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A cold case is a crime, or a suspected crime, that has not yet been fully resolved and is not the subject of a current criminal investigation, but for which new information could emerge from new witness testimony, re-examined archives, new or retained material evidence, or fresh activities of a suspect. New technological methods developed after the crime was committed can be used on the surviving evidence to analyse causes, often with conclusive results.
Characteristics
Violent or major crime
Typically, cold cases are violent and other major felony crimes, such as murder and rape, which—unlike unsolved minor crimes—are generally not subject to a statute of limitations.
Sometimes disappearances can also be considered cold cases if the victim has not been seen or heard from for some time, such as the case of Natalee Holloway or the Beaumont children.
The rate of cold cases being solved are slowly declining, soon less than 30% will be solved per year. About 35% of those cases are not cold cases at all. Some cases become instantly cold when a seeming closed (solved) case is re-opened due to the discovery of new evidence pointing away from the original suspect(s). Other cases are cold when the crime is discovered well after the fact—for example, by the discovery of human remains.[1] Some cases become classified cold cases when a case that had been originally ruled an accident or suicide is re-designated as murder when new evidence emerges.
The John Christie murders is a notable case when Timothy Evans was wrongly executed for the alleged murders of his wife and child. Many other bodies were later found in the house where they lived with Christie, and he was then executed for the crimes. The case helped a campaign against capital punishment in Britain.
Identifying a suspect
A case is considered unsolved until a suspect has been identified, charged, and tried for the crime. A case that goes to trial and does not result in a conviction can also be kept on the books pending new evidence.
In some cases, a suspect, often called a "person of interest" or "subject" is identified early on but no evidence definitively linking the subject to the crime is found at that time and more often than not the subject is not forthcoming with a confession. This often happens in cases where the subject has an alibi, alibi witnesses, or lack of forensic evidence. Eventually, the alibi is disproved, the witnesses recanted their statements or advances in forensics helped bring the subjects to justice.
Sometimes a case is not solved but forensic evidence helps to determine that the crimes are serial crimes. The BTK case and Original Night Stalker (the latter pending trial as of April 24, 2018)[2] cases are such examples. The Texas Rangers have established a website[3] in the hopes that it shall elicit new information and investigative leads.[4]
Tunnel vision
Sometimes, a viable suspect has been overlooked or simply ignored due to then-flimsy circumstantial evidence, the presence of a likelier suspect (who is later proven to be innocent), or a tendency of investigators to zero in on someone else to the exclusion of other possibilities (which goes back to the likelier suspect angle)—known as "tunnel vision".
Improvements in forensics
With the advent of and improvements to DNA testing/DNA profiling and other forensics technology, many cold cases are being re-opened and prosecuted.[5] Police departments are opening cold case units whose job is to re-examine cold case files. DNA evidence helps in such cases but as in the case of fingerprints, it is of no value unless there is evidence on file to compare it to. However, to combat that issue, the FBI is switching from using the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) to using a newer technology called the Next Generation Identification (NGI). Other improvements in forensics lie in fields such as:
- Digital Forensics one application of which is to recover hidden or deleted data.
- Ballistics Analysis which involves the evaluation of ammunition and firearms to determine which weapon might have been used in a crime.
- Forensic Anthropology which analyzes skeletal remains to determine their cause of death or any other relevant information.
- Mobile Forensics and Social Media which, since their creation, have had increased involvement in any police case cold or not.
- Forensic Psychology which can be used to analyze crime scenes and identify suspect profiles.
- Facial Recognition which has been used to identify suspects based on their facial features.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) which is used in all of the above systems to help analyze data and information from crime scenes.
Famous criminal examples
The identity of Jack the Ripper is a notorious example of an outstanding cold case, with numerous suggestions as to the identity of the serial killer. Similarly, the Zodiac Killer has been studied extensively for almost 50 years, with numerous suspects discussed and debated. The perpetrators of the Wall Street bombing of 1920 have never been positively identified, though the Galleanists, a group of Italian anarchists, are widely believed to have planned the explosion. The burning of the Reichstag building in 1933 remains controversial and although Marinus van der Lubbe was tried, convicted and executed for arson, it is possible that the Reichstag fire was perpetrated by the Nazis to enhance their power and destroy democracy in Germany.
