You're listening to a stage talk titled Investigating Coal Cases. This week we were joined by my colleague Bellingcat researcher Peter Barth. Peter spoke about his latest investigation into the death of a Texan oilman and provided invaluable tips for investigating coal case crimes, admitting much of it he'd picked up over the three years he'd looked into this particular case. Sharing
his lessons learned. He encourages everyone interested in open source research to have a look at local cold cases, as there are too many to count unsolved. This talk was hosted by me, Charlotte Ma, on Thursday the 3rd of July 2025 in the Bellingcat Discord server. Hi, you're tuning into this week's stage talk. Today we're joined by my fabulous colleague, Peter Bach. On an average day, you might find Peter reporting on environmental issues like the illicit wildlife trade or organized
crime groups like the Kinnerheim cartel. But over the last year, he's been taking on something a little different, diving into a murder that took place over 50 years ago. Now, you might argue that cases like this don't necessarily matter, with so much time passing and many of those alive at the time now passed on. But the volume of cold cases that exist is staggering. In the USA alone, the Murder Accountability Project, MAP, counts almost 346 ,000 cold cases of homicide
between 1965 and 2023. And this is still likely and undercount since many homicides from the earlier decades are excluded. and not all US police departments report to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program on which this data is based. Online crowdsourcing efforts have also sprung up to tackle cold cases, including groups like Uncovered, with almost 50 ,000 unsolved
murder and missing persons cases. All of these cases represent families who are still seeking justice, just like the one that Peter's going to talk about today. Peter's investigation was an exercise in showcasing what can be uncovered with modern investigative techniques. In this session, we'll hear a little of the tale he unraveled and how he unraveled it and talk about why open source techniques can be an incredibly beneficial skill set to have when looking into these cases.
We'll discuss what it takes to investigate and what things you might need to look for as an independent researcher. As we talk, please make sure to add your questions in the chat box as I just mentioned. via the message bubble icon in the top right corner of your screen. And please note within your question if you do not want me to read your username out. Okay. Peter, tell us a story of murder, hitmen, and pigeons. Thank you, Charlie. Hello, everybody. Hopefully you
can hear me okay. Thanks so much for joining us today. I'm really, really excited to talk about old case research and some of the ways we can use open source to shed light. on unsolved murders. So yeah, without further ado, I'll just kind of launch into it. I'm going to talk a little bit about my story just kind of touch on it here and there. But I mostly wanted to give you guys some tips in case you're interested in looking into cold cases yourselves from the open source
side of things. I'll talk about a little bit about some of the lessons I learned in doing that and some of the challenges. And yeah, give you guys some suggestions and then just leave a ton of time open for questions at the end. So basically, I'm going to talk mostly today about unsolved homicides in the US, just because that's what I'm familiar with. That's what my story touched on. And it's a huge, huge issue here. It's obviously a huge issue in other countries
as well. So hopefully what I'm talking about in the US still applies to wherever you are. And you can still take some of these open source techniques and adapt them to wherever you are around the world. And yeah, if the screen share hasn't worked, maybe you can pull up my story on the Bell and Cat website, and you'll see a lot of that in there too. So anyway, it'll be focused on the US today, but hopefully some of
the same principles apply everywhere else. In the US, this problem is almost unfathomable in terms of scale of unsolved homicides, as Charlie was saying. The best estimates are about 346 ,000 unsolved cases is one estimate. The most conservative one I heard in the story was 270 ,000. hundreds of thousands of unsolved murders, which means even more folks, family members, friends of all of these victims who are left with a gaping hole in their lives from losing
a loved one. It means that there are potentially tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of killers out there as well. Dead, alive in some cases. So ultimately, this is a huge problem for a whole lot of reasons. It's an accountability issue. It's a public safety issue. And it's a problem that's so big that we don't even really have the data that like fully captures it because murder is typically handled in the US by local,
county and state law enforcement. it sometimes will be looked at by the FBI if the killing involves crossing state lines, if it's a prolific serial killer, if it's organized crime related, if there's some kind of federal crime tied to it, they might look at it, but usually it's local authorities investigating. Not all of those local authorities report all of their data to the federal government.
