April 29, 2023 • 34 mins
When a suspect or prisoner goes on the lam there are plenty of ways to hide: in plain sight, in the mountains, in another country. There are as many types of ways law enforcement uses to track wanted people as their are ways to go on the lam, but there are some founding principles to carrying out a successful manhunt and they actually include you. Learn about how the fuzz tracks down fugitives and how it's evolving in the age of social media in this classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everybody, be on the lookout APB, middle aged white
male podcaster on the loose, guilty of bad jokes. Man
Hunt underway. That's right, everyone, how man Hunt's work? December sixteenth,
twenty thirteen. Enjoy it right here, right now. Now I've
(00:22):
got to go. I'm on the LAMB. Welcome to Stuff
you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's childhood be Chuck Bryant.
Guest producer Noel is hanging out with us for today. Noel,
(00:44):
and that makes the stuff you should know the podcast.
That's right. I gotta come in with something different to
call it, so you should know the podcast. It's boring.
We'd be explainerators infocast, right, I don't know post Chuck. Yes,
(01:06):
do you know of a man named James Earl Ray? Yeah? Yeah,
a jerk, Yes, I saw him. I saw him referred
to as dim witted. Oh really yeah, which makes his
escape pretty thrilling and yeah, suspect really Well, let me
give you a little back out. So, James Earl Ray
was a Missouri prison escape ee when he rolled into
(01:27):
Memphis to assassinate Martin Luther King Junior, yes, who was
in Memphis to support the sanitation workers strike there in
nineteen sixty eight. And James Earl Ray got a room
across the street from the Lorraine Hotel where MLK was staying,
apparently published in the papers not only where he was staying,
(01:48):
but his room number, which I guess was custom at
the time. Actually from what I understand, it was customary, okay,
or it wasn't unheard of. And James Earlway got a room,
found out that he had a decent shot at the
balcony outside of King's room if he leaned out of
the bathroom the shared bathroom of his communal hotel and
(02:10):
shared bathroom huh, shared bathroom down if somebody could have
gone in and been like, oh sorry, sir, pretty much
didn't see you in here with that rifle, with that
huge hunting rifle. Yeah, Well he got a shot off,
he killed MLK, and he ran out of this place
that was referred to as a flophouse, and he left
behind valuable evidence with his prints on it, namely the rifle,
(02:31):
bundle of his clothing and some other stuff that they
used to create a trail for James Roway got a name.
Eventually got a picture and James Arway made it out
of Memphis and he actually made it to Canada, and
he made it to Portugal and then the UK yea.
And the way he made it was under an assumed passport,
(02:55):
which for a dim witted Missouri prison escapee a forged passport.
That's pretty heavy stuff. Yeah, I think it was probably
easier back then. Well, okay, you know he was traveling
under the name George Ramon sneed right, Yes, And they
found out that he was traveling under that name because
(03:15):
Canadian police, after being contacted by American authorities with a
picture of James Roway, went through about one hundred and
fifty thousand passports that they had accepted. I guess they
had copies of them, yeah, that I think about it,
and then finally found one that looked like James Roway
(03:36):
found out that the person traveling under that passport was
in fact at Heathrow Airport or in London. Yeah, And
when he went to Heathrow Airport, they apprehended him and
he said, you got me. I'm James Rolwray and I
killed MLK. I imagine that was tough because everyone back
then looked like James Rolway. Yeah, pretty much. You know,
all those dudes looked the same back in the fifties,
(03:56):
although this was the sixties, but he still looked like
that in the fifties. He looked fifties ish. He did,
h and he confessed, And then later on, of course
Rican did and said no, I was part of a
plot and a conspiracy, and they said t s oh.
Actually the King family said, you know what, we think
this guy's telling the truth, and they got a new
(04:17):
trial brought and he died in prison before he could
be brought to trial again. Yeah, in the late nineties, yep.
And then you two wrote a song about it. What
song it was, the song Pride in the Name of Love?
Oh yeah, early morning April four, But that came before
James Horbrey. Yeah, and what do you mean you said,
(04:37):
and then you two wrote it was just missing. You
confused me for a second. Yeah, And I don't know
if it was early morning either, for I think for
some reason I always heard that Bono got that one wrong.
Oh really, yeah, I'll have to look that up. I'm
not sure what time it was. Yeah, I'm sure we
could find out, but Bonno wouldn't say that morning is
like a state of mind or something. I'm cool. I
(04:58):
got on blue sunglasses always. So the hump for James
Earl Ray is just one example. History is littered with
man hunts, and what's strange about that is that no
man hunt really resembles other man hunts. Yeah, I mean,
it's it's weird, like you can hold up in the
(05:20):
woods for years and then eventually get caught, or if
you're a whitey Bulger, you can go out in your
driveway in Santa Monica and get caught. Like I guess,
no man hunt is the same, because no going on
the lamb is the same. Prefer hide and plain sight deal,
So I prefer the middle of the woods. Some people prefer,
you know, Bolivia. Sure you know, Nazis. What would you
(05:43):
do if I were on the run, Yeah, on the lamb,
I would I would probably be a woodland creature. I
don't know, But even if I did know, I wouldn't
say on the podcast because that'd be pretty dumb. If
in case I ever do need to go on the
lamb in the future. Although the hyde and plain sight
thing is there's something to be said for that. Sure
you know, Yeah, Well, I mean you got to get
some plastic surgery done in this day and age, Yeah,
(06:06):
or just mess your face up a little bit. Well, actually,
with Whitey Boulger, he was on the Lamb with his
longtime girlfriend Katherine Grieg I believe her name was, and
she had extensive plastic surgery, um, and which had nothing
to do with being on the lamb. They well, they
m to they she actually got them found. Oh really, yeah,
(06:28):
they're they're so. Whitey Boulger is on the land for
sixteen years, right, yeah, and it was he was up
there with Osama bin laden as one of America's most
wanted fugitives. Um. There was a million dollar bounty on it.
