Interview with Mr.Lane

The interviewee, Lou Zawane, is a retired detective from the New York City Police Department. He shares two unsolved cases he worked on. The first case is a kidnapping where the victim was found dead in the street. The investigation was hindered by a lack of technology to track the victim's phone. The second case is a domestic violence incident where the main suspect was the victim's brother. The detective believes that advancements in DNA testing could help solve these cases today. Zawane also mentions that crime rates have significantly decreased over the years due to improved tracking methods. Here we have who I'm interviewing. Please introduce yourself. My name is Lou Zawane. I'm a retired sergeant from the New York City Police Department with 27 years experience. And before you begin telling us about your case, could you answer some questions? Sure. So why did you decide to become a detective? Initially I just decided to become a police officer because my mother said that would be a good job. So after college, that opportunity came up like two months after I graduated from college. So I accepted it and from there I became a police officer and moved on to become a detective. And did you work in the Pacific Bureau? Yes, most of my work was in two boroughs. One was the upper part of Manhattan and the South Bronx. Alright, those were the questions I had. So if you could tell us about an unsolved case of yours. I had numerous cases as an investigative detective in the, they call it the Detective Bureau, where we investigated crimes such as homicides, major crimes such as homicides, robberies and so on. Numerous homicides, but I would say there are two that stand out that could be solved and could not be solved. One involved a kidnapper. A gentleman was kidnapped in Manhattan and after kidnapping, I received a call from a family member saying they believed he was kidnapped. At that time they initiated an investigation with myself and numerous detectives from Manhattan. I was at that time in South Bronx, the 48th precinct, which is called the, how would you call that, Marcini, I think, area. That's right across the bridge from Manhattan. I got the call, we went there, we interviewed the relatives and it turns out a group of individuals came, stopped their car and pulled him out of the back seat and took him and didn't see him after this. The investigation lasted about three weeks before, about a month and a half before we started to slow down. We believe he knew the individuals that kidnapped him, but the family didn't want to tell us all that was going on because it was drug related. The interesting part of the whole investigation was that he had a cell phone and we never recovered his cell phone. We went looking for him, we interviewed, they said that he may have, the people that may have been involved or somebody that knew about it worked at a garage, went to the garage and interviewed that individual. He confirmed pretty much the story, that yeah, he heard too, that some guys came and kidnapped his friend. He didn't know who the people were that kidnapped his friend, but he, now not the family, thinks it was drug related. He also had a girlfriend. His girlfriend now told the story that was the same, but his friend had said that he believes the girlfriend was involved, his girlfriend was in his life. So he thinks the girlfriend set him up and knew the kidnappers and they wanted the money and since they didn't get the money, he was killed. And the reason I got the case, I should have started with this, was we got a call of a body in the middle of the street. So we drive there, it was a 130 street and I think it was like St. Ann's Avenue. When we get there, there's a body laying in the middle of the street that happened to be the guy I'm talking about. He was dead. So they must have kidnapped him, didn't get what they wanted, killed him and left him in the middle of the street. I got at that scene. Now, we did get his phone. Okay, so I don't know what I was doing, didn't get any leads. Okay, running with this for three or four weeks, went to the funeral, tried to identify people at the funeral. No one suspicious came to the funeral, but he had a lot of friends. Again, he interviewed the girlfriend three times. And every time we interviewed her, her story changed a little bit. We didn't have enough to get her for committing a crime. In the end, while it might bring up when it comes to the full case, I think what we solved is because we got his phone numbers back, but we didn't get all. Like today, you can get, I think this case was in the late 90s. So it was like the 1940s, like 1999, 2000. At that time, you couldn't run a phone records like you can now. And based on that, we couldn't get enough information to find out who was using his phone after his death. But today, as I told you previously, today, with the technology and how the phone companies now, through the courts, are not able to interpolate or assist police way more than they used to then, I'm pretty sure that case would be solved by just tracking that phone. That I was never able to track the way you track phones today to find out, for example, after his death, where the calls were coming from, what's the phone numbers that were being called, and then track those people. During my time, that would take 10 to 15 minutes. Today, it wouldn't take that much. But that's one case. Anything else you want to add? Before we talk about another case, you mentioned that you thought he was kidnapped for money. Do a lot of kidnapped cases involve money? Well, one, you don't get a lot of kidnappings. Because kidnapping is a certain crime that people know not to do, just a historical basis of kidnappings. If you may not know this, but back, it might have been the 1930s, if you remember, there was a case called the Lindbergh case, if you know who he is. I don't know who he is. Okay, Lindbergh was a very prominent pilot. And I believe Lindbergh was one of the first people to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. Well, when he did that, he became very famous. He didn't have a lot of money. He became very famous. And it turns out, when he got back, they kidnapped his child, the Lindbergh baby. Based on