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Cold Cases: Gone But Not Forgotten, Part 2By Ashley Hinson, Anchor/ReporterHundreds of people go missing or are murdered every year, and while many people are held accountable for crimes, many others go unpunished. KCRG TV-9's Ashley Hinson was granted exclusive access to the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation Laboratories, and takes us inside to show us how investigators are working to make sure murderers end up behind bars.
Piles and piles of evidence but no one to connect to the crime; That's the problem surrounding dozens of cold cases in Iowa.
"There's family members out there who never got any closure because they don't know who is responsible for it, " says Lt. Jim Steffen of the Iowa City Police Department.
Looking back at cold cases takes a lot of backtracking for investigators. TV-9 spoke with Law Enforcement from all around eastern Iowa, and many have cold cases dating back to the 1950's -- or even earlier.
Robert Duncan, an investigator with the Waterloo Police Department says there are a number of tactics used to re-fire a cold case investigation.
"First thing we're going to look at is the possibility of DNA. It's wonderful,” Duncan says
DNA is just one of the ways investigators can tie people to cases of yesteryear. At the DCI, criminalists are generating profiles from anyone convicted of a felony in Iowa and entering them into the national Database, the Combined DNA Index System or CODIS.
It actually takes about 5 hours at the bare minimum to develop a sample to be entered into CODIS using the machine. Additionally, DNA is often times invisible to the naked eye, so criminalists processing the mountains of evidence say it can be a time consuming process.
"There's no magical way to pick which stain is going to match the suspect, so a lot of times I have to do all the stains and see if there's any that match the suspect or that don't match the victim, so you can put it in the database,” says DCI Criminalist Michael Schmit.
The AFIS, or the Automated Fingerprint Identification System can help narrow down a suspect who may have just been entered into the system. But that also goes for identifying victims...even as far back as the 1970's.
Darwin Chapman is a fingerprint analyst at the DCI in Ankeny. He originally took prints from a Jane Doe back in the 1970’s.
"It languished in the file until 2005," Chapman says. But the print was re-run against prints put in the national database. "The prior arrest print, and the print of her thumb, are identical," he says, showing that a match can be made years after a case goes cold.
And in the ballistics department, they enter shells and casings from bullets into the NIBIN. That’s the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network.
"We’re able to take the images from this bullet in the old homicide case and compare it to every bullet that's been entered into the system since then,” says Victor Murillo, a ballistics analyst for the DCI. “We average about 50 to 75 images we enter into the database every month.” In fact, the week our crews were visiting, the lab was working to process evidence from a 1982 murder investigation.
Bullets, Fingerprints, DNA, and the technology that helps process the evidence, are giving investigators hope at putting together pieces of sometimes very old puzzles.
Investigator Duncan says he holds out hope cold cases can be solved, and says while they rarely make arrests, the victim’s families know police are looking into it.
“We’re not going to let it die,” says Duncan. "Once you get that lead and you actually start putting a good case together and you think hey we're actually going to make an arrest here, that's the exciting part of it."
The DCI lab is getting more and more requests for testing of evidence from cold cases. In fact, criminalists say they're finding matches for not only murders and missing persons’ investigations, but also sexual assaults and robberies that otherwise might never be solved.
For more on cases that are cold, but not forgotten, visit IowaColdCases.com
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