10 Disturbing Crimes Solved By Amateurs

When Hayley Faith Wilson slipped out her window and ran away from home, her father, Ray, uploaded a heart-breaking video on YouTube. In it, he used white cards to tell the world about how his missing 17-year-old daughter had left behind her mobile phone, along with a yellow sticky note telling him to let her go.

Although there were a bunch of cynics who denounced the father’s plea for help as crocodile tears and a ploy to promote his band Texas Heat, over 620,000 people watched the video, and many shared it on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtags #FindHayley and #LoveHayley.

After several days of Twitter users sending claims they saw her at a party in Oceanside, the trending search party culminated with Carlsbad police finding the runaway Texan and detaining her. Ray then flew to San-Diego where he was reunited with his daughter.

This is only one example of ordinary people using the internet to help the police and shattered families. Since its exponential growth, a bevy of Sherlock Holmes wannabes have used the world at their fingertips to not only find runaway girls dreaming of the California life, but to identify Jane and John Does, and to solve other disturbing cold and current crimes of rape, murder, and paedophilia.

And sometimes these amateur sleuths go beyond using the internet…

A day after taking her fox terrier for a walk through the woods, Dr Helen Davidson’s body was found by a search party of 100 soldiers on 10 November 1966. Dr Davidson, 49, had been battered with a 2ft 6in chunk of charred wood, and her eyes had been caved into the back of her skull.

Detective Chief Superintendent Jack ‘Razor’ Williams of Scotland Yard headed the Thames Valley Police murder hunt and interrogated half a dozen sex offenders. With them all having solid alibis, Williams ended the investigation by ruling that Davidson had been the victim of a motiveless murder after spying illicit lovers with her binoculars.

Although the notorious News Of The World newspaper offered a £100,000 reward in 1971, and anniversaries saw several appeals for the investigation to be continued, it wasn’t until sparkling vampire Robert Pattinson’s aunt stumbled upon the cold case that the killer was identified.

Through old files given to her by forensic photographer John Bailey and the pathologist who carried out the post-mortem, Professor David Bowen, true crime author Monica Weller uncovered George Garbett as Davidson’s Grim Reaper.

With homosexuality being illegal in ’66 and Davidson’s corpse being found in a renowned part of the woods where male lovers embraced under the cover of darkness, Weller figured that the bisexual Garbett fretted that Davidson would dob him into the police and thus eliminated her.

But, with the case being solved 50 years too late, Garbett was unable to serve jail time as back in 1979 he had set himself ablaze with a gallon of petrol.