ABSTRACT
This chapter describes two distinct cases where geo-spatial technologies were applied to the investigation of homicides in the metropolitan area of Spokane, a city in the Eastern portion of Washington State. In one case (The Brad Jackson Case), in which GPS and GIS played a pivotal role, a man suspected in his wife’s earlier disappearance and the subsequent disappearance of his nine-year-old daughter under suspicious circumstances was ultimately arrested and convicted of murder based on GPS data, processed using GIS. The GPS data ultimately led investigators to both a temporary grave five miles from Brad Jackson’s Spokane Valley home and a more isolated permanent grave in a remote area of southwestern Stevens County, Washington about sixty miles away. This second grave contained the suffocated body of his young daughter. He had unknowingly led investigators to the location where he had exhumed his already dead daughter and then transported her to what he must have felt was a safer hiding place where he reburied her. Jackson successfully “stonewalled” detectives in his wife’s, technically still unsolved disappearance. It seems probable that he would have evaded prosecution in his daughter’s disappearance as well, without evidence that depended directly on geo-spatial technologies. Spokane County GIS specialists used GPS data coupled with GIS base-maps to map out routes and waypoints from Jackson’s secretive journeys and extract accurate coordinates of gravesites. It can be convincingly argued that only by using these geo-spatial technologies, could Spokane County Sheriff’s Department investigators have obtained the evidence that led to the arrest and conviction of Brad Jackson.
