D.C. police detective Jim Trainum helped crack countless cases, from the triple slaying at a Georgetown Starbucks to the killing of a Capitol Hill intern.
But Trainum, 54, who retired earlier this month after 27 years on the job, says one of his best legacies grew out of one of his worst mistakes.
In 1994, Trainum and his partner were assigned to the kidnapping and beating death of Lawrence O’Connell, a Voice of America worker from McLean. Within a few weeks, the detectives had obtained a confession from a homeless woman. She claimed that she had two friends attack O’Connell.
In the weeks after charges were filed, though, Trainum realized that her confession was false — that the woman had succumbed to subtle suggestions Trainum and his partner made as they interrogated her.
“It taught me to be more critical of my thinking and reasoning — not just accepting something for what it looked like, but asking, why do I think we know this?” Trainum recalled.
In the months and years after the false confession in the O’Connell case, Trainum made himself an expert on interrogations and a champion of reforms such as videotaping police interviews and creating independent forensic labs. He testified around the country and pushed his own department to change its ways.
It made him a lot of enemies in police departments here and abroad.
“We are extremely conservative and slow to adopt new ways,” he said. “We just don’t like change.”
Former Councilwoman Kathy Patterson, D-Ward 3, worked with Trainum over the years as he quietly bucked his supervisors to try and drag the police department into the modern era.
“District of Columbia residents have a lot to thank Jim Trainum for,” she said.
Trainum spent the last decade-plus of his career buried in old files as the leader of the city’s cold-case unit. It was exceedingly difficult work: There are 4,000 unsolved homicides on the District’s books, and the city has only recently committed to building a DNA lab.
But he’s not walking away. He still volunteers with the cold-case unit once a week.
Trainum started his career as a firefighter in Arlington, but he gave it up because “it wasn’t intellectually stimulating.”
He joined the force in 1983 and became a homicide detective in 1990, just as the District was becoming the nation’s “murder capital.”
The work has been intellectually stimulating, all right — but also emotionally challenging.
“No one’s ever glad to see a cop,” he said. “You never, ever have good news for anybody.”
