Achi news desk-
They are the amateurs who spend hours on the Internet trying to solve crimes – not always with the blessing of the police.
But this new wave of armchair detectives actually helped put dozens of murderers and pedophiles at bay, including the killer of an 11-year-old boy who had been missing for nearly three decades.
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They also captured a heartless killer who dismembered his roommate’s body and helped loved ones find the truth about the body of a young student found in a water tank in a Los Angeles hotel.
Now true crime fans have the chance to show off their detective work by taking part in the hunt for a killer – hiding 9,000 miles away at a remote research station in Antarctica.
The fictional murder mystery in Spotify’s new podcast series, Cold Tapes, focuses on the death of 33-year-old behavioral scientist Andrew Fairfield.
With each episode, listeners will look to piece together the clues and uncover the killer – with a real £10,000 prize on offer to the winner.
For inspiration, we look at the hard work of the most notable cases cracked by cyber evil.
bucket head
In 2001, Ronald Telfer brought home a plastic bucket full of concrete that he found abandoned at a Missouri truck stop.
He hoped to use it to feed his pigs, but when he removed the contents he found what he thought were animal remains trapped inside.
In fact, the grim discovery was the remains of a human skull belonging to Greg May – who had been reported missing months earlier.
Greg was murdered by his close friend Doug DeBruin – who intended to sell the victim’s valuable antiques from the Civil War.
With the help of his girlfriend, Dibruin dismembered the body and scattered it in various places, placed Greg’s head in a bucket and poured cement inside.
After the skull was turned over to the Missouri State Police, officers hired a forensic sculptor to recreate Gregg’s face.
Enter Ellen Leach, a former supermarket worker who devotes her spare time to investigating cold cases from her home in Orange Grove, USA.
In 2004, Ellen spotted a photograph of Greg on the Iowa Missing Person website and linked it to a legal recreation she had seen on another forum.
Tips for armchair detectives
While there are no set rules when it comes to investigating a cold case, the avid John Lordan fan has a rough plan that he usually sticks to when creating his videos.
He says: “In the beginning I will do a media review, I will go over everything that is available to the public.
“If there’s any kind of police material or released statements, I’ll include them all as well. I’ll usually start without any direct contact with the family, before I hear from them.
“People might be upset at first and ask why I didn’t reach out to ask them about it first, but I’ve found that information from family can be the most biased yet.”
Todd Matthews agrees and suggests that the first step should always be to look through old newspaper articles, gathering all the public information you can together.
In the meantime, according to an online Jack The Ripper travel guide, some simple tips to stick to include paying attention to the small details, walking away if you get too invested in research – as it can cloud your judgment – and being adaptable, tailoring your research to each individual case in place according to one uniform method.
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Coincidentally, Greg’s memorabilia began appearing on various auction sites months later, and the police were able to track down the seller – who was DeBruin.
With the help of Allen’s elements, investigators were able to piece the two pieces of evidence together and convict De Bruyne of first-degree murder and first-degree theft in 2005.
Mother captures masked kidnapper
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In 1989, 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling was riding his bike to his local video store in Minnesota with his younger brother and a friend when he was abducted by a masked stranger.
The police arrived at the scene within six minutes, but the young man had already disappeared and for the next 27 years his case would not be solved.
But the family’s agonizing wait for answers inspired mum-of-two Joy Baker to launch her own investigation.
The 57-year-old woman told The Sun: “Everyone was shocked and horrified and everyone wanted to help… It’s so hard to describe what our country was like at that time.”
With the case open, Joy created a blog in 2010 called “Where Are You Jacob?” – Dedicated to a child who has been missing for 21 years.
She filled her content with police files and archived newspapers and tried to discredit the theories of the past.
She found that local law enforcement failed to follow up on credible leads, evidence was mishandled and key witnesses were never interviewed.
Her research eventually led her to the case of another young boy who was kidnapped and attacked by a masked man – just nine months before Jacob disappeared and only ten kilometers away.
Now a man in his thirties, the victim, Jared Shearle, was desperate for justice and teamed up with Joy to uncover a string of unsolved sexual assaults on young boys that took place between 1986 and 1897.
