The History of the Red String Evidence Board
“Evidence board.” “Murder map.” “Wall of crazy.”
Whatever you call it, you’ve definitely seen a corkboard covered with photos of victims and/or suspects, possibly pinned to their relevant locations on top of a map, usually connected by yarn, often red. You’ve seen it on TV shows, movies and even memes, in use by detectives and/or conspiracy theorists as a tool for solving crimes, real or imagined. Is there even a chance that something so convoluted has ever actually existed in the law enforcement community?
The surprising answer: Yes? Kind of? Scotland Yard has used them, but as one retired detective pointed out, it was never one big “wall of crazy” — there were different kinds of charts for different kinds of crimes. “With burglaries, you’d use maps with colored pins, because they’ll help you to spot patterns such as different times or places,” he told Esquire. “You might spot burglaries that happened next door to each other, when (at first) it wasn’t clear from the addresses that the two places were even close. With other crimes, you might map out who a villain’s mates are. You might find out who their friends were when they had been in prison, and see who they were linked to. With a kiddy murder, you’ll do a full chart of the family with all the connections showing, and profile them all. You might find that an uncle is connected to a villain, or something like that.”
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When it comes to people who don’t talk like Sherlock Holmes, the evidence board has been out of favor for as long as anyone can remember. No one at the FBI or CIA will admit to ever even hearing about someone using tape and string to crack a case since long before a “Big Board” was first displayed in Dr. Strangelove in 1964 and a web of red tape popped up in the 1979 television adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It makes sense — there are a lot of disadvantages to the Hobby Lobby method. Detectives usually have more than one case going at a time, for one thing, and a limited amount of wallspace to map them all out on. Anyone strolling through the office could learn everything the agency knows about the crime, including potential suspects. Most importantly, they have better tools for visualizing and tracking such details. You ever heard of computers? Nifty things.
You know what the web of red string is good for? Communicating a lot of information to a viewer very quickly in a visual medium. That’s why the wall o’ crazy took off so fast in the golden age of crime TV in the ‘80s and also why the FBI recently used images of a yarn-strung wall in a recruitment campaign to lure in potential future agents with a tool they admittedly haven’t used in decades.
It truly is life imitating art imitating life.
