Playing cards for inmates may help crack cases

? Prison inmates are getting a present from the state of Florida: playing cards. For detectives looking to solve dozens of cold cases, it’s the start of a game of Go Fish that might pay off big.

On Tuesday, Florida’s nearly 93,000 state inmates started getting one of two decks that between them highlight 104 of the state’s most troubling unsolved murder and missing persons cases.

“What better way to get them talking than to have cards with the cases on them?” said Special Agent Tommy Ray of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. “These are people who have been in there for years. That’s the best source of information. There are a couple of high-profile cases I think we’ll get solved.”

Ray helped launch the statewide program after he and colleagues on a cold case squad in Polk County got the idea to produce a similar deck for county inmates there in 2005.

Soon after the Polk County cards were issued, they generated a tip. Two men have been charged with murder in the 2004 killing of one of the victims on the cards.

Other law enforcement agencies have caught on. Authorities in San Diego, Kansas City, Mo., and Odessa, Texas, are among those who have created their own decks, and Ray said he has gotten inquiries from as far away as Australia.