Michigan State Police, this is what commitment looks like in the OCCK case:
- Pick up the phone and speak with Marney Keenan about the status of the investigation. You have her number.
- Pick up the phone and call Dr. Ashlen Kuersten, Director of Western Michigan University’s Cold Case Program and ask if her students can assist in digitizing the case files in the OCCK case. https://wmich.edu/news/2023/10/72963 . You know as well as I do that for any genetic genealogy results to be at all useful, your files must be accessible and usable. They are not and never have been. Your agency already partners with WMU.
- Contact the Michigan State University Cold Case Unit at 833-725-1354 for further assistance in the above project. Your agency partners with MSU to offer internship opportunities in cold case investigations. https://online.cj.msu.edu/cold-case-unit .
- Use some common sense with genetic genealogy results and do not allow the state lab or the FBI to drag this out unnecessarily.
- Tell the families why a third-party lab will not be used in this case.
- Get somebody who won’t back-burner this case up-to-speed so s/he can conduct real interviews if you get viable genetic genealogy results. Have them speak to survivors of the child rape rings in Michigan of the 1970s who have come forward over the past decade and been blown off by law enforcement so you understand the network and can cross-reference names of ring participants and enablers. Hell, have an intern from the MS program at MSU prepare you for such an interview.
- DO YOUR JOB. Stop making civilians try to keep track of your many broken promises and failures to act.
Start with the phone calls. Stop shirking. Of course you are too busy; get help digitizing the files and put in the call before the next semester is in motion.
And stop with this nonsense; this bogus script you use to avoid transparency until you can pass the file off to another desk. It’s sickening.
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The base problem is that neither Oakland County nor MSP want this case solved.
The reasons for that must be exposed, one way or another.
Well said!
Well, very likely the actual killer had some sort of link with the higher ups in Oakland County.
Seems like the MSP is a prime example of what social psychologists call the ‘Shirky Principle:’ “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”. More broadly, it can also be characterized as the adage that “every entity tends to prolong the problem it is solving”.
“The Michigan State Police Cold Case Unit determines which cases will be officially reopened by using a scoring matrix. The matrix is comprised of several factors which determine each case’s solvability rating. Even though all cold cases will be reviewed, not all of them may be reopened for investigation.”
https://cj.msu.edu/undergraduates/cold-case-unit/cold-case-unit.html
I’d like to see this scoring matrix (and factors) for the OCCK case and how it compares to the other “open” unsolved cases. Even better, the scoring matrix for the case of each child in the OCCK case. Then let these university programs each work on a specific case.
Excellent idea, G-Man. One way to break the stranglehold of the Shirky Principle is to break up the “problem” into manageable segments and assign a group to work on each segment. That silences the endless echo chamber that occurs in a single group.