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Michael
Connelly in Lost Light and The Narrows; J.A. Jance in Long
Time Gone; Linda Fairstein in Entombed; Jonathan Kellerman in
Obsession, Harlan Coben in One False Move; Kathy Reichs in
Bones to Ashes come to mind. Each is terrific.
Readers recognize a cold case plot whatever it's called: the crime was
committed not today or yesterday, but a year or perhaps many years ago; the
case wasn't solved at the time, and investigators must go back into the past
to pick through old evidence to assess the history and completeness of the
early investigation, and to discover the truth.
How did cold cases become a hot topic? To mystery
readers, the concept must have seemed to spring out of nowhere, but it grew
out of the changing type of homicides in the U.S. In the past, most
murderers and their victims knew each other, but by the 1990s, many murders
were committed by strangers. The determination of motive, of major
importance in earlier crime detection, was useless in this kind of killing.
Then, too, murders today often take place outside the home, once the typical
crime scene. Today the crime is more likely to occur in an empty parking lot
or a deserted alley or some other public and probably filthy space, where
clues are hard to discern. Perhaps most important, most contemporary crimes
are drug-related and are difficult to solve partly because of the lack of
credible witnesses. This combination of factors has led to more and more
cases going "cold," and remaining unsolved.
The first Cold Case Squad (called "Pending Case Squad")
was established in Miami in 1979, was shut down, and reestablished in 1983;
and in 1984 formally became the Cold Case Squad. That same year, the
Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter Edna Buchanan wrote an article about
the CCS for the Miami Herald; she later told an interviewer that she
was struck by what a fabulous book and television series the subject would
make. She eventually produced the book, Cold Case Squad, but her
proposed television series, while optioned, was never produced. When the
first Cold Case television show aired in the U.S. on CBS in 2003, it was set
in Philadelphia, and based on thinly disguised true crimes. The pilot was
inspired by the notorious Greenwich, CT Martha Moxley murder case of 1975.
U.S. television producers were slow to realize how
fascinating cold case investigation could be. By the time the CBS series
appeared, Cold Squad had aired in Canada in 1998, and Waking the
Dead in England in 2000, and real Cold Case Squads were springing up all
over the United States. The realization that nationally more than a third of
murder cases "go cold" spurred local governments to establish teams to solve
old cases, especially murders.
The results are clear. The Washington, D.C. Cold Case
Squad was formed when, at the end of 1991, only 54 percent of the homicides
committed that year in Washington had been solved, versus 91 percent solved
in 1965. All cases investigated by the Washington CCS are at least a year
old, and since its establishment, the group has closed many unsolved cases.
Eight years after the 1996 establishment of New York Cold Case Squad, they'd
cleared 629 cases of the 2,136 investigated.
Mystery readers know how Harry Bosch and Myron Bolitar
and other fictional investigators work, but exactly how do real life
detectives solve stale and stubborn cases? Most of their approaches are
routine, like running down those known to have been involved in a crime, or
witnesses to it, who couldn't be located during the first investigation.
Stacy Horn in The Restless Sleep, Inside New York City's Cold Case Squad,
quoted a police officer who told her that a detective "would go out with
five or six or ten or twelve different Cold Cases. He'd come back after a
weekend, only a weekend mind you, with nine or ten of these cases put to
rest. He'd find five or six of these people already in jail on other
charges, he'd hunt the other people down and find them in their homes, at
their workplaces…" (Sounds simple, doesn't it? Contrast that account with
the adventures of Stephanie Plum, Janet Evanovich's hilarious bounty hunter,
chasing after "Cold Case" bondees who have failed to appear).
According to the experts, the solution of most cold
cases comes from eye-witnesses. A witness in a cold case might come forward
because enough time has passed so that he or she is no longer afraid of
retaliation. Occasionally that witness could have been a terrified child,
now grown, and no longer living in fear of a threatening adult.
Cold cases require a lot of slogging. Detectives go
through stacks of ancient paper files to check for loose ends,
inconsistencies, phone calls not made, pieces that don't fit. They canvas
crime scene neighborhoods where most of the people they're looking for have
moved or forgotten anything they saw or heard years earlier. They interview
and reinterview surviving suspects and witnesses, and follow up tips, most
of which lead nowhere. They tackle the crime they're investigating the way
any researcher does ?with tedious and detailed digging through records, and
talking to anyone who may have useful information.
But that kind of detection usually doesn't make
an interesting novel plot. In fiction, authors use the latest techniques,
and employ tools that real life detectives might not use-hypnosis, for
example, to bring back memories, as in Jance's Long Time Gone. Lie
detection tests are used far more often in fiction than in reality, and
psychological profiles of the victims, as used in Stephen White's Cold
Case, are rare. Most surprising, while detectives in mystery novels
might comment that television-watching crooks know better than to leave
fingerprints, and every fictional detective seems to use DNA analysis,
knowledgeable sources claim that for every one crime solved with DNA, 26
cases are solved with fingerprints. The experience of the New York Cold Case
Squad bears this out: DNA was used in less than 2% of the cases they cleared
in their first eight years of operation.
The Automated Finger Identification System is used by both fictional and
real detectives, and computers and data bases have made researches more
efficient. Ballistics and blood work are important to both, and both use
cadaver dogs when necessary. Perseverance and the determination to solve the
crime are paramount whether in fiction or fact, whether the crime was
committed yesterday, or 50 years ago. Meanwhile, more and more fictional
cold case investigations turn up in novels, and they are almost always
interesting to read.
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