The Trouble With Notorious Murder Investigations

Putting “all hands on deck” and “casting a wide net” may not be the best way to solve a crime.

In 1993, when 16-year-old Rayna Rison was abducted outside her afterschool job and then found submerged in a rural pond one month later, the La Porte, Indiana, community demanded the police find her killer. Law enforcement quickly responded in ways to show their concern. Typically, those methods are described with two nautical terms: All Hands on Deck and Casting a Wide Net. But as I show in Submerged, there were flaws in that approach because some of those hands quickly uncovered vital clues to the crime, but they slipped through holes in that wide net.

From the start, the police focused on Rayna’s brother-in-law, Raymond McCarty, as the prime suspect because he was convicted of molesting her three years earlier. The La Porte County prosecutor said he could not bring charges because police could not “put [McCarty] with Rayna that night” or “account for his whereabouts” that evening. However, a credible witness called the police dispatch desk a few days after she was seized. He described two men looking under the hood of Rayna’s car thirty to forty minutes after her abduction. His description of one—in height and weight— was so close to McCarty it was uncanny. He was just as precise with McCarty’s accomplice. But this tip passed through hands that were not as knowledgeable about the Rison investigation to understand its significance.

Similarly, another clue that would have uncovered the conspiracy behind Rayna’s murder never reached the chief detectives on the case or the prosecutor’s office. Like the other tip, the informant was known to the officer who wrote up her call, which was also recorded. Like the other tip, police received it before Rayna’s body was found, further cementing its credibility. But the failure of this information to be properly processed was also due to the wide net. In the weeks after her abduction, the police from multiple agencies conducted nearly one hundred interviews and even more in the year that followed. Hundreds of tips accompanied these. As any person who has fished the ocean would advise, it’s one thing to cast a wide net. It’s another to sort through all the sea life it pulls up.