State to distribute cards of dead, missing to highlight cold cases

Posted by Archie Parsons on July 26, 2011 Leave a comment (0) Go to comments

Madison - The state Department of Justice is using a creative strategy in hopes of uncovering new information on unsolved homicides and missing persons in Wisconsin: distributing playing cards with pictures of the victims’ faces and descriptions of the cold cases.

The cards will be distributed to prisons and sheriff’s departments throughout the state in the hopes that inmates will recognize information on the cards and come forward with a lead.

Two decks of playing cards are being released – one for Milwaukee-area cases and one for the rest of the state. The cases span from 1953 to 2008.

“The information received from an inmate might just be the missing link that can breathe new life into a case that has gone cold,” Special Agent Jim Holmes said in a statement released by the DOJ.

Alexis Patterson, the 7-year-old Milwaukee girl whose disappearance in 2002 dominated headlines in the city, is featured in the deck, along with Brittany Zimmermann, the 21-year-old University of Wisconsin-Madison student who was found dead in her apartment in 2008.

The DOJ says there are hundreds more cold cases in Wisconsin not included in the two decks.

Holmes, who is heading up the project, said local law enforcement agencies contacted victims’ families to tell them about the initiative and requested permission to use photos of the victims on the cards.

“Some of the families were just happy that the local agencies didn’t forget about the case,” Holmes said.

Similar programs exist in Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Texas and Washington. The Wisconsin project was funded through donations from various law enforcement associations in the state along with a national grant from the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice.

It cost $10,500 to produce the initial 2,000 decks of cards for the program. Of that, 800 decks of cards were given to the Department of Corrections to distribute throughout the state’s prisons.

Patricia Clason, a member of Marquette University Law School’s Restorative Justice Initiative, said having unmarked cards identifying cold case victims is a good idea, but said it is tasteless to make playing cards with victims’ faces on them.

“To see this information on a playing card with the king of hearts on it . . . that’s a possibility of emotional damage,” Clason said. “It’s inappropriate, it’s insensitive and it’s disrespectful.”

Holmes said seeing the victim on the card can “really hit home” with prisoners who may come forward with information.

“It really personalizes the case,” Holmes said.