It varies state by state. So states like Mississippi are not as great at reporting as some other states. So this is really just sort of a our best guess at the scale of the problem. Yeah, behind each one of these is a story of somebody who was killed and whose case remains a mystery. And it's also a problem because police are usually incredibly under -resourced to deal with this. And the story that I looked at, for example, takes place in a city called Corpus Christi in Texas, right
on the coast. It's about 600 ,000 people. Their police department has two detectives who are working a hundred plus unsolved murders part time while they're working on murders that are happening every day right now. So these are detectives who are already struggling to keep up with current homicides and who are already dealing with that. And in any free time they have, they're working
on historical cases. And bear in mind that when I say working on historical cases, they usually have a paper file with like old interview notes, old handwritten notes and stuff. And that's all they're working with. These cases often are so old. But the policemen who originally worked them are dead or retired. It's a huge, huge issue. And essentially, with several of the cases that I looked at through this story, the police didn't even know that these cases were still unsolved
and that they had them on file. So that's kind of the issue we're talking about here. That's why I encourage anybody and everybody who's interested in this subject to try to join some kind of community, which I'll get into in a bit, and try to research this problem in your local area. because we need more folks working on it. We need more bodies on this problem trying to help with this issue. Okay. Homicides aside, there's also a huge problem
with unidentified folks. Some of them are murder victims, some of them died of natural causes, but there are tens of thousands of unidentified bodies and unclaimed remains all over the country. It's a related problem. a lot of them are homicide victims. So you'll look into the, you know, a file of a skeleton found in the woods, for example, I was just doing this and had two bullet holes in the back of the skull, which means this person
was murdered and dumped in the woods. And not only do we not know who killed that person and why and all of that, but we don't even know who that person was. It's a whole sort of separate and related issue. But I just I'm mentioning this because we just The scale of the problem is so huge, and not only do we have unsolved murders, we have unidentified victims themselves. We also have tons and tons, tens of thousands
of missing folks out there. These problems, a lot of folks who work cold case homicides are also interested in missing persons cases, are also interested in unidentified remains. Okay, so one of the first things, if you're considering looking into cold cases, one of the first things you should ask yourself, and I think... Honestly, one of the most important questions you can ask in the whole course of it is, is the case you're interested in even mentioned online? Is there
anything about it online at all? And the Bill Richardson murder that I looked into and wrote about, there was nothing on the open web about it. The only information out there in the public about this murder was in old newspapers, some of which had been digitized. So when I did Google searches for the victim, there was hardly anything at all. And I had to go out there and just collect
everything I could. And honestly, my number one goal with the story was to collect anything I could about this victim and about his murder and put it online so that other folks in the community can access it in the future. So that if someone else wants to look into this, they can. And I talked to some folks who basically said, look, even just collecting, organizing and putting this stuff online is a huge help.
even for law enforcement because these detectives have paper files and they go online and search for anything just like we would and there might not be any info out there on them. So there's a couple websites that are actually open source focused crowdsourcing efforts out there. They're both nonprofits and just a quick plug for them. Uncovered is one. It's the largest. There's about 50 ,000 unsolved murders in the US logged on
Uncovered. It's a community effort. It's really, really good for collecting and organizing information on victims. And it's run by a small nonprofit and managed by volunteers. A very similar one to that would be solve the case, which is a lot newer. It was actually created by a homicide detective that I interviewed for my story. And same thing, there's a community of people uploading information about cases and commenting on them
and sharing info. So if you're working on this kind of issue, and you're wondering where to get started, start by participating in a community like this. There's Loads of other ones out there as well. There's all kinds of message boards and forums. I'm sure you guys know True Crime is a huge, huge community and world. There's different shades of it, but I would encourage you to kind of join a community if you're just
getting started. Also, just a plug, we do have a cold case channel that's pretty new in our own Discord. So definitely join that if you're interested in the topic. There's a few of us in there chatting. I plan to be a lot more involved in there. And this is a topic I care about a lot. So I encourage you guys to join that one. Okay, jumping back in. So let's say you're interested in looking at cold cases from the open source.
You need to think about whether the case you're looking at is even possible to research in open source. It's a big question to start with. Let's just start with the basic fact that people commit murder for a whole plethora of different reasons,
right? You have sexually motivated crimes like serial killers usually are right where they're going out there and selecting a type of victim and Killing sort of someone who matches the same profile over and over again because of some sort of deep you know, psychological impulse that they can't control. You also have domestic violence, family disputes, disputes over money, robbery has gone wrong. There's all sorts of different
reasons folks commit murder. That means that each murder you look at is going to be pretty sort of its own thing, right? They're each going to be unique. They're each going to be different. There are commonalities between them you can work with. But in my case, I happen to be really interested in organized crime, specifically the American mafia and different organized crime groups that have been active here in the U .S. over time. Some of them still are. Some of them
aren't anymore. And one of the reasons I looked into Bill Richardson's murder in particular is that I gambled on the fact that it was pretty apparent he'd been killed by professional killers. And so I went off of the assumption that, hey, these people probably killed other folks and they probably have. pretty hefty paper trails through agencies like the FBI who are probably monitoring these people for other crimes. So what I figured was, okay, this is a killing that's
probably mob related. I don't know which mob, I don't know who did it exactly yet, but it was so apparently done by professionals, by hitmen, that I figured if I could try to figure out who those hitmen were, I could discover more public records about them and work it from an open source angle. So some murders are going to be easier to cover from open source. Others are going to be extremely difficult, like the unidentified skeleton example I just gave. There's almost
no public information out there on that. In order to dig into that, you would have to make information public by requesting police records and things like that. So just consider that when you're starting your case. I will get to the family question. That's really, really good. And we'll get to that. later. So a couple more considerations really quickly. When you're thinking about doing a case, it's important to consider how extensively it was covered originally. Is there maybe just
one local media mention of it? Are there multiple newspaper articles? Are there TV reports on it? There's sort of a couple different sides to this. The more coverage you have, the more data points you have to start working with. However, the more coverage you have might mean that folks have already kind of run the public research side of this, the open source side of this to
the end, right? So if it's covered extensively and there's a ton of journalists working on it and a ton of people in the true crime community or something who have worked on it and researched it and uploaded everything online, that's one thing. I will tell you guys just anecdotally that I found multiple murders looking into this one unsolved case. I found multiple murders that there was public data out there for, there were
newspaper articles about. archival records and things like that, but there was nothing on them online. There's a lot of room to do really important good research here and to contribute towards research into these cold cases. I would just say that it's a huge problem and it doesn't take very long to find cases where you're like, oh my God, there's nothing off of Google about this murder that happened in my town. I have some
newspaper articles about it. I should upload this to Uncovered or solve the case or something. Backing up a little bit, each case is going to be completely different, like I said. Is it even going to be possible to cover from a public record's open source angle? If it's someone like a gangster, a mobster, that means that there's going to be a hefty paper trail you can probably work with.
