Fascinating article by Leon Neyfakh for Slate.com regarding an ingenious new way to solve cold case crimes.  Yes, it does indeed involve a deck of cards!

Cold Case Playing Cards Are An Ingenious New Way of Cracking Unsolved Crimes

At the risk of stepping all over the article (you should read it!), penal authorities have copied the deck of card concept used during the second Iraq war to post information on unsolved crimes.  If you don’t recall the whole deck of cards concept from the Iraq War, it went like this: A list of all the “most wanted” Iraq figures were posted on a deck of cards the soldiers played or distributed to people in Iraq.  Rewards were offered and, essentially, you had a large deck of “wanted” posters available in a pocket sized edition.

Fast forward to today where this concept is being used with the cards distributed to prisoners, among them, those in Connecticut and Florida.  The cards are ordinary playing cards but on them is information regarding a cold case and rewards (if any) are offered along with a number to call if someone has any information on the unsolved crime.

Because inmates mingle in very close quarters, there is a possibility they may overheard other inmates brag/lament/talk of knowing about a crime they were never brought to justice for and/or in which they knew a friend or several friends/acquaintances who were involved.  They may sit on this information, never knowing if the story they heard was true or not but with the playing cards, they now have the means of verifying this to be the case and, hopefully, they will subsequently take the initiative and tell someone what they know of these old, unsolved cases.

The playing cards thus become a very clever way to effectively “interview” a large population of their knowledge of any number of crimes.