Said it was big time. And whenever they found out
that he had been somewhere or they thought he was somewhere,
(06:49):
they the FBI would take out thirty second commercials on
TV saying, have you seen this man? Have you seen
this woman? This woman's known to frequent hair salons. This
guy's Whitey Boulger. You know, all the FBI if you
see him in the area during times when his girlfriend's
demographic would be watching TV. Oh sure, so this served
(07:10):
a twofold purpose one if she saw it and he
saw it, then it would scare him and hopefully flush
him out of hiding, because it's a lot easier to
catch somebody out in the open. Yeah, which is a
common tactic, right. Or Two, the people that she might
be friends with, an associate with, could be watching TV
at the time and drop a dime on her. And
in fact that's what happened. Someone like some lady who
(07:31):
gave her a pedicure add a hair salon really called
and said, I think this woman that you're looking for
is here, and this is her address. And the cops
went to the apartment said, sir, it looks like somebody
broke into your storage unit here around the corner. And
why do you boulg your steps outside and they go
clink clink? Why did they even say that? Could they
(07:52):
not go inside or something? I guess they didn't have
enough probable cause they had to lure him outside. I
love that. That's okay, right. It's not okay him in,
but it's okay to lie and say that your store
units busted into. Yeah, I'm surprised you feel for that too. Yeah,
I'm sure he is too. He might have gotten lazy
after sixteen years, and I don't think so, man. I
think he was really wound up pretty tight. I read
a long form article by a neighbor of his, a
(08:16):
young guy who like befriended him over the years, and
he said he was wound up real tight, always on
the lookout. Did he write a book seam kg he
will called like neighbor to the mob? Pretty, I'm sure,
Matthew Modine. Yeah, if I lived next to Whitey boldread
that book would be on the shelves right now, sure,
and it would be called neighbor to the mob. I
(08:38):
wonder what Aaron Cooper is gonna make that? So who
else we got? John Wilkes Booth He famously went on
the lamb for a pretty short time after he shot
Lincoln twelve days and ended up in a farmhouse where
there's all kinds of stories on how he might have died,
whether he was burned alive or whether he was truly
rooted out by the fire and then shot. Did you
(09:00):
die instantly to linger for a while? But either way,
man hunts have been around as long as people have
been killing people. Yeah, and there are some principles that
do kind of hold true for all man hunts across
the board, and pretty much one of them is get
the public involved. Yeah, because when you do that time
(09:22):
and time again, man hunts have shown that like, somebody
out there has seen this person recently, and we'll call right,
especially these days with technology, with like everyone having a
camera in their pocket basically, or sharing on social media
or being up to the second with news reports, it's
like it's made man hunts easier. Yes, And then the
other factor that makes for successful manhunt is having a
(09:47):
lot of people doing a lot of grunt work, like
the Canadian officials going through all of those passports to
try to find one that looked like James Earl Ray. Yeah.
I wonder how many people they visited before him, like
the other twelve guys that look just like right, yeah,
Like it's not me, so all right, Chuck. So let's
(10:26):
say that somebody's on the run in the United States, Okay,
and it's not a it's not a big deal. It's
not necessarily a national manhunt. Um, it's a it's a
regional man hunt. We'll say, Okay, like someone knocked off
a liquor store and shot somebody and was on the loose. Yeah,
in a neighborhood. I want to find that guy. What
do you do? Well, I'm glad you asked, because I've
(10:48):
done this with mirrored sunglasses on. Yeah, Bloodhound, the first
thing you gotta do, my friend, is contained the area.
It's called containment, and um, it sounds just like what
it is. You are basically trying to seal off an
area and watch all the possible exits from that area.
(11:09):
If it's a neighborhood, I guess you're gonna just pick
out a certain amount of blockage and shut it down
and have cops posted it each street exit right, and
just know that we have at least this area completely
contained if this dude is in here, and we're gonna say, guys,
because how many times do women do stupid stuff like
this and go on the lamb? Not much? You know?
(11:30):
Sure have you not heard of fellman, Louise? That's like
the one thing. So if you do have an area contained,
what you want to do is not just not let
anybody in or out without finding out if it's the
person you're looking for. Yeah, you also probably want to
go door to door and say, hey, are you being
held hostage right now? Did some guy with a gun
(11:52):
come into your basement window? Recently and that's what they
did actually, or with a twenty square block area when
there was peaching for the Boston Marathon. Bombers. Yeah, should
we talk about those guys real quick? Sure they were
jerks too, Yeah, the Sara enf brothers. They blew up
(12:13):
a couple of pressure cookers fashioned into bombs at the
finish line of the Boston Marathon, and the FBI got
on it pretty quick with getting photos released of who
they thought these guys were, which turned out to be
really key because after a kind of a crazy scene
where one of them was shot and killed by the police,
(12:33):
like throwing bombs at the cops. Yeah, I mean it's
quite a scene, run over by his brother. And then
the one I guess is at Zokar the da silent right, Yeah,
Joe Car or Joe Car. Joe Car. I think he
is the one that ended up in a residential neighborhood
hiding in a boat under a tarp. Yeah, and he was.
(12:53):
They sniffed him off the case with some infrared imaging
and basically it was like pred They were like, there's
a guy in that boat because I see his red
body breathing. Right. So the reason that they found out
that the dude was in the boat was because the
person who owned the boat was under in this area
(13:14):
under the security lockdown, in containment yea, and was well
aware thanks to the local news and social media and
everything else, that they were looking for this guy. So
when he saw that there was a dude in his boat,
he called the cops. That's how the cops found suspect
number two in the Boston bombing case. Right. I bet
(13:34):
that was a rush for that guy. I read about
like what he said. I think he was kind of scared.
I'm sure, because it's pretty obvious, Like you see a guy,
there's a lockdown, you neighborhood, and you see a guy
go climb under your boat tarp in their backyard. That's him. Yeah,
you know, bleeding guy. I think he was bleeding at
the time. Even more reason so with with the Boston's
(13:55):
a great case because it's a recent everybody knows about it,
but because it has like so many different points to
it that really kind of give you an idea of
what a man hunt consists of. So you've got containment,
you've got a door to door search, you've got um
the public transportation being shut down. Yeah, that was a
big one. That's part of containment as well. Yeah, they
(14:16):
set up a no fly zone. They closed the schools,
they closed, they shuttered businesses. It was basically the biggest
shut down of a major US city in history. Right.
People who were in the containment area were asked to
not leave their house. That horrid news speak. Shelter in place. Yeah, yeah,
term that just sounds like you should be in a
(14:39):
corner like shelter in place. Yeah. I remember a tweet
from doctor Ruth while that was going on. She's saying, Hey,
if you're having the shelter in place, maybe now's a
good time to turn off the TV and get intimate
with your loved one. I couldn't believe it. Wow. Yeah,
they say they're still counting up the money is but
(14:59):
it's tallying up to over a billion dollars for that
man hunt. What isn't it crazy? Somebody's milking that. You
gotta think billion dollars. I got a little sidebar's not
on a man hunt. But President Obama came through my
neighborhood a few months ago, like on his way to
school indicator for something cool, and literally drove like down
(15:22):
the block from my house. The motorcade, did did you
run out to Well, no, you can't. That's my point.
Like my friend, you remember Chris Cox, his wife. We
ended up being stuck at the same intersection and her
house was across the street, like forty feet away. She's like, sir,
that is my house. I have a babysitter there. I'm
paying Like, can I just walk across the street. And
(15:44):
he was like, nope, no, he would not let her
walk across the street and enter her own home. You
have no rights. The president is on your street. Yeah,
and he wasn't. Even It took like another half hour
and she's like, I really just need to walk right there,
and he wouldn't allow it. So that's some serious lockdown,
I guess is when the government wants to lock you down,
they can lock you down. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Um,
so Chuck, you do have rights. However, Well, yeah, that's
(16:09):
a good segue, I guess. Um it was a great segue, buddy. Yeah.
If if you're in if you're being told not to
leave your house, first of all, you can technically leave
your house, can you. I think you just your risk
of being shot at by the police go through the roof. Maybe,
so that's a pretty good reason not to leave your
house just out of common sense. You can be enraged
(16:32):
all you want indoors, well, just like any other night,
and the police can't just come busting down your door saying,
isn't he in here? No, okay, let's go kick down
the next door. They can knock and say can we
come in and look, and you can say, yeah, you're
a Nay. If they have probable cause, say one of
them saw the suspect run into your house, they can
(16:55):
go in after them without asking you. Yeah, Or if
they're creeping around your backyard and peeking in your winds,
which they can do legally. Yeah, the cops, yeah they can.