It also means if it happened a long time ago that they probably committed, they probably went on to commit other crimes later on, and those might be relevant to the case you're looking at. What data points are public? What can you start to use to research? Do you have the victim's death certificate? Are there names of suspects involved with the murder? Were those suspects cleared already by the police? In my case, one
of them was put on trial and acquitted. We found out some more information about him that actually turns out to be pretty incriminating. But yeah, it's something to consider. Did the police even reveal that many details about the death? In a lot of cases, they might withhold a lot of information, a lot of the details of how the person was killed, how the body was found, where
it was found. they oftentimes strategically withhold that information so that it doesn't interfere with their investigation and so that if they get things like witness statements later on, they can corroborate it with information that kept secret. So it depends on how much information was released about the murder, how much has been reported, that sort of thing. A really key thing is were suspects named or not? Are they still
alive or not? That's a huge question. Another, this is a little bit more, if you're doing a traditional journalist approach, where you'd be going and interviewing family members, which I'll talk about more later. And I saw we have some questions about. But if you're looking strictly from an open source side, are there family members, say, who've created a Facebook group for their
loved one? Oftentimes with a cold case murder, there'll be a Facebook group with members of the local community that's open and you can see people. posting news articles about it, leaving comments, posting information about their family member, posting photos. There is a lot of that
online around this topic. So. Other factor factor to consider, and then lastly, which law enforcement agencies worked the case because that determines where you're going to file your public records requests, which I'm going to focus on in just a second. And Bill Richardson's case, it had been reported a lot. Initially, there were a lot of newspaper articles for me to start with. None of them. were indexed by Google, I had to pay for a newspapers .com account to find this
information and kind of unlock it. But there was enough for me to get started on the case where there were suspects named, there was a related murder that was mentioned. So there was some information I could start with and then I just started blasting out FOIAs based on that information that I started with. I also took information from those newspaper articles. went to Ancestry .com and started to use that to pull more. So I was able to get death certificates.
I was able to find family members that were still alive that I could try to reach out to. I was able to find a lot of information that helped me dig further on using the combination of newspapers .com and Ancestry. Not an endorsement of them. Those just are the paid tools that I happen to use for this because they're great for US -focused research. Yeah, some key suspects were named. They had extensive criminal careers, which meant
that I could file FOIAs with the FBI. I could request records from local and state police. I could map out the course of their criminal career and figure out whether that was relevant to this murder. And then because these guys were dead, the suspects in my case are dead, it made it much, much easier for me to get records from them from the FBI. because I could send them the death certificate and say, this person is
deceased. I'm requesting any files related to their criminal history to FBI investigations into this person. And because of privacy laws, they're able to release more if the subject is deceased. OK, so I'll just keep going real quick. You guys all know this already as members of the Bill and Kat Discord, but these are the sort of typical tools we use for our open source work, right? If you're looking into a cold case homicide,
it might look something more like this. I was using digitized newspapers, in my case, paid services. There are some freely available out there through libraries. If you're a student or you're a faculty member of a university, that's a nifty way to be able to access digitized newspapers as well. I also used ancestry .com, like I said, to pull some pretty vital information. So certificates, which gave me social security numbers and birthdays
and surviving family members. I also did a lot of social media work, honestly, even though this case happened in 1971 before the internet. The survivors and family members are on Facebook, and they tend to be in this case, they were anywhere from in their 50s to their 80s and 90s even, and they were real active on Facebook. So I was able to reach out to some of them for interviews on here. There were people posting information
and leaving comments and stuff like that. So social media, even for a case like this that's really old, was still relevant. And lastly, and crucially, FOIAs and public records requests, which I did entirely online. And many of them I did before I even joined Bill and Kat. I just had a completely different job. I wasn't a journalist. I wasn't working in the journalism space. And I was just filing FOIAs because I was interested
in learning more about this murder. And because we have public record laws here in the US and in Texas that let me do that. So huge plug, huge plug for Muckrock. If you guys are at all interested in ever filing any kind of FOIA with any agency ever, Muckrock is your place to go. I say that because you can go in there, search for FOIAs that are similar to the ones that you want to file. So I can go in there and search for FOIAs
sent to the FBI. And I can find example letters that other people, including journalists, have sent in. And I just use those as a template for my own. So I went in there and I found someone who had requested FBI records related to a mobster. It was a journalist and I took their letter. I changed a couple things around and I sent it into the FBI. And the second I started doing that was the second I started getting better results from FOIAs. So big plug for Muckrock.
They're really, really awesome. You can also just file them directly through agency websites like the FBI. But more on that in just a second. Speed up here. What's the muckrock site? We can draw there. Charlie just dropped the link. There you go. Yeah, so I kind of I want to speed through this a little bit. But when we're doing our typical Bellingcat investigations, where we're looking at maybe the social media accounts of someone
who's accused of some wrongdoing, right? We're pivoting around using different data points. We're finding a username and an email and a phone number. It's a very similar idea when you're doing this type of research. In my case, I often started with a newspaper article, which would give me the name of somebody, a suspect maybe. I could search for them on ancestry .com, figure out if they were alive or dead, figure out where
they lived. So if they were deceased, I usually got a death certificate with a date of birth, surviving family members that I could find on Facebook. And using those points above, I could also file FOIAs. If the suspect was deceased, it meant that I could... Okay, and you know, it sucks. I can't talk to this person. I can't interview them. However, it does mean I can request their records from the FBI or the local police.
