If it’s getting harder to solve homicides, it’s because they’re less personal today than they used to be, experts say. “In the old days there were a lot more domestics,” former D.C. homicide detective Jim Trainum told The Washington Examiner. “It was intimate.”
The rise of lethal drug gangs has made homicide less personal, said Trainum, who is a national consultant on cold cases. When a husband kills his wife in a weekend argument, say, there is a lot of forensic evidence from close-quarter combat. There are also neighbors who can testify, Trainum said.
With drive-by shootings, there’s often scant evidence. “A lot of the cases I’m talking about are cases where the only evidence you’ve got are a few shell casings on the street. That’s not much to go on,” Trainum said. Also, drug and gang homicides often involve witnesses who are gang members themselves or afraid of gang retaliation if they testify. “A lot of our unsolved murders, we know who did it, but we can’t get anybody to come forward and say, ‘I was there. I saw it,’ ” Trainum said.
The reluctance of witnesses to “snitch” often allows violence to spread. Take the 1995 shooting death of Tyrone Benson, whose body was found in a patch of woods in far Southwest Washington. Benson was a known drug dealer and apparently had a dispute with a neighborhood dealer. His body was found nearly five years to the day after the body of his mother, Sharon Benson, was found in the same spot with multiple gunshot wounds.
All six homicides reported so far this year in Montgomery County are killings in which there wasn’t a clear relationship between the victim and attacker, said Cpl. Dan Friz, a police spokesman. That makes it harder to solve those cases, he said. When there’s a pre-existing relationship between victim and suspect, Friz said, detectives can often “piece things together very quickly.”
