Crime Database’s Aim: Countywide Clout

Using a simple spreadsheet on their personal computers, two Orange County prosecutors have created a novel tool for solving sex slayings that is helping local police take another crack at cold cases.

The fledgling database has already helped connect several unsolved slayings to serial killer Gerald Parker, the so-called Bedroom Basher who is scheduled to be sentenced today.

The concept--inputting reams of data about homicides into a computer and looking for patterns that connect the cases--isn’t new.

What makes the Orange County database unusual is that it’s open to all Orange County police agencies, with investigators adding cases and using basic search software to match them with unsolved ones.

The information-sharing arrangement represents a shift in police attitudes and is believed to be one of the first countywide collaborations in the nation. Detectives, officials said, are traditionally reluctant to publicize details about their cases--even to fellow officers--out of fear that it could jeopardize their own investigations.

Big-city agencies such as the Los Angeles Police Department maintain their own databases. But the information is accessible only to department analysts who process specific requests from their detectives as well as outside agencies. The same is true of the FBI crime databank, which contains only a small fraction of the nation’s homicide cases.

Local officials said the Orange County system is more helpful and efficient because it allows investigators to pore over hundreds of cases from different departments in one database using a computer, modem and simple search software.

“Overall, criminal databases are not well-interconnected,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Mike Jacobs, who created the Orange County system with recently retired prosecutor Mel Jensen. “Each jurisdiction pretty much does its own thing.”

Eventually, Jacobs hopes the system, known as TracKRS, will be placed on a secure Internet site so police agencies across the country can use it. If other counties develop similar databases, he said, those too could be placed on the site. He would like to expand the database beyond sex homicides.

So far, the Parker case represents Orange County’s biggest break, though officials are now using it on dozens of other unsolved homicides. Based on patterns detected by the system, Parker eventually confessed to a murder spree involving six Orange County women, prompting the district attorney’s office to free a Tustin man wrongly convicted of one of the murders.

The trail that brought investigators to today’s sentencing began in 1995, when Costa Mesa police detectives approached Jacobs and Jensen seeking help on some old murder cases whose tracks had grown cold.

Using coroner files on nearly 350 murders countywide, Jacobs and Jensen worked in their spare time to categorize and input data--everything from evidence to crime scene descriptions.

Analyzing the mountain of facts manually would have taken hundreds of hours. But with a few clicks of a mouse, the prosecutors were able to narrow the 350 murders to a few dozen cases they believed were linked. The cases were all similar, either in how the murders were committed or in the presence of physical evidence.

At the same time, new DNA technology had connected three late 1970s rape-murders in Orange County to Parker, who was in state prison on a separate rape conviction. The murders rang a bell for Jacobs and Jensen because they were among the several dozen cases that the database had linked.

Confronted with the information, Parker confessed to a total of six murders--all of which Jacobs and Jensen had highlighted.

“I never in a million years thought that Parker would confess,” said Tustin Police Det. Tom Tarpley.

“I think the reason why the case was so successful is what TracKRS does,” he added. “It identifies patterns in murders, and usually in sexual assault cases you don’t have just one. You will have offenders who commit multiple crimes.”