So okay, just an example of how it worked with in this case, in my story, if you read it, there was a suspected hitman who belonged to something called the Dixie Mafia, this really fascinating, shadowy, extremely violent organized crime group that used to be real active all across the American South and the Midwest. This guy was tied to my murder. He was a suspected getaway driver. He belonged to essentially a team of hitmen who thought to have killed the murder victim in my
case. He was murdered himself, it turned out. I figured that out researching. The local police didn't even realize that his case was still unsolved, which was really interesting. I filed a FOIA with them and they responded by saying, basically they acknowledged that they didn't realize that the case was still unsolved and that they were going to treat it as an unsolved case. And they gave me some files related to it, surprisingly. So I pivoted around with different data points.
In this case, I ended up using his tattoos. I had his autopsy report. I could see different tattoos he had all over his body. And because he had multiple aliases, he used multiple names, his tattoos ended up being really important because I could match up the tattoos under his autopsy in one name with his prison records, which listed his tattoos under another name. And I could prove that, hey, this is the same guy. Did that all
through open source? Yeah, too long. Okay, so the other thing is just search terms, just like you would with any other investigation, right? Increasingly, a lot of older documents, especially things like FBI documents related to mobsters, people with prolific criminal careers, serial killers, things like that. As government documents that have been foiled by other people are released online or even released by the government themselves, search engines are going to start indexing some
of the language in there. Even if it's a document that's handwritten, that's been OCR'd, sometimes those terms will show up off a simple Google search. In my case, a huge finding came from the most simple Google search, essentially. I searched a variant of one of the friends of the victim. I searched for a variant of his name and I got a document from the JFK assassination record collection act. It kind of made my stomach churn because I thought like, Oh, boy, I'm getting
into JFK territory. I'm not prepared for this. But it ended up being huge because it involved organized crime connections, actually, to the Sicilian -American mafia, because of Nostra. So it was just off a simple Google search, like many of our investigations are. So be creative with your search terms, use every possible combination, spelling variations, use search operators like quotation marks, file type, site. usual stuff that you guys know from our other Bellingcat
cases. And then like I said with with FOIAs and public records, use Muckrock, find examples that are similar to the type of FOIA you want to file and file those early, as early as you possibly can. And then get ready to A, have to negotiate a little bit, you'll have a little bit of an email back and forth, right? They'll usually email you and say, like the FBI emailed me and was Hey, we have 12 ,000 pages on this one guy
you just requested for. If you want all of those, you have to wait eight years, or we can give you 50 of them in the next two months. Which do you prefer? So I had to learn just off the cuff. I'd never done that before. I had to learn off the cuff how to negotiate with them. And once I did it once, twice, three times, it got much easier each time. I got more confident doing it. And anyway, Muckrock is a good resource for learning how to do that. And you can also just
shoot me a message on Discord. I'm happy to help with FOIA questions. I find the whole process really fun, frustrating as well, but also really fun. A couple things to consider. Each state's totally different in the US. For example, in Texas, it's actually easier for me to get autopsy records than it is where I live in Massachusetts. It's a lot harder. They're not considered in the public record up here, unfortunately. So just learn your state's public records laws.
Learn how to game it a little bit. There's different tips and tricks for that. There's folks that do really awesome FOIA work online. File it with as many agencies as you can. If you think your murder was looked at by the local police and the county sheriff, then file a public records request with both of them for the same case. Fire them off in the same go. I would just do it in the same morning. Don't be afraid to learn as you go. Don't be afraid to make mistakes.
