Social media, cell phone signals, online search history and other digital evidence led to the arrest and guilty plea of an Ohio man in the murder of a 23-year-old woman in the summer of 2018.
By Eric Schwartzberg. Dayton Daily News. May 13, 2019
(TNS) — Technology, especially the kind used with text messages, search engines and geolocations, is being used more prominently by police in criminal investigations.
Those efforts were underscored recently in hundreds of court documents that revealed a Butler County, Ohio, police department determined that Michael Strouse of Liberty Twp. “left a digital trail of evidence related to stalking and pre-meditated murder” of Ellen “Ellie” Weik, a 23-year-old West Chester Twp. woman who went missing in July 2018 and whose body was found in a field in August.
The more than 800 pages of court records unsealed earlier this month and obtained and examined by this news outlet, and a clear indication of how West Chester Police Department detectives used technology to investigate Strouse.
Those efforts included “various search warrants executed on email accounts, social media accounts, cell phone accounts and electronic devices.”
According to court documents, police turned to a law enforcement database to determine harassing texts sent to Weik originated from an account registered to Strouse, who pleaded guilty to Weik’s death and is serving a life sentence for murder.
Police were able to look into a “spoof” phone number with a 213 area code, one used to communicate with Weik in the months before her death, by obtaining data from computer-generated phone number provider GoTextMe.com.
That included account holder information such as user ID, username, sign-up date, last login, email, phone number associated with the account and IP address on signup.
Such information also included Facebook ID, device ID, geolocation and last IP address used, as well as call logs associated with the account.
The account was registered to a “Mikael Strouse” and police used a thorough search of Strouse’s social media pages determined he “definitively used” the name “Mika.” That, according to court documents, linked him to the number used to send Weik harassing and stalking messages…
Continue reading GovTech.com HERE.
