News Brief
Courtesy of CBS News, Channel 5
Thousands of murders remain unsolved across the nation.
But now police are getting help from amateur detectives working online.
Jim Acosta and Jamie Reese report on this new kind of private eye.
-An amateur investigator has been turning to music fans at Bonnaroo to search for people who've gone missing from other concerts. This search is not happening on the ground; it’s happening online.
-Even the people camped out at Bonnaroo have access to an Internet cafe and cell phones that can search the Web.
-So, an investigator in Livingston, Tenn. is hoping those music fans can solve some very old cases.
-Forgive Todd Matthews if he's not sure of the lineup at Bonnaroo. His interest isn't in the music.
-Matthews said he hopes at least one of Bonnaroo’s 80,000 can help him solve the disappearance cases of music fans at other concerts. Some of those cases are over 30 years old.
-“It seems to be like a cult following, so maybe that’s the type of people we need to be targeting with this,” Internet sleuth Todd Matthews said. “There's seven people that have been missing either on their way to, from or during a Grateful Dead concert.”
-He has e-mailed flyers to hotels near the festival and posted a Bonnaroo link on the missing music fans Web site.
-“I'm hoping to reach somebody that is somehow related to them, you know, circumstantially, they like the same thing. … It could happen,” Matthews said.
-He's so sure, because it has happened.
-By his count, Matthews and his squad of volunteer Internet sleuths have helped identify 36 missing people, beginning with the Kentucky Tent Girl case.
-Matthew's father-in-law found her body in 1968.
-Matthews found her name 30 years later. These days, the clues come faster from Web sites, chat rooms and Internet postings.
-“You always knew there was a big world, but when you get online, it’s unreal,” Matthews said.
-The trick is to target the search.
-"The right group is going to pay most attention to something. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't,” Matthews said.
-And if Bonnaroo ends without closing a case, Matthews won't lose hope of finding the missing.
-“Some of these cases are like 30 years old. They're not going anywhere,” he said.
-Many of the people attending Bonnaroo weren't even born when these concert goers disappeared, but Matthews has solved colder cases than these.
-Sometimes it just takes one person and one clue.
Click links below to view videos of these news briefs:
by Jamie Reese
(Video 1)
by Jim Costa
(Video 2)
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The Sixties in America
Altamont Music Festival
The Dead were supposed to play at the infamous 1969 Altamont Speedway Concert with the Rolling Stones. The movie Gimmie Shelter filmed the concert as well as an infamous stabbing of an 18 year old concertgoer by the HEll's Angels.
There were three other deaths. Two by a hit and run driver and an unidentified person drowned in an irrigation canal while having an acid trip.
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