“We always catch the dumb ones”

“We always catch the dumb ones” is a police saying about the apparent reliability of solving ordinary cases—and the stubborn exception that can undo that confidence. Its significance lies in the gap between a near-complete record of success and the one unresolved case that continues to demand an explanation.

The Saying and Its Exception

The maxim appears as a general observation about arrests: investigators may be able to tick off ninety-nine out of a hundred boxes, yet the single unchecked box can become an enduring vexation. The phrase therefore carries two meanings at once. It expresses confidence in law enforcement’s ability to identify offenders, but it also acknowledges that a difficult case can remain outside the pattern that makes the confidence seem justified.

The book leaves the saying impersonal; it is attributed to cops generally, not to a particular officer or investigation. Its force comes from the contrast between the broad claim and the singular remainder. The hardest case is not made negligible by the many cases that can be solved. Rather, the missing answer becomes more conspicuous because the rest appear to fit a familiar process.

What the Unsolved Cases Demand

The account of Keith and Patty Harrington’s murders gives that exception a human cost. Their possible connection to Manuela Witthuhn’s case had not been ruled out, but the cases went cold. Years passed without the tip that could change the investigation. Files were reviewed, while Roger Harrington repeatedly returned to fragments of the murders, hired a private investigator, offered a large reward, and sought help from a clairvoyant. None of these efforts supplied the answer he wanted.

The phrase’s unchecked box is thus not merely a technical gap in an investigator’s record. For Roger, uncertainty endured as an unresolved loop: details remained present, but did not cohere into an explanation. The saying compresses the institutional problem into a line; the family’s experience shows what that problem looks like across time.

Evidence, Delay, and the Limits of Confidence

The breakthrough came not through the expected phone call but through three glass tubes preserved in manila envelopes. Opened and tested in October and November 1996, the tubes produced results that led Orange County Sheriff’s investigators to prepare calls to the families. The material had remained available after years in which the cases yielded no answer, making preservation—not a sudden confession or a new tip—the means of advancing the investigation.

That progress came too late for Roger. He had died on March 8, 1995, a year and a half before investigators were ready to contact the families. The sequence sharpens the saying’s irony: the investigation moved closer to an answer, but not within the lifetime of the person who had spent years pursuing one. The maxim’s confidence cannot guarantee that a case will be solved in time for those who have waited.

Forensic Reversal

The results also promised more than an answer to one family’s questions: investigators were positioned to tell the families about evidence that linked the cases. Yet the eventual understanding would have corrected Roger’s own interpretation of a detail in his son and daughter-in-law’s deaths. He had believed that the killer covered their heads with a bedspread out of remorse; the book explains instead that the killer wanted to avoid getting blood on himself after an earlier, messy killing.

That reversal makes the saying’s distinction between the solvable and the unsolved less comfortable. Even when evidence advances a case, resolution can arrive after years of uncertainty and after a loved one has died; it can also replace one explanation with another. The maxim names the exception that resists routine success, while the preserved evidence and Roger’s absence show the human limits of any promise to catch the person responsible.