FINDING DIGITAL EVIDENCE, ELICITATION OF DETECTIVES, AND RP STATEMENTS - 094

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This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, finding digital evidence, elicitation of detectives and RP statements.

I'm Adam Richardson, and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau.

Welcome to episode number 94 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime related fiction. This week I'm answering your questions about finding digital evidence when the devices are missing, elicitation of detectives by a mole within the police department and where to believably take a statement from a reporting party. But before we get into that, I need to thank Gold Shield Patrons, Debra Dunbar from debradunbar.com, C.C. Jameson from ccjameson.com, Larry Keeton, Vicki Tharp of vickitharp.com, Chrysann, Larry Darter, Natalie Barelli, Craig Kingsman of craigkingsman.com, Lynn Vitale, Marco Carocari of marcocarocari.com, Robert Mendenhall of robertjmendenhall.com, Terry Swan and Rob Kerns of knightsfallpress.com.

By the way, thanks, Rob, for upping your monthly pledge. I appreciate it. But I want to thank all of them for their support, along with my silver cufflink and coffee club patrons. You can find links to all of the patrons supporting this episode in the show notes at writersdetective.com/94. To learn more about using Patreon to grow your author business, or to support this podcast for as little as $2 per month, check out writersdetective.com/patreon. P-A-T-R-E-O-N.

So before we get started, how are you guys holding up? It has been a busy few weeks of craziness around here, and it looks like Tuesdays are going to be the new podcast drop days each week, as I'm now working weekend nights for the foreseeable future. It's been quite a while since I lived like a vampire, but despite the toll it takes on the home life, I have always liked being out and about at night, or at least when it comes to work. Also, I want to give a huge shout out and thank you to the writers of Kern for having me open their yearly writers conference this week, albeit virtually. I wish I'd been there in person, but thank you for that and welcome to the Bureau. So without any further ado, let's get to this week's questions.

Author S.C. Wynne, whom you can find at scwynne.com, and that's S-C-W-Y-N-N-E, asked this in the Writer's Detective Q&A Facebook group. "I have a question. I did a search, but didn't see this anywhere. If the police have a murder victim they suspect met the guy on a dating site, but they don't know which one, would they check every dating site in existence? I find this hard to believe since there are over 1500 sites or something, but I'd like to be accurate. They know the victim's name, but his laptop and phone are missing."

The old proverbial needle in the digital haystack. The investigative steps would start with what the detectives would have access to, and namely the evidence they could find in the murder victim's possession or in his home that could lead them forward. Now in previous episodes and back when I blogged, I talked about a Mincey warrant. M-I-N-C-E-Y. Essentially, this is the search warrant detectives get when they need to search a homicide scene or the location related to the decedent in the homicide case.

So in this case, the detectives would likely get a Mincey warrant for the victim's home. Now, for the sake of argument, let's just say the victim lived alone in an apartment. That Mincey affidavit, meaning the application to the judge asking for the search warrant, is going to ask the judge to approve the search of the apartment for the seizure of specific things, but it will be a laundry list of things that will hopefully be evidence in the crime. Now, the obvious things would be any kind of bodily fluids or fingerprints, hair samples, carpet fibers, that kind of stuff, that could possibly be related to the crime. It's important to note that anything that detectives asked to seize in the warrant need to be justified for in that affidavit.

Again, the affidavit is the application for the warrant and then the warrant itself is the court order that says go forth and do this, signed by the judge. So if I say I want to look for these items I just mentioned, then I would need to explain in my affidavit that it is my training and experience that bodily fluids, fingerprints, hair samples, and carpet fibers, and their subsequent scientific examination, may determine the identities of persons responsible for the killing of the victim. Okay. So knowing what the Mincey is for and how to use it, another common thing to look for in a murder victim's home is correspondence and electronic communications devices. In your scenario, S.C., we don't have access to the devices themselves, but if we include correspondents and other indicia, such as canceled mail, billing records, invoices and the like in our affidavit, we could seize things like the cell phone bill that was mailed to the victim or the internet contract in the filing cabinet or the invoice for the storage unit he rents.

