'The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City's Cold Case Squad'
by Stacy Horn
Viking, 320 pp., $24.95
Murder is different from all other crimes. The crime of murder is so abhorrent that there is no time limitation on murder prosecution. Even 50 years after a killing, a murderer - if he or she is caught - can still be tried, sentenced and convicted. But, unfortunately, the catching is often the hard part. There are thousands of murder cases in New York City that go cold, remain unsolved and are pushed into the far corners of dusty evidence rooms.
The problem is that if a murder is not solved within the first few days, the chances are good that it never will be solved. As time passes on, memory fades, evidence disappears and the trail, if one existed, evaporates. As new cases pile up, demanding attention, the older unsolved cases get pushed aside and, eventually, forgotten.
New York City tackled this problem by creating a elite team of detectives with the responsibility for chasing such "cold cases." In "The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City's Cold Case Squad," Stacy Horn tells the story of the Cold Case and Apprehension Squad, its formation and a handful of its successes.
In New York, since 1985 alone, there are 8,894 unsolved murders. That's 444 murders a year; 37 a month; more than one every day. These are awful, brutal crimes for which the perpetrators remain entirely free.
Horn tells the story of four of these cases, from the crime to its resolution, years later. These are not delicate stories. Linda Leon and Esteban Martinez, for example, were murdered just 10 days before Christmas in 1996. They had been brutally tortured and then murdered while their three young children huddled in another room, distracted by an accomplice.
Police officer Ronald Stapleton died in early 1978 after he stumbled onto the scene of a robbery in progress while off duty. Beaten so badly he could hardly move, he was shot with his own gun and then his eye was torn from its socket with a meat hook. Christine Diefenbach died early the morning of Feb. 7, 1988, just 14 years old at the time. She was fetching milk for her family but was found hours later, dead, at the top of a small hill near railroad tracks.
Some of these cases are even older. Jean Sanseverino was 26 years old on March 8, 1951, when she was found strangled. When the cold case squad tackled the case, the file had not been opened for 20 years.
In every case, the original homicide detectives ran into a wall during the original investigation. Leads failed to pan out. Witnesses dispersed or failed to remember key facts. For a million reasons, or none at all, the crime simply couldn't be solved.
But then the cold case squad, a curious group of part-historian detectives, began poring through the notes, re-examining the evidence and re-interviewing witnesses, searching for what all of the detectives before had missed. And surprisingly, in at least these four cases, they resolved the murders, found the murderers and - decades after the bad guys thought that they had gotten away with it - slapped the cuffs on them.
It's satisfying, but of course only scratches the surface. For all of its success, the squad has barely dented the backlog. And for each of these success stories, there are hundreds of other cases that remain cold and unsolved.
"The Restless Sleep" tells an interesting story but is unfortunately flawed by Horn's tough-guy approach to her writing style. At times thoughtful and lively, the book is too often marred by breathless first-person narratives or the grunting vernacular of street cops.
Horn provides a short statistical summary of homicide rates and case resolution, but provides precious little comment on the very phenomenon she describes. Why so many unsolved murders? Why such limited success? These are compelling, even stunning, success stories, but how can we capitalize on this success? Like the murders themselves, those mysteries are left cold and unsolved by this otherwise entertaining true crime expos
