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According
to the book description of Best of the Spingola Files, Vol. I, “The very emphasis of the commandment:
Thou shalt not kill,” Sigmund Freud noted, “makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain
of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.” During a career
that spanned parts of four decades, homicide detective Steve Spingola spent 15-years chasing down the killers Freud described.
Yet, in Milwaukee alone, hundreds of murders remain unsolved—their files collecting dust in a windowless storage room.
In the fall of 2009, a few of Spingola’s students
thought it odd that several high-profile organizations, such as the Innocence Project, sought to exonerate the convicted,
while only a handful of groups advocated for the victims of unsolved slayings. In response, their instructor created the Spingola
Files—a Web site that explores death investigations, organized crime, and other matters of criminal justice import.
Whether it is the strangulation murders of over a dozen women; a bicyclist who went for an afternoon ride
but never returned home; the unsolved homicides near Wisconsin state colleges; or the suspicious drowning deaths of men in
the hard-drinking city of La Crosse, Best of the Spingola Files profiles cases that trouble the investigator known amongst
his colleagues as ‘the sleuth with the proof.”
According to the book description of The
Killer in Our Midst: The Case of Milwaukee's North Side Strangler, “During his 25-year career with the
Milwaukee Police Department, Steven Spingola investigated hundreds of homicides. In the corridors of the Police Administration
Building and throughout southeastern Wisconsin, his reputation as a tenacious and thorough detective is legendary. Yet, on
occasion, even preeminent sleuths catch cases that, for a variety of reasons, remain unsolved. Recent advances in DNA technologies,
however, are filling in the gaps left by unwilling witnesses, faulty memories, a lack of adequate resources, and father time.
This same scenario unfolded during a two-month period
in 1995 when two north side Milwaukee women were strangled to death within a six block radius of each other. Homicide detectives
carefully sifted through both crime scenes, but were unable to develop sufficient evidence to affect an arrest. Fourteen years
later, DNA evidence collected from these two murders, as well as five others, has linked one unidentified serial killer, dubbed
by one Milwaukee television station as “the north side strangler.”
As the detective who investigated the 1995 homicides
of Florence McCormick and Shelia Farrior, Steven Spingola revisits the crimes scenes, identifies the strategies employed by
the perpetrator, and provides a profile of the suspect. "The Killer in Our Midst" is a e-magazine expose that enables
the public to walk-a-mile in the worn soles of a busy homicide detective.”
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