Amateur Sleuths Keep Cold Cases Alive

I had a place to visit my siblings, but Tent Girl didn't have any family. So she became part of my own family. And I became determined to find out who she was. I went to her grave many miles away in Kentucky. I visited newspapers in the area to look through hard-copy archives, searching both for stories about the Tent Girl, as well as any accounts detailing a missing person that matched her description. For 10 years that is how I conducted the search. I spoke to investigators and journalists by phone or in person, looking for any shred of data. I felt so close yet so far, as if the information was just outside my field of view. As I worked, I also learned many things about how to search for information. When the internet arrived, the main thing it changed was communication. In the early days the vast online resources available today did not exist. But I could do my searches by e-mail, and information about how to contact government and media offices was easier to find. Research was much easier, more affordable and realistic. Distance was no longer an obstacle. But perhaps more important was that it ended the isolation of individual investigators. Once the World Wide Web connected the planet, a natural gathering took place. I found other like-minded people doing the same kind of work. The internet gave us an opportunity to gather and share information, to work on a common cause. We could cross the globe in seconds with a click of a computer mouse. Yahoo-based Cold Cases group was one of the first of these such "virtual" gathering places and out of it grew organisations such as the Doe Network, so called because John or Jane Doe is the name used by the FBI for the unidentified. Over the past decade, an increasing number of websites devoted to particular cases of missing persons have been created. One of the first was my own for the Tent Girl. Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/6583129.stm

Note: http://news.bbc.co.uk/g...