The Skeleton Crew by Deborah Halber Page B

most clumsy and careless servant girl.” An amazed Watson asks Holmes how he knows this. “It is simplicity itself . . . My eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant boot-slitting specimen of the London slavey.”
    Holmes never let Watson forget that he considered himself strictly an amateur. “I claim no credit,” he says in The Sign of Four . “My name figures in no newspaper. The work itself, the pleasure of finding a field for my peculiar powers, is my highest reward.”
    With the help of newsgroups, online databases, and message boards, a new breed of amateur detective evolved, modeled on the famed detectivesof fiction but with one big difference: the real-life amateurs were dealing with real-life crimes, real-life bodies, and real-life tragedies. And not all sought only personal satisfaction as their reward.
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    Every amateur sleuth toiling in the realm of Jane and John Does has a pet case. For Canadian photographer Troy More, it was Cali, also known as Caledonia Jane Doe, a teenaged girl shot execution-style in an upstate New York cornfield in 1979.
    When I set out to write this book, I tried to identify the origins of the first site to list details of unidentified remains, but found it was like trying to name the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper or first explorer to reach the North Pole. The answer depended on whom you asked.
    When I asked Todd Matthews about the early days of the Doe Network, he pointed me to an archived corner of the Web where I found a treasure trove—every post since the inception of a cold cases newsgroup, accessible only through a little-used back door. Google doesn’t get you there.
    That’s how I learned that in 1999, More used Yahoo! —then a relatively new domain offering free hosting and other services—to create a newsgroup dedicated to the missing, the murdered, and the unidentified. He called it ColdCases, fashioned a fingerprint-and-handcuffs graphic, and flung an invitation into cyberspace: “Want to discuss unsolved cases? Subscribe to our list.”
    A handful of web denizens made their way to the newsgroup. Reading the moderator’s messages, I got a sense of the man who first summoned the web sleuths to Yahoo! Yet, as elsewhere on the Web, the newsgroup was a veil and More’s identity was indistinct: I saw only what he chose to reveal, sketchy details that emerged piecemeal in random posts meant for an audience that, as far as he knew at the time, did not yet exist.
    More described himself as a jaded news photographer who had seen “a few too many bodies.” He likened photographers to snipers, locking their lenses on the faces of victims’ family members, hoping to capture a moment of agony. In his view, the police, the media, and nonprofits were all uselesswhen it came to missing persons: law enforcement bungled cases, the media ignored “forgotten” victims, and nonprofit organizations fought over donation dollars with the same cutthroat mentality as corporate moguls.
    On ColdCases, he was adamant about including only cases that had fallen off the mainstream radar. He dismissed a prospective member who made the mistake of expressing interest in the murder of fashion mogul Gianni Versace: “We don’t normally deal with celebrity cases here as I’d like to think that people who aren’t rich and don’t wind up on Entertainment Tonight also deserve justice,” he wrote; he preferred to champion victims who weren’t well-known but who had died “just as violently as any celebrity.” Two years before