Prisons seek clues with cards

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published July 25, 2007

TAMPA - There is not a lot to do in prison. Inmates talk. They play cards.

Special Agent Tommy Ray figured out a way for Florida's 92,000 state prison inmates to combine those activities and maybe help detectives crack a cold case or two.

The veteran Florida Department of Law Enforcement agent helped launch a program to give inmates decks of playing cards featuring 104 of the state's most troubling unsolved murder and missing persons cases.

The program started with a local deck in Polk County in central Florida. It went statewide Tuesday when state officials handed out the first of two decks to inmates at Wakulla Correctional Institution in the Panhandle town of Crawfordville.

The cards will eventually be distributed to all state prison inmates.

The decks feature real playing cards, good for poker, go fish or solitaire.

The state attorney general's Crime Stoppers Fund is paying the $75,000 cost of the program - about $68,000 to produce the cards and $7,000 for rewards, an agency spokeswoman said. Authorities printed 85,000 decks featuring the first 52 cases.

In a few weeks, 15,000 decks with 52 different cases will be distributed.

[Last modified July 24, 2007, 23:24:00]