Don't be afraid to reach out to them. I was a little intimidated with my first couple of FOIAs. But these are public record laws for a reason. We're members of the public. We can request these. You're essentially requesting that information be made available to us because we are looking into a public issue, which is unsolved murders. So keep that in mind. Also keep in mind that a lot of these officials actually want to help
you. Someone told me that early on and it actually It helped me out a little bit with the process because I kind of assumed that these people wanted to hide every record from me, right? And that they were trying to fight me on these record requests. In some cases, that was a little bit true. But in a lot of cases, the public information officer at the local police department, they're like excited that someone's looking into some case that they don't have time to deal with,
right? And maybe they want to strategically release a little bit of information about it. That happened to me in a couple cases. So don't be afraid to head out to negotiate with them. You'll have some email back and forth. It's really common. A lot of people do this. You don't have to be a journalist to file FOIAs. Yeah, 404 Media also has a FOIA workshop. Yeah, thanks for that. 404 is really, really awesome for that. And so is Muckrock. Those are my two faves. Okay, just
a quick note. A lot of the research happens off of weird, obscure archives. A lot of the coolest stuff that I found that was very relevant to the murder I was looking into. was off of university libraries, was off of special collections at local libraries. They were bits of information available in archives that weren't reachable just from simple Google searches. I had to dig a little deeper, go to the library website, access photo collections, and search in there. They
weren't all indexed, essentially. Get creative. Look around. You never know what you'll find. Go to your local library and talk to a reference librarian. Honestly, they're awesome, and they can help you get started, especially if you're looking at local cases. Hyperlocal Facebook groups. Find them if they're out there. Here's an example of this one, old gangster days in Fort Worth for mine. This is populated entirely by the kids and grandkids of the gangsters I was looking
at. There are hundreds of family members of these gangsters who are posting photos of them. telling old stories. It's a treasure trove for journalists and crime historians and it's really awesome. And then those crowdsourcing sites I mentioned, that's a good place to start too. Maybe your case is already in there, you can start working from that. Another really good resource, NamUs. This is the national database basically for missing and unidentified people. I just searched my county
in Massachusetts right before this. There's 27 unidentified remains just in the database alone that I could start searching with. If you're looking at an unidentified murder victim, you can go in here and you can look for similar cases in a similar area. You can look for, you know, maybe victims who meet the same general profile, maybe the same age group, male or female, or you can search by different categories in here, and it's NamUs is a really good place to start
as well. There's a couple other in here, and I really just wanted to emphasize One thing which is that if you're trying to get started in this topic and you're interested in it I urge you to look in your local area first And I urge you to dig a bit deeper than just google searches A lot of these murders are not even publicly listed online as I mentioned So get a paid, you
know newspapers .com account go to your local library get a university account Ask a friend who has one start searching through your local paper or for terms like murder, Jane Doe. Look in your local area though and I guarantee you, you're going to find unsolved cases. In the couple of towns around me since I started this, I have been honestly appalled at the number and I also
just hear people out and about. I heard a woman at breakfast the other day talking about how her mom is the victim of a cold case, actually a mafia related cold case too. So it's not that hard to find these everywhere. These people's family members are often posting on Facebook about it, like urging people to come forward or posting on the anniversary of their death or their birthday. Looking at these cases, we need people working on them, join groups that
work on them. If you want to learn more skills about how to do this, how to do it responsibly, how to engage with, you know, family members in some cases are like parts of these groups and they're willing to chat with people you never know. So I'd say if you're just getting started, join a group and look local. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to open it up to questions. We went a little
bit over time. Thanks for listening to Yap. The last point I'll say is that with a lot of these cases, especially if there's not much on them off of the Google search, if there's not much on them online, you might be the only person who is looking into that case. There's a really good chance that you will be the only person interested in a given case. So this is important stuff. There are too many of these to deal with and I hope people get out there and start working
on them. Even in other countries, this is a huge problem everywhere. So reach out to me on Discord. Here's my Blue Sky account. Open the floor to questions. Thanks so much, Peter, for giving us so many useful tips there. Hopefully, we can find out some more in this discussion. Obviously, we've already dug a little bit into the FOIA requests, but quite a lot of the questions are focused on that. So I just want to Just return
back to that conversation while we go. Thank you to everybody who's been popping really useful links in the chat, particularly for non -US based stories. For example, Miss B, thank you for sharing Right to Know that's useful in Australia, Ask the EU, which is useful in the EU, and the IGF .org, which is useful in Canada. Again, if you're listening to this on the podcast, all of these links will be in the description of the podcast,
so you don't need to worry about that. And Scoot asked earlier, how long before the FOIA requests were answered? Because that's the big thing when it comes to FOIA requests is the actual length that it takes. And as someone who has filed a lot in her life, being an investigative journalist prior to this job, I know that often when it comes back, a certain word that you've used or a phrasing that you've used might not fit what
they have on their side. And therefore you might get a rejection and that is gutting after you've waited months, maybe a year to get a response to then be rejected and not get the data you're looking for. So how long did it take you to get your data back? And did you have any instances like that where you realized that you weren't using the right legal speak or the right phrasing that you should have been to get the data that
you needed? Yeah, yeah, oh man, so the the short answer to how long I waited it ranged from like a month in some cases To I think the longest FOIA that I filed was like close to 15 months with the FBI and that was I was the first big one that I filed with them and it took a lot of Negotiating but I also was new to it and and once I had learned Kind of what I was doing a
little bit more. I could have sped that up. But essentially if you're doing a case like this put out the foyers at least months ahead of time and look at it like you're just you're putting irons in the fire. You're putting your casting fishing lines out there and you're hoping that months later they will start trickling back in. So the more of them you file, the more targeted
you are in that language. So with the FBI, for example, I learned kind of instead of saying I'm requesting all of your files related to this person, I would And I did this just by kind of asking them how to do it too. Like I honestly would email back and forth with them and be like, I'm trying to get this, can you help me kind of adjust the language a little bit? And in some cases, they would help me do that. Not always, but sometimes. So I learned to be more specific.