They could, you know, see somebody they think looks like
the suspect, and that's probable cause there's a there's a
loophole big enough to drive like an armored truck through
if you're not picking up on that. Yeah. If they
(17:16):
need to provide emergency services, they can do that. Yeah.
They can say, oh, we thought you you needed CPR.
We're glad to see you're okay. Now that we're in
your house, we're looking around. Or another big loophole is
the exigent circumstances, which I don't know. In the case
of Boston, they could probably barge into anyone's home and
(17:38):
be covered under that one. Yeah, that's basically like there
were there's a state of emergency going on, like the
civil law is just out the window because the situation
is so dire. And yeah, they argued that this guy
was running around with explosives. That's an emergency. Sure, as
far as I know, they didn't like go into any
houses unbidden though. Yeah, and we're not trying to say,
(18:01):
like in a case like that, like bust down some doors,
you know, Like I'm not saying like cops shouldn't be
doing this stuff. Well, they were like two bombers on
the loose, so I get it. Even still, the cops
don't want to bust down a door because they're going
to have to prove exigence circumstances, and if they can't,
then any evidence that they they got from and on
lawful searches out the door, and so their case could
(18:24):
be as well. Yeah, you gotta be careful stuff like that.
That's thing you want to do is have your perp
walk you like all this cop speak, yeah walk, Yeah,
if your purp walks because of bad, bad evidence. Then
you're gonna be uh, what's it? What's it called? When
the cop gets eighty six suspended without pay I'm feeling
(18:49):
like we're channeling the TV show episode we Yeah. Oh yeah,
you're like we had a TV show. Yeah, just zoned
out about that. Um, okay, where are we then? Well?
I was saying that one of the hallmarks of a
good man hunt is having a lot of people doing
a lot of work. And again Boston was a good
(19:10):
example of that. He had a lot of different law
enforcement agencies, basically ones you hadn't even heard of, all
ponying up personnel. Yeah, I mean you're gonna get state cops,
local cops, sheriff's, FBI, and that that's for a case
like that, or obviously if it's something like UBL then
(19:30):
everyone seems you're dark thirty or if you haven't, you should.
You've got like thousands of people over a decade, all
over the world working together. It was just that one lady.
It was just the one lady, the pretty redhead. So
the author of this article makes a pretty good point
that during a man hunt, there is such a thing
(19:52):
as um what in police speak would be called collateral damage.
I guess sure. Like the LAPD search for Christopher Dorner
is a very good example of this. You remember that case. Yeah, man,
that was freaky. Yeah. There's like, there's a Facebook page
that's twenty thousand plus people strong. It says it's called
(20:13):
we Stand with Christopher Dorner. Oh really yeah, because he
left behind. So he was an LAPD officer who was
fired for making a false accusation against another cop when
he reported that a copy was working with kicked a
homeless man during an arrest. But that was false. It
was found false, and he was fired as a result.
(20:33):
Right from his perspective, if you see it through his
through his eyes, that was all just a huge cover
up and they got rid of the troublemaker who was not,
you know, going with the flow on the force. The
LAPD covering up, right, that's weird. So he leaves this
like angry manifesto about you know how the LAPD's the
most corrupt organization on the planet and it's a racist
(20:53):
and yeah, there's a lot of people out there who
are like, I know this to be true because I've
I've been on the wrong end of a night stick
with the LAPD l a confidential Yeah exactly, and that's
in the forties. Yeah, I mean that's that's I know
they've cleaned it up a lot, but that is one
department in this country that's been fraught with allegations. Yeah.
And his point was they haven't cleaned it up a lot,
(21:15):
they've just gotten better at PR. So he goes on,
he takes the manifesto and ends up going on an
assassination killing spree, killing cops. He killed the woman who
represented him in his case, who is the daughter of
a cop, and it was announced like that's what's so
scary about it. Was like he was like, Hey, I'm
coming to kill cops. Exactly. You're not going to see
(21:38):
me coming either. He was on a rampage. Yeah, it
was scary stuff. So the LAPD is super jumpy at
this point and they fire on not one but two
cars that don't have Christopher Dorner in him. Killed two
people unbelievable as a result. And finally there's this standoff
after they find him thanks to some park rangers in
(22:01):
Big Bear or Big Sir, one of the two Big
Bear Big Bear, Yeah, and he ends up setting is
the cabin he's in on fire and perishing in flames.
That was crazy. But the the fact is two different
cars were shot on by the LAPD during the search
for this guy. So these aren't just necessarily clean affairs,
(22:25):
say with Bin Latten. You know, this was part of
a campaign that took place over a very long time. Yeah,
and a lot of people were killed to weaken the
structure that was hiding him. Still, yeah, drone strikes out
the wazoo. They used some pretty interesting tactics too, that
we're not in the movie, even though if I've heard
(22:45):
the movie is pretty accurate. But they didn't include everything obviously.
They sent a doctor in a CIA guy who conducted
an immunization drive in the neighborhood where they believed his
compound was there and basically hoping to come across DNA
from him or his family under the guise of a
blood drive. Right, it was an immunization drive. Yeah, they
(23:08):
didn't call it like, hey, it's a DNA collection, right drive.
But there was a lot a big public outcry, especially
from the vaccine establishment, saying like, dude, you can't do
that because now our name is on that vaccine, right
and the next time we want to have a real
vaccine drive. No one's gonna show up and our vaccination
people are gonna get killed because they're gonna think they're CIA. Yeah,
(23:29):
there's a big beef, a big hubbub about that. That's legit.
These days, it's tough, especially if you're in a city
like London, England, to do anything without being caught on
a closed circuit camera. In fact, that's how they eventually
identified with the help of actually one of the victims.
(23:50):
In Boston, they're on camera too, But if you're in
a big city it's tough to get away with anything
these days. Cameras are everywhere. They also have I mentioned
the infrared device, the forward looking infrared device, night vision.
You've got all sorts of tricks up your sleeve as
law enforcement agencies. You think you're hiding in a boat
(24:12):
under a tarp, that's pretty safe. You don't think about
the dude with the predator camera that can see you
from you know, fifty feet away, breathing heavily. Right. They
also have like armored trucks. I think you mentioned those, yeah,
even not even about this, like from die Hard. Yeah,
and you see those things roll in like I'm sure
they love to play with those once a year. Again,
(24:32):
that was LAPD. Yeah, but those are very expensive and
but they do come in handy. I guess about once
a year if you can afford it, if your town's
large enough. We should say that there was facial recognition
software that they had working on the video for the
Boston bombing and it did not work. Yeah, we have
(24:53):
an article on that, by the way. I think we
should cover that at some point. Facial recognition. Yeah, yeah,
it's scary stuff. Apparent Google has one that like they
won't they won't release to the publicly because they're afraid
of the use it'll be put to. It's like that
good wow, and that potentially bad. But the one the
CIA has doesn't work that well. I can see Google
(25:14):
having way better algorithms in the CIA's true, so chuck.
