Playing Cards to Solve Crimes

Prisoners will soon help solve cold cases. The state  plans to ask them for help on more than 50 homicides, and victims’ families hope they’ll come forward with information and bring them closure.

Starting on Friday, when prisoners in Connecticut buy decks of playing cards, each card will feature a homicide victim.  Investigators want them to take a close look at those pictures, and they aren’t the only ones.  

“I would like to find the person who killed my great grandmother,” said Kristen Wilcox. 

Her great-grandmother was put on one of the cards for those inmates to see.  

“She didn’t get to see me go to college and that was a big thing for her,” Wilcox added.  Josephine Catania, 86, was killed in July of 2001. 

Her body was found in a storage unit of her Middletown apartment complex and, at the time, records showed she was killed by blows to the head. More than a decade later, no one’s been arrested.

“It's very frustrating. Every year goes by, the date goes by, I think of her. I think how nothing's been heard, nobody’s been questioned,” Wilcox said.

That could soon change. 

When inmates buy these new decks of cards and look at the 52 victims, they might know who committed the crimes or even confess to them.

“If you know anything, you think you might know anything, just let it be known,” said Wilcox.

The Department of Correction sold different decks of cold-case cards to inmates in 2009 and the 15,000 sold generated hundreds of tips. 

The cards actually helped solve the murder of Sean Dudley, who was killed in 2006 in Hartford.  Last year, Quan Morgan was convicted of shooting him at a party.

“I want answers,” Kristin Wilcox said. 

She hopes this new batch of cards helps find out who took her great-grandmother’s life.

“It's like whoever did it is just kind of walking free for now,” Wilcox added. 

Catching the killer would bring her and her family closure after feeling hurt for more than a decade.

The cards won’t cost taxpayers anything.  A deck costs inmates about 95 cents and the profits from that batch of cards in 2009 paid for the new ones.