New York's Coldest Case: A Murder 400 Years Old
The victim: John Colman.
Not much is known about him, much less about his murder. His body was hastily buried and has never been found. A weapon was recovered, but it vanished. The only account of the crime is secondhand, pieced together from a few witnesses, some of whom might have harbored a grudge. The chief suspects were singled out because of racial profiling but were never questioned. No one was ever prosecuted.
It was on Sept. 6, 1609 — 400 years ago Sunday — when this, the first recorded murder in what became metropolitan New York, was committed. Colman was killed only four days after the first Dutch and English sailors arrived.
“There’s a reason it’s still a cold case,” said Detective Michael J. Palladino, president of the city detectives’ union, mulling the scant evidence that remains today.
Some 300 people have been murdered in the city so far in 2009. Typically, half the homicides are solved in the first year and 20 percent the year after. Relatively few are solved decades after they occur, although some are. So it’s about time modern police brains were brought to bear on the murder of John Colman. Some detectives gamely agreed to apply their skills to the case during interviews.
In addition to Detective Palladino, they were Joseph A. Pollini, who commanded the Police Department’s cold case homicide squad and now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and William McNeely, a Manhattan South homicide detective. A couple of historians were consulted to add context.
The facts as they are known (maybe):
Colman was an accomplished sailor, one of a handful of Englishmen in Henry Hudson’s largely Dutch crew of 16. They sailed into New York Harbor early that September on the 85-foot-long Half Moon, searching for a Northwest Passage to Asia, and anchored somewhere between Coney Island and Sandy Hook...
... “He was English, the crew was Dutch,” said Detective McNeely. “You couldn’t rule anybody out. We’d detain everybody, including the injured sailors. You couldn’t just take the word of somebody else. They could say he was attacked by Indians; it would be easy to make that up. I don’t know if that’s racial profiling, but it’s definitely scapegoating.”
Colman’s murder inspired a poem by Thomas Frost:
Then prone he fell within the boat,
A flinthead arrow through his throat!
Also, a mural in the Hudson County Courthouse in Jersey City.
“They say a picture is worth a thousand words,” Detective Palladino said. “If we could force that picture to talk, we could crack the case.”
Read entire article at NYT
Not much is known about him, much less about his murder. His body was hastily buried and has never been found. A weapon was recovered, but it vanished. The only account of the crime is secondhand, pieced together from a few witnesses, some of whom might have harbored a grudge. The chief suspects were singled out because of racial profiling but were never questioned. No one was ever prosecuted.
It was on Sept. 6, 1609 — 400 years ago Sunday — when this, the first recorded murder in what became metropolitan New York, was committed. Colman was killed only four days after the first Dutch and English sailors arrived.
“There’s a reason it’s still a cold case,” said Detective Michael J. Palladino, president of the city detectives’ union, mulling the scant evidence that remains today.
Some 300 people have been murdered in the city so far in 2009. Typically, half the homicides are solved in the first year and 20 percent the year after. Relatively few are solved decades after they occur, although some are. So it’s about time modern police brains were brought to bear on the murder of John Colman. Some detectives gamely agreed to apply their skills to the case during interviews.
In addition to Detective Palladino, they were Joseph A. Pollini, who commanded the Police Department’s cold case homicide squad and now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and William McNeely, a Manhattan South homicide detective. A couple of historians were consulted to add context.
The facts as they are known (maybe):
Colman was an accomplished sailor, one of a handful of Englishmen in Henry Hudson’s largely Dutch crew of 16. They sailed into New York Harbor early that September on the 85-foot-long Half Moon, searching for a Northwest Passage to Asia, and anchored somewhere between Coney Island and Sandy Hook...
... “He was English, the crew was Dutch,” said Detective McNeely. “You couldn’t rule anybody out. We’d detain everybody, including the injured sailors. You couldn’t just take the word of somebody else. They could say he was attacked by Indians; it would be easy to make that up. I don’t know if that’s racial profiling, but it’s definitely scapegoating.”
Colman’s murder inspired a poem by Thomas Frost:
Then prone he fell within the boat,
A flinthead arrow through his throat!
Also, a mural in the Hudson County Courthouse in Jersey City.
“They say a picture is worth a thousand words,” Detective Palladino said. “If we could force that picture to talk, we could crack the case.”