Fort Myers firm aids police with unsolved crime playing cards

A Fort Myers marketing and public relations firm has had a big — but mostly behind the scenes — role in helping law enforcement agencies solve open investigations.  

That effort got some statewide attention last month, when Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody announced her office is partnering with the Florida Association of Crime Stoppers, Florida Sheriffs Association and Florida Department of Corrections to distribute 5,000 packs of playing cards to prisons and jails with the goal of hopefully generating new leads on some cases. 

The company, Fort Myers-based Priority Marketing Group, has been designing the cards since 2008. For Priority Marketing founder Teri Hansen, with an enthusiast-level interest in true crime, the project has been a passion as well. 

The cold case playing cards are a standard deck of four-suite playing cards distributed to inmates in prisons nationwide. Each playing card contains information of cold cases from the jurisdiction on the face and the name and logo of the agency on the reverse. 

The cards, officials say, really work. 

Last year a 2019 homicide case in Kansas received a tip that led to the arrest of a woman in South Carolina. And Moody, in a statement after the Tampa event, says she's "seen so many stalled investigations get new life after someone came forward with groundbreaking information. Sometimes that new information comes from criminals or co-conspirators, who have a change of conscience or maybe they are motivated by a reward."

"We are giving Cold Case Cards to inmates, but we are not playing games," Moody adds. "This low-tech approach to generating tips may prove to be an ace up the sleeve as we continue to bring finality to seemingly unbreakable cases.”