| NEWS | Detectives from p 8 CrimeDoor also provides geotargeted case profiles on a map, giving app users information about murders, missing persons, and unsolved cases in their area. That’s what Mandt, a 10-time Emmy Award nominee, had in mind when he launched CrimeDoor in 2020. Mandt is a true Hollywood guy. He produced this year’s Golden Globe Awards, and has worked as an executive producer at Food Network, Fox Sports, ESPN, Showtime, NBC Sports, Walt Disney Studios, Lionsgate, and E! Entertainment. He produced films like Disney’s Million Dollar Arm and covered sports including The Road to the Super Bowl in 2018 and the 2000 Summer Olympics. Educated and trained as a journalist, his interest in true crime started in 1995, when he produced broadcasts of O.J. Simpson’s murder trial and the Oklahoma City bombing for ABC News. “Reporters go out there every day and tell the worst stories,” Mandt said. “You wake up and it’s like, ‘What horrible thing am I going to see today?’” After five years in the news business, Mandt couldn’t take it anymore. He ques- tioned if he was too soft for the job. “It was too much for me. It was too intense,” he said. “I didn’t want to be around all that. It took a toll on me and it made me think about families and victims and how they are left out.” He was thinking about Robinson, the 24-year-old who has been missing for a whole year. Robinson is one of nearly 2,000 cases highlighted in the app. More than 60 of those cases are in Arizona. Other subjects are Caleb Powell, who also was 24 years old when he went missing in Maricopa in 2014, and Mikelle Biggs, a girl who was 11 when she was last seen riding her bike in Mesa in 1999. “These victims only have a moment in time,” Mandt said. “When the hype goes away, the families are left by themselves with that pain forever. I wanted to do something about that.” Mandt was inspired to create CrimeDoor when he played Pokémon GO, a mobile video game that is widely cred- ited with making augmented reality mainstream. He calls CrimeDoor “the ESPN of true crime.” The app allows users to walk through some of the most infamous crime scenes, involving victims such as Nicole Brown Simpson, JonBenét Ramsey, Nipsey Hussle, Tupac Shakur, and John Lennon. The fatal shooting of the ex-Beatle offers details like the discarded revolver, the dropped reel-to-reel tape, Lennon’s bloodied body, and Yoko Ono on her knees weeping for her murdered husband. And CrimeDoor does not hold back on the gory details. Exploring the scene of 10 Rebecca Zahau’s suspicious hanging death near San Diego in 2011, users can see the woman’s nude body dangling from a balcony with her wrists and ankles bound and her hands behind her back. Seeing an uncensored crime scene helps solve cold cases, Mandt asserted. “When you experience things, you can understand them,” he said. “It is impos- sible for the human brain to understand something without experiencing it. Visual learning is so much more powerful.” Users can even witness the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on the CrimeDoor app. But that has led critics of the app to accuse Mandt of exploiting tragedies for profit. Experts wonder if investments in virtual reality technology will move the needle on America’s growing murder problem. Something has to. According to the most recent FBI data, in 2020, just 46 percent of homicides were cleared. The second half of 2020 was the only six- month period of time in recorded American history when the majority of murders went unsolved, according to the FBI. It’s likely that future FBI data will show that 2021 was the first full year when that’s true in the United States, according to Tom Hargrove, a retired investigative journalist and former White House correspondent based in Washington, D.C. With a vision not too dissimilar to Mandt’s, Hargrove founded the nonprofit Murder Accountability Project in 2015 to track unsolved homicides nationwide. “We are less likely to solve a murder now than we ever have been in American history,” Hargrove told New Times. “You’d think with all the new technologies we’re developing, you’d think we’d be solving these murders in 60 minutes.” But this isn’t Hollywood, Hargrove said. Beautiful people aren’t solving murders in minutes while huddled around a giant computer monitor displaying maps, finger- prints, and karyotypes. “We’re getting worse and worse at solving these crimes,” he said. “I applaud new technology, but the truth is, every- thing is going south.” In Hargrove’s opinion, the only solu- tion is to bolster funding for law enforce- ment agencies to allow for investments in forensic analysis, detective work, and state labs. When DNA testing became prevalent in the mid-1980s, many people thought they’d never see an unsolved murder again, Hargrove recalled. It didn’t play out that way. As of last month, detectives in Arizona are waiting an average of 126 days to get the results of a DNA test amid a 700-case backlog, according to numbers from the Arizona Department of Public Safety. In some cases, cops wait two years for DNA test results. >> p 12 JUNE 30TH–JULY 6TH, 2022 PHOENIX NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | FILM | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | NEWS | OPINION | FEEDBACK | CONTENTS | phoenixnewtimes.com
