Prisoners in Southern Mississippi are getting dealt playing card decks that are customized with the faces of missing persons and murder victims, but instead of keeping poker faces, authorities want them to confess any information they might have that could resolve these cases which have been open for years.
Each card has a photo and name for a victim; the date when the person died or went missing; and contact information for the Mississippi Coast Crime Stoppers’ organization. For example, the Ace of Spades in the deck depicts Kimberly Watts, from Long Beach, Miss., and underneath her photo is a brief description of what is known about her death: she was strangled and stabbed in her home by an unidentified person.
The Mississippi Coast Crime Stoppers, a nonprofit that helps law enforcement garner tips in unsolved cases, are distributing 2,500 decks. The 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 trying to solve cold cases.
“We have nothing to lose,” said Lori Massey, the chief executive director of the organization. “These cases are sitting on investigators’ desks. We feel like one lead is better than no leads at all.”
While Massey says she believes that the cards are a good idea, she doesn’t expect that they will yield a high quantity of solved cases. Though she also argued that one case could mean all the difference for a victim’s family.
Southern Mississippi isn’t the only place to have tested this method, as in Indiana, “cold case cards” are available for purchase in the state’s prison facilities, according to the Correction Department website.
In 2008, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension distributed its version of cold case cards to all 515 police departments and sheriff’s offices in the state, in addition to 75 county jail and annex facilities, as reported by the state Public Safety Department.
One of the success stories of the decks took place in July 2007, when 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, and two of the cases managed to be solved; the separate murders of James Foote and Ingrid Lugo, according to the state’s Department of Law Enforcement.
Although these tactics can be somewhat helpful, many have objections to their usage due to ethical and budgeting concerns, raising questions of if they’re solving more problems than they’re creating.
