It takes all kinds of people to fight crime. There are many different types of law enforcement agencies around the world, and there are even people who dress up in superhero costumes and patrol the streets. However, there are others – ordinary men and women working ordinary day jobs – who investigate crimes or mysteries and eventually bring the perpetrators to justice.
10Landon Crabtree
What always amazes adults about young people, especially children, is their natural adaptability to new technologies. Take, for example, eight-year-old Landon Crabtree of Manchester, Tennessee, who managed to bring a serial criminal to justice with just an app.
After Landon's home was burglarized, he went online and used a tracking app to find his stolen iPad. The app allowed him to see where his iTunes software was updated, and eventually showed where his iPad was located. Landon's father alerted police after his son informed him the missing item was at a local motel.
Within an hour of his call, police had tracked down the iPad along with the rest of the stolen goods and valuables from other homes. The occupant of the room, John Docherty, was arrested at the first attempt. After his arrest, it was discovered that Docherty was wanted for several other burglaries.
9 Bill A. Jacob
Bill Jakob is the only person on this list who was in law enforcement, although he was unemployed at the time of this story. At one time he was a petty cop, but never a state certified police officer. He had also worked as a security guard and wedding minister. According to records, his last known job was as the owner of a trucking company that went bankrupt.
Jacob's house was 37 kilometers from the small town of Gerald, Missouri, with 1.172 inhabitants removed. Like other small towns in America, Gerald had problems with methamphetamine. Jacob called himself "Sergeant Bill" and went to Gerald's house to help. He showed a badge to local police and told them he was an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Agency. He even provided a phone number to verify his claims. When they called, a woman who claimed to work for "the multijurisdictional task force" answered and confirmed that Jacob was undercover. Police later came to suspect that the name of the alleged task force had been taken from the film Beverly Hills Cop.
Using a shotgun, Jacob brought the police from Gerald when he started kicking down doors and arresting suspects. When people asked for a warrant, he told them he didn't need a warrant because he was a federal agent. He handcuffed people and led them away without reading them their rights. In all, he arrested about 20 people over the course of five months, and after his arrest, most of the suspects confessed.
Jacob's ruse unraveled when a suspicious reporter sought "Sergeant Bill's" story. He was arrested and found guilty of 23 charges, including depicting a police officer, and sentenced to five years in prison. The police chief and two officers were also fired, and the city now faces charges of false arrest. Gerald's mayor, however, said Jacob was "very effective" at the time.
8Joselyn Martinez
On 22. November 1986, Jose Martinez and his wife Idalia were working at their New York restaurant, Inwood, The Dominican Express. At some point during the night, Justo Santos and his two friends began harassing Idalia. Jose threw her out and Justo responded by shooting him, leaving Idalia a widow and her nine-year-old daughter Joselyn, without a father.
After the murder, Justo fled to the Dominican Republic. The only progress police made in the investigation was getting Santos to confess on the phone in 1987. He was arrested, but for some reason he was later released. After that, authorities lost track of Santos, and Jose's murder looked like it would go unpunished.
At that point, Joselyn began investigating the murder that left a huge hole in her life. Her search began in 2005 and used paid search engine services to track down her father's killer. For the next eight years, Joselyn tracked Justo's movements and found that he was living in Miami, Florida, under his own name. Joselyn passed the information on to the NYPD cold case investigation division and on the 6. June 2013, Justo was arrested in his apartment.
7Lee-Anne Cartier
Am 4. May 2009 Philip Nisbet died after dinner in his apartment. His wife of eight months, Helen Milner, claimed Nisbet committed suicide. He had apparently intentionally caused an allergic reaction by taking certain medications. Milner forwarded a letter that appeared to be Nisbet's suicide note.
Police seemed to accept her story, and the 47-year-old's death was ruled a suicide, but Nisbet's sister Lee-Anne Cartier had some reservations. She did not think her brother was a suicide, and the signature on the note did not correspond to her brother. Despite these concerns, the police did not investigate the possibility of misconduct, so Cartier took it upon himself. First, she flew from her home in Australia to her brother's home in Christchurch, New Zealand, to talk to his neighbors and her boss. After taking the information she shared with police, it turned out that the coroner had apparently noticed signs of asphyxiation on Nisbet's body. This finally brought the police into the investigation.