Examples of criminal cold cases that ended in conviction
1940s
| Victim(s) | Convicted | Location | Crime date | Conviction date | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Victims of Nazis' Neuengamme Concentration Camp (sub-camp in Meppen, Germany) | Friedrich Karl Berger | Meppen, Germany | January to March 1945 | March 5, 2020 | In a deportation case tried in 2020 in U.S. Immigration Court in Memphis, Tennessee, US (therefore not strictly a criminal prosecution), Friedrich Karl Berger was adjudged complicit in Nazi crimes of persecution committed while serving as an armed guard for the SS in Meppen, Germany, at a sub-camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp during World War II. This decision, reported in a March 5, 2020, United States Department of Justice press release,[7][8] is likely the oldest criminal conduct (75 years) ever proved against a defendant in court by prosecutors in the United States. The judge ordered Berger deported to his native Germany, as his appeal was dismissed in November 2020.[9] However, Berger who was a member of the Kriegsmarine, and later worked in building wire-stripping machines,[10] was deported in February 2021.[11] |
1950s
| Victim(s) | Convicted | Location | Crime date | Conviction date | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Harold Blauer | The Central Intelligence Agency | New York City, New York, US | January 8, 1953 | 1987 | Retired tennis player who was unwittingly injected with 3,4-Methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA) after checking himself in to the New York Psychiatric Institute for depression. The experiment was part of the CIA's secret mind-control program, MKULTRA, and Blauer's medical records were altered to hide the real cause of his death. MKULTRA was revealed to the public in 1975, and Blauer's estate was awarded $700,000 in damages in 1987. |
| Frank Olson | November 28, 1953 | 1976 | A CIA bacteriologist and biological warfare expert who was unwittingly dosed with LSD by his supervisor. Nine days later, Olson had a nervous breakdown and jumped from his 13th-story room at Hotel Pennsylvania. Olson's family agreed to withdraw a wrongful death lawsuit against the agency in exchange for an out-of-court settlement of $750,000 and apologies from President Gerald Ford and CIA director William Colby. Olson's children ordered a new autopsy in 1994 and tried to reopen the case as murder in 1996 and 2012, but both requests were denied because of the previous deal. | ||
| Richard Phillips, Milton Curtis | Gerald Mason | El Segundo, California, US | 1957 | 2003 | Two police officers were shot when they pulled over a car for running a red light. Mason was arrested 45 years later after a computerized fingerprint database identified him as the purchaser of the murder weapon. At the time, he had just raped a 15-year-old girl at gunpoint at a local lovers' lane, and he killed the officers to avoid prosecution for the crime. Mason's back still bore the scar left by a bullet fired by the officers as he fled. |
1960s
| Victim(s) | Convicted | Location | Crime date | Conviction date | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Irene Garza | John Feit | McAllen, Texas, US | April 16, 1960 | December 8, 2017 | A 26-year-old beauty queen who disappeared when she went to church for confession and was later found raped and murdered in a canal. Feit, a 27-year-old priest at the church who later pled no contest to raping a parishioner, and left the priesthood in the 1970s, was a suspect since the beginning, but little investigation was made due to the opposition of long-time district attorney Rene Guerra (1980–2014). |
| John Orner | Edward Freiburger | Columbia, South Carolina, US | February 1961 | 2002 | A 60-year-old cab driver who was robbed and murdered on the job with a .32 H&R pistol. Freiburger, then 19 and a soldier stationed at nearby Fort Jackson, became a suspect when it was discovered that he purchased the same weapon at a local pawnshop only hours before Orner received his last dispatch call, after which he went AWOL. Freiburger was stopped by Tennessee State Police a month later and found with the gun in his possession, but ballistics tests were inconclusive and he was never charged. In 2002, a private firearms examiner working for the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division cleaned up the slugs and matched the bullets to the gun.[12] |
| Malika Maria de Fernandez | Peter Reyn-Bardt | Wilmslow, England, UK | June 1961 | December 1983 | Reyn-Bardt, De Fernandez's estranged husband, made a detailed confession about how he had murdered, dismembered and disposed of her body in the bog behind his home after peat cutters found human remains there, 22 years later. Although these remains were later determined to be thousands of years old from Carbon 14 testing, Reyn-Bardt's confession was considered enough evidence to convict him of the murder of his wife, whose body was never found. |
| Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Carol Denise McNair (plus 22 injured) | Robert Edward Chambliss | Birmingham, Alabama, US | 1963 | 1977 | Victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Although the FBI had identified Chambliss, Blanton, Cherry and a fourth Klansman, Herman Frank Cash, as the perpetrators already in 1965, no arrests were made for political reasons, and the case was shelved in 1968. Cash died in 1994 without being prosecuted. |
| Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. | 2001 | ||||
