A woman checking on a Hawaii vacation home is brutally attacked and murdered. Her young daughter would be the key in helping find her killers. For episode information and photos, please visit: anatomyofmurder.com/the-vacation-home/ Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc
Chapter 1: Who was Telma Boyneville and what happened to her?
Chapter 2: What role did social media play in the investigation?
From what police could gather, neither Brown nor Dandurand had criminal records.
They're kind of like nobodies, so to speak. Nobodies in the sense that they're not known to law enforcement.
Which meant that even with physical descriptions and fingerprints lifted from the crime scene, it might have taken weeks to ID possible suspects. Instead, with the help of social media, it had only taken a matter of hours. You know, Anastasia, there are so many stories, positive ones, that come out with the availability of social media, helping identify missing persons, potential suspects.
So, wow, what a great tool. But let me just take the other side for a moment, because there are cases where armchair detectives may post a photo of someone they believe may be involved in a case, in a murder case, potentially putting an innocent person in danger. And adding to that fact, it also may deflect resources for law enforcement unnecessarily.
I mean, the speed of which this social media, these posts like spread around the island, it was like wildfire, which is amazing, Scott, right? But then on the flip side, like you're saying, there can be misinformation there and what people are reading or hearing they're going to take as fact. And you just don't know how that's going to factor into the investigation.
And also you don't want vigilante justice for the primary reason you don't want additional people to be hurt in all this. So this really is a lot of back and forth when you're thinking about these cases. But on the positive note here, luckily in this case, the lead generated by the public was a strong one.
So the body is found at about 3.15 p.m. by police officers. But the officer documented that he became aware of the social media picture at 7.07 p.m. and whereupon he distributed it throughout the police department.
The search also continued for Telma's gold-colored truck, which was almost as distinctive as the suspects with the dyed hair.
It was an older truck. It was beaten up. It was a well-used truck, but they had the big model license plate and police officers were looking throughout the North Shore for that truck.
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