And I would say, I'm interested in any information you have on this person related to organized crime activity in Texas between 1965 and 1972. And that would narrow it down. And then they would say, okay, we have files from 1968 and 1969. We'll send those to you in a month. The more specific you can be, the better. But again, there's people posting like 404 and Muckrock have really, really good tips on how to use that
language. I would just say, look for FOIAs at the same police department that you're interested in filing with. and try to find ones that are written by a journalist or a researcher that sounds professional and that are citing specific laws. Because the minute I started doing that and basing my FOIAs off of what other people do was the minute it started happening quicker. I'd start getting files back sooner, but I literally got FBI documents yesterday that I had filed
eight months ago or something. Wow. More stuff to uncover then. Hopefully. I would also say that some authorities, not really the police, but if you're looking at local authority documents, like councils and state -led departments, sometimes they can be a little bit mean. If you start asking questions after you've filed your FOIA, they can then reset the clock. They can say, oh, well, you inquired about something. Therefore, we're going to reset the clock that we have to respond
to. Just be aware of that. But absolutely, kind of being as specific as possible is really useful. And there's so many good books out there as well on FOIA requests per country as well. For example, if you're looking for it in Holland in the Netherlands, I'm sure you could find Netherlands specific advice as well in a book form, because there's lots of journalists that specialize in kind of the best forms of FOIAs for each country. Lots
of questions coming in. Keith has asked, any comments on safety when investigating these? Did you encounter any issues? I was going to ask that as well, because obviously, you talked about reporting on mafias and organized crime. What would be your advice for people starting to investigate these kinds of cases in terms of safety for themselves? Yeah, that's a big
issue. My murder was 54 years old. I had a lot of people who were very, I don't want to say afraid, but there was a stigma about talking about this, folks in their 80s, 90s, including folks in my family, by the way, because I'm from Texas, who it just didn't feel safe either talking about it or having their name attached to it because they just assume that there's this mafia presence that's still there. And understandably, they're They're worried about safety concerns
for that. In my case though, because this was so old, the suspects that I was able to identify tied to this were all dead. All of them. I mean, every single person I was looking at, I found a couple of folks who were sort of tangentially related to them. But pretty much everyone was dead by this point. The mafia group that they belonged to, which was the Dixie mafia, was sort of... other topic is pretty much defunct. There's
a couple guys left but pretty much gone. I'm also across the country now, which helped a little bit with safety. But if you're looking at a murder that's more recent, especially one tied to gang activity or organized crime, that's absolutely a concern. And it's more of a concern when you're starting to work on it publicly when you're when you're posting about it online or talking to folks. However, you're also keep in mind you're
doing public records research. So filing foyers to the police department, looking for newspapers online, that sort of thing. Take the same precautions you would doing a modern day ongoing type of research or type of crime that's going on today. Take the same approach. A lot of cases are gonna be so old and they'll have suspects that are named who are now deceased. But you still might be able to find stuff in the open source out there. So don't let it hold you back either.
But I would also say lastly, and most importantly, another good reason to join a community of people who are working on this issue. Participate in a forum and a local group of some kind. Plug in with other people who can share safety concerns and resources with you in your local area. Absolutely. Take away, don't do organized crime if you're interested in longevity. Yeah, that's a good one. We had a question earlier actually about how you find the family members, particularly
as they probably aged quite a lot. Could you maybe talk about the technique of how you discover the people to talk to and then how you approach them on this particular subject? Because it's quite a hard thing to kind of bring up and possibly retrain someone about. Absolutely. It's a really good question. It's a really tough issue. It's something I was just at a... investigative journalism conference two weeks ago. And it's a thing that's like at the top of everyone's minds because each
case is so different. And this is a really hard topic. I mean, even when these murders happened 50 years ago, you can hear it when you're talking to these folks. I mean, this stuff is, it doesn't matter how much time has passed, it is raw. And there's a lot of anger often mixed in there. There's confusion at why the authorities have haven't been able to solve the case. There's suspicion. Who are you? Why are you looking into
this? It's such a huge question, but I will start by saying I guess that I would find the family members usually I'd find their names on ancestry .com. So I would search for like I was looking at Bill Richardson, the main murder victim I was focusing my story on. I quickly was able to find birth records basically for his kids that had their names. I knew he was from Corpus Christi in Texas. So I started working with that information that I got off of genealogy websites.
I started doing searches on Facebook, searching for people um, with those names in Corpus Christi. And I quickly found a couple of them. Some of them had changed their names, they'd been married or divorced and their names had changed and whatnot. Um, but I was able to find them. I was able to
find them through mutual friends. I would, I would cold reach out to them and just say, you know, on Facebook, which isn't great because when you're not friends with somebody that, you know, it goes to their hidden inbox or whatever, I would then, um, later on I started finding phone numbers and stuff like that. But it was really scary at first because I'm I'm reaching out to them as a random nobody asking about their
dad who was murdered 54 years ago. I sent out Facebook messages and I think it took about a month until I got my first reply back. It was one of the daughters and she said, hey, I heard through my family that you're trying to reach us. Why are you looking at my dad's case? It was a scary question to get, but I was straightforward and I just said, I'm a journalist with Bellingcat. I'm looking to publish an article on this murder. And I'm hoping to get some more information beyond
just what's out there in the newspapers. And she very graciously agreed to talk with me. We still text all the time. So I was able to do that. But granted, I work in a journalism space. So I have a little bit of experience doing that already. So that helped. In the case, if you're not a journalist and just work in cold cases, it's a lot harder to do and it's harder to explain, hey, I'm just a random person who is into research
cold cases. And yeah, so I'd say again, being part of a community where there's folks that know how to do that. Maybe there's victim advocates and stuff like that, even who already do that already. There's, in fact, here, I'll drop it in here later on, but there's a podcast that I love here in the US that's really good about how they reach out to family members and doing it in a considerate way and stuff. Otherwise, they're often available in Facebook groups and
stuff too. They're literally often want people to be researching these and they're posting about it themselves or they've created a group about it themselves. Okay, I yapped a bunch about that. I want to make sure to get to other questions. If you have more questions on contacting family members, definitely reach out to me. You send me a message on Discord and stuff. I'm happy
to chat. And we can also talk about it in the thread that we mentioned earlier that is in the Discord for cold cases, because we're always in there looking at potential tools and tips for looking into these cases. So please check that out. If you scroll up, you'll find it in the chat. I put it in there earlier. And thank you so much for everyone putting in missing person links as well for the various countries. They are super useful as well in these particular
cases. Scoot asked, could you talk about your methodology a bit? Did you formulate hypotheses and then test them? You mentioned earlier that, for example, you kind of suspected that organized crime was involved in this particular case. I wanted to ask you, is it often hard to stop yourself pulling the thread because you found multiple murders and ended up with a huge pin board, as we see in the article? So how do you know once you've started pulling that thread, once you've
started unraveling that methodology? How do you stop? How do you say, okay, well, this is the story. This is how far I can get at this point in time. Yeah. Yeah. First of all, hi, Scoot. Nice to see you here. Second of all, I wish I had an organized methodology behind doing this. I tend to work in all of the research I do pretty freeform. I have a running Google Doc of notes and I just... let myself go down to a rabbit
holes and pursue it. However, with this one, I did develop a methodology kind of over time, because there were so many other murders tied to this, because it was a mafia thing. I say that loosely there, there was the mafia, but also other mafias involved with this. I started to see sort of the same types of like murders over and over again, the same suspects popping up over and over again, similar crimes. So there were a lot of different strands with this investigation.
