Cops Closing Doors on Cold Cases

(NEWSER) - Law enforcement officers from across the country descended on Oakland today for the funerals of four cops gunned down by a fugitive last weekend, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. All 815 members of the Oakland force attended while officers from other jurisdictions patrolled the streets in their stead. An overflow crowd that included 19,000 officers from as far as New York and Boston filled two stadiums. More»

LAPD wants audio tapes that could yield new evidence

(NEWSER) - The horrific history of Charles Manson and his followers could soon be rewritten. The Los Angeles Police Department has asked for eight hours of decades-old audio recordings that could link the Manson family to more murders, reports NBC Los Angeles . The tapes feature conversations between Manson's former right-hand man, Charles "Tex" Watson, and Watson's lawyer Bill Boyd, and they have never before been heard by law enforcement. More»

Police believe results will narrow search for Sarah Yarborough's killer

(NEWSER) - In December, stumped Washington state authorities sent a DNA sample from an unsolved 1991 murder to a forensic consultant in California—and though she didn't return with a match to the murderer himself, she did figure out who his 17th-century ancestors were. The DNA profile closely matched the family of Robert Fuller, whose relatives came to America on the Mayflower; the consultant found the connection by looking at genetic profiles donated by people tracing their genealogy. Of course, Fuller—who lived in Salem, Mass., beginning in 1630—probably has thousands of descendants, but detectives are optimistic that the results will help narrow their search. More»

Police performing an autopsy today

(NEWSER) - A British mystery is officially a murder mystery: Police say that the human remains discovered on the grounds of Sandringham, the queen's massive rural estate, belong to a woman, and that the case is being treated as a murder. An autopsy scheduled for today will hopefully shed some light on the identity of the victim, as well as her cause of death, reports the AP . It's not clear if the woman, age unknown, was killed on the 20,000-acre estate or moved there after death. More»

City officials trying new programs, but will they work?

(NEWSER) - Choose nearly any line from a New York Times article on murders in New Orleans, and it will depress you: By late last month, the city had seen 175 homicides in 2011—the same as the total number for all of the previous year—and there have been eight more since then. The homicide rate was 10 times the national average in 2010, when there were 51 murders per 100,000 residents. (Compare that to seven per 100,000 in New York and 23 in Oakland.) "From September of last year to February of this year, a student attending John McDonogh [high school] was more likely to be killed than a soldier in Afghanistan," said the mayor recently. Though New Orleans has long been known for its violence, the homicide rate has been rising since 2000 and city officials are struggling to stem it. Making things particularly difficult is the corruption in the police department. Residents "do not trust the police," says one activist. More»