Another aspect of Boston search the Boston man hunt was
the use of social media for good and ill or
did good effect and bad? I should say, Yeah, getting
the word out on Facebook and Twitter is not a
bad idea. Yeah. Well, the Reddit was kind of the
(25:37):
star of the show or the scapegoat, I should say,
for um, social media in the search for the Boston
bombing suspects because there were apparently like a couple of
thousand stills, video stills and photographs from the area around
the time of the bombing posted on a Reddit subreddit. Yeah,
and all of these people were like combing real. I'm like,
(26:00):
they were trying to crowdsource this manhunt, yeah, which is
a good intention. Yeah, they were looking for suspects. This
is before anybody ever released any official photos, and that
in and of itself is kind of a good idea, sure,
but it went a step further where the people on
Reddit were saying, Okay, I've got to figure it out,
(26:21):
and it's this person, and they would name a suspect,
and all of a sudden, there's a rumor out there
that this person bombed the Boston Marathon even though they hadn't.
So Reddit took a lot of heat for that, and
apparently they even took that forum down. But social media
also helped in a lot of ways because everybody was
(26:43):
totally connected to this manhunt and had complete up to
the date, information to the minute information from within that
containment area, from everywhere, and I guess kind of helped
a little more than just passively watching television during a manhunt. Yeah,
good point. One of my favorite man hunts. And this
is weird to say that, but um, actually, you know what,
(27:05):
let's take a break. I'm going to tease that and
I'm going to reveal my favorite man hunt after the break. Okay,
(27:30):
So who is it? It's the UNI bomber. Oh okay, Yeah,
that was on the lamb for eighteen years. One of
the lengthiest man hunts in US history. Not easy to
hide out for that long. Um, and he did it,
which he did it in the wild of Montana. Just
pretty good idea. I guess if you're gonna hide out,
(27:51):
just drop off the map. Yeah type manifestos. Actually Montana.
They should have been looking there, They should have been
going there first. But um, he mailed sixteen bombs over
the course of quite a few years and ended up
killing three people, wounding twenty three more. And I had
a million dollar bounty on his head. Was one of
(28:12):
the most wanted, and eventually he was rooted out by
his own brother, who read one of the manifestos and
said that sounds like Teddy Yeah, and went to the
cops and said, hey, this guy might be my brother.
The writing style, the things he's saying like it very
well could be my brother. And it turned out that
was him, right, So, which is another another point for
(28:35):
the case that for a man hunt to work, you
have to get the public involved, and they did so
by publishing these manifestos and said anybody familiar with this? Yeah,
and the guy's brothers said, yeah, me, yeah, same with
Eric Robert Rudolph. Yeah, let his name. I don't remember
how they caught him. I believe it was hikers in
the woods turned him in. I might be wrong, but
(28:58):
he was definitely hiding out in the wood. And he was,
of course the Olympic bomber um, not the guy they
originally impended on, which was pretty sad, right. What was
his name? Richard Jewel? Yeah, man, I felt so bad
for that dude. Yeah. Can you imagine, like life ruined? Yeah,
and they they compensated him pretty handsomely afterward. But then
(29:19):
he only lived a couple of several million. Oh he died. Yeah,
he died of a heart attack a few years after that.
I don't think I knew that. Yeah, it's because he's like,
I'm eating steak and lobster every night, asked me the
drawing butter or Richard Jewel? Yeah, I didn't know he died. Yeah. Um,
and then so back to online real quick. Um, there's
there's evidence that you can crowdsource a man hunt. Yeah,
(29:42):
there's a whole group of people that live online that
are into true crime, that are that like us, their
interest in their online search skills to try to find
the identities of like long lost serial killers, and there's
all sorts of online man hunts the amateurs take on.
And apparently the State Arment held something called the Tag
(30:02):
Challenge where they had people hiding in cities around the
world and people had twelve hours online contestants had twelve
hours to find them in like these five different cities
using just mug shots and it worked. So they found
that with a search, as time becomes more of an essence,
(30:25):
as the pressure amount, people stop just shooting the info
out to wherever they can and start like really targeting,
focusing their search. And once you have a bunch of
people doing that who are really focused in searching, but
a lot of them and sharing information like on social media,
that's when they like a search and not just a
(30:47):
man hunt or search for a person, but a search
for anything becomes most successful. I guess, well, yeah, imagine
in Boston. I bet every thousands of people in that
twenty square block radius are looking out of their window.
Oh yeah for this dude. Yeah, so you've got thousands
and thousands of more eyeballs. That's two eyeballs per person
(31:09):
in most cases, unless you're one of those weird pirates
Boston pirates, right, And that's just that helps you know, Yeah,
as long as they're not out, don't grab their guns
and you know, get in position. Well yeah, that's scary.
Well that's why they released the pictures of the suspects finally,
because they were trying to crack down on online vigilanniasm
(31:30):
that could lead to real life vigilaniism. Yeah, so hats
off to the dude who saw the dude in the boat.
You got anything else? I got nothing else? All right, Well,
if you want to learn more about man hunts, you
can type that word in the search bar house to works.
And since I said search bar, that means it's time
for listener mail. Yeah, I'm gonna call this Chess about Chess,
(31:55):
and I'm gonna read a couple of them, not here,
but one now and one another of so because we
got a lot of great feedback from Chess enthusiasts. I
notice people dig this game. This is from David Wagner. Hey, guys,
while you were discussing the concept of castling, y'all said
you didn't quite understand the value or strategy behind it.
You're right. It is all about protecting the king. Remember
(32:18):
how you pointed out that you want to control the
center of the board. Yes, that when your pieces are
off to the side, they're not as strong. Yes, well,
that has a lot to do with why you want
to castle. Basically, the king is more vulnerable, open to
attacks and has less protection when he remains in his
original E er D square, so you want to castle
him and get him away from those center squares. Also,
(32:38):
you talk about the en passant rule, which is one
of my favorites and something almost never pass up. You
sell Herman, mostly because I get because I rarely get
a chance to implement it. It doesn't happen when a
pond passes another pond though on its first move out.
It is when it lands next to another pond that
(32:59):
the latter pond capture it. So I think we screwed
that up. Not big time. We were close. No, I've
got that way wrong. Okay, one last thing, and then
I'll quit chess pieces. You're gonna love this, okay, and
their symbols on top. Many of the basic pieces themselves
serve as visual reminders of how they can move. For example,
(33:20):
the night is l shaped, which is how it moves.
The bishop's miter has a diagonal slit in it. They
move diagonally. The rook, when seen from above, can move
in the basic cardinal directions forward, back, left, right, and
on top of the rook there are turrets pointing in
all the cardinal directions. A queen has many points on
her crown showing that she can go in any way,
(33:40):
any direction, and that small little cross on top of
the king lets you know how far he can go,
although that doesn't include his diagonomos, which he can move in,
so that one the whole theory kind of falls apart
there a little bit. But that is from David Wagner
in Columbia, South Carolina. Nice. Thanks a lot, David Wagner.