I would kind of treat each one like on an individual basis. So I'd get the name of a suspect, I'd start doing open web searches for them. I'd start running searches on newspapers .com for that same person. Same thing with ancestry .com. And I would try to find any family members online that might have posted photos about them on Facebook, for example, or posted in the forum somewhere. So I sort of I use the same set of tools on each person individually. And that was sort of the
methodology approach. When it came to putting it all together, this crazy detective cork board that you see is like what was going on in my mind for three years. So I would definitely recommend being more organized. I would recommend a couple things. Become friends with Google Docs, learn how to use their organizational features, which are really awesome. I'm still learning them myself, but keep a running list of notes and keep it organized. So have contact information for people
in one. Have a tab for each individual person with all of the data points you have about them, the knowns, the unknowns. That would be a good place to start. Definitely I would keep a spreadsheet of the foyers you've sent off. I would also keep a spreadsheet of like contact info for people. So in a lot of cases, I just have like four or five phone numbers per person. And I'd have to figure out which one was their current phone number, which ones were old. So yeah, being being
a bit more methodical would be good. But I didn't I didn't have like a formal methodology of like hypothesis and test it was a lot looser than that. I wish I had a better answer, but pretty chaotic. Hey, we like chaos, as well as order. So I want to revisit, we've got about 10 minutes left. If you have any other questions, please pop them in the chat. I want to revisit Saiba's
question. Saiba asked earlier about whether you felt the need to wait to publish in order to make sure that the family were informed and also local law enforcement. Perhaps you can talk a little bit about the ethics behind publishing. Perhaps if you can't get in touch with the family members that you might want to. Is it worth just not reporting if people aren't responding to
you, for example? And then how you manage that local law enforcement issue if the law enforcement isn't happy to kind of share details with you and vice versa. Yeah. Okay. So a couple of sides to this. Okay. So to start with, it was really important for me to try to talk to someone from the family, because just from my own sense of
Ethics behind it. I felt it was important that they know that I'm looking into it and I wanted to sort of for lack of a better term I kind of wanted their blessing a little bit just just to I'm digging up old heavy stuff, right their dad was murdered and in front of some of them and I'm I'm another person not in the family looking into it. So yeah when I heard from the daughter, it was sort of a big win for me and she basically said look We haven't heard from
the police since the 1970s. We don't think this will ever be solved. So if you think you can find new information, good on you. Good luck. Here's what I know. And we kept in touch. That was really, really important for me. You're not going to get that in all cases. You might not even know who the person is. So how are you going to find their family? The victim could be an unidentified skeleton in the woods. That doesn't
mean you shouldn't work on it. Those communities that I posted earlier uncovered and solve the case. There's others out there. There's tons of others out there Those are a good place to start because You know these people a lot of them might even have like fallen out of touch with their families You never know it could be a very stigmatized person like a sex worker or
something who? Came from a rough family background or doesn't have a family or no one knows who they are there's still a person whose death remains unsolved their killer still remains out there and one way or another and That doesn't mean that if anything, that means I think people should be working on those cases even more. So it's ideal if if you're able to kind of have a family that's willing to share information and stuff. But that won't always be the case with the law
enforcement side of that. I would basically file the public records request with them very early. I say, hey, I'm I'm looking at this murder. Please give me. The public information portions of your report on this murder, you know, I'm going to release it to the general public. I'm a journalist. That's what I would say. And sometimes they'd share more than I asked for. Usually they'd send me a heavily redacted single page document or they wouldn't respond or there'd be a back and
forth. It was all over the place. Sometimes the public information officer was willing to chat and they were happy I was looking into it. Other times they clearly didn't want to be dealing with me. You know, they see I'm a journalist and automatically shut off because I'm talking about the American South here. So so it's kind
of all over the place. Sometimes they'll be they'll be retired policemen, for example, who used to work for the police department, who've maybe spoken to journalists before who are involved. who've spoken publicly about the case, who've been interviewed in newspapers. You might be able to reach out to them and talk to them about, hey, you worked this case when you were back with the department. Can you share anything about it? They might even have old files sometimes.
