The Skeleton Crew
Subtitle: How amateur sleuths are solving America's coldest cases
By: Deborah Halber
Edition: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 285
ISBN-13: 9781451657586; 9781451657593
Subjects: Cold cases (Criminal investigation); Citizen participation; Criminal investigation
Description: In America today, upwards of forty thousand people are dead and unaccounted for. These murder, suicide, and accident victims, separated from their names, are being adopted by the bizarre online world of amateur sleuths. It's DIY CSI. The web sleuths pore over facial reconstructions (a sort of Facebook for the dead) and other online clues as they vie to solve cold cases and tally up personal scorecards of dead bodies. The Skeleton Crew delves into the macabre underside of the Internet, the fleeting nature of identity, and how even the most ordinary citizen with a laptop and a knack for puzzles can reinvent herself as a web sleuth.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 265-285).
Table of contents: title: Prologue: The well driller; title: The ultimate identity crisis; title: You can disappear here; title: It's the ethernet, my dear Watson; title: Ghost girls; title: Bring out your dead; title: Inside Reefer 2; title: The perks of being ornery; title: Seekers of lost souls; title: How to make a John Doe; title: Finding Bobbie Ann; title: Quackie is dead; title: The head in the bucket; title: The hippie and the lawman; title: The oldest unsolved case in Massachusetts; title: Relief, sadness, success; title: Epilogue.