What possible value would it have almost four decades after the fact that justifies expending not inconsiderable taxpayer resources?
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The whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa’s body has been a recurring meme for as long as I can remember. After spending a couple days looking for him in Detroit pursuit to a tip, the FBI has abandoned the latest search.
But let’s say they found him. What possible value would it have almost four decades after the fact that justifies expending not inconsiderable taxpayer resources?
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Well murder has no statute of limitations so, theoretically, they could bring someone to justice, although that seems unlikely in this case.
Personally, I think we’ve been witness to a decades long game of old Detroit mobsters trolling the police and the FBI with the latest “tip” on what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. My favorite was the one that had him in the end zone at Giants Stadium. Since nothing was found when that stadium was demolished after Met Life Stadium was built, we know that one wasn’t true. Disappointing.
People are still looking for Amelia Earhardt and we know what happened to her.
Reading William Manchester’s The Glory and the Dream, I was startled to see him state as fact that Earhart was captured by the Japanese. He’s a good writer, but that was how I learned he also had trouble resisting a good story.
If there’s halfway-credible information about the location of a unburied corpse, it’s sort of a basic human function to investigate. If someone told me that there was a corpse encased in the walls of my 120 year old home (I’m in the Northeast where homes that old are commonplace) or buried in my backyard, I would do something about that, even though I’ve lived in that house a long time without a problem and could in theory just ignore that information.
@Doug Mataconis: yeah, but he swallows other stories too, like the children’s radio host who muttered into the mike “that oughta hold the little bastards” when he thought it was dead.
You don’t recount a minority view as if it were the gospel truth, if you’re a good historian.
I do however cherish this tale he retold (not his words, just what I googled):
a man at Westhampton Beach who received in the mail on September 21, 1938, a barometer purchased a few days earlier in New York. He found the instrument’s needle pointing down near 28 degrees, at the section of the dial marked “Tornadoes and Hurricanes.” He shook the barometer and banged it with his fist, but the needle refused to move, so he rewrapped it, enclosed a note of complaint, and carried it to the village post office. While he was gone, his house was blown down.