That was a great email, pleasant, approachable, gentle with the correction,
(34:06):
just good stuff all around. You can dance to it
all right, man, Way to go a Wagner If you
want to send us an email or reach out to
us digitally to say hello or whatever. You can tweet
to us, join us on Twitter at sysk podcast, join
us on Facebook at Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you
(34:27):
Should Know, or you can send us an email to
Stuff Podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com. Stuff you Should Know
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Hi, everybody, be on the lookout APB, middle aged white
male podcaster on the loose, guilty of bad jokes. Man
Hunt underway. That's right, everyone, how man Hunt's work? December sixteenth,
twenty thirteen. Enjoy it right here, right now. Now I've
(00:22):
got to go. I'm on the LAMB. Welcome to Stuff
you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's childhood be Chuck Bryant.
Guest producer Noel is hanging out with us for today. Noel,
(00:44):
and that makes the stuff you should know the podcast.
That's right. I gotta come in with something different to
call it, so you should know the podcast. It's boring.
We'd be explainerators infocast, right, I don't know post Chuck. Yes,
(01:06):
do you know of a man named James Earl Ray? Yeah? Yeah,
a jerk, Yes, I saw him. I saw him referred
to as dim witted. Oh really yeah, which makes his
escape pretty thrilling and yeah, suspect really Well, let me
give you a little back out. So, James Earl Ray
was a Missouri prison escape ee when he rolled into
(01:27):
Memphis to assassinate Martin Luther King Junior, yes, who was
in Memphis to support the sanitation workers strike there in
nineteen sixty eight. And James Earl Ray got a room
across the street from the Lorraine Hotel where MLK was staying,
apparently published in the papers not only where he was staying,
(01:48):
but his room number, which I guess was custom at
the time. Actually from what I understand, it was customary, okay,
or it wasn't unheard of. And James Earlway got a room,
found out that he had a decent shot at the
balcony outside of King's room if he leaned out of
the bathroom the shared bathroom of his communal hotel and
(02:10):
shared bathroom huh, shared bathroom down if somebody could have
gone in and been like, oh sorry, sir, pretty much
didn't see you in here with that rifle, with that
huge hunting rifle. Yeah, Well he got a shot off,
he killed MLK, and he ran out of this place
that was referred to as a flophouse, and he left
behind valuable evidence with his prints on it, namely the rifle,
(02:31):
bundle of his clothing and some other stuff that they
used to create a trail for James Roway got a name.
Eventually got a picture and James Arway made it out
of Memphis and he actually made it to Canada, and
he made it to Portugal and then the UK yea.
And the way he made it was under an assumed passport,
(02:55):
which for a dim witted Missouri prison escapee a forged passport.
That's pretty heavy stuff. Yeah, I think it was probably
easier back then. Well, okay, you know he was traveling
under the name George Ramon sneed right, Yes, And they
found out that he was traveling under that name because
(03:15):
Canadian police, after being contacted by American authorities with a
picture of James Roway, went through about one hundred and
fifty thousand passports that they had accepted. I guess they
had copies of them, yeah, that I think about it,
and then finally found one that looked like James Roway
(03:36):
found out that the person traveling under that passport was
in fact at Heathrow Airport or in London. Yeah, And
when he went to Heathrow Airport, they apprehended him and
he said, you got me. I'm James Rolwray and I
killed MLK. I imagine that was tough because everyone back
then looked like James Rolway. Yeah, pretty much. You know,
all those dudes looked the same back in the fifties,
(03:56):
although this was the sixties, but he still looked like
that in the fifties. He looked fifties ish. He did,
h and he confessed, And then later on, of course
Rican did and said no, I was part of a
plot and a conspiracy, and they said t s oh.
Actually the King family said, you know what, we think
this guy's telling the truth, and they got a new
(04:17):
trial brought and he died in prison before he could
be brought to trial again. Yeah, in the late nineties, yep.
And then you two wrote a song about it. What
song it was, the song Pride in the Name of Love?
Oh yeah, early morning April four, But that came before
James Horbrey. Yeah, and what do you mean you said,
(04:37):
and then you two wrote it was just missing. You
confused me for a second. Yeah, And I don't know
if it was early morning either, for I think for
some reason I always heard that Bono got that one wrong.
Oh really, yeah, I'll have to look that up. I'm
not sure what time it was. Yeah, I'm sure we
could find out, but Bonno wouldn't say that morning is
like a state of mind or something. I'm cool. I
(04:58):
got on blue sunglasses always. So the hump for James
Earl Ray is just one example. History is littered with
man hunts, and what's strange about that is that no
man hunt really resembles other man hunts. Yeah, I mean,
it's it's weird, like you can hold up in the
(05:20):
woods for years and then eventually get caught, or if
you're a whitey Bulger, you can go out in your
driveway in Santa Monica and get caught. Like I guess,
no man hunt is the same, because no going on
the lamb is the same. Prefer hide and plain sight deal,
So I prefer the middle of the woods. Some people prefer,
you know, Bolivia. Sure you know, Nazis. What would you
(05:43):
do if I were on the run, Yeah, on the lamb,
I would I would probably be a woodland creature. I
don't know, But even if I did know, I wouldn't
say on the podcast because that'd be pretty dumb. If
in case I ever do need to go on the
lamb in the future. Although the hyde and plain sight
thing is there's something to be said for that. Sure
you know, Yeah, Well, I mean you got to get
some plastic surgery done in this day and age, Yeah,
(06:06):
or just mess your face up a little bit. Well, actually,
with Whitey Boulger, he was on the Lamb with his
longtime girlfriend Katherine Grieg I believe her name was, and
she had extensive plastic surgery, um, and which had nothing
to do with being on the lamb. They well, they
m to they she actually got them found. Oh really, yeah,
(06:28):
they're they're so. Whitey Boulger is on the land for
sixteen years, right, yeah, and it was he was up
there with Osama bin laden as one of America's most
wanted fugitives. Um. There was a million dollar bounty on it.
Said it was big time. And whenever they found out
that he had been somewhere or they thought he was somewhere,
(06:49):
they the FBI would take out thirty second commercials on
TV saying, have you seen this man? Have you seen
this woman? This woman's known to frequent hair salons. This
guy's Whitey Boulger. You know, all the FBI if you
see him in the area during times when his girlfriend's
demographic would be watching TV. Oh sure, so this served
(07:10):
a twofold purpose one if she saw it and he
saw it, then it would scare him and hopefully flush
him out of hiding, because it's a lot easier to
catch somebody out in the open. Yeah, which is a
common tactic, right. Or Two, the people that she might
be friends with, an associate with, could be watching TV
at the time and drop a dime on her. And
in fact that's what happened. Someone like some lady who
(07:31):
gave her a pedicure add a hair salon really called
and said, I think this woman that you're looking for
is here, and this is her address. And the cops
went to the apartment said, sir, it looks like somebody
broke into your storage unit here around the corner. And
why do you boulg your steps outside and they go
clink clink? Why did they even say that? Could they
(07:52):
not go inside or something? I guess they didn't have
enough probable cause they had to lure him outside. I
love that. That's okay, right. It's not okay him in,
but it's okay to lie and say that your store
units busted into. Yeah, I'm surprised you feel for that too. Yeah,
I'm sure he is too. He might have gotten lazy
after sixteen years, and I don't think so, man. I
think he was really wound up pretty tight. I read
a long form article by a neighbor of his, a
(08:16):
young guy who like befriended him over the years, and
he said he was wound up real tight, always on
the lookout. Did he write a book seam kg he
will called like neighbor to the mob? Pretty, I'm sure,
Matthew Modine. Yeah, if I lived next to Whitey boldread
that book would be on the shelves right now, sure,
and it would be called neighbor to the mob. I
(08:38):
wonder what Aaron Cooper is gonna make that? So who
else we got? John Wilkes Booth He famously went on
the lamb for a pretty short time after he shot
Lincoln twelve days and ended up in a farmhouse where
there's all kinds of stories on how he might have died,
whether he was burned alive or whether he was truly
rooted out by the fire and then shot. Did you
(09:00):
die instantly to linger for a while? But either way,
man hunts have been around as long as people have
been killing people. Yeah, and there are some principles that
do kind of hold true for all man hunts across
the board, and pretty much one of them is get
the public involved. Yeah, because when you do that time
(09:22):
and time again, man hunts have shown that like, somebody
out there has seen this person recently, and we'll call right,
especially these days with technology, with like everyone having a
camera in their pocket basically, or sharing on social media
or being up to the second with news reports, it's
like it's made man hunts easier. Yes, And then the
other factor that makes for successful manhunt is having a
(09:47):
lot of people doing a lot of grunt work, like
the Canadian officials going through all of those passports to
try to find one that looked like James Earl Ray. Yeah.
