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King County to Distribute Cold Case Playing Cards to Inmates
By Pete Kotz in cold cases, homicide, unsolved
Monday, Oct. 26 2009 @ 9:00AM

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King County plans to give 4,000 decks to inmates
​It was the spring of 1983 when thirteen-year-old Patrick Cress disappeared. He was leaving a friend's house after a sleep over, but never made it to the shopping center where he was supposed to meet his parents. His hometown of Kirkland, Washington -- a quaint suburb of Seattle -- began buzzing with rumors that grew more morbid the longer he remained missing. Girls at his junior high school passed notes to each other in the hallway that suggested he was even murdered...

When Patrick's body was finally discovered in a wooded construction site eighteen days later, everyone's worst assumptions were proven true. The teenager had been beaten to death.

Now, more than twenty-five years later, the former crime scene is a tennis court -- and Cress' gruesome murder remains unsolved.

King County -- where Kirkland is located -- is sitting on dozens upon dozens of similar unsolved murders, including the case of real estate agent Mike Emert, who was showing a house when he was stabbed multiple times. His watch and wallet were stolen along with his car, which was later recovered in a parking lot. Still, Emert's killer was never identified and his case remains cold to this day.

Despite breakthroughs in DNA evidence, cold cases are incredibly hard to solve. The chances of solving a murder are cut in half when detectives don't get a lead in the first forty-eight hours -- and it only gets worse the longer a case remains open. Still, it's not impossible to close a homicide case even thirty years later. All a cop needs is the right tip. And the King County Sheriff's Office thinks it has 52 ways to get it.

This week, the King County Sheriff's Office, in partnership with the Crime Stoppers of Puget Sound, will be distributing over 4,000 decks of cold case playing cards to prison inmates. Each of the 52 cards features an unsolved murder -- including those of Cress and Emert. Local law enforcement is obviously hoping that a quick game of pinochle may jog the memory of its criminals -- since bludgeoning someone to death is apparently a hard thing to forget. But any tip will do, especially after decades of silence in many of these cases.

The Sheriff's Office claims it was inspired by the Most Wanted Iraqi playing cards -- also referred to as the "Deck of Death" -- released by the U.S. military shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and distributed to troops. Each of those playing cards featured high-ranking members of Saddam Hussein's government. Aside from becoming a hot eBay item, the playing cards also inspired a number of other spin-off spoof decks like "Most Wanted GOP" and "China's Most Wanted Politicians."

While the King County Cold Case Deck is certainly the most noble of these derivatives, we're not sure how effective the deck will prove in the hands of jail house snitches. Still, authorities in Snohomish County, which released a similar deck to its inmates, claim that their cold case cards helped to generate a lot of tips. Whether those tips have proven to be fruitful is still yet to be seen.

Tags: Washington