Reward Offers: Long Odds and Few Winners

For four weeks, the tip hot line has been ringing, on average, once every 55 seconds with possible clues in the Oklahoma City bombing. Since federal officials posted a $2-million reward in the case, more than 40,000 calls have been logged on their toll-free line.

And even though FBI representatives aren’t revealing much about how useful the information has been, don’t expect miracles. Reward offers in criminal cases are like a law-enforcement version of the lottery: long odds and few winners.

Occasionally, the jackpots even backfire.

Still, most experts seem to think they’re worthwhile.

“If it doesn’t work, you’re no worse off than when you started,” says Gilbert Geis, a UC Irvine professor emeritus of criminology and law. “And if it does help--even if it’s only one case out of a thousand--then it’s a useful tactic.”

Rewards are a time-honored tradition in America. In the Old West, “dead or alive” posters promised cash payouts for the capture of train robbers and cattle thieves. And before municipal police departments began forming in the mid-1800s, most crimes were probed by bounty hunters or private detectives bankrolled by wealthy victims or their kin, says James Farris, a criminal justice professor at Cal State Fullerton.

Today, rewards are anted up in matters small and great, from graffiti vandalism and tax cheating to the O.J. Simpson case, in which defense lawyers and a supermarket tabloid dangled a combined $1.5 million for information exonerating the former football star.

Other noteworthy bounties include the $1 million (never paid) that President George Bush laid out for Manuel Noriega’s capture in 1989, the multimillion-dollar contract on author Salman Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini, and the $13.5 million on the head of drug lord Pablo Escobar before he was gunned down by Colombian authorities. Not to mention the 30 pieces of silver paid to Judas Iscariot for handing over Jesus.

The State Department has a program that offers as much as $2 million (and possible residency in the United States) to informants who snitch on terrorists involved in hijackings, bombings or other attacks on Americans abroad. The department posts its modern-day “Wanted” posters on matchbook covers and newspapers around the world, according to the Associated Press.

In some instances, however, hefty rewards are viewed as more hindrance than help. When actress Winona Ryder offered to put up a $1-million reward after 12-year-old Polly Klaas was kidnaped in 1993, Petaluma police rejected the idea, fearing such a high sum would “spark a lottery-like frenzy” and swamp police lines with useless calls, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Instead, Ryder pledged $200,000 for information leading to Klaas’ safe return.

“I don’t like big rewards,” says Greg MacAleese, a former Albuquerque, N.M., detective who founded Crime Stoppers, an international network of tipster hot lines that pay up to $1,000 for information that helps crack unsolved cases.

High rewards, he says, can attract “bounty-hunter types,” whose efforts sometimes interfere with police investigations, or mercenary types who “will say whatever [prosecutors] want them to [if the case goes to trial]. . . . It’s much easier for defense attorneys to impeach the credibility of informants [who receive large rewards].”

Big-buck offers also create logistic headaches.

“It takes 10 to 20 minutes to process a call,” MacAleese says. In a case like the Oklahoma bombing, that means an army of agents tied up answering the phones. And another army out in the field, checking into the seemingly credible leads. An unidentified federal official told the Associated Press two weeks ago that nearly 15,000 substantive tips had been written up and shipped to FBI offices across the country for further investigation.

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How often do such leads pay off?

Hardly ever. Rewards make headlines and provide strong motivation to help police, experts say, but they seldom solve mysteries, especially the whodunits where cash incentives are often the last resort.

“Rarely will they offer a reward unless they can’t solve it any other way,” says UCI’s Geis, who has written several articles about the use of rewards in criminal cases. “The reward is generally a function of frustration, so the odds are [police] aren’t going to solve it anyway.”

But the bounties can serve other purposes, such as symbolizing community outrage over a crime or easing a surviving family’s sense of grief and powerlessness.

In some instances, rewards are even offered by the bad guys themselves, to create an appearance of innocence. MacAleese recalls a case in Alaska in which a $25,000 reward was established by a murdered couple’s children, who were later convicted of masterminding the crime.

There can be other problems, as well.

Rewards offered by private parties often don’t get paid. “In the flush of excitement after a crime,” says MacAleese, co-workers and relatives of the victim will often pledge cash for the arrest and conviction of the guilty party. But once the suspect is captured, “all of a sudden, that money is nowhere to be found. The funds were never raised, or never put into escrow.”

Even when the money is there, it usually goes unclaimed. In 1993, a Sacramento Bee investigation of We Tip, a national anonymous crime-tip hot line, found that the organization raised $1.2 million in 1992, but paid only $16,000 in rewards.

Likewise, a recent Times examination of reward funds set up by Los Angeles city and county governments noted that about 80% of the cash offers expired with the cases still unsolved.

The main problem, police say, is that sources who have the best information on a crime--usually relatives or close friends of the criminals--often fear retaliation.

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But there are success stories.

* The IRS has paid more than $21 million for tips that have led to the recovery of more than$1 billion in taxes since 1967.

* L.A.’s anti-graffiti fund has shelled out more than $85,000 to tipsters who turn in spray-paint vandals.

* And 19 people shared a bounty of Rams tickets, cash and toys after Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker serial killer, was convicted in 1989.

In a number of cases, however, tipsters decline such payments.

An Arizona couple whose call led police to the body of Orange County resident Denise Huber, missing since 1991, turned down a $10,000 reward from her family, authorities say.

And an FBI spokesman in Ventura County says the agency receives dozens of tips daily on bank robberies but only 5% of the people ask about a reward.

Finally, there is the case of Gerald Lydell Voyles, a murder suspect in Bartow, Fla., who turned himself in and tried to collect a $3,000 reward for his own capture.

“We believe he was serious about the reward,” says Sheriff Lawrence W. Crow Jr. “He will not be eligible.”

* This article was supplemented from Times library files and wire services.