Told by Inv. Sergeant Michaels, Tri-State Fusion Center Task Force:
Obviously I need to be vague about the details of this investigation as the case is now with the Prosecutor’s Office. Our DA took office about 4 years ago and had a mission of clearing out a backlog of cold cases. One in particular, a presumed serial killer who was thought to be linked to 5 different murders based on M.O.
Sergeant Michaels"Our Task Force is now working with the DA’s Office in prosecuting Smith...VIXN remains a great resource for our team."
To bring these cases to justice the DA formed a Task Force that grew into a Tri-State Intel Fusion Center. I had been working as a Sergeant in the Sheriff’s Office’s Human Trafficking Unit and much of my work was interviewing girls in our facilities booked on prostitution charges. Unfortunately, this demographic is often a victim profile in cold case homicides, so with my background knowledge I was added to the Task Force.
Clearing the serial killer case was our top priority, and by 2022 we had a few persons of interest identified. However, circumstantial evidence and witness accounts were all we had connecting these persons to the crime scenes. We needed something more conclusive — finding that hard evidence was our mission.
In April of 2023, I met the VIXN Team. They were on-site running a training of VIXN for one of the Units I work with. I was impressed not only with how the system ran fast visual analysis of data, but the broad, deep data search it seemed capable of.
During a break, they ask the room if anyone had information they wanted to run through the system as a demo. I had the list of a dozen burner phone numbers collected from my interviews, suspected to have been used by the killer to contact victims. We ran these numbers through VIXN, and within 2 minutes all the results returned.
And there on the results screen I saw his name… our key person of interest, let’s call him ‘Tom Smith,’ connected to 2 of the phone numbers. Also in the results were several massage parlors located in the vicinity of a few of the crime scenes. We now had real new leads from these burner numbers.
I left the training room and went back to my desk to pull the logs for these numbers from the phone provider. The investigation took off from there. Hundreds of warrants later and a DNA sample retrieved from our prime suspect, we had Tom Smith in custody.
The VIXN Team also assisted me in retrieving all of the source data from the findings that validated Smith as our suspect, connecting him directly to those phone numbers. Our Task Force is now working with the DA’s Office in prosecuting Smith, as well as digging into other cold cases. VIXN remains a great resource for our team.