| Bobby Frank Cherry | 2002 | ||||
| James Keuler | Samuel Evans | Seattle, Washington, US | June 1968 | 2011 | Evans, already incarcerated for other crimes, entered an Alford plea after DNA linked him to Keuler's crime scene.[13] Oldest case ever solved using DNA evidence.[14] |
1970s
| Victim(s) | Convicted | Location | Crime date | Conviction date | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Helen Betty Osborne | Dwayne Archie Johnston | The Pas, Manitoba, Canada | November 13, 1971 | December 1987 | A Cree Aboriginal woman abducted while she was walking home at 2:30 pm and subsequently beaten, raped and stabbed over 50 times. Although four Caucasian men were implicated in the murder, only Johnston was convicted for it after 16 years, and the case was officially closed on February 12, 1999. The government of Manitoba officially apologized for its poor handling of the case on July 14, 2000. |
| Jackson and Daisy Schley | Samuel Evans | Seattle, Washington, US | January 9, 1972 | 2011 | A couple attacked during a home invasion. Jackson was murdered and Daisy was abducted and raped. Evans entered another Alford Plea for the murder after his DNA was matched to semen recovered from Daisy's clothing. Daisy died of unrelated causes in 2007, before Evans was identified.[13] |
| Steven Stayner | Kenneth Parnell | Merced, California, US | December 4, 1972 | 1981 | A seven-year-old boy kidnapped and held in captivity for eight years by Parnell, a pedophile. After Stayner hit puberty, Parnell lost interest in him and kidnapped five-year-old Timmy White from Ukiah, California as his replacement. However, Stayner and White escaped on March 1, 1980, while Parnell was at work, leading to his identification and arrest. |
| Joseph, Julie, Joseph Jr. and Josephine Otero | Dennis Rader | Wichita, Kansas, US | January 15, 1974 | August 18, 2005 | A family victim of "BTK", a serial killer who would invade homes and kill women after stalking them for long periods; other members became unintended victims when they returned home earlier than expected. BTK would later write taunting letters to the media and police about his crimes. Rader's arrest was made possible by metadata found in a floppy disk he sent to police and a partial DNA match to his daughter. Neither technology existed at the time he committed the murders. |
| Kathryn Bright | April 4, 1974 | ||||
| Lizbeth Wilson | John Henry Horton | Prairie Village, Kansas, US | July 1974 | 2003 | A 13-year-old girl last seen running across the field of Shawnee Mission East High School by her brother, who was racing ahead of her. Her remains were found in an empty field six months later. Horton became a suspect because he was the only adult working on the school grounds at the time, and the investigation revealed that he had taken a suspicious break and also tried previously to lure other girls into the school. A duffel bag and a bottle of chloroform was found in his car, which Horton claimed using to "get high", but this was deemed circumstantial. In 2002, investigators interviewed an overlooked 15-year-old girl at the time of the murder who had been given chloroform by Horton and was sexually molested while she was unconscious. However, the Kansas Supreme Court overturned Horton's conviction in 2005 on the basis that the "prior bad act" had not been placed on the public record and the testimony should not have been allowed. A leave to re-try and re-file the case was granted, and this time the same evidence and the testimony of two fellow inmates was enough to declare him guilty.[15] |
| Katherine and Sheila Lyon | Lloyd Lee Welch | Washington, D.C., US | March 25, 1975 | September 12, 2017 | Two sisters aged 10 and 12 who disappeared during a trip to a shopping mall. For decades, the police centered their efforts in locating a 50 to 60 years old man who was seen playing a tape recorder with children in different malls. However, in 2013 the attention shifted to Welch, by then a convicted and incarcerated child molester. Welch, who was 18 in 1975, strongly resembled another man seen stalking the girls by one of their friends, and it was found that in 1975 Welch himself went to the police, claiming that he had seen the older man abducting the girls. After a cousin of Welch confessed to helping him burning two suspicious duffel bags in his property of Thaxton, Virginia in 1975, the police searched the place and found items that had belonged to the girls. While no trace of their bodies was found, Welch pleaded guilty to both counts of abduction and murder. |
| Myrna Opsahl | Emily and William Harris, Kathleen Ann Soliah, Michael Bortin | Carmichael, California, US | April 21, 1975 | November 7, 2002 | A 42-year-old customer killed during the robbery of the Crocker National Bank by the Symbionese Liberation Army. The case was revived only in 1999, after Soliah (indicted for the attempted bombing of two LAPD patrol cars in August 1975) was arrested in Minnesota, thanks to a tip from a neighbor who had watched her case featured in America's Most Wanted. |
| James Kilgore | 2003 | Arrested on November 8, 2002, in South Africa, where he was living under an alias, and extradited to the United States. He was the last SLA member to be apprehended and convicted. | |||
