-add.
From what I can tell, most Internet sleuths aren’t trained investigators or preternaturally perceptive polymaths; they’re just homebodies with a lot of time on their hands. There are “a spectrum of personality types on the message board,” writes McNamara, “from paranoid cranks to the raw, curious insomniacs driven by the same compulsion to piece together the puzzle as I am.”
Their value-add, in other words, is diligence, the patience and commitment needed to investigate every potential lead, no matter how seemingly irrelevant. They do the tasks that actual investigators could never do, either because they lack the time or because the tasks make no sense.
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