redball

A redball is a homicide investigator’s urgent, changeable priority: the case that must be dealt with now, until another call rearranges the work. In Tim Braun’s investigations, the term marks more than a busy detective’s workload. It captures a system in which attention is scarce, urgency can be imposed from outside, and a case’s apparent importance does not guarantee either proof or justice.

The shifting priority

In the account of Newark, New Jersey homicide work, a detective on call takes whatever arrives during a twenty-four-hour shift. Tim Braun once caught four cases in a single night. Every new murder can reshuffle the deck, so the redball is not a permanent rank but a temporary designation: a hot hand that may quickly go cold. Each new body changes the order of attention, and each call resets the clock.

Public visibility can help determine which case rises to the top. If news cameras reach a scene before Braun, the case is likely to become a redball. A child’s death or the involvement of a mayor’s son can also make one. These examples suggest that urgency is partly shaped by whose death attracts attention and by the pressure surrounding the investigation, not solely by a detective’s assessment of evidence. The designation carries an awkward double meaning: it identifies a case that cannot be ignored, while also making it the one everyone wants off the desk and gone.

Ethel Duryea and the case that went cold

The term’s instability becomes personal in Braun’s investigation of Ethel Duryea, a respected fifty-year-old nurse shot on a sidewalk in an affluent Newark suburb. A jogger found her body in the snow, with her purse untouched beside her. There were no witnesses, leads, or suspects; the bullet was the only clue. The case was treated as a redball, probably in part because Duryea was white and middle class and had a nephew in the State Police.

Braun spent a year connecting the bullet to a gun, then another six months linking the gun to a multimillion-dollar insurance scheme. The investigation suggested that someone in local hospital emergency rooms had been selling privileged patient information to slip-and-fall lawyers, some of whom had political influence in Newark. Duryea’s murder began to look like a hit on a whistleblower. Braun’s superiors told him to leave the matter alone. When he kept pursuing it, they temporarily removed him from Homicide and assigned him to courthouse duty.

The case’s status changed even though Braun had not stopped caring about it. He came to understand that it would remain cold unless he was willing to risk his pension. The redball had gone cold, and the family and press would never know that Braun had found the gun that killed Duryea. For him, that reversal exposed the distance between solving a murder and being permitted to pursue what its solution implicated: his work could target street crime, but not necessarily the machinery of power behind a politically sensitive case.

An urgent case without a confirmed crime

At Somerset Medical Center, the same term attaches to a far less settled investigation. Braun and Danny Baldwin were asked to make sense of medical incidents that had already been examined internally for five months. The material consisted of numbers, laboratory values, and technical results that even professional laboratory staff could not explain. The patients were only potential victims; their deaths might still have been natural. At that stage, they were bodies without visible wounds, and it was not even certain that a crime had occurred.

That uncertainty made the redball label especially uneasy. Braun suspected that a senior figure in the hospital’s corporate structure had an agenda, but the information before the detectives did not yet establish a criminal case. The incidents had received months of internal investigation without a clear answer. The expression therefore does not mean that guilt has been proved or that the underlying events have been classified as murders. It names the pressure to act while the nature of the problem remains in doubt.

From local priority to a widening investigation

As the Somerset investigation expanded, the distinction between urgency and proof became more consequential. Work in several counties raised red flags and made Charles Cullen a strong person of interest, but the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office still lacked hard evidence and a case. The evidence there did not technically establish even one victim of homicide: the overdoses remained incidents and unexplained medical occurrences, while suspicious laboratory results could be contested. Information connecting Cullen to incidents at other hospitals was circumstantial, and investigators had no evidence against him at Somerset.

The label did not make a small prosecutor’s office better equipped to solve a sprawling case. Tim Braun argued that the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office needed a task force, other counties’ manpower and resources, and software capable of bringing scattered information together. Sharing the redball with investigators beyond Somerset meant giving up sole possession of it, but continuing alone threatened to overwhelm the office and jeopardize the investigation. The urgent priority thus became a coordination problem as well as a question of who would carry the case.

Braun also felt the case’s clock ticking whenever Cullen returned to work. Its connection to the Duryea investigation recalled a previous redball that had cooled under institutional pressure. Yet the cases differed in what remained unknown: Duryea’s murder had yielded a gun and a suspected political motive, while the Somerset investigators initially lacked firm proof that the incidents were crimes at all. In both, the redball measures urgency without guaranteeing authority, evidence, or an outcome. Its heat can draw a case into view; it cannot by itself ensure that the people with power will let the investigation continue.