| Martha Moxley | Michael Skakel | Greenwich, Connecticut, US | October 30, 1975 | 2002 | A 15-year-old girl last seen talking to Skakel's brother, Thomas, at a party, and who was bludgeoned and stabbed with a golf club that was traced back to the Skakel home. Over the years, suspicions switched from Thomas to Michael, who was an alcoholic and peeping tom at the time of the murder (when he was also 15) and who was said to have bragged about getting away with murder due to his family's connection to the Kennedys. Skakel was convicted of the murder in 2002, and again on retrial, in 2016. |
| Carol Hutto | James B. Kuenn | Largo, Florida, US | December 1976 | February 10, 2000 | A 16-year-old girl whose body was found in a lake near an abandoned house. She was last seen alive the night before when she received a call. Suspicion fell on her 17-year-old half-brother Jerry Irwin, a known juvenile delinquent who had stayed out all night and whose route home took him past the house and lake.[16] However, the real murderer was Hutto's boyfriend, James B. Kuenn, who later joined the US Navy and served in a submarine. In 1998, Kuenn confessed to NCIS agents that he had killed Hutto and disposed of her body after she refused to have sex with him.[17] Kuenn's confession was confirmed by DNA. |
| Shirley Vian | Dennis Rader | Wichita, Kansas, US | March 17, 1977 | August 18, 2005 | See above. |
| Nancy Fox | December 8, 1977 | ||||
| Deana Lynne Bowdoin | Clarence Wayne Dixon | Tempe, Arizona, US | January 7, 1978 | January 24, 2008 | A 21-year-old woman who was strangled and stabbed to death in her apartment. In 2001, DNA profiling linked Dixon to the crime, a former neighbor of Bowdoin's, who was serving a life sentence for a 1986 sexual-assault conviction. Dixon was formally sentenced to death for the murder in January 2008 and was executed in May 2022.[18][19] |
| Melvin "Ricky" Pittman, Ernest Taylor, Alvin Turner, Randy Johnson, Michael McDowell | Philander Hampton | Newark, New Jersey, US | August 20, 1978 | August 2011 | Five African-American teenagers who disappeared at once from Newark's Clinton Avenue. In 2008, while being interrogated for an unrelated case, Hampton confessed to having helped his cousin, local contractor Lee Anthony Evans, in luring the victims to an empty house with the promise of work, then locking them in a room and setting the house ablaze. Hampton led investigators to the place of the fire but no human remains were found. In spite of this, Hampton pleaded guilty and was convicted of five counts of murder, while Evans, who claimed innocence, was acquitted. |
| Etan Patz | Pedro Hernandez | New York City, New York, US | May 25, 1979 | April 18, 2017 | A 6-year-old boy who disappeared on his way to a school stop; his disappearance helped launch the missing child movement and he was the first child with a photo on a milk carton. For decades, suspicion was cast on a convicted child molester, Jose Antonio Ramos. However, Hernandez's brother-in-law identified him as the real perpetrator in 2012, claiming that he had confessed publicly at his church in the 1980s and that his guilt was an open secret in his family. Hernandez confessed again after his arrest, but doubts about his mental health delayed a guilty verdict until 2017. |
| Floralba Sánchez | Pedro López | El Espinal, Tolima, Colombia | 1979 | 1995 | The only identified victim of López, one of the most prolific serial killers of all time, in his native Colombia. López was tried after he completed his controversial 16-year-long sentence in Ecuador and was deported to his home country.[20] |
1980s
| Victim(s) | Convicted | Location | Crime date | Conviction date | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roger Wheeler | Johnny Martorano, Steve Flemmi | Tulsa, Oklahoma, US | May 27, 1981 | 2001 | The owner of World Jai Alai, murdered in his car by members of the Winter Hill Gang after he discovered that they were stealing funds from his corporation. Whitey Bulger (a fugitive since 1999) and H. Paul Rico, who died before trial, were also indicted. |
| Green River Killer victims | Gary Ridgway | Near Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, US | July 8, 1982 – March 5, 1990 | December 18, 2003 | 48 prostitutes and runaways raped and strangled after being picked up along Pacific Highway South. Ridgway was identified in 2001 after a DNA test was made on samples collected from him already in 1987. Ridgway also killed a 49th woman in 1998, 38-year-old Patricia Yellowrobe. |
| Kalinka Bamberski | Dieter Krombach | Lindau, Bavaria, Germany | July 9, 1982 | October 22, 2011 | A French 14-year-old girl who died in the home of her German doctor stepfather (Krombach) after being injected with a cobalt-iron solution. Because German authorities declined to prosecute Krombach in spite of his testimony being inconsistent about the purpose of the injection and with the autopsy report, Bamberski's biological father, André, lobbied for Krombach to be prosecuted in France. Krombach was tried in absentia in 1995 and found guilty, but the verdict was annulled by the European Court of Human Rights in 2001. In 2009, Bamberski had Krombach abducted from his home and delivered to a French police station in Alsace, where he was arrested. Krombach was tried again and sentenced to 15 years in prison, while Bamberski received a one-year suspended sentence for his abduction in 2014. Since 1997, several German women have come forward claiming that Krombach drugged and raped them as teenagers. |
| Dos Erres massacre | Manuel Pop, Reyes Collin Gualip, Daniel Martínez Hernández, Carlos Carías | La Libertad, El Petén, Guatemala
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