Once we're in the victim's home and talking to the victim's friends and family, we could pretty quickly establish the phone and internet service providers the victim used. From there, we would author another search warrant for the records both service providers have. So in these warrants, we would have to explain what records we're looking for and why, which would essentially be that we're looking for the IP addresses and URLs, meaning the website names, that the victim accessed along with any call detail records in a specified amount of time, so let's say the last 90 days, because we believe the victim may have been in contact with the person responsible for their murder. We could do the same thing for the victims credit cards and so on. But each one of these searches would be another search warrant. In theory, at least.

I mean, there are ways to conduct multiple records searches for multiple businesses in a single warrant, but since this is not a search warrant class for new detectives, just know that this is so not important to your story and I won't bore you with the minutia of how to write search warrants. Okay. So within 10 days or so, honestly, it's usually longer, but 10 days is what the law says is what is supposed to be the deadline for these businesses once we serve them with the warrant. So within that 10 days, then the companies should have come back to us with the records. So now, once we get those records back, our detectives will be able to see that the victim was accessing dating website abc.com or IP address 123.456.789.01, which resolves to dating website abc.com. For the search of the cell phone provider, we could see which phone numbers he called or texted, or those that called or texted him and that kind of thing.

We may not be able to get the content of those texts or phone calls, but we should be able to see which numbers and any call details like how long the calls lasted. Since I've been doing this helping writers thing for a while, my recommendation is to use this potential 10 day wait to your advantage, as it relates to setting up your story timeline and to create progressive complications for your protagonist. So if you need the records to appear quickly, then by all means, have your detectives request a rush as this is a homicide case and have the company graciously fast track this so you can get it into the hands of your character within a matter of hours, or maybe a day or two.

Or you could go the realistic route where tech companies despise having to comply with court orders for law enforcement, and even though it's a homicide, you're now the 275th homicide detective in line waiting for a record search because this is an international company, and after all, you still have to wait your turn. Getting it done in 10 days is often an undue burden on this giant company that has an intentionally tiny legal compliance department. I've seen records like this take 30 or 60 days in a homicide case. If it's a case for anything else, it might even be 90 days, especially if you're looking for a lot of different kinds of information, which is why I limited the scope to the last 90 days in my example. Because the more I asked for the longer it's going to take to get back from the company. So I hope this helps, S.C. Thanks for your question.

Ryan Elder is back with another great question. So Ryan writes, "Thank you very much again for your advice and podcasts. I really appreciate it and it's helped me a lot. I'm glad to see that the show is pulling through in these tougher times. I have a question about a screenplay I'm writing. A gang of criminals have a mole. A crooked cop in the police department, working for them, trying to find out information on what the police have on them. However, when a mole has to find out what other cops in the department have on a case that is not his, how would the mole talk to the other officers to find out information? Are they allowed to talk to each other about their cases casually on lunch, for example? Or would the mole have to do extra finessing? Thank you very much again, I really appreciate it. Have a good day."

Well, Ryan, it really depends on where the mole works within the department and what kind of case we're talking about because the type of case will determine which investigative unit is handling it. Detectives essentially work two kinds of cases. One's that look backward to figure out what happened and who's responsible, like a homicide case or a robbery or a sexual assault. Those are usually the detectives that wear a suit and tie and work out of a detective bureau in the regular police station or the police headquarters. Then there are those cases that are proactive, where the detective units like narcs or vice or gangs that have discovered who the criminal players are, are proactively trying to build cases on crimes that are currently occurring, like drug dealing or prostitution or human trafficking rings or ongoing gang violence. These are the detectives that are running informants and are doing a ton of surveillance.

They're in street clothes and they probably don't shave very often. They may work in an offsite office, meaning they aren't coming in and out of the police station on a regular basis. Having worked in both kinds of units, I can tell you that the latter of the two, those proactive units, are far more likely to keep their investigative cards close to their chests and will treat any kind of elicitation, meaning any kind of attempt to get info about their cases by someone not already part of the investigation, with a lot of scrutiny. When you run informants as a handler, you are keenly aware that divulging who they are, whether intentionally or not, could get that informant killed. So you don't talk shop with anyone outside your unit. Also, if you do this kind work long enough, your informants or your own surveillance will make it clear that some of your coworkers may have connections to unsavory characters that most people in the department don't know about.