that, his country went crazy. He was the darling child of the darling family of the great hope and the kidnappers. So, they found the kidnappers, and they all, I believe it was the babysitter that was involved. They ended up finding the kidnappers. The baby, of course, they didn't want to go after the death of the baby. They found the kidnappers, and based on that, most of the kidnappers are very, very strange. Okay, so most people run to not kidnap in this country. And in Mexico, we have a lot, but here in America, we don't allow kidnappers. And when you do, it's a big net. For example, most times, you don't get the FBI involved. The kidnapping law in Mexico calls you to call the FBI for kidnappers. Based on this Lindbergh case, and how kidnappings are a big, big thing here in America. So, we don't get many kidnappers. I think that was maybe one of, yeah, that was the only kidnapping case I got. And I don't recall many other kidnapping cases. So, that's a rare event here in this country. A kidnapping happens, but it doesn't happen often. And usually, now, when you have kidnappings, as you just asked your question, it's usually drug-related. Alright. So, can I hear about another case you've heard of? What's another one? There's a few that, another one that shouldn't be solved. We had a case of a, we believe it to be a domestic violence case. A lady that was killed viciously at her home. And the thing was, our main suspect was her mother. Okay. She had a boyfriend. And a boyfriend, we pretty much, we didn't even know what happened. She didn't know what happened. It was out of town. It had occurred. So, we pretty much scratched him up. And she had a brother that lived with her. Hit the scene. She's there. She was there over, I think, 50 times. 50? Yes, over 50 times. Which, cases go that we, a case like that is a, we call that a case in a lot of fashion. Because that's not normal for somebody to do that to somebody. That was the first thing that came to our blood. That was the first thing that came to our blood. Because that's usually somebody that knows you that will do that to you. And, in view of the brother, the brother never had a good excuse of, he didn't seem all that upset at some point. Which is a bad sign when you live with your sister and your sister is mutilated like that. You would show more emotion. And another interesting thing with the case, it was that she had a, I believe the child was about 18 months, less than two years old. And the child was in the other room. And the perpetrator never touched the child. So, that was another sign that this had to be somebody that, one, knew them. Two, again, be so vicious to her and not do anything to that child was kind of off cue too. Because usually if you're going to kill, you're going to kill everybody. You don't want anyone alive. Although the child can't really say anything. But still, for that child not to be touched, but the mother to be viciously attacked, led us also to believe that it was a family member, somebody that knew her. And by the end, again, we never got to get enough on the rug. But like I told you before, I would believe that case too would be solved today. Because usually if you stab a person 50, 60 times, you usually cut yourself or injure yourself. And usually that scene would leave a lot of DNA evidence. Then during that time again, early 90s, DNA was there, but it wasn't really done on every case. Now, I would guess that that cold case would be solved too by just doing a lab test on all the evidence that would come from the scene. Even that has changed so drastically how when we used to do evidence and when you go to the scene, all the stuff they do. So I'm pretty sure that also in the case that we had now, could be pretty easily solved. Alright, but I have a question and we can wrap this up if you don't have anything else. The cases like, the vicious cases like being stabbed 50 times by a broker, do these like affect your mental health? Uh, no, not really. No, not really because after a while, you look at it as, one of these things happens. A lot. I should say, they happen less now where I used to work than then. But for example, when I used to work, we used to have, a few of the cases I worked at, 100 homicides a year at one place. Now, that's cut down drastically. A buddy of mine told me that you used to do the same thing I did and you used to laugh because I used to work in the precincts where we had a lot of crimes where you could get 100 homicides. That same precinct today, last year I believe or the year before that, it went from 100 homicides to 10. Okay, so crime has changed drastically. Crime the way I used to work in New York, it's not a crime. I don't know what they would call this now, but it's not like it used to be where random killers were a big thing. Now it's not. Plus, again, law enforcement has changed drastically. We've had, they think about better ways to track crime, which is the same people do it. People that won't commit a crime are never going to commit a crime. People that commit crimes will always commit crimes. Once you figure that out and you get a tracking, which is easy to do, of the people that are going to commit crimes, where you can stop them in a sense before they go on these rampages for years before you catch them then, usually you'll catch them within maybe a crime or two rather than, like I said, same people constantly killing before you can catch them. So a big change is how you track crime now. You don't really track just a crime. You track a person. And if you track a person because people commit crimes, you're usually going to hit that person before he has a long history of committing crimes. So that's, I think, what really cut down crime drastically, where you're not going to get these vicious crimes and the same person, serial killer, keep killing people. Because sooner or later, something will pop up to show his nature and then keep tracking him and catching him the way you go on for five or ten years doing something that you should go on eight years earlier. So I think that's a big thing that how you track crime has changed. So crime in general has changed drastically. Crime in general. Well, thank you for letting me interview you today, Mr. Lane. Okay.