PHILADELPHIA - He has studied the ransom note left in the Jon Benet Ramsey case.

He has analyzed testimony from the murder case of a young girl last seen walking along the side of a lonely road.

He has poured over televised statements of a man who claimed his wife had disappeared and whose body later was found three states away.

He has provided his opinion on the unsolved murder of a television producer in a Philadelphia motel.

Currently, he's reviewing transcripts and tapes of interviews connected to the murder, dismemberment and burning deaths of two transvestite prostitutes.

All totaled, he's spent thousands of hours enveloped in intrigue and mystery, searching for a missing link.

But this crime-solving guru doesn't wear a badge or carry a gun. He's not a cop or an FBI agent or even a private eye. He is Donald Weinberg, an introspective, soft-spoken professor of English here at the Community College of Philadelphia.

Each semester, as he has done for 22 years, Weinberg patiently coaxes his four classes of English students through the likes of Plato and Marcus Aurelius. And when they need relevance of literature to the real world, his students just might get to hear about the escapades of the other Donald Weinberg.

A truth-seeker extraordinaire who is a sleuthing member of an exclusive crime-solving organization called the Vidocq Society, Weinberg is devoted to solving the unsolvable murders and mysteries around the country.

Most Vidocq Society Members, or VSM's as they are called, are current and retired forensic professionals who donate their case-cracking talents to help law enforcement officials make progress on "cold cases" - usually murders or disappearances that remain unsolved for more than two years. Cases can come from a victim's family member, a law enforcement official or a private investigator. But the society only takes on cases when asked to do so. If the members have a substantial interest in pursuing the case, an investigative team forms to take on the task.

Scattered among the law enforcement and forensic specialists are a handful of college instructors with something unique to add to the mix. In Weinberg's case, it is a keen interest in mysteries and puzzles, combined with a fine-tuned capacity to analyze verbal content, that landed him a coveted Vidocq Society membership.

"It was my ability to read," Weinberg says modestly.

In fact, it is his ability to "deconstruct" linguistics and language use, analyzing things such as vocabulary, pronoun usage, stance and person to detect changes or subtleties that reveal important clues about the author or speaker.

In one case, for instance, he studied a four-page document supposedly written by the perpetrator. From that sample, Weinberg deduced the author was an African American male from the Midwest, about 29 years old, with a high school - and perhaps some college - education. Authorities working the case located a suspect who matched that description.

 

'Cuisine and Crime'

The Vidocq Society got its name from Eugene Francois Vidocq, an 18th century French detective who many consider to be the father of the modern criminal investigation. He was a fugitive from French justice turned informer who eventually headed up a force of 28 detectives, all former criminals themselves. Writers Charles Dickens, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe have modeled fictitious characters after the legendary Vidocq.

The modern-day Vidocq Society limits its membership to 82, the number of years that Vidocq lived. It originally was conceived nine years ago by an ex-FBI agent as a small group of law enforcement professionals dedicated to victims' rights.

Today it is now a formal organization whose members hail from 17 states and 11 foreign countries. Each member donates his time and talent to solving the previously unsolvable.

Vidocq members meet every other month here in Philadelphia for "cuisine and crime." At the luncheon meetings on the top floor of the historic Public Ledger Building, members and their guests listen to the presentation of one or more long-unsolved murders or disappearances.

Confidential crime and evidence material sometimes is disclosed to the group to elicit valuable insight. Lively question-and-answer sessions almost always follow the presentation. "Did you consider this?" or "What happened to so-and-so?" often helps investigators working the case to think along new lines of investigation. Motivated purely by public service, members of the Vidocq Society then form working groups for a more intense probing.

"Even as a rookie cop, I felt victims never got a fair shake," says Vidocq founder William Fleisher. "Our main goal is to find out who did the crime, or at least eliminate those who didn't do it."

Fleisher, whose paid career these days is private investigation, is a former Philadelphia police officer, FBI agent, and U.S. Customs special agent. His specialty is polygraph and behavioral analysis. Nine years ago he had lunch with some law enforcement colleagues who ended up talking about old, unsolved cases. Voila - the Vidocq Society was born.

Fleisher, now the Vidocq Society commissioner, won't say how many cases the group has cracked. The figure is in the hundreds, depending on one's definition of "solved," he says. At any rate, the organization refuses to be driven by statistics and prefers to operate outside the limelight.

