Wichita Police Seek Serial Killer Using Laserfiche Technology
April 26th, 2004 Comment on this articleIt’s any cop’s nightmare. A serial killer who disappears a quarter century ago pops up again, taunting police with clues about unsolved murders. But it’s not a nightmare; it’s a real case unfolding in Wichita Kansas.
Wichita IT analyst Cliff Thomas became part of the search team when local detectives and FBI agents arrived in his office. Wichita police reports stored in Laserfiche digital records management system contains clues needed to break the case, they said. They’ve been studying Laserfiche files daily ever since.
The killer murdered seven people in between 1974 and 1979, four young women, two children and a man. He calls himself “BTK” in letters to police and news media due to his preferred murder method: “bind, torture and kill.”
“Critical police investigative records from the 70s cases are indexed in Laserfiche,”Thomas said. “The indexes have been scanned and are accessible on investigators’ computers. Laserfiche’s full-text search let polices study similarities in the cases they couldn’t do 25 years ago with thousands of individual pieces of paper.”
The BTK case is a joint investigation of the Wichita Police Department, Kansas Bureau of Investigations and Federal Bureau of Investigations. Detectives believe the killer is still in town. Wichita Police administrative aide Vonnie Forgie said Laserfiche helps new investigators become productive instantly.
“Having the BTK case indexed and searchable is a great help in a cold case,” Forgie said.
Laserfiche new officers can research specific details of the case without having to read through every file folder. The killer resurfaced after The Wichita Eagle ran a story on the 30th anniversary of the first killing.
He sent police a single sheet of copied photos of a woman mysteriously killed in 1986 and marked the piece of paper with the secret signature he used to identify himself in several 70’s letters.
Laserfiche solution provider Galaxie Business Equipment in suburban Winfield, KS is ready to index new information developed. This is likely to be a case in which technology will finally given police the leverage to bring BTK to justice.