Students tackle cold cases

Print

By Heather Travis
Thursday, February 4, 2010
The Alphabet Killer, The Grim Sleeper, The Frankford Slasher, and The Phantom Killer sound like chilling movie titles. Stripped from the headlines, University of Western Ontario students are reopening these cases to find clues the Federal Bureau of Investigation couldn't.

Faculty of Information and Media Studies lecturer and PhD candidate Mike Arntfield is drawing students into his line of work – crime solving. A detective constable for the London Police Criminal Investigation unit, with 10 years of law enforcement experience, Arntfield puts a new twist on the usual course offerings.
 
 
They may not have his badge, but students of Faculty of Information and Media Studies lecturer and London police officer Mike Arntfield are learning to investigate cold cases of serial killers. The most convincing investigation will be forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
 
 
Students in the class “The Serial Killer in the Media and Popular Culture” have been assigned cold cases to examine with new eyes, using available technology and proven investigative methods.  
 
They are learning about the rise of the serial killer phenomenon and the glamourization of these cases by the media and film. This is the first course of its kind at Western. Arntfield describes it as “an ad hoc detective club.”  
 
“Serial killers, in my opinion, appeal to people's sense of fantasy, spectatorship, and social drama,” says Arntfield. “Regardless of their interests in getting into this course, those interests are going to be retooled to serve the interests of justice.”  
 
In general, serial killers have three or more victims; crimes take place over at least a 30-day period with a ‘cooling off’ between killings; and have specific motivations.
 
Less than one per cent of murders in the United States is a serial case and make up an even smaller fraction in Canada; however they are often perceived to be more prevalent, he notes.  
 
The public has a macabre fascination with serial killers, popularized on film by characters such as Dexter and Hannibal Lector.  
 
“I think this course offers a populist, practical approach to media scholarship,” he says.  
 
In the tradition of the Vidocq Society, an exclusive group of forensic professionals and interested citizens in Philadelphia, Pa. who gather monthly to investigate unsolved deaths brought to them by the investigating agency, students are challenged to conduct their own investigations of serial cases from the U.S.
 
“General deductive reasoning from an outsider’s perspective can often get the case hot again and bring up new ideas that investigators who have been bogged down for a number of years might not have considered,” says Arntfield.  
 
Arntfield hopes his students can help crack open these cold cases and the most convincing one presented by his class will be forwarded to the FBI’s behavioural sciences unit for consideration.  
 
He expects the students to be successful, having history and technology on their side.   Students are encouraged to use Google Maps to examine the geography of the crime area; look up genealogical websites, census data and birth and death notices which are available online.  
 
“They should be able to synthesize the data and not necessarily solve it, but come up with a tangible theory or a direction that the case should go ... considering these new variables.”  
 
Media reports of the crimes, classified ads and weather reports can harbour clues. “Traditionally, technology and record-sharing, or the lack thereof, has served as one of the main obstacles to not only catching, but identifying serial killers,” he says.
 
In Canada, a provincial inquiry into the Paul Bernardo investigation highlighted police shortcomings in sharing information among departments. A new model was devised, called the major case management command triangle, which focuses on the division of labour within the investigative team. Arntfield is using this model to assign roles to students.  
 
“There aren't fewer serial killers today, but rather technology and better training is helping us – the police – catch them early on, typically after one murder or when some of the precursor and high-risk behaviours such as fire starting, breaking and entering, etc. can be identified and recognized for what they are and the offenders monitored.”  
 
Tyler McWatters, a fourth-year MIT student, loves playing detective. He is investigating the Phantom Killer case involving five deaths and three attacks in rural towns along the Texas-Arkansas border between February and May 1946.  
 
“With the help of Google Maps, we were able to see where each murder took place,” he says. “We are trying to figure out what it was like back then and what it is now.”  
 
“For me it’s really fabulous to have a chance to see how things are filtered through the media and how that affects public perception,” adds Sonya Gilpin, a fourth-year MIT student.   Melissa Zeller, also a fourth-year MIT student, is excited about the prospect of helping with an FBI investigation.
 
“I’ve never been in a course where something we are doing is potentially going to be beneficial in the end,” she says.

Also from this web page:

About

Hours

Weekdays
8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
(holidays excluded)

Contact

Publisher:
Helen Connell (hconnell@uwo.ca)

Editor:
Jason Winders (newseditor@uwo.ca)

Reporter/Photographer:
Paul Mayne (pmayne@uwo.ca)

Reporter/Photographer:
Heather Travis (htravis2@uwo.ca)

Advertising Coordinator:
Denise Jones (advertise@uwo.ca)

Off-Campus Advertising Sales:
Chris Amyot, Campus Ad (campusad@sympatico.ca)

National Advertising Representative:
Campus Plus

Phone:
519-661-2045

Fax:
519-661-3921

Mail:
Western News, Suite 360
Westminster Hall
The University of Western Ontario, London N6A 3K7

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Western provides the best student experience among Canada's leading research-intensive universities.