Milner was arrested, convicted of murder and sentenced to a minimum term of 18 years. Police admitted they had not handled the case properly and offered Cartier the money they had spent on the investigation.She declined the offer, explaining that she was seeking a mysterious "broader compensation" instead.
6Yaakov German
Am 11. July 2011, eight-year-old Leiby Kletzky went missing on his way home from a day camp in his neighborhood of Boro Park in Brooklyn. Residents of the predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Boro Park searched for the missing boy. One man, a real estate executive and father of 12, named Yaakov German, was a bit more dedicated than the rest.
German's son was Kletzky's teacher, so they first watched the video surveillance of the school where the day camp was held. The next day, the German also convinced the store owners in the area to let him look at their video surveillance. Through the videos, he was able to track the child's movements. Finally, in footage from outside a car leasing company, the German saw Kletzky talking to a man before getting into his car.
NYPD tracked the car to the home of hardware clerk Levi Aron. Police swarmed Aron's apartment, and unfortunately they found the boy had suffocated to death. Aron confessed to the crime and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
5Jane Alexander
In 1983, 88-year-old Gertrude McCabe was brutally murdered in her home. She has been beaten, stabbed, and swallowed with a bicycle chain multiple times. McCabe had no enemies, and because the house was in disarray, investigators believed the murder had occurred during a burglary. McCabe's niece, Jane Alexander, wasn't so sure about that. Alexander, a former Navy intelligence officer, said the murder might have something to do with a former friend named Tom O'Donnell.
In 1977, Alexander began seeing O'Donnell at age 55 after her husband died. Tom was an old family friend, but Jane soon realized that no one had any idea who Tom O'Donnell really was. Initially, O'Donnell convinced Alexander to take out a loan that used her home as collateral. Soon after, he took 10.000 dollars from her money. Only after he fled did she examine her personal finances and realize O'Donnell had left her on the brink of insolvency, forcing her to sell her home.
Alexander's search for O'Donnell eventually led to Las Vegas, where he was arrested for fraud, but no one could find enough evidence to link him to McCabe's murder. After Alexander spent the next 13 years working on the murder case with a police inspector named Jeff Ouimet, two key pieces of evidence were found. The first was a witness, O'Donnell's nephew, who said his uncle mentioned McCabe's death the day before police discovered the body. The second was a police photo Alexander found that linked O'Donnell to changes at the crime scene. The investigation was reopened, and O'Donnell was convicted of first-degree murder with life in prison. During the trial, prosecutors said O'Donnell likely murdered McCabe because he believed Alexander would receive an inheritance.
4Susan Galbreath
On 29. July 2000, the body of 18-year-old Jessica Currin was found on the playing field of a school in Mayfield, Kentucky. Currin had died a horrible death – she had been raped, there was a belt around her neck and her body was badly burned. The case was passed on to rookie detective Tom Fortner, who handled it very poorly. A suspect was charged and arraigned for the crime, but turned out to be innocent. Fortner eventually quit his job with the force and became a security guard, leaving Currin's case cold.
Without Susan Galbreath it would probably have remained unsolved. Galbreath was a Mayfield housewife obsessed with the murder. She gathered information about the case and wrote to many different celebrities, including Julia Roberts and Oprah Winfrey, hoping to gain more media attention. She had no luck until April 2004, when she wrote to Tom Mangold. Galbreath knew Mangold, a veteran journalist with the BBC, from his recent TV series. Panorama.
Amazingly, Mangold agreed to fly to Mayfield to investigate Currin's case. Mangold and Galbreath interviewed several people involved in the crime, including Jeremy Adams, the man mistakenly arrested for the crime. During the interviews, one name kept coming up: Quincy Cross, a drug dealer who lived in Tennessee. There was no solid evidence of Cross's connection to the murder until 2006, when Galbreath received a message on her MySpace page from a woman named Victoria Caldwell, who confessed to helping Cross throw the body. Galbreath connected Caldwell with police and she told them the story of how Cross kidnapped, raped and murdered Currin. Cross was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
While Galbreath thanked some after the trial, she had angered many citizens during her investigation. She finally had to move out of Mayfair.
