Three Up. Three Down.

There have been three high profile criminal cases in the news in the last month.  Although very different, all three were prominent because of the element of randomness involved, as well as the potential to be terrorist incidents.

First was the shootings of two district attorneys in Texas, two months apart.  Both were shot at home.  Media speculation centered on the possibility that the Aryan Nation prison gang was attempting to intimidate prosecutors.  The second case was letters containing ricin, a poison.  These letters were mailed to both a Mississippi senator and President Obama.  The sending of poisoned letters recalled the anthrax scare of 2002.  Finally, of course, there was the bombing of the Boston Marathon.

In all three cases, the anonymity of the criminals was a major factor in the prominence of the case.  That you could be at home, or at work, or walking down the street, and violence could strike you, is an unnerving prospect.

This week all three cases were solved.  In the case of the Texas prosecutors, it was not assassination by free members of a prison gang.  It was the far more mundane and tawdry story of a justice of the peace, who had lost his job because he was caught stealing computer monitors.  The two prosecutors had worked together to convict the man, who lost his job as a result.  After arresting the former justice of the peace, police connected the man’s wife to the crimes.  She broke down and confessed her role in a single interrogation session.

The poisoned letters was a case that was cracked even more quickly.  The FBI traced the letters back to a man in Mississippi, and scooped him up.  It didn’t hurt the investigation that the sender put his initials at the bottom of the letters.  After his arrest, his family came forward with the revelation that they had been trying for years to get the obviously mentally ill man committed before he hurt someone.  In the best detail of the case, it turned out that the perpetrator had worked on more than one occasion as an Elvis impersonator.  You just can’t make that stuff up.

Finally, the case of the Boston Marathon bombing was cracked within three days.  Police were aided by the plethora of closed circuit cameras in the area, as well as the cell phone pictures and video that spectators provided.  As we all now know, one of the two bombers was killed in a shoot out with police, while the other was found after a lockdown search of a suburb of Boston, and is currently in custody.  Turns out they were just a pair of young immigrants who had failed to assimilate in the US.  Their own uncle, a successful immigrant, assigned the proper label to these two: losers.

The big lesson from these three cases is that in the post 9/11 world, the government has a lot of extra resources and tools for catching criminals.  If the case is big enough, they will use those tools to find the criminals.  It really is a CSI world out there.