Does this trope have a single point of origin? You’ve seen it in all the police procedural/serial killer type shows, where our hero pins photos of suspects, articles about events, and scraps of toilet paper on a bulletin board and then connects them in all random directions with color-coded yarn and 15 lb. fishing line.
The first time I remember seeing this was on FlashForward, a short-lived ABC sci-fi series in 2009 that was canceled before the first season finished. But I suspect it goes back farther than that.
Was there a particular TV show or movie where this trope was first used? Have any real-life detectives ever done this, or does it just look good on screen?
I don’t know where it started, but there’s a UK show called The Chelsea Detective that uses this trope. The lead detective lives on a houseboat, and he has a “board” on board. But he has a roll down (matchstick?) blind that he can lower when he has company. It’s a little detail, but I like it.
I’ve long wondered about this myself, and I’ll be quite surprised if it is not a completely contrived device invented for TV and movies. Or if it is used by police anywhere, it is because they saw it on TV.
I have a distinct memory that the Watergate investigative team (the junior grunts, not the big names in the news) used that exact device to work out the links between the Plumbers and the White House.
Having said that, I can’t find a single piece of evidence to prove what I said, but even if I just saw Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford do it in All the President’s Men that would push it back to the mid-1970s.
Link analysis procedures were developed and evaluated to aid law-enforcement agencies integrate collected information and develop hypotheses leading to the prevention and control of organized crime. The procedures were designed to portray the relationships among suspected criminals, to determine the structure of criminal organizations, and to identify the nature of suspected criminal activities. An experiment was conducted in which 29 teams of law enforcement intelligence analysts completed link analyses from information contained in identical data bases. The results compared favorably with criterion solutions prepared earlier. Subsequent field applications of link analysis by trained law enforcement officers confirmed the utility and potential value of these procedures.
It’s probably not as crazy-looking as the corkboard with the photos and strings and stuff, but it’s the same basic idea. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the full paper.
Here’s a real-life example from a 1999 serial killer in Australia. In this case, though, it was the killer who kept the big board.
That information went on a chart of sorts that Bunting had on a wall in a spare room in his house that he called the “spider wall” or the “wall of spiders”.
It consisted of various pieces of paper and Post-it notes that were connected by bits of pink and blue wool.
The papers contained the names of people Bunting considered “dirty” because he believed them to be homosexuals and paedophiles, or “rock spiders”.
The bits of paper were connected in the manner of a flow chart, with one section having Lane’s name at the centre, linked to other names including that of Ray Davies.
In the intelligence world this is actually done, though perhaps not with strings, but functionally with whiteboard and markers or whatever works. So I don’t think that it really qualifies as a trope per se. I’ve seen it done in the SIGINT and Spec Ops realms, operationally.
The trope in up-to-the-minute Scandi cop shows now is a clear glass or perspex board*, so they can get moody shots through it of the detectives looking puzzled or having their eureka moment.
Then there’s the scene where they uncover a suspect’s secret store of cuttings, etc., about the victim(s).
*This may be coupled with the grizzled cop grumbling over the trendy designer furniture, the open-plan office, not being allowed to smoke, having to cope with senior desk-jockeys angling for media attention, etc., etc.
I had it in the back of my noggin to post this exact question. I thought I might be the only person wondering about this.
I’ve watched several police procedural series over the past few years, and the wall-O-photos connected by yarn seems to be the one ingredient they all contain.
I can’t imagine a genuine police/detective investigation taking up an entire wall - sometimes an entire room - with photos and yarn.
(and I guess they leave it to some poor custodian to yank it all down once the case is cracked?)
