BBM:
I respectfully disagree.
This is the way criminal investigations work, regardless of whether they're conducted by the military or by local LEAs.
I've followed numerous missing person's cases here where LE has remained extremely tight-lipped right up until the time an arrest is made.
Evidence-gathering and analysis takes time.
I also suspect the current covid situation has also caused some of the evidence processing to take longer.
CID really doesn't owe the public anything at all right now.
It's not their job to satisfy the public's curiosity as to the case progress.
Their job is to determine what happened to VG, and if she has become the victim of foul play, to ensure the guilty party is brought to justice.
To that end, they'll do what they have to do to protect the integrity of their investigation.
I have every confidence they're doing their due diligence to determine who is responsible for VG's disappearance, and what exactly happened to her.
JMO.
This is absolutely spot on. A few days ago I wrote a summary on the Suzanne Morphew Thread of what Is happening when you are investigating a murder or major incident or missing person enquiry , as I spent 30 years as a Detective Chief Inspector and SIO ( senior investigating officer ) in charge of 80 plus detectives and I was personally responsible for leading a team on such investigations. I am putting it here for reference and for any of my fellow WSleuthers who didn’t see my original post . I also apologise to those that have seen it and think it’s repetitive...
I don’t know if the following post will help my fellow Websleuths members with regards to how a major investigation is run . I have tentatively mentioned this in a previous post but I have had quite a few questions privately in response so I decided to tidy up and expand my previous post ...
Here goes ....
With any major enquiry wether that be a murder / Homicide or a missing person , a dedicated team of detectives is set up with a SIO ( senior investigative officer) as the lead .
Certainly in the UK, a policy book is commenced and everything that you know , everything that subsequently happens, every decision taken and every action followed up, is written into the policy book . Every decision made by the SIO and the justification behind such a decision, has to be written into the policy book .
I was responsible for leading a number of murder investigations and Missing persons investigations and I would lead teams of detectives and forensic experts etc
A twice daily briefing would be held where everyone has an input as to what has happened that day , any evidence found , any witnesses spoken to etc and a summary of the day’s investigation would be written up by the SIO.
Each investigation has a strategy and that strategy is followed from the Murder and Major Crime investigations Manual .
So at the start of the investigation, there will be various strategies drawn up to encompass all of the different strands of the Investigation.
They are :
1.Victim - what do we know ?
2. Suspect - Do we have any?
3. Circumstances of last seen
4. Intelligence - What do we know ? What can we find out?
5. Cell phone analysis
6. Forensics - what do we have ? How are they to be prioritised? Submissions to laboratory and cost?
DNA evidence
Fingerprints
7. Search parameters and recovery of evidence to include continuity of retrieval
8. CCtv - What’s available ? How do we prioritise it?
9. Cell Phones - Victims, Suspect’s, Family etc
10. Family History
11. Actions - those raised that need investigation and those that are considered but not deemed to take the investigation further ( but it still all needs recording )
12. Forensic mapping
13. Witnesses
14. Interviews - suspect/s?
15. Exhibits/Property Officer - to record everything brought into the enquiry and the continuity of that evidence
16. File of evidence - Who will create the file of evidence for submission to CPS/DA
17. Warrants - allocated officer to swear all warrants
18. Disclosure - Officer allocated to start a disclosure record ( court process )
19. Family liaison officer - Officer allocate to be the go between for the family and SIO
20. Media strategy - controlled release of information to press
I could go on but I think that you get the drift that any investigation of this type is massive and takes time and has to be that way to get it right so that by the time it gets to the Court process, there’s no room for doubt or for weaknesses in the investigation to allow the accused to get off on a technicality or procedural issue .
Then if there is a suspect you need to start thinking of who will do the suspect interview and the downstream monitoring and alibi checks .
