Danielle Van Dam

'Wanted' no more

Like the fugitives from San Diego and elsewhere that it profiled every week for 23 years, “America’s Most Wanted” goes into hiding after tonight’s season finale.

The Fox network television show, loved by law enforcement and crime-story junkies, is being dropped from its weekly slot but is expected to return with four two-hour specials next season — if it doesn’t move to another channel first.

“It was the modern equivalent of the old post-office wanted poster,” said Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University.

Wanted: Fugitives like Charles Russ, who fled San Diego after he ran over and killed his wife with her own Mercedes in 1987. “AMW” profiled him three times, and viewer tips helped police arrest him in Florida two years later.

Wanted: A suspect in the serial killings — six women stabbed — that terrorized Clairemont and University City in 1990. One month after the “AMW” segment ran, police arrested Cleophus Prince in Alabama.

Wanted: Missing children like Danielle van Dam of Sabre Springs and Leticia Hernandez of Oceanside, 7-year-old girls kidnapped from their homes in 2002 and 1989, respectively. Segments on them generated hundreds of tips, but not happy endings. Both were found dead along rural roads.

It was one of television’s first reality shows — before “reality” meant putting strangers together on an island or in a house and pitting them against each other — and it became not just the first hit for Fox, regularly winning its Saturday night time slot, but also spawned manhunts on other networks and low-budget local spinoffs in many cities, including San Diego.

Criticism about sparking vigilantism or paranoia have shadowed the show, and no one knows how many innocent people had their lives upended temporarily by false identifications or how much time police wasted chasing false leads.

But its formula of crime-scene re-enactments and quasi-documentary interviews proved successful right away. Four days after the first program aired in April 1988, viewer calls led to the arrest of one of the fugitives depicted, a murderer-rapist on the FBI’s most-wanted list.

According to the program, it has triggered 1,153 “captures” worldwide since the first episode.

The San Diego area showed up early and often, either as the place where a crime had happened, or — because even bad guys like a border town with good weather — as the place where fugitives were found.

Fun Tuna: Casey Anthony Bug Expert

If you’re confused, imagine how the jury feels after Baez’s opening statement and the probability Baez’s bizarre claims will stick to the juror’s brains like Post-It notes throughout the trial. Which leads to Day 27 of the Casey Anthony trial and testimony from Dr. Neal Haskell, the ‘bug expert’ forensic entomologist who has ties to the sensational 2002 capital murder trial of David Westerfield.

Forensic Astrology

Congressional Record, V. 151, Pt. 15, September 8 to September 22, 2005

Newsweek

Fundamentals of Forensic Science

Wounded innocents and fallen angels, child abuse and child aggression