I wonder how many people they visited before him, like
the other twelve guys that look just like right, yeah,
Like it's not me, so all right, Chuck. So let's
(10:26):
say that somebody's on the run in the United States, Okay,
and it's not a it's not a big deal. It's
not necessarily a national manhunt. Um, it's a it's a
regional man hunt. We'll say, Okay, like someone knocked off
a liquor store and shot somebody and was on the loose. Yeah,
in a neighborhood. I want to find that guy. What
do you do? Well, I'm glad you asked, because I've
(10:48):
done this with mirrored sunglasses on. Yeah, Bloodhound, the first
thing you gotta do, my friend, is contained the area.
It's called containment, and um, it sounds just like what
it is. You are basically trying to seal off an
area and watch all the possible exits from that area.
(11:09):
If it's a neighborhood, I guess you're gonna just pick
out a certain amount of blockage and shut it down
and have cops posted it each street exit right, and
just know that we have at least this area completely
contained if this dude is in here, and we're gonna say, guys,
because how many times do women do stupid stuff like
this and go on the lamb? Not much? You know?
(11:30):
Sure have you not heard of fellman, Louise? That's like
the one thing. So if you do have an area contained,
what you want to do is not just not let
anybody in or out without finding out if it's the
person you're looking for. Yeah, you also probably want to
go door to door and say, hey, are you being
held hostage right now? Did some guy with a gun
(11:52):
come into your basement window? Recently and that's what they
did actually, or with a twenty square block area when
there was peaching for the Boston Marathon. Bombers. Yeah, should
we talk about those guys real quick? Sure they were
jerks too, Yeah, the Sara enf brothers. They blew up
(12:13):
a couple of pressure cookers fashioned into bombs at the
finish line of the Boston Marathon, and the FBI got
on it pretty quick with getting photos released of who
they thought these guys were, which turned out to be
really key because after a kind of a crazy scene
where one of them was shot and killed by the police,
(12:33):
like throwing bombs at the cops. Yeah, I mean it's
quite a scene, run over by his brother. And then
the one I guess is at Zokar the da silent right, Yeah,
Joe Car or Joe Car. Joe Car. I think he
is the one that ended up in a residential neighborhood
hiding in a boat under a tarp. Yeah, and he was.
(12:53):
They sniffed him off the case with some infrared imaging
and basically it was like pred They were like, there's
a guy in that boat because I see his red
body breathing. Right. So the reason that they found out
that the dude was in the boat was because the
person who owned the boat was under in this area
(13:14):
under the security lockdown, in containment yea, and was well
aware thanks to the local news and social media and
everything else, that they were looking for this guy. So
when he saw that there was a dude in his boat,
he called the cops. That's how the cops found suspect
number two in the Boston bombing case. Right. I bet
(13:34):
that was a rush for that guy. I read about
like what he said. I think he was kind of scared.
I'm sure, because it's pretty obvious, Like you see a guy,
there's a lockdown, you neighborhood, and you see a guy
go climb under your boat tarp in their backyard. That's him. Yeah,
you know, bleeding guy. I think he was bleeding at
the time. Even more reason so with with the Boston's
(13:55):
a great case because it's a recent everybody knows about it,
but because it has like so many different points to
it that really kind of give you an idea of
what a man hunt consists of. So you've got containment,
you've got a door to door search, you've got um
the public transportation being shut down. Yeah, that was a
big one. That's part of containment as well. Yeah, they
(14:16):
set up a no fly zone. They closed the schools,
they closed, they shuttered businesses. It was basically the biggest
shut down of a major US city in history. Right.
People who were in the containment area were asked to
not leave their house. That horrid news speak. Shelter in place. Yeah, yeah,
term that just sounds like you should be in a
(14:39):
corner like shelter in place. Yeah. I remember a tweet
from doctor Ruth while that was going on. She's saying, Hey,
if you're having the shelter in place, maybe now's a
good time to turn off the TV and get intimate
with your loved one. I couldn't believe it. Wow. Yeah,
they say they're still counting up the money is but
(14:59):
it's tallying up to over a billion dollars for that
man hunt. What isn't it crazy? Somebody's milking that. You
gotta think billion dollars. I got a little sidebar's not
on a man hunt. But President Obama came through my
neighborhood a few months ago, like on his way to
school indicator for something cool, and literally drove like down
(15:22):
the block from my house. The motorcade, did did you
run out to Well, no, you can't. That's my point.
Like my friend, you remember Chris Cox, his wife. We
ended up being stuck at the same intersection and her
house was across the street, like forty feet away. She's like, sir,
that is my house. I have a babysitter there. I'm
paying Like, can I just walk across the street. And
(15:44):
he was like, nope, no, he would not let her
walk across the street and enter her own home. You
have no rights. The president is on your street. Yeah,
and he wasn't. Even It took like another half hour
and she's like, I really just need to walk right there,
and he wouldn't allow it. So that's some serious lockdown,
I guess is when the government wants to lock you down,
they can lock you down. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Um,
so Chuck, you do have rights. However, Well, yeah, that's
(16:09):
a good segue, I guess. Um it was a great segue, buddy. Yeah.
If if you're in if you're being told not to
leave your house, first of all, you can technically leave
your house, can you. I think you just your risk
of being shot at by the police go through the roof. Maybe,
so that's a pretty good reason not to leave your
house just out of common sense. You can be enraged
(16:32):
all you want indoors, well, just like any other night,
and the police can't just come busting down your door saying,
isn't he in here? No, okay, let's go kick down
the next door. They can knock and say can we
come in and look, and you can say, yeah, you're
a Nay. If they have probable cause, say one of
them saw the suspect run into your house, they can
(16:55):
go in after them without asking you. Yeah, Or if
they're creeping around your backyard and peeking in your winds,
which they can do legally. Yeah, the cops, yeah they can.
