Actually, the odds are pretty good that something will come out of the blue and help solve a crime. It's just that it usually takes a good deal of time for something to come out of the blue. It is usually something very simple. You just have to react to it.
The Watergate break-in was detected by a security guard seeing that a door had tape horizontally placed over a lock rather than vertically placed. Despite the door being closed, the tape was visible when he made his nightly rounds. An awful lot followed.
Joel Rivkin, a serial killer of Long Island prostitutes, was stopped by the police when it was noticed that his landscaping truck had no rear license plate. The dead body in the truck under a pile of grass clippings was hard to explain.
The Son of Sam serial killer was brought down in 1977 when a parking ticket was traced to his car near what turned out to be his last shooting. It was wondered why a car registered in Westchester was illegally parked on Shore Road in Brooklyn on a Saturday night. David Berkowitz is still in jail.
And so it goes. The researcher looking for the Mississippi book specifically came to the Swedish library from somewhere else in Europe to look at the book, an exceedingly rare edition. When the library couldn't produce it, the researcher was told to come back in six months. The detailed inventory that followed lead the librarian to confess to dealing in stolen books over many years. He committed suicide soon after.
All things and all people that are searched for are not always found. I'm still missing some socks.
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