Del Quentin Wilber's Blog

Photo of the Day:
Even at a murder scene, a detective can take a break to playfully strum a tune. The detectives used gallows humor and practical jokes to cope with a very difficult job. I found the humor jarring at first but as time wore on, I truly understood and appreciated it. Andre Brooks Sr. Feel free to share. More on book here: http://amzn.to/1UADxCR

Photo of the Day in A Good Month for Murder:

"The Batting Order." This is the small dry-erase board near the front door of the PG homicide office and it tells detectives who is up for the next case. The PG squad went to a rotation system during a particularly bloody stretch of homicides in the 1990s to ensure everyone got about the same number of cases. It's pretty self-explanatory. Anyway, I took this photo just after Marcos Rodriguez was assigned the slaying of a 15-year-old for the shoes he was carrying and just before Billy Watts caught a double homicide of two teenagers. Within hours of Watts arriving at his scene, David Gurry was at his (a horrific shooting of an innocent motorist by a PCP user). Not even two days later, Ally Hamlin was investigating a domestic-related homicide. To find more about A Good Month for Murder: http://amzn.to/1UADxCR (It is the top seller in Law Enforcement on Amazon).

Photo of the Day: I love the expression on rookie Detective Jonathan Hill when he realizes he was wrong about the potential identity of the dead woman on the gurney in front of him. This was very early one morning in February, and Hill was investigating a police-involved shooting that had left a woman dead.
Hill and other detectives believed the dead woman was the lease-holder of an apartment in Bladensburg. To confirm this identification, the detectives visited the morgue at Prince George's County Hospital. Trasee L Cosby, an investigator for the medical examiner standing to Hill's left, has just unzipped the body bag, and the detective is frowning because the driver's license photo of the lease-holder does not match the face of the corpse.
Thus, the body to the medical examiner as a "Jane Doe," leading one of the detectives -- I shit you not -- to start singing "Do Re Mi" from the "Sound of Music." You can check out the book here: http://amzn.to/142MfoY

Photo of the Day: Detectives Ben Brown and Billy Watts, along with crime scene techs, scoured the scene of a double homicide in February 2013. In this photo, I captured Brown and two techs inspecting a knife that may, or may not, be coated in blood. "Someone brought a knife to a gunfight," Brown said. Have attached relevant passage from book. More on book here: http://amzn.to/1UOfeE0

Homicide detectives did much of their best thinking and plotting in a "haze of cigarette smoke and bullshit" either in an old evidence bay or outside the rear doors of CID. Here is the photo of the day
Learn more about book here: http://amzn.to/1UOfeE0

In one of my final scenes in A Good Month for Murder: The Inside Story of a Homicide Squad, I watched a homicide detective fall asleep at her desk, exhausted from a marathon interrogation session. I captured the moment in this photo. Poor Ally Hamlin. She had gotten up to leave, put on her "murder coat," but couldn't make it out the door.

Check out the book here: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Month-Murd...

I took some photos during my tour with the PG Police homicide squad for A Good Month for Murder: The Inside Story of a Homicide Squad and I'm going to post a few on my Facebook pageand on my Twitter feed over the next couple of weeks. The first one is one of my favorites of detectives at a homicide scene. In this photo are D.J. "Dom Ino" Windsor, Lt. Brian Reilly and Eddie Flores. It was just after 4 a.m. on a friged Tuesday. I love how focused the investigators are at the corpse, just a few feet away, and how the light captures that intensity in their faces. In the background, Mike Ebaugh is hustling to get a better sense of the scene. (Feel free to share).

You can find the photo here


You can get the book here:
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Month-Murd...