I mean, these cases are old on paper. Sometimes people share stuff like that. However, most of the time the police aren't going to release information to you. They'll consider it an active and ongoing case, even when it's not, even when they have a hundred other cases and they're not looking at this one and they know nothing about it. So by all your information requests, don't expect
much from them. It doesn't mean that they are like, you know, hate folks looking into it, but they usually just are prohibited from releasing information about cases that are technically still open. What part of that question, Charlie, did I miss any? I think you answered it very well. I was going to just ask, did you send the information to the police as well afterwards? A couple of the public information officers, so sometimes it'll be like a policeman assigned
to the role. Sometimes it's just an administrative person who responds to these. A couple of times when they were working with me and we had a little bit of a rapport when the article was published, I'd send it to them. Just because I kind of got to know the person a little bit or whatever, we talked on the phone, we had an email back and forth. I didn't know if it was just a police official who shared the bare minimum and I wouldn't send it to them. But once the article was published,
I would. But I shared it to them in the published form. I wasn't going with them and working with them actively. Yeah, we don't do that at Bell and Cat, so it wasn't like that. The last part of the question, Charlie, that you asked ethically about like interacting with the family and when to publish and everything. That was the big reason why we partnered up with Texas Observer. We partnered with local journalists who cover crime in Texas because they're familiar with all of the nuances
of that area. Again, the more local you can go, the more you can team up with folks in your local area to do this type of research. The better off you'll be. The reaction locally was pretty good, right? Yeah. There's a couple of things. Because this case dealt with the Southern mafia for lack of a better term, the Dixie mafia, there's still a lot of stigma around that. Especially folks in their 70s, 80s, and 90s. I don't want
to talk about this stuff a lot of the time. So, for example, I learned through some of the family members and stuff that I talked to and keeping up with, that the article is definitely going around Corpus Christi, that people are sharing it and talking about it and calling each other and stuff like that. They're not necessarily commenting on it on social media, reaching out to me or anything like that, but I know that it's making the rounds because I've heard that
from multiple people. And the reaction has been surprise from the family members. They had no idea that a lot of these people were tied to this kind of organized crime. They didn't know the extent of it. The murder victim's family knew he was probably involved with gambling, but his friends and stuff had suspected mafia ties and their families didn't know a lot of that. So it was a kind of a mix of surprise.
Um, a little bit of shock. Um, uh, but it was, it was sort of mostly, wow, you know, we, we didn't know that this was kind of going on in the background and it kind of explains why the killing happened the way it did and who might've been involved in the types of people, um, that the victim was associating with. So it's been interesting and I'm still, I'm still hearing back from people. I've gotten some, some interesting texts and phone calls and stuff like that. So.
I'm glad it's resonating on the ground. Last question, final one. Mossman asked, when investigating a cold case, how do you decide when or if to throw in the towel if you're not finding what you need to find? That was a question that a lot of journalists were just asking me, so it's a really good one. It's one that we all struggle with. I would say this, if you're hitting dead end after dead end, or if you're burning yourself out, or you're frustrated, or you've kind of...
Run the public information open source Angles to their to their end. Don't give up on it. Just put it on the back burner have it like Have it on a Google Doc that you revisit every now and then I worked on this off and on for three plus years I wasn't Actively 100 % of the time. I
was doing other stories. I had other jobs. I You know life happened So I would have to pause pause my research on do it and jump back in it at a later date I'd get like a shower thought where I'm like, oh my gosh, I didn't search for this set of search terms. I'm going to go do that. Just keep it on the back burner. Don't give it up. Be part of a group. Share information with them. Keep it going. You don't have to just like permanently give things up. It's not black
or white. You can keep it on the back burner. So how do you know when to stop? I encourage you like with any other research. If it's coming from a place of curiosity and excitement at the most basic level, for me, I was just obsessed with this group of people. I need to know what their organized crime ties were because there were hitmen involved in gambling. I have to know which mafia this was, where these people were. I was obsessed with it. I just pursue that. getting
tired of it. If you're hitting dead ends and you need to pause it, pause it, but you don't have to give it up. Hope that helps. Thanks so much, Peter. And excitingly, this week's, this month's Bell and Cat challenge is actually inspired by cold case research as well, which you helped design. So if you have been having a go at the Bell and Cat challenges, look out this Sunday slash Monday for the release of a new set of
challenges from Peter. And you can let him know how you're doing on that in the Discord server as well. Yeah, good luck, everybody. It was hard to write them. So hopefully it's not impossible to solve. But it's been really fun. And some of them are tied to the story. And yeah, I love the historical stuff in general. So yeah, reach out to me guys on Discord. I'm on Blue Sky as well. But shoot me a DM on Discord if you have
questions. I'm always happy to help with like a FOIA question or... even ethically, you know, just hit me up and work on cold cases. Please, please, please work on them. We need lots of people. Thank you for listening to the stage talk. If you'd like to catch a stage talk live where you can ask the guest questions, join the Bell and Cat Discord server by visiting www .discord. The music you've heard is titled Dawn by Newer Self and is courtesy of Artlist.