 

A Passion for Police Work

Fleisher first worked with Weinberg when he needed help editing a book on forensic interviewing, the subtle linguistic cues revealed during an interview which can be a reliable indicator of truth. Vidocq had among its members Murry Miron, whom Fleisher calls the "top guy" in the country on neurolinguistics before his death. Therein lies Weinberg's specialty as well.

In addition to his life-long study of language, the English professor brings another background to the crime-solving group: prison work. While an instructor at Mercer County Community College in the late 1960s, Weinberg won a grant to bring education into the New Jersey state prison system, tying all maximum security prisons together in a network.

Later, as the director of education and work release at Trenton State Prison, he was involved in hostage negotiations with prisoners on three separate occasions, further fine-tuning his linguistic interpretive skills. He went on to work at a state prison in Pennsylvania after joining the faculty at the Community College of Philadelphia.

Law enforcement has remained in his blood. He is proud of his work with the Vidocq Society because he believes the society plays an enormously valuable role.

"It tells the killer that someone is out there looking for him. Perhaps he will sleep a little uneasier tonight," Weinberg says. "But it also tells the relatives of victims that their loved ones haven't been forgotten."

Perhaps most importantly, he says, the organization reaffirms to society that each and every life is very valuable.

"No jurisdiction could afford the kind of talent that this group brings to a case," he says.

Robert LaRatta is another Vidocq member who teaches college students. A charter member of Vidocq, LaRatta is a retired federal agent currently working as a private investigator and security consultant.

His specialty is interviewing and interrogation. Once or twice a semester, LaRatta teaches criminal justice as an adjunct faculty member at Camden County College in Blackwood, N.J.

LaRatta has examined the pathology report in the Ramsey case, uncovered DNA evidence in a student strangling case and helped prove a young girl's reported suicide actually was a homicide. He often shares his cases with his students at Camden.

"I'll tell the class what's going on in the case - at least the parts that are public record - and get feedback from them," he says. "Sometimes they have good ideas" for pursuing the case.

 

Becoming Student-Oriented

For most Vidocq members, the organization is their "night job," their pro bono contribution to the world. Even as Weinberg devotes hundreds of hours to a single criminal-related transcript, reading, thinking, rereading and thinking some more, he prefers to be known as an English professor. That is the thing for which he is most proud. In the classroom, his two lives intersect.

"Vidocq lends me a certain authenticity with my students," he says. "Students think English teachers aren't real people - they took a wrong path somewhere and ended up liking poetry."

But sleuths who solve murders are real. So Weinberg will mention a case he's working on, and then say, "Let's talk about Plato's allegory of the cave." A discussion of Plato's theory that the average person can't be trusted to make decisions about himself ensues. Mixing in talk of murderers and the numbers of people in prison lends some realism to Plato's view of the world, Weinberg believes. It also creates provocative writing assignments.

"It elevates my class out of the trite stuff like teen pregnancy and so forth," he says.

Weinberg worries about his students feeling disconnected as much as he worries about the horrible crimes that have gone unsolved. Four years ago he decided he needed to remind himself of what it's like to be a student in a difficult subject. Purposely seeking out something for which he had no talent or aptitude, Weinberg took up karate.

That activity, he jokes, has "brought panache to dysfunction at a level they'd never seen before." As the self-proclaimed "Baryshnikov of maladroitness," Weinberg's pursuit of karate was frustrating and annoying. And he realized that's how many of his students felt in class. 

"I discovered it's easy to find reasons 'why not' and harder to find reasons 'why,'" he learned as he struggled through the jumps and kicks. "But ultimately, only the doing has meaning, and that's what I had to convey to my students."

In order to duplicate his students' experience, he says, he had to stick with karate until he had arrived at some point of public success. This month, he tests for his black belt certification. And he expects to get it.

As is so often the case, one thing leads to another. Vidocq's founder, Bill Fleisher, was a fellow karate student. Toughing it out on the mat was the nexus of their mutual crime-solving quest.

Perhaps the karate story will be a part of "Vidocq: the movie." Danny DeVito's Jersey Films has optioned the life stories of three of Vidocq's founders. Award-winning screenwriter David Fanzoni attended the society's January meeting, sparking talk that a major motion picture might be in the works.

A movie would be alright with this group of inquisitive minds, as long as it tells the truth. After all, the Vidocq Society credo is "Veritas Veritatum" - Truth Begets Truth.

Vidocq Society thanks to Community College Week for permission to reprint this April 20, 1998 front-page article.

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