Derailed series

A a four-part investigation of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. (BNSF) by the Star Tribune (Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn.) with ProPublica reveals a troubled railroad company.  "Over the past decade, court records show, judges around the country have disciplined BNSF after finding that the company or its lawyers broke rules aimed at ensuring fair legal proceedings in 13 cases involving collisions or workplace injuries."

The Post and Courier (Charleston, S.C.) spent months going through individual case files at the Charleston County Probate Court to learn what was happening to the savings of elderly incapacitated persons. Reporter Doug Pardue discovered a court that was set up to protect vulnerable elderly persons but often helped drain their estates throught court-approved fees to lawyers, guardians and conservators.

In The Washington Post's continuing investigation, The Hidden Life of Guns, reporter Cheryl W. Thompson offers the first comprehensive analysis of how cop-killers got their guns. "Legal purchase was the leading source of weapons used to kill police officers. In 107 slayings, the killers acquired their firearms legally. In 170 deaths, The Post could not determine how the shooters got their guns, including 29 killings in which weapons were not recovered." Additionally, the analysis showed that traffic stops and domestic disputes are the two deadliest situations for officers.

In a two-part story on North Caroina's satellite-based monitoring of sex offenders program, the Winston-Salem Journal newspaper found that technological limitations create a system that some say does nothing more than create a false feeling of security. Additionally, legal challenges may reduce the number of offenders who will have to enroll. The Journal built an in-house spreadsheet to track more than a year's worth of decisions out of the state Court of Appeals, which showed that GPS monitoring was overturned in more than half the cases the court considered. The Journal also used a database of statistics provided by the program's administrators to determine that 41 percent of enrollees were being tracked despite the fact that there were no restrictions on where they could go. The data were also used to create an interactive map that showed the distribution of GPS-monitored sex offenders across the state using the Geocommons map builder.

Police in Ohio and Indiana have launched new murder investigations after a Scripps Howard News Service investigation revealed dozens of clusters of unsolved killings of women nationwide that are likely the work of serial killers. Also, authorities in Nevada acknowledge they are hunting a serial killer, although the public has not been told that the unsolved murders of up to seven women are connected. Through analysis of over 525,000 murders in America, Thomas Hargrove created a database that crime experts say is the most complete accounting of homicide victims ever assembled in the United States. Using the Freedom of Information Act, Hargrove obtained details about 15,000 murders never reported to the FBI. Hargrove also created a Serial Killer Detector, a computer algorithm that flags potential serial killings. Using the Detector, readers and viewers can sort through a database of 185,000 unsolved murders to determine for themselves if serial killers are at work in their communities.

An investigation by of The Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake City, Utah) found that inconsistently reported crime data has meant criminal activity on the country’s American Indian reservations is not well understood. Due to inconsistencies in the reporting of this data, some tribes have missed the chance for federal money for resource intended to help stem crime. A new program has been introduced to try to curb this problem.

Yang Wang, of the Houston Chronicle, found a number of massage parlors remain open despite repeated police raids for vice crime and licensing violations. In Houston, “292 establishments have been cited by police for compliance violations, including operating without a state license, hiring unlicensed workers, operating during prohibited hours or engaging in vice crimes.” Vice officers have arrested 23 women for agreeing to sex dates on 14 visits to one non­descript establishment over the past two years, yet the business is still open.

John Diedrich and Ryan H of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report that a pair of criminals who robbed a 17-year-old at gunpoint avoided incarceration because "neither the judge nor the prosecutor appears to have considered the crime or their past records to be serious, according to transcripts of the sentencing. Rather than a brazen holdup that threatened Stewart's life, they referred to the crime as 'silly' and 'stupid.'" Less than a year later, one of them had killed someone.

In a report by Ben Botkin of the Times-News (Twin Falls, Idaho), found that the state's system for completing background checks on teachers fails to give school districts a full picture of the applicant's background. The problem came to light after a Times-News investigation found that a teacher charged with sex crimes had a prior record of misdemeanors that school officials were unaware of, despite the state background check.

The Hidden Life of Guns, a year-long investigation by The Washington Post, traced guns recovered in crimes in the region. The Post's analysis found a small number of gun stores in the region were linked to a vast majority of the guns recovered in crimes. "Since 1992, more than 2,500 guns recovered by police and tied to crimes in the Washington area have been traced back to their original sale at Realco Guns in Forestville, Md. The total is four times that of the dealer with the next highest number of gun traces." In Virginia, 60 percent of the 6,800 guns seized since 1998 can be linked to just 40 dealers — one percent of the licensed firearms dealers in the state.