After thinking about the Daniel Morgan Murder, I was thinking about other unsolved murders in the UK. wouldn't it be great it you could solve one? There’s been plenty of cases where an amature has solved one (Incluidiong a group of schoolgirls who solve a murder as part of a documentary they were working on for school). So what would it take to actually solve a murder? Well let's find out.
First off we need a case. A quick search on google found a list of unsolved murders in the United Kingdom. Because I am Welsh, I searched through the list to find cases relating to wales, of which there was two. The first was about a man called Evan David Harris who was killed in Swansea Docks on the 27/02/1948. The other was about Sandra Phillips who died in Swansea (What is it about Swansea?) in 1985. Both of these cases were reviewed as part of a group of 28 that had been reinvestigated and are still unsolved. So these are the two that I am going to look into.
Now that we have our cases, we now need to get their files. So I asked all the police services in Wales the same four questions:
1) How many cold cases does your constabulary have (At time of writing)
2) How much was spent investigating cold cases from 01/01/15 to 01/01/16
3) Do you have an archive service which the public can access?
4) If the answer to question 3 is no, please can you tell me what you do with archived files
The answers are:
Name
|
Cold Cases
|
Cost
|
Archive
|
28
|
Unable
|
No
| |
3
|
Unable
|
No
| |
Referred to Website
| |||
2
|
Unable
|
No
|
The reasons for the above questions is simple. It gives us some context on how many cases are outstanding (Should we want to look at other cold cases). It also shows us how to get at older files, if we want to.
The biggest difference between these two cases is the age. Evan David Harris case is nearly 70 years old. As a result his case has been transferred to the National archive. It is my birthday coming up so I may get a copy of this file (Do I know how to party or what!). So what about the Sandra Phillips murder? It’s part of the South Wales Police force so maybe I can ask them for the files? Judging by my attempt to access a cold case from the MPS, I couldn't get less help. So let's ask them if I can get a copy of all the files relating to Sandra Phillips.
This has got my attention. Through the FOI act we can see that we can look at different unsolved cases AND get some of them. Not only that we can see how many cases that have unsolved. In times gone by (Like in Life on Mars), the authorities would be without any sort of recourse. Now we can see what is going on.
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