Reward not paid: authorities regularly offer financial incentives for tips that lead to a crime being solved, but criminologists claim large payouts are rare

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 1, 2003 | by Timothy W. Maier

Kim Peterson, executive director of the Carole Sund/Carrington Memorial Reward Foundation, says it paid $50,000 to a tipster who found the burned vehicle. Peterson says the FBI insisted Damant didn't deserve the reward because "only Stayner connected himself to the other women." So did the killer get the cash? "He tried to get it for his family," Peterson says. "The FBI told him, `No.'"

So where's the outrage? Surprisingly, it doesn't come from Damant. She has refused to file a lawsuit because, she says, "I am not a suing person. I didn't do it for the money." Good citizens such as Damant often just walk away. Nor are tipsters in the underworld likely to do more than complain, because they know the unwritten street rule: Snitches end up in ditches.

The Damant case is far from isolated. For example, what happened to the reward promised for finding Chandra Levy, murdered girlfriend of former congressman Gary Condit (D-Calif.)? It too can be stamped "Reward Not Paid." The anonymous dog walker who discovered the intern's remains in a park last summer got nothing. The reason? He didn't know those bones were those of Levy, explains Washington Metropolitan Police spokesman Kenneth Bryson. "This is still an open case," he says. "It went from a missing person to a homicide investigation. The dog walker didn't find her--he found her remains."

Indeed, there were some qualifiers in the Levy case, including that a reward would be offered for her "safe return." That's why Condit never had to pay his pledge of $10,000 to a fund that grew to nearly $250,000 as Washington searched for the missing intern. Most of the Websites that promised big rewards independent of the police reward program simply shut down--and any cash that may have been collected or pledged will not be dispersed until Levy's killer is brought to justice, police say. As for Condit, he has fallen so far off the political radar screen that he has had to threaten lawsuits for libel to get attention.

The cases in which rewards actually are paid often involve low-profile cases from the files of the nation's 1,150 Crime Stopper programs. They have paid out $60 million to tipsters since 1976 when they began offering a maximum $1,000 reward. But even these programs have produced disputes.

For example, in Montgomery County, Md., police spokesman Derek Baliles runs the county's Crime Stopper program, which paid about $3,000 last year. Baliles says, "We have had sticks shaken at us" for not paying rewards to citizens who thought they deserved them. One such case involved the murder of popular preschool teacher Sue Wen Stottmeister, 48, who in January 2001was beaten to death on a jogging path by Albert Walter Cook. A witness who helped stop another assault by Cook by calling 911 to alert authorities was not considered instrumental enough in collaring this criminal to merit a payday.

The witness was praised for his lifesaving action, but "because he didn't follow the publicly advertised procedure," which means providing information linking the suspect to the crime, he wasn't eligible to receive the reward, Baliles says. Never mind that, if the witness hadn't done exactly what he did, Cook likely would have claimed another victim. Cook subsequently was convicted of the earlier murder.