Cold Case
While traditional homicide rates in the United States are declining, the rate of stranger homicide is on the rise.
Each year hundreds of human skeletal remains are found around the country. Each day cases involving stranger homicide go cold. With advances in forensic science and better trained investigators, these cold cases are solvable.
This site will focus on forensics, criminal profiling and cold cases. Namely how the above mentioned investigative areas can solve previously unsolvable crimes.
When the US general homicide rate finally begin to fall in the mid 1990's, there was no accompanying collapse in multiple murder rates.
Gregg Mccry former FBI profiler says(about cold case investigation) you prioritize by solvability factors such as having a suspect or available witness or a relationship that was intact at the time that has since broken up. In some cases, new technologies can move a case up the solvability scale. Or you may try something that wasn't utilized in the original investigation.
Top priority cases have well-developed suspects and evidence that has been preserved and on which new technology can be used such as biological evidence that can be tested with new technologies or fingerprints that can be entered into data bases that now have more prints than they has before. Cases with many unknowns or which may have high expenses with little pay off are relegated to the lowest priority.
Cold case detectives are most interested in witnesses who were previously uncooperative or unknown. Some may have once felt intimidated by threats that are no longer in place or may have left relationships and now feel bitter toward the person they once protected. They may have overheard a killer boast about his crime when his own inhibitions relaxed or they may have heard something new since the last time they were questioned.
Death Investigation
One aspect of death investigation involves evaluation the cause, mechanism and manner of death. A cause of death is whatever made death occur such as strangulation, and the mechanism is what happens physiologically (oxygen deprivation). The manner of death according to the NASN classification places it on one of four categories: Natural, accidental, suicide, homicide. If it cannot be classified, then its manner is considered undetermined.
It is estimated that s some 15-20% of deaths around the country occur in a manner that is undetermined.
Time Since Death Postmortem Interval(PMI)
PMI estimations have been based on a variety of changes following death, because these changes were observed to proceed in a predictable order.
In the late 1700's French Physician Pierre Nysten recorded the changes in rigor mortis from flaccid to stiff to flaccid provided Nysten's law to the effect that the process begins in the face and neck and moves downward through the body. Even decapitation did not seem to change this.
Inside Cold Case Investigations ABC NEWS
Cold Cases Bexar County Sheriff's Office, Texas
Alachua Country Sheriff's Office
Department of Operations--Cold Case Information is about half way down the page
Using DNA to solve Cold Cases--PDF
Crime Spider-Cold Cases
Western District Major Crime Squad--Cold Cases-Connecticut State Police
Source Information---The Science of Cold Case Files by
Katherine Ramsland. 2004 Berkley Publishing Group.