3 Rakesh Singh
In May 2009, Rakesh Singh was at a wedding with his family in Gurgaon, India, when the music suddenly stopped. Outside the venue, there had been a fatal accident. Singh rushed outside to find that his 16-year-old son Akshay had been run over by a truck carrying 41 tons (45 tonnes) of mining equipment. The only way Singh knew was that his son was because he recognized his shirt. Otherwise, the teen's body was too weak to be identified.
The heartbroken father demanded justice for his son, but the police only filed a report, so Singh took matters into his own hands. Singh took off his job as an industrial consultant and began eating roadside dhabas (restaurants) frequented by truck drivers.He even went as far as hitchhiking to meet and evaluate the truckers. Singh eventually found his husband, Ravinder Kumar, who was immediately arrested by police.
2Judy Weaver
Am 27. June 2005, Judy Weaver was called to the hospital because her 34-year-old son, Ronald Johnson, had slipped into a coma after suffering blunt force trauma to the head. Witnesses said Johnson hit his head on the curb while trying to do tricks during a bike ride on a wet and rainy night.
It was not a good fit for Weaver. When she saw Ronald on the gurney, she noticed that his pockets had turned out as if he had been robbed. When she inspected the scene of the accident, she found that the bicycle was undamaged and there was no mark on the curb where Johnson allegedly hit his head. Weaver kept quiet about this suspicion until she could find out what was going on. Meanwhile, Johnson succumbed to his injuries nine days later. The detective in charge of the case, Paul "Spike" Hopkins, decided the death of an accident based on witness testimony.
Weaver received a surprise visit from a 25-year-old man named Jason Gailey, who admitted that he had accidentally struck Johnson. Weaver took the story to police, but the case was dropped and they refused to reopen it. With the help of her daughter Deborah Moore, Weaver collected a large file on the witnesses and the death of her son, without success.
One evening in 2013, a sheriff's deputy came to the restaurant where Weaver worked. Both Weaver and the deputy had a slow night, so they sat down to talk, and Weaver was unloaded for 45 minutes. She talked about all the details she had and slammed the sheriff's department, specifically Spike Hopkins, for their lack of interest in justice for her son. The deputy took notes as he listened and said he would try to get the cold case unit to look at the case. At that point, he introduced himself to Weaver – as Lieutenant Paul "Spike" Hopkins.
Hopkins, true to his word, asked cold case investigators to look into the crime. Using the information gathered by Weaver and Moore, detectives interviewed witnesses, and a new story emerged. Apparently Gailey had pistol-whipped another man, and Johnson tried to separate him. Gailey hit Johnson with gun when he fell on cement and hit his head. Eight years after Johnson's death, Gailey was arrested and charged with second-degree murder.
1And Matthews
In 1988, Todd Matthews became obsessed with a cold case his wife Lori had mentioned to him. In 1968, Lori's father had found the body of an apparently murdered girl in Georgetown, Kentucky. The locals called her "Tent Girl," and that name was engraved on her tombstone. She was a young woman with reddish brown hair and a gap in her front teeth. Other than that, no one knew anything about them.
The case deeply disturbed Matthews, who decided to uncover the true identity of Tent Girl. He searched library records and police reports looking for clues that might help. When the Internet came along, Matthews saved up to buy a computer specifically to search online forums and other websites for clues. Matthews found that he was not alone in the search for a missing person. He has come across thousands of people using the Internet for the same purpose.
This is when the Doe Network was founded. It is a message board for users to connect reports of missing persons with reports of John and Jane Does. Run by volunteers, the group was initially criticized as overzealous would-be cops. They implemented screening procedures for volunteers, and the Doe network became a strong and useful tool for identifying entities, managing to resolve at least 67 cases.
Matthews' work led to a national task force that created the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUS) in 2007. The NamUS consists of a database of missing persons that is checked against another database of unidentified bodies. The idea is that police departments and medical examiners update the database and connections are made.
As for Tent Girl, Matthew finally found what he was looking for in 1998. He encountered a message from Rosemary Westbrook of Benton, Arkansas, saying she was looking for her sister, who went missing in 1968 brown hair and a gap in her front teeth. A DNA test confirmed that Weston's missing sister, Barbara Ann Hackmann, was the same girl Lori Matthew's father found. After a 10-year battle, Todd Matthews finally gave Tent Girl back her name.