Serendipitous Discoveries

Sometimes you make a serendipitous discovery when you're writing.

I spent today writing some more backfill articles for the Fractured Fairfax wiki, trying to turn some of the red links that are sprinkled throughout the 1,753 articles there into blue links. For those of you not in the know, a red link on a Mediawiki wiki (which is what Fractured Fairfax is) is a link to an article that does not yet exist.

I started out by writing an article about Matthew B. Harper, who stabbed his sister Anne to death on Thanksgiving Day, 1995. While researching and writing, I discovered that the lead detective on the case was named June Boyle, who was honored as one of the Virginia Homicide Investigators Association's Top Homicide Investigators in 1999 for the nearly three-year long investigation she conducted to prove Harper's guilt. A blurb in the article about Boyle's receipt of the honor mentioned that she had shot an unarmed recreational pharmaceutical salesman to death in November of 1987.

Serendipitous discovery! June Boyle was in fact Irene M. Boyle, whose November 16, 1987 shooting of unarmed criminal suspect Jose Carlos Rodriguez was commemorated in a series of articles snarkily titled "Fairfax County Police officer Irene M. Boyle “Opps! Gee gosh it was loaded?” awards" on the nastily anti-cop Fairfax County Police Watch blog.

Armed with my new knowledge, I went ahead and wrote up an article about Detective Boyle after I finished up the Harper article.

One more red link down, 3,349 to go.