It doesn't mean that your coworker's guilty of anything, but it may lead you to realize there are some ties that might be a little uncomfortable. Being in a surveillance intensive unit, like narcs or vice, may lead to being used in internal affairs investigations as well. When these kinds of cases happen, it naturally leads to a bit of paranoia about revealing details of an ongoing investigation to anyone outside of the unit. The reason I mentioned this is that the proactive cases would most likely be the kinds of cases the gang would be trying to get the mole to learn about. Now, if the mole's more interested in a specific investigation of the more typical type, like a homicide, that would probably be a little easier to get info on from the mole's perspective. "Hey, so how's it going with the Smith homicide?" That's a pretty benign question from one cop to another that might happen to be working on it because it's common knowledge that there's a case.

But to ask a narc about a case that no one's even supposed to know about is a very different scenario. So the mole may have to do the digging in a less obvious way. But I know what you're thinking and it's worth noting that modern records management systems, meaning the police report writing system, has built in audit logs. So if I use my login to read a report, my credentials are listed in the file as having read the report. So in other words, if I go snooping, anyone else reading that report can see that I read it too. Of course, you can always gift your mole with a plausible explanation as to why they did so, but that's up to you as the creator of the story. It's my opinion that about the only way for the mole to realistically not raise red flags would be for them to be part of the unit or to be supervising the unit that is handling the case. Bosses always make great antagonists.

Author Kathy Joy asked this question in the Writer's Detective Facebook group as well. She writes, "I'm writing a story where the main character finds a girl he likes dead in her room. So naturally he calls the police to report it. This is in the UK. What would the procedure be? Would they question him there? Would they take him down to the station for a statement or would they tell him to go home and question him there when they had sorted out the crime scene? The plan is the main character is going to be framed or mistakenly arrested for her murder. So also knowing if they would come and give a followup interview at their home would be useful so they can spy some, quote unquote, "evidence" that incriminates them."

Well, Kathy, I cannot be certain, but I think how this procedure would play out would be similar in the U.S. and the UK. First, the police would get him, the reporting party or RP as we call it where I am, out of the crime scene so as to preserve that crime scene as best they can. So the question then becomes, where would they take him? The police station is the most obvious choice as they can ensure that the statement is audio and video recorded. Plus, if there's any indication that he did anything at the crime scene prior to calling the police, like moving the body or trying to provide first aid, they may want to collect his clothing and shoes as possible evidence, as well as photograph him as he was when he reported finding the girl dead, assuming the police are believing it to be foul play immediately.

In order for the police to arrest him, they will need sufficient cause to do so. Here in the U.S. we refer to it as probable cause. Based on my quick Google search, so I'm not 100% accurate or 100% sure this is accurate, but it may be referred to as reasonable grounds in the UK. But the concept is the same and definitely do your research on this. But the bottom line is the police need a sufficient reason to arrest you. So assuming the police don't have that yet, as it relates to framing your RP, you might have the police go to the RP's home and try talking to anyone else there, like a parent or a roommate to corroborate the RP's version of events while that reporting party, RP, is still being questioned at the police station.

Remember, this is your story. So you can create the sequence of events however you like. But if this was my story, I'd have the police detective downplay the questioning at the home as routine, and I'd have that detective remain very polite. I can easily see the detective being invited in for a cuppa while they go over the benign questions of things like what time did the RP ... I don't know his name in this case so I'm just going to keep calling him RP. "What time did the RP leave the home? How long has the RP known the girl? Have you met the girl? What was she like? Do you know who might want to harm her?", and so on. Then I'd have the detective close with something reassuring, like, "The RP did the right thing by calling the police and he will most likely be home as soon as they finish up at the police station. It shouldn't be much longer." During that process, I'd work in the detective observing whatever it is that you have up your sleeve for the incriminating evidence they're going to observe.

So thank you, S.C, Ryan and Kathy for the questions this week, and thank you all for listening. This show does not happen without your questions. So send me questions by going to writersdetective.com/podcast. Thank you again for listening, have a great week, wear your mask and write well.

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