They mapped all the incidents which revealed a clear cluster around the town of Paynesville, which they flagged to the police.
Through Joy’s work, the case went viral and tips poured in.
In October 2015, advances in DNA testing since the late 1980s meant evidence from the crime scene linked Jared’s attack to local man Daniel James Heinrich, now 59, who was originally investigated by police over Jacob’s disappearance. He was a 100 percent match.
Tragically, the statute of limitations applied to Jared’s case, meaning he could not be prosecuted for murder, although the law has since changed. But Heinrich was charged with 25 counts of child pornography and jailed for 20 years in November 2016.
Henrich confessed to kidnapping, sexually assaulting and killing the young boy, and as part of a plea deal, he revealed the location of Jacob’s remains which were buried in a field near Painesville – where many of the other attacks took place.
A dead woman in a tent
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Todd Matthews began researching his recliner after hearing how his father-in-law discovered a woman’s body wrapped in a tent in 1968.
The grim discovery in Georgetown, Kentucky would be nicknamed “Tent Girl” because the woman was never identified and the trail went cold.
Todd, who died earlier this year, began his detective work in the 1990s and recalled: “Back then you couldn’t Google a filing cabinet. The struggle was real, you had to get in your car and drive there to get any material.”
Due to the victim’s small frame, police assumed the “tent girl” could be 13 to 16 years old.
This clashed with Todd’s father-in-law’s memories of her having painted fingernails, full breasts and a child’s nappy in a bag – suggesting she was an adult.
Years later, with the birth of the Internet, factory worker Todd was able to reach cold forums and present his findings.
Todd said: “Eventually I saw a listing from a woman looking for her sister who was last seen in December 1967 in the area… I just knew.”
After sharing notes, the two were able to exhume the body in 1998.
A DNA test identified the tragic find as the woman’s sister – Barbara Ann Hackman Taylor.
A body rotting in a water tank
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In 2013, the naked body of Canadian student Alyssa Lam was found floating in a water tank on the roof of a downtown Los Angeles hotel.
The chilling discovery was made after guests complained about the smell and taste of the water in the hotel.
Authorities later released CCTV footage of her in an elevator – shortly before she was last seen alive – sparking a flood of online conspiracy theories.
The video showed her acting erratically and appearing to gesture a lot while trying to hide.
Hobbyist John Lorden recalled: “People had all these crazy theories, one person said they saw a ghost in the elevator, another said it was someone in military camouflage gear. Some of them were very disrespectful.”
This prompted him to create a YouTube video about the case, with the aim of debunking some of the theories.
As he investigated further, Lordan dug up legal documents from a wrongful-death lawsuit filed against the hotel by Lam’s family and shared his findings with his followers.
He also visited the hotel himself and found that there were only two ways up to the roof – an outdoor fire escape and an indoor stairwell that was supposedly closed by a worried door.
John explained: “The story was that the hatch [on top of the water tank] It was closed when it was found, so how did it close? That had to mean someone had been up there and put her in there.
“But when we got to the legal documentation, we learned that the hatch was really off. There was a specific statement from the guy who found it, he got up there and saw that the hatch had been removed.”
Through John’s findings and the video reconstructions, Lam’s death was eventually ruled accidental by a US court.
Don’t mess with cats
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Perhaps the most well-known large-scale test of the armchair was by a group of cat lovers who brought down the sick Canadian killer Luca Magnotta.
The twisted killer, then 30, courted notoriety online by circulating videos of himself killing kittens — even feeding one to a python.
In 2010, Magnotta horrifyingly shared another video of himself suffocating two kittens in a plastic bag using a vacuum cleaner.
For the next 18 months, internet stalkers followed his online activities, with the aim of tracking him down.
But in 2012, his crime spree escalated and he murdered his lover Lin Jun, a 33-year-old computer engineering student from China, and posted an online video of himself killing Lin and abusing her body.
The cat-loving idiots helped the police nail the sick torturer, and in 2014 he was found guilty of killing John Lin, dismembering his body and placing his hands and feet wrapped in pink tissue for schools and political parties.
The extraordinary case went on to inspire the 2019 Netflix series Don’t F**K With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer.
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