Pathological by Henry Cordes & Todd Cooper

Author:Henry Cordes & Todd Cooper [Cordes, Henry & Cooper, Todd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948239011
Publisher: WildBlue Press
Published: 2018-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21: THE NERD COP

Back at his desk in Omaha, Nick Herfordt plugged Anthony Garcia’s iPhone into an electronic contraption not much bigger than a tissue box. Omaha’s self-dubbed Nerd Cop was about to uncover what would prove to be some of the most damning evidence yet in the case detectives continued to build against the homicidal doctor.

Within three years of the iPhone’s 2007 introduction, smart phone use nationally had exploded. Suddenly, almost every American was, in effect, walking around with a computer in hand — one that held such intimate secrets as who they were communicating with, where they were at any given moment, what websites they were frequenting, even how many steps they were taking in a day.

By 2013, law enforcement agencies across the country were slowly waking up to how critical digital forensics could be to police work. And few cops anywhere knew the cyber-sleuth’s art like Nick Herfordt. If more criminals realized what digital detectives like Herfordt were capable of gleaning from a cell phone, they would never carry them.

“It’s not rocket science,” Herfordt liked to say of his craft. “But it is computer science.”

Herfordt, though, was more than just a computer geek. What helped set his work apart were his investigative skills. He combined a detective’s eye for knowing what type of information was most relevant to a case with the technical knowledge of where on the device to find it.

The little back box Herfordt plugged Garcia’s phone into was known in the trade as a “universal forensic extraction device,” or UFED — one of numerous electronic toys Herfordt had lying around his desk.

With the UFED, Herfordt downloaded all the data from Garcia’s phone. He then ran the data through a software program, enabling him to navigate the byzantine numbers, letters and symbols that made up the code. He was looking for clues.

Herfordt first examined Garcia’s internet search history, hoping he might find incriminating things Garcia had looked up on the web. The detective found only two searches there. Either inadvertently, or most likely in an intentional effort to cover his tracks, Garcia had recently cleared the phone’s search history.

But simply deleting that history wasn’t enough to foil Herfordt. For him, the browser history really represented just the low-hanging fruit. He had other tricks to help him find what he was seeking.

What Herfordt knew, and Garcia didn’t, was that whenever a smartphone user closes out of a web browser, the phone internally saves the last page that was viewed in a mode called “suspended state.” That way the next time the browser is reopened, the phone can take the user back to the same place. And, Herfordt knew, all those suspended state entries are stored. Herfordt went poking around in Garcia’s suspended state log, and he quickly found a smoking gun.

He could see Garcia had gone on to the Whitepages.com phone directory website to search for the address of Roger Brumback. The log entry didn’t have a timestamp, so Herfordt didn’t know exactly when the search occurred.

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