They could, you know, see somebody they think looks like
the suspect, and that's probable cause there's a there's a
loophole big enough to drive like an armored truck through
if you're not picking up on that. Yeah. If they
(17:16):
need to provide emergency services, they can do that. Yeah.
They can say, oh, we thought you you needed CPR.
We're glad to see you're okay. Now that we're in
your house, we're looking around. Or another big loophole is
the exigent circumstances, which I don't know. In the case
of Boston, they could probably barge into anyone's home and
(17:38):
be covered under that one. Yeah, that's basically like there
were there's a state of emergency going on, like the
civil law is just out the window because the situation
is so dire. And yeah, they argued that this guy
was running around with explosives. That's an emergency. Sure, as
far as I know, they didn't like go into any
houses unbidden though. Yeah, and we're not trying to say,
(18:01):
like in a case like that, like bust down some doors,
you know, Like I'm not saying like cops shouldn't be
doing this stuff. Well, they were like two bombers on
the loose, so I get it. Even still, the cops
don't want to bust down a door because they're going
to have to prove exigence circumstances, and if they can't,
then any evidence that they they got from and on
lawful searches out the door, and so their case could
(18:24):
be as well. Yeah, you gotta be careful stuff like that.
That's thing you want to do is have your perp
walk you like all this cop speak, yeah walk, Yeah,
if your purp walks because of bad, bad evidence. Then
you're gonna be uh, what's it? What's it called? When
the cop gets eighty six suspended without pay I'm feeling
(18:49):
like we're channeling the TV show episode we Yeah. Oh yeah,
you're like we had a TV show. Yeah, just zoned
out about that. Um, okay, where are we then? Well?
I was saying that one of the hallmarks of a
good man hunt is having a lot of people doing
a lot of work. And again Boston was a good
(19:10):
example of that. He had a lot of different law
enforcement agencies, basically ones you hadn't even heard of, all
ponying up personnel. Yeah, I mean you're gonna get state cops,
local cops, sheriff's, FBI, and that that's for a case
like that, or obviously if it's something like UBL then
(19:30):
everyone seems you're dark thirty or if you haven't, you should.
You've got like thousands of people over a decade, all
over the world working together. It was just that one lady.
It was just the one lady, the pretty redhead. So
the author of this article makes a pretty good point
that during a man hunt, there is such a thing
(19:52):
as um what in police speak would be called collateral damage.
I guess sure. Like the LAPD search for Christopher Dorner
is a very good example of this. You remember that case. Yeah, man,
that was freaky. Yeah. There's like, there's a Facebook page
that's twenty thousand plus people strong. It says it's called
(20:13):
we Stand with Christopher Dorner. Oh really yeah, because he
left behind. So he was an LAPD officer who was
fired for making a false accusation against another cop when
he reported that a copy was working with kicked a
homeless man during an arrest. But that was false. It
was found false, and he was fired as a result.
(20:33):
Right from his perspective, if you see it through his
through his eyes, that was all just a huge cover
up and they got rid of the troublemaker who was not,
you know, going with the flow on the force. The
LAPD covering up, right, that's weird. So he leaves this
like angry manifesto about you know how the LAPD's the
most corrupt organization on the planet and it's a racist
(20:53):
and yeah, there's a lot of people out there who
are like, I know this to be true because I've
I've been on the wrong end of a night stick
with the LAPD l a confidential Yeah exactly, and that's
in the forties. Yeah, I mean that's that's I know
they've cleaned it up a lot, but that is one
department in this country that's been fraught with allegations. Yeah.
And his point was they haven't cleaned it up a lot,
(21:15):
they've just gotten better at PR. So he goes on,
he takes the manifesto and ends up going on an
assassination killing spree, killing cops. He killed the woman who
represented him in his case, who is the daughter of
a cop, and it was announced like that's what's so
scary about it. Was like he was like, Hey, I'm
coming to kill cops. Exactly. You're not going to see
(21:38):
me coming either. He was on a rampage. Yeah, it
was scary stuff. So the LAPD is super jumpy at
this point and they fire on not one but two
cars that don't have Christopher Dorner in him. Killed two
people unbelievable as a result. And finally there's this standoff
after they find him thanks to some park rangers in
(22:01):
Big Bear or Big Sir, one of the two Big
Bear Big Bear, Yeah, and he ends up setting is
the cabin he's in on fire and perishing in flames.
That was crazy. But the the fact is two different
cars were shot on by the LAPD during the search
for this guy. So these aren't just necessarily clean affairs,
(22:25):
say with Bin Latten. You know, this was part of
a campaign that took place over a very long time. Yeah,
and a lot of people were killed to weaken the
structure that was hiding him. Still, yeah, drone strikes out
the wazoo. They used some pretty interesting tactics too, that
we're not in the movie, even though if I've heard
(22:45):
the movie is pretty accurate. But they didn't include everything obviously.
They sent a doctor in a CIA guy who conducted
an immunization drive in the neighborhood where they believed his
compound was there and basically hoping to come across DNA
from him or his family under the guise of a
blood drive. Right, it was an immunization drive. Yeah, they
(23:08):
didn't call it like, hey, it's a DNA collection, right drive.
But there was a lot a big public outcry, especially
from the vaccine establishment, saying like, dude, you can't do
that because now our name is on that vaccine, right
and the next time we want to have a real
vaccine drive. No one's gonna show up and our vaccination
people are gonna get killed because they're gonna think they're CIA. Yeah,
(23:29):
there's a big beef, a big hubbub about that. That's legit.
These days, it's tough, especially if you're in a city
like London, England, to do anything without being caught on
a closed circuit camera. In fact, that's how they eventually
identified with the help of actually one of the victims.
(23:50):
In Boston, they're on camera too, But if you're in
a big city it's tough to get away with anything
these days. Cameras are everywhere. They also have I mentioned
the infrared device, the forward looking infrared device, night vision.
You've got all sorts of tricks up your sleeve as
law enforcement agencies. You think you're hiding in a boat
(24:12):
under a tarp, that's pretty safe. You don't think about
the dude with the predator camera that can see you
from you know, fifty feet away, breathing heavily. Right. They
also have like armored trucks. I think you mentioned those, yeah,
even not even about this, like from die Hard. Yeah,
and you see those things roll in like I'm sure
they love to play with those once a year. Again,
(24:32):
that was LAPD. Yeah, but those are very expensive and
but they do come in handy. I guess about once
a year if you can afford it, if your town's
large enough. We should say that there was facial recognition
software that they had working on the video for the
Boston bombing and it did not work. Yeah, we have
(24:53):
an article on that, by the way. I think we
should cover that at some point. Facial recognition. Yeah, yeah,
it's scary stuff. Apparent Google has one that like they
won't they won't release to the publicly because they're afraid
of the use it'll be put to. It's like that
good wow, and that potentially bad. But the one the
CIA has doesn't work that well. I can see Google
(25:14):
having way better algorithms in the CIA's true, so chuck.
