The finding appeared to make the detective's death one of the strongest cases arising out of post-Sept.
There is no attempt to make the detective on his case a dominant hero, and nor is there any conventional insight into the mind of Succo himself, at least partly because the film is based on Pascale Froment's original documentary study, which strictly limits itself to what can be retrieved from eyewitness evidence.
Like any novelist, Summerscale follows her storytelling instincts in making the detective the hero of her book.
Otash's daughter Colleen, and the family's sometime neighbour Manfred Westphal, said they had made the detective's records public to counter his negative portrayal in Ellroy's fiction.
For Mr. Ross it's not enough to have one hero who dreams about killing his wife; he's got to make the two detectives investigating Alice's murder into doppelgängers with similar marital problems.
Of those 40 unresolved cases, "there are only a handful where we have a suspicion there was a homicide, but we don't have enough proof to make the charge," Detective Bonner said.
It's a fact of crime fiction that social misfits make the best amateur detectives.
Alice Stevenson, the director of the children's museum, who was helping conduct the tour along with Mr. Skolnick and others involved in the project, said that the exhibits were intended to make the visitors "history detectives" who explore and learn, and who discover that history is not something trapped in a book.
To get on the task force, an officer has to get his gold shield, make the rank of detective.
Both Detective Moran, who was trying to make the drug buy, and Detective Cruz, who like Detective Vasquez was a "ghost" whose responsibility was to shadow and protect the undercover detective, have given their accounts to the Internal Affairs Bureau and the office of District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau of Manhattan, the investigators said.
