Cold Cases

A cold case by definition is any murder, missing person, or suspicious death that is not actively investigated by the original assigned investigators. Typically, cold case murders normally fall into three categories:

Unsolved: No known suspects.

Unresolved: Suspect(s) known or suspected but never successfully prosecuted.

Unidentified: Victim identity unknown (Jane or John Doe).

In Las Vegas, Nevada, cold case files currently number over 450 unresolved cases, the oldest being from 1952.

In Orange County, Florida, 280 murders are unresolved.

In September 2007, the UK Home Office announced that four thousand unsolved sex offence cases are to be reviewed as part of a £1 million cold case project.

In March 2009, a new technique which can decipher previously unintelligible DNA samples was made available to all police forces in England and Wales.

In recent years, new technologies, especially DNA evidence, have helped solve many outstanding cases. It is essential, however, that investigators working on these cold cases can quickly become familiar with investigative work already undertaken. Sadly, in many instances there is a very laborious task of reading documentation, and this can take many investigators many months.

Investigator is a powerful tool to assist with cold case investigation. Entities such as people, places, organizations, vehicles, transactions, phone calls, photographs, etc., associated with the cold case can be stored in Investigator, so that investigators can more easily understand the complex relationships of the case.

Investigation activities undertaken can be viewed in chronological order in Investigator. Threading of activities can help investigators quickly understand why certain activities were undertaken. Easy to use visualization will show relationships between entities, and often provide clues for further investigation work.

Even searching is easier with Investigator - there is a thesaurus search capability which enables investigators to search through massive volumes of documentation using multiple terms. For example, there are possibly hundreds of names for marijuana - in Investigator it is easy to build a thesaurus of these names, and run a single search across the entire database looking for all of them.

Cold cases need to be resolved - Investigator can help.