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Notes -
The vast majority of homicides are straightforward to solve: the motive, the weapon or even the perp himself are obvious or at least limited to a manageable subset of all possibilities.
Let's say you have a well-dressed man with no wallet or phone found shot in a dark alley. It's obviously a mugging gone wrong or a disagreement over purchasing some vice. You round up the usual suspects, they all have alibis. Maybe some traveling crew? You check all out-of-state plates seen last week in the neighborhood, all are boring civilians.
Okay, stage 2. Maybe it's a hit made to look like a mugging gone wrong? Again, you check the usual possibilities: infidelity, business troubles, money troubles at home. Nothing: the victim was a midlevel manager in charge of a boring department, kids are too young to plot against him, no signs of being gay or having a mistress.
You've hit stage 3: psycho killers. While muggings gone wrong are so common that you have a solid solution template, the template for catching psycho killers is very limited: get all other unsolved homicides and start looking for something in common. Any other similar victims? Similar weapons? Similar circumstances? If there's a match, go through every single detail again and try to find a connection.
Sometimes it's something actionable: you have three similar homicides, you trace the bus routes at each location and find out that there's a bus stop you can reach all three locations from (true crime story from the 90s!). Sometimes it's something obvious and not very useful.
Homicides you solve at stage 1 are cookie-cutter, the biggest challenge is doing the paperwork right. Homicides you solve at stage 2 are "interesting". Homicides you (usually don't) solve at stage 3 are fucking frustrating. However, they are a tiny minority of all cases. It's better to centralize this capacity as much as possible (now matter how heart-rending violated and butchered schoolgirls can be) and concentrate on stage 0: minimizing the number of stage 1 homicides that occur.
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