And on top of all that, the biggest and most onerous task besides cell phone evidence retrieval, is CCTV ! And that is a biggie ... it takes Detectives hours upon hours to go through and watch CCTV to enable them to ascertain if there is anything of evidential value on each individual recording and that can be CCTV from the street , from a shop, car park, toll booth , buildings, churches , Public CCTV along a route and individual CCTV in peoples driveways or on their mobile phones etc
You start to get the idea of just how much work is involved in a major investigation and that’s before you go to a judge to swear out warrants and arrest the perpetrator. Once an arrest takes place, you then have interviews and downstream monitoring in real time of the interviews and then liaison with the CPS in UK and DA/attorney general I think maybe in the USA? And then putting the whole file of evidence together and ensuring full disclosure to the defence ... it’s massive workloads and it goes on and on ...
Cell phone data is also massive because of pings of location and subsequent searches and data dumps of all cell phones active within a specific MAST area and tracing who those numbers belong to and ascertain what they were doing in the area. And I can tell you that the evidence from one cell phone alone can run into thousands of pages for my detectives to read through and decipher what, If anything, is relevant to the case . So can you imagine when you have numerous people involved in an investigation, wether it to be rule them in or out or as an alibi or a victim, just how onerous this task is? And it is just one small part of the investigation.
Also the CCTV , people ask why now , 1 month later ? Well you don’t know what evidence that LE already have and if they had nothing else then the individual private residence CCTV would have been done immediately but it is a massive task and takes officers hours and hours to sit and watch every piece of CCTV that comes into the enquiry so it’s now easier to say , keep hold of your own individual residential CCTV and if you think that you have something of importance then let us know immediately otherwise we will get round to looking at it when we can because EVERYTHING has to be prioritised.
In the UK we have HOLMES ( home office Major enquires system ) and everything is entered into the system and looked at by three officers working with admin staff and any actions deemed necessary as a result of those 3 officers painstakingly going through every piece of information, item, cell phone number, cctv , search recovery evidence etc and allocating actions ( work ) to officers to compete before they are given another action . And some officers are individually given specific roles for example CCTV, Cell phones, Intelligence, Statement takers , Family liaison .
So this gives you an idea of just what is going on behind the scenes .
And the information released has to be protected and provenanced to ensure accuracy and the SIO doesn’t want information released unless absolutely necessary because the perpetrator may slip up and say something that hasn’t yet been released to the public and that then becomes dynamite to the investigation.
I hope this helps you all to understand the process , procedures and time for any major investigation to bear fruit .
Regarding technology- People do not realise just how much electronic tracking there is in our everyday lives and the footprint that we leave . Let’s take for example the obvious ones like public CCTV and residential / business CCTV and street CCTV , shop and bank and fuel CCTV, road surveillance CCTV to monitor traffic flow and speed camera CCTV etc The list is endless! Then there are tracking devices on the car if there is one , then there is the cell phone and text message/social media footprints alongside Pings
But - there are some footprints that we either don’t think about or are not aware of for example I own a luxury ( ish ) brand of car and I don’t have a key , I have a black plastic fob that I carry around which activates the car but without inserting it anywhere within my car console. Now when my car has a problem and I go to the dealership, this fob is inserted into their computer and it tell you every journey I have made and the status of the car throughout that journey, if the fuels low , if the seatbelt warning is activated, if any warning lights come on , if tyre pressure is low etc
I was gobsmacked just how much information that could be obtained and to be quite honest, I am a law abiding citizen but it scared even me , just how much we are being monitored. Then there is ANPR both mobile and static and lets not forget that it’s not only your cell phone that can be pinged and calls traced but LE can go to any mast and triangulate all mobile cell phones that ping off a particular mast at a given time and they can cross reference the data from this to any of the contacts in your phone and see if there are any patterns . So just from this you can start to see how many avenues are open for LE to look at. And then we have instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp and snapchat and Twitter and email and fit bits and apple watches and you start to get my drift .....
Edited to add: We have family Life 360 so that we can see where our children are and vice versa and my DH decided to turn his location permissions off
BUT although it does not now tell me his location in words, it does show him driving down the various roads and highways when he’s out and about. So another form of surveillance and if somebody was going to commit a heinous crime, they cannot possibly erase all their electronic footprints
Then we have Amazon Alexa and Smart devices ...
The list is endless!
