People incarcerated in southern Mississippi have been receiving new sets of playing cards that they can use to pass the time, but the images on those cards are not of the typical jacks, queens and kings of other game sets. Instead, they feature people whose murders or disappearances have been unsolved for years.
The authorities hope that people awaiting trial or serving sentences will recognize someone while playing with the cards and offer information to help solve some those crimes.
The Mississippi Coast Crime Stoppers, a nonprofit that helps law enforcement generate tips in unsolved cases, are distributing 2,500 decks. The card sets cost about $6,000 to make and were made possible by a grant from Season of Justice, a nonprofit that provides funding for investigative agencies and families looking to solve cold cases.
“We have nothing to lose,” said Lori Massey, the chief executive director of Mississippi Coast Crime Stoppers. “These cases are sitting on investigators’ desks. “We feel like one lead is better than no leads at all.”
Each card has a photo and a name for a victim; the date when the person died or went missing; and contact information for the Crime Stoppers’ organization. For instance, the Ace of Diamonds shows Rebecca Reid, a woman from Lumberton, Miss., who was last seen in 2020, and it provides her age, height and weight. The Ace of Spades depicts Kimberly Watts, from Long Beach, Miss. Underneath her name and photo, there is a brief description of what is known about her death: She was strangled and stabbed in her home.
Southern Mississippi isn’t the only place to have tried this approach. In Indiana, “cold case cards” are available for purchase in the state’s prison facilities, according to the Correction Department website. In Minnesota in 2008, the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension distributed its version of cold case cards to all 515 police departments and sheriff’s offices in the state, plus 75 county jail and annex facilities, according to the state Public Safety Department. Connecticut law enforcement agencies have issued five editions of a playing card deck featuring missing people, cases of unidentified remains and homicides; they have published a list of solved cases about people featured on the cards.
Although Ms. Massey thinks that the cards are a good idea, she doesn’t expect that they will yield a high volume of solved cases. For one victim’s family, however, they could make all the difference, she said.
“If one case is solved, it would be worth it,” she said.
There have been some success stories linked to the use of playing cards. In July 2007, about 100,000 decks of cold case playing cards were given to inmates in Florida state prisons. There were two editions that listed 104 unsolved cases from across the state. As a result of the effort, two of the cases were solved: the separate murders of James Foote and Ingrid Lugo, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Some nonprofits and law enforcement agencies have decided not to make the cards, considering them not to be a good use of their funds, said Ryan Backmann, the founder and executive director of Project: Cold Case, an organization in Jacksonville, Fla., that provides resources to victims’ family members.
It costs thousands of dollars to print those decks, and they may result in only a few success stories, he said, adding: “but I think the families of those one or two cases would disagree that the return on investment wasn’t there.”
His organization printed 1,000 decks for cold cases across Florida for $5,000, Mr. Backmann said. It printed one edition in 2022 and another in 2023, which were made possible through grants, he said.
Typically, the cards are distributed in jails and prisons, said Joseph Giacalone, who is an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. The cards have been around for years, said Mr. Giacalone, who is also a former commanding officer of the Bronx Cold Case Squad of the New York Police Department.
“The idea behind them is: Get them in the jails and prisons because if someone’s got a long stretch they might look at them and say, ‘This is my get-out-of-jail free card or I could get a lighter sentence,’” he said.
Although jailhouse informants can be helpful, there is ethical concern around using them, said Camela Hughes, the director of the Cold Case Analysis Center at The College of St. Rose in Albany, N.Y.
“From a general standpoint, there is always a concern about jailhouse informants and any sort of veracity of their statements,” she said.
Often, informants receive better treatment from the authorities, earning transfers to other locations and even negotiating reductions in their sentences, so information from a jailhouse informant should be corroborated with someone else, Dr. Hughes said.
Dr. Hughes said she didn’t see an issue with employing the cards to seek tips as long as family members of the victims had given their permission to do so. (Both Mississippi Coast Crime Stoppers and Project: Cold Case said they had asked for permission from family members.)
There are some places where the cold case cards are available outside the criminal justice system. In addition to jails, Mr. Backmann said that Project: Cold Case gave the cards to halfway houses and any businesses with waiting rooms or foot traffic that wanted them.
Although the ultimate goal of the cards is to help solve cases, they have another purpose: to tell victims’ stories.
“In a world where there’s so much violence, death and trauma, everybody’s fighting for their loved ones to be seen and their story to be heard,” Mr. Backmann said. “This was something that a lot of these families never thought they would have the opportunity to be a part of.”
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