Santa Barbara's Denials & Casual Attitude toward GSK Murders
May 8, 2018 13:39:46 GMT
trabuco, looking4justice, and 2 more like this
Post by magnumforce73 on May 8, 2018 13:39:46 GMT
saturnrising ... There are plenty of indications in our forum that Santa Barbara County did not take seriously the idea that the Goleta murders were committed by the EAR/ONS.
And SB County was the only major county not represented by a speaker at the recent news conference announcing the arrest of DeAngelo.
At the old AETV forum, poster Arch (if you don't know who Arch is, do a "Search") quoted an investigator from SB, as follows:
Poster "rogdomingo" [Deb Domingo's dad] wrote in our forum on Sept. 5, 2013:
On August 17, 2015, Port wrote:
I don't have time to look for more examples. The above three took about 10 minutes to find. If you do a Search you will undoubtedly find others. In addition, you have the comments in this thread posted by people who live or at one time lived in the Santa Barbara area.
Drifter
If each agency had listened to the other departments, who had been tracking the guy FOR years, then properly leveraged that experience and the geographic (and other) clues that yielded, they could have solved this within months or a year of the Visalia PD trotting down to Sacramento...How?
There was a high probability the VR would have lived in Visalia or the surrounding areas in 1974 and 1975. He would likely have appeared in the Visalia Directory for 1975 as he offended all of that year and the end of 1974. Directories back then were amazing because they listed addresses and occupations. There was a good chance that the VR moved on to Sacramento. If SAC had read all the details of the police reports from the ransacking and Snelling (too bad the 12-26-75 podcast didn't exist back then!), they should have realized that the criminals did not overlap in time and had way too many weird, specific behaviors in common. They could have at least entertained the theory to see if it gave them any real investigative avenue.
Trying to pull a "needle out of a haystack" in Sacramento is a lot more difficult than playing process of elimination in Visalia. They could have obtained a copy of the 1977 Visalia directory, which also includes surrounding towns, and then compared it with the 1974 or 1975 version. They could have circled anyone's name in the 1974 / 1975 version that didn't appear in the 1977 Visalia directory. Though at 700 some pages and 40 people per page, this might have taken some time, it's just a visual matching process until you produce a list. An intern could have crossed out matches. Obviously women would be eliminated so that limits your sample. Then you eliminate people that died, are in jail, are over 40, or otherwise could not have committed the crime. Then they could have prioritized the list by professions of interest. Then figure out if any of the missing people ended up in Sacramento or surrounding areas in 1976/77. Then add those folks to your list.
There were always too many clues and points of comparison in this case. Visalia was always going to yield the most limited potential pool of suspects to track. It obviously could have led nowhere (or indicated that he was perhaps a teenager or lived outside Visalia or was not in fact the Ransacker), but it also would have produced a list of people to look for in Sacramento. It would have taken time to go through that process, but they HAD 40 years! (The 1974 and 1977 directories are on ancestry if anyone wants to time themselves on a side by side comparison of several pages and then extrapolate the full sample to see how many total people would have needed elimination). There's always the chance that the person would not have been listed, such as if they were migrant worker, a young teenager living with parents, only in the area intermittently Etc. However, the length of time of the ransackings and time spent prowling suggested that they likely lived in the
area, so I think it was worth a shot. It may have produced a larger suspect pool than is ideal, but given the characteristics available for elimination (age, height, shoe size, etc.), I think it could have been done. I can't imagine that a huge number of people would have left in a 2-3 year timeframe in a somewhat rural area. And whittling the list down to a more manageable sample wouldn't have been a high skill task. That suspect list would have yielded Exeter City Police Officer, JJD, who is listed in the 1974 Visalia Directory, but no longer appears in the 1977 version.
Hell, like Shelby even said, if they'd just listened to each other and shut the frack up on the police radio, then maybe some of the in-residence stakeouts and other measures taken by Sacramento LE would have worked without flipping through directory pages. I know they tried hard, I know they all continued to work on it for years. I know they carried it with them. Most jurisdictions really actually cared and carried it with them. And I think the work Carol Daly did with the victims was commendable. That's the type of LE work that's nice to hear about. And I know they leveraged technology throughout the case in creative ways, etc. But what they didn't do was listen to each other and then use that information!!!!! That's the lesson from this one. And we're supposed to ask these questions of what they (we) missed...even if the truth is hard to face. It is easy to * all over LE, and I don't want to, but I do think we need to figure out where the case went wrong and what are best practices going forward. There was great detective work at times in this case, but the lack of communication was just detrimental. And in Santa Barbara's case, it was ridiculous.
I saw how much not solving it hurt them. I know they were overworked, overwhelmed, understaffed, underpaid, and stressed out to a level I can't imagine. They need more resources, staffing and pay. I'm sympathetic and I think there are a lot of fantastic police officers and detectives and FBI agents. And the vast majority are doing it for the right reasons and in the right way and certainly not getting rich for it.
But then you hear how Tulare County Sheriff's Department initially wrote off Jennifer Armour's murder as the accidental drowning of a party girl when she was found naked with her hands tied behind her back with a bra in the canal (Wonder if they care to give that one a once over now?). Or I listen to In the Dark and how it took so long to solve Jacob Wetterling's case.. (a must listen podcast, great micro and macro information about why cases don't get solved!!!! I cannot recommend it enough). Or how Santa Barbara had their fingers in their ears for decades...
We should be critical of LE when warranted. Because this is life or death. And our system is way too far from perfect and I haven't seen much recently to reassure me otherwise.
Peace officers--as they once were called prior to the fetish for the term "Law Enforcement"--are no different from elected officials: IN THEORY, they work for "the citizens." Unfortunately, we have that cognitive dissonance at play: do they work for citizens, or are the citizens merely cattle kept penned in a corral?
mf73