What Is a Cold Case? Characteristics of Cold Cases

A cold case is a crime investigators have not legally resolved. Solving crimes requires clear witnesses, suspects, and evidence; without these factors, cases can become cold. These cases can baffle police departments and thwart law enforcement agencies like the FBI. Investigations that go on for more than a year without resolution can have a disastrous effect on the family members of a victim in an unsolved murder, sexual assault, or missing persons case.

Criminal investigations involving homicide, and sexual assault in certain states, are not subject to a statute of limitations and can take as long as necessary. Cold case squads will seek new evidence (human remains, fingerprints, crime scene eyewitnesses, camera footage) to reopen case files. Cold case units also rely on forensic science to better understand older cases and original investigations.

Cold cases are difficult to crack because they inherently involve some element of mystery and the passage of time.

• Mystery: Cold cases might include violent crimes, where someone ensures evidence is hard to find, or serial killers who change their location and become a threat to public safety. Unidentified people, who may not have IDs or other easy ways to distinguish them, might also be cold-case perpetrators.
• Time: Long periods between new evidence are also characteristic of cold cases. This is especially true of crimes committed years and decades ago that did not have the benefit of advanced technology to more easily identify a sex offender or locate an original suspect. In unsolved homicides and other crimes, victims’ families may request case reviews to check on investigative progress, and the reality is some cold cases are never solved.

Because of systemic inequities, cold cases about the disappearance and murder of white people, particularly white women, receive greater attention and news coverage than crimes against people of color.

Detectives can solve cold cases through investigation, sound testimony, and helpful evidence. Consider these examples of unresolved cold cases and solved ones:

1. 1. The disappearance of Shaun Ritchie: Ritchie disappeared in 2014 at age twenty, and witnesses last saw Ritchie in the Strichen area of Aberdeenshire, Scotland. His family believes someone murdered him over a debt, but the case remains unsolved.
2. 2. The kidnapping of Tanya Nicole Kach: Eighth-grade student Tanya Nicole Kach went missing for ten years after a school security guard kidnapped her. The guard held her in his second-story bedroom, and she escaped after ten years. The guard, Thomas Hose, then pleaded guilty in 2007.
3. 3. The murder of Morgan Harrington: Harrington, a twenty-year-old college student at Virginia Tech, disappeared at a Metallica concert in 2009. Police found her murdered six months later. Years later, forensic evidence and CCTV footage identified the culprit as Jesse L. Matthew, Jr., who also murdered University of Virginia student Hannah Graham, in 2014. Matthew pleaded guilty in 2016, closing the case.

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