Another aspect of Boston search the Boston man hunt was
the use of social media for good and ill or
did good effect and bad? I should say, Yeah, getting
the word out on Facebook and Twitter is not a
bad idea. Yeah. Well, the Reddit was kind of the
(25:37):
star of the show or the scapegoat, I should say,
for um, social media in the search for the Boston
bombing suspects because there were apparently like a couple of
thousand stills, video stills and photographs from the area around
the time of the bombing posted on a Reddit subreddit. Yeah,
and all of these people were like combing real. I'm like,
(26:00):
they were trying to crowdsource this manhunt, yeah, which is
a good intention. Yeah, they were looking for suspects. This
is before anybody ever released any official photos, and that
in and of itself is kind of a good idea, sure,
but it went a step further where the people on
Reddit were saying, Okay, I've got to figure it out,
(26:21):
and it's this person, and they would name a suspect,
and all of a sudden, there's a rumor out there
that this person bombed the Boston Marathon even though they hadn't.
So Reddit took a lot of heat for that, and
apparently they even took that forum down. But social media
also helped in a lot of ways because everybody was
(26:43):
totally connected to this manhunt and had complete up to
the date, information to the minute information from within that
containment area, from everywhere, and I guess kind of helped
a little more than just passively watching television during a manhunt. Yeah,
good point. One of my favorite man hunts. And this
is weird to say that, but um, actually, you know what,
(27:05):
let's take a break. I'm going to tease that and
I'm going to reveal my favorite man hunt after the break. Okay,
(27:30):
So who is it? It's the UNI bomber. Oh okay, Yeah,
that was on the lamb for eighteen years. One of
the lengthiest man hunts in US history. Not easy to
hide out for that long. Um, and he did it,
which he did it in the wild of Montana. Just
pretty good idea. I guess if you're gonna hide out,
(27:51):
just drop off the map. Yeah type manifestos. Actually Montana.
They should have been looking there, They should have been
going there first. But um, he mailed sixteen bombs over
the course of quite a few years and ended up
killing three people, wounding twenty three more. And I had
a million dollar bounty on his head. Was one of
(28:12):
the most wanted, and eventually he was rooted out by
his own brother, who read one of the manifestos and
said that sounds like Teddy Yeah, and went to the
cops and said, hey, this guy might be my brother.
The writing style, the things he's saying like it very
well could be my brother. And it turned out that
was him, right, So, which is another another point for
(28:35):
the case that for a man hunt to work, you
have to get the public involved, and they did so
by publishing these manifestos and said anybody familiar with this? Yeah,
and the guy's brothers said, yeah, me, yeah, same with
Eric Robert Rudolph. Yeah, let his name. I don't remember
how they caught him. I believe it was hikers in
the woods turned him in. I might be wrong, but
(28:58):
he was definitely hiding out in the wood. And he was,
of course the Olympic bomber um, not the guy they
originally impended on, which was pretty sad, right. What was
his name? Richard Jewel? Yeah, man, I felt so bad
for that dude. Yeah. Can you imagine, like life ruined? Yeah,
and they they compensated him pretty handsomely afterward. But then
(29:19):
he only lived a couple of several million. Oh he died. Yeah,
he died of a heart attack a few years after that.
I don't think I knew that. Yeah, it's because he's like,
I'm eating steak and lobster every night, asked me the
drawing butter or Richard Jewel? Yeah, I didn't know he died. Yeah. Um,
and then so back to online real quick. Um, there's
there's evidence that you can crowdsource a man hunt. Yeah,
(29:42):
there's a whole group of people that live online that
are into true crime, that are that like us, their
interest in their online search skills to try to find
the identities of like long lost serial killers, and there's
all sorts of online man hunts the amateurs take on.
And apparently the State Arment held something called the Tag
(30:02):
Challenge where they had people hiding in cities around the
world and people had twelve hours online contestants had twelve
hours to find them in like these five different cities
using just mug shots and it worked. So they found
that with a search, as time becomes more of an essence,
(30:25):
as the pressure amount, people stop just shooting the info
out to wherever they can and start like really targeting,
focusing their search. And once you have a bunch of
people doing that who are really focused in searching, but
a lot of them and sharing information like on social media,
that's when they like a search and not just a
(30:47):
man hunt or search for a person, but a search
for anything becomes most successful. I guess, well, yeah, imagine
in Boston. I bet every thousands of people in that
twenty square block radius are looking out of their window.
Oh yeah for this dude. Yeah, so you've got thousands
and thousands of more eyeballs. That's two eyeballs per person
(31:09):
in most cases, unless you're one of those weird pirates
Boston pirates, right, And that's just that helps you know, Yeah,
as long as they're not out, don't grab their guns
and you know, get in position. Well yeah, that's scary.
Well that's why they released the pictures of the suspects finally,
because they were trying to crack down on online vigilanniasm
(31:30):
that could lead to real life vigilaniism. Yeah, so hats
off to the dude who saw the dude in the boat.
You got anything else? I got nothing else? All right, Well,
if you want to learn more about man hunts, you
can type that word in the search bar house to works.
And since I said search bar, that means it's time
for listener mail. Yeah, I'm gonna call this Chess about Chess,
(31:55):
and I'm gonna read a couple of them, not here,
but one now and one another of so because we
got a lot of great feedback from Chess enthusiasts. I
notice people dig this game. This is from David Wagner. Hey, guys,
while you were discussing the concept of castling, y'all said
you didn't quite understand the value or strategy behind it.
You're right. It is all about protecting the king. Remember
(32:18):
how you pointed out that you want to control the
center of the board. Yes, that when your pieces are
off to the side, they're not as strong. Yes, well,
that has a lot to do with why you want
to castle. Basically, the king is more vulnerable, open to
attacks and has less protection when he remains in his
original E er D square, so you want to castle
him and get him away from those center squares. Also,
(32:38):
you talk about the en passant rule, which is one
of my favorites and something almost never pass up. You
sell Herman, mostly because I get because I rarely get
a chance to implement it. It doesn't happen when a
pond passes another pond though on its first move out.
It is when it lands next to another pond that
(32:59):
the latter pond capture it. So I think we screwed
that up. Not big time. We were close. No, I've
got that way wrong. Okay, one last thing, and then
I'll quit chess pieces. You're gonna love this, okay, and
their symbols on top. Many of the basic pieces themselves
serve as visual reminders of how they can move. For example,
(33:20):
the night is l shaped, which is how it moves.
The bishop's miter has a diagonal slit in it. They
move diagonally. The rook, when seen from above, can move
in the basic cardinal directions forward, back, left, right, and
on top of the rook there are turrets pointing in
all the cardinal directions. A queen has many points on
her crown showing that she can go in any way,
(33:40):
any direction, and that small little cross on top of
the king lets you know how far he can go,
although that doesn't include his diagonomos, which he can move in,
so that one the whole theory kind of falls apart
there a little bit. But that is from David Wagner
in Columbia, South Carolina. Nice. Thanks a lot, David Wagner.
That was a great email, pleasant, approachable, gentle with the correction,
(34:06):
just good stuff all around. You can dance to it
all right, man, Way to go a Wagner If you
want to send us an email or reach out to
us digitally to say hello or whatever. You can tweet
to us, join us on Twitter at sysk podcast, join
us on Facebook at Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you
(34:27):
Should Know, or you can send us an email to
Stuff Podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com. Stuff you Should Know
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Josh Clark
Chuck Bryant
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