Defrosting Cold Cases

While renovating a home at 3156 Oahu Avenue, Manoa, Hawaii, construction workers came across human remains buried in dirt under a concrete slab. Renovation can indeed lead to surprises! This is the same way that ultimately Elizabeth Heath was found. Police told Hawaii News Now that the remains belonged to a man who had been shot in the head [...]

Tags: Autopsy, Ballistics, Crime Scene, Cruelty, Evidence, Forensics, Gun Fire, Hawaii, Identification, Investigations Division, Missing Person, Police, Unsolved Homicide, Victim

Today, detectives in the Saginaw Police Department’s Cold Case Unit packed up their things. The news they hoped would not come had arrived. Their federal grant funding will not be renewed. “It’s not that I’m losing my job. The hard part is that we didn’t get to fulfill what we wanted to,” says Det. Roy Walton, who [...]

Tags: Michigan, Unsolved Homicide, Victim

She was found eight years ago behind a strip mall in Tempe, Arizona. I call her “Tempe’s Jane Doe.”  She was between 15 and 19, of Latino, Native American or biracial descent, with straight dark hair and brown eyes. She had a scar on the top of her left shoulder and a small, “L-shaped” scar on [...]

Tags: Autopsy, DNA, Forensics, Identification, Partial Finger Printing, Police, Unidentified, Victim

Vidocq receives more and more requests from people to take a look into a case. The emails are all from heartbroken people who have lost a family member to homicide or whose family member disappeared into thin air. All these emails are touching and I thank all the writers for contacting me. The emails tell [...]

Tags: DCC

The Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI) Cold Case Unit, in partnership with Colorado.gov, announced the launch of an online Cold Case Database that citizens may access via the official state Web site at www.colorado.gov/coldcase. This is the first time the public will have online access to this data, which was previously managed in paper and computer [...]

Tags: Autopsy, Ballistics, Colorado, Crime Scene, DNA, DNA Database, Evidence, Finger Printing, Forensics, Investigations Division, Missing Person, Police, Unsolved Homicide, Victim, Witnesses

In 2002, a woman of West African origin was arrested in Glasgow in connection with the murder of a young boy whose torso was found in the Thames in London. The child’s torso, clad only in a pair of orange shorts, was spotted floating in the Thames near Tower Bridge on 21 September, 2001. It had [...]

Tags: Autopsy, Crime Labs, Cruelty, Evidence, Forensics, London, Police, Ritual Killings, Torso, UK, Unidentified

NamUS, a new online database, promises to crack some of the nation’s 100,000 missing persons cases and provide answers to desperate families, but only a fraction of law enforcement agencies are using it. The clearinghouse, dubbed NamUs (Name Us), offers a quick way to check whether a missing loved one might be among the 40,000 sets [...]

Tags: Dental Records, DNA, Finger Printing, Investigations Division, Law Enforcement Agencies, medical examiners, Missing Persons, NAMUS, Unidentified

The Washington Monthly has an excellent article by Michael Bobelian about issues related to DNA that are unknown to many and kept under wraps by few. However, the few do it very well. This article is about the statistical chance that a DNA match is found when running a sample in a cold case through DNA [...]

Tags: Actual Innocence, Autopsy, Capital Punishment, Crime Labs, Crime Scene, DNA, DNA Database, Evidence, Expert Testimony, FBI, Forensics, Miscarriage of Justice, Police, Prisons, Rape kits, Unsolved Homicide, Victim, Witnesses, Wrongful Convictions

Police have released photos of four pieces of jewelry that may help detectives identify the skulls of a man and a woman found in a burned-out mountain ravine of the Angeles National Forest. The pictures show three rings, one with small ruby stones, one with emerald-green stones, and one with black stones, each with interlocking white [...]

Tags: California, Unidentified