Social Justice: Tricia Griffith’s Community of Internet Detectives

On August 5, 2016, Tricia Griffith joined Jack Hitt onstage at the Institute Library in New Haven, Connecticut, as part of the ongoing series “Amateur Hour,” in which various tinkerers, zealots, and collectors discuss their obsessions. Griffith operates the online forum Websleuths, which is dedicated to crowdsourcing solutions to baffling crimes, including in-depth examinations of cold cases and the uncovering of key evidence in ongoing investigations. The conversation that follows has been edited for brevity and meaning.

jack hitt:

When most of us think about crowdsourcing solutions to crime, we think of some kind of tip line, but what you and your online members do more closely resembles actual detective work, right? You might all work on one part of a cold case or group-crash a single piece of evidence to learn something new. Give me a sense of the daily action on your website.

tricia griffith:

Imagine a room full of people from all over the world, thousands of people spitballing ideas about crime. Occasionally you’ll have someone pop up and say, “I’m an expert in cell-phone things or mapmaking or forensic artistry,” and then they’ll come in and join us and help out. As far as what cases are chosen, people just join the website and they can start a thread, and that thread just follows the case. If someone was murdered and you want to have a discussion about it, you come on to Websleuths and you type, “Murder of John Smith, happened May 2, 1999”—boom. And then everyone comes on and just starts talking. Occasionally people take action, and that’s amazing—it’s few and far between, but when it happens it really is something fascinating to watch.

What kinds of things do you do on a case?

Take the eagle T-shirt case. In that one, a forward-thinking detective in a small town in Nevada called me and basically said, “Look, I love what you guys do. I have this cold case from 1992—a man was murdered. We don’t know who the victim is and we don’t know nothing about anything he had on him.” He had a scrap of a T-shirt that had an eagle emblem on it. He said, “We’ve been trying to track down this darn eagle emblem on this T-shirt for over twenty-three years. How about if we release this information to you, and you sleuths see if you can do it.” He told me he’d been chided by his fellow detectives for turning to us. “But,” he said, “I believe it can be done.”

So we took this picture, and the emblem wasn’t very clear at all. You could tell what it was, but it was ragged and had a lot of wear and tear on it. We put it up on Websleuths and said: “Figure this out.” It was up there for about two weeks when this one member on vacation came home, looked at it, and within thirty-six hours had figured it out—where it was made, when it was made, where it could be purchased, and everything they needed to know about, things the police had not been able to do. And you know how she did it? She went to Etsy and was able to find someone who knew the designer. So we gave the police that bit of evidence.

Photograph by ADAM WATKINS

For the screenplay, that’s the linchpin piece of evidence.

Yes! That’s the one that solved everything, and the killer was taken off the streets. In reality, they never tell us if it helped solve or move a case forward. We never get that information. Still, that was a turning point in being taken seriously.

Do you all get involved in famous cases that we’re reading about in the papers?

We did with Casey Anthony. She was tried for the murder of her daughter, Caylee, but they couldn’t prove she did it. She’d gone on...