Dashed hopes and big breaks: What it’s like to work on cold cases

Thomas Elfmont, a retired Los Angeles police officer, was living in Bozeman, Montana, when the local sheriff invited him to lunch. Over Mexican food, the sheriff described the murder of a 15-year-old girl that rocked a nearby small town almost 30 years ago and had never been solved. The sheriff asked: Would Elfmont take it on?

Fascinated and believing he could make a difference, Elfmont accepted.

“I was just determined, even with the roadblocks that I faced, that I was going to get the guy that did this,” Elfmont said.

In a span of eight days this month, law enforcement announced key breakthroughs in at least four homicides after decades without arrests. In California, police charged a 75-year-old man in the 1973 murder of Nina Fischer. In Texas, police named suspects in two separate murders — of Susan Leigh Wolfe and Terri McAdams — from the 1980s. And in Montana, Elfmont believes he found who killed Danielle Houchins in 1996.

This series of discoveries may seem like an encouraging turn of events in the world of cold cases. But in reality, even with advances in forensic technology, such breakthroughs are rare. Many U.S. law enforcement agencies have no teams dedicated to such cases, and there remain hundreds of thousands of unsolved homicides across the country.

Among the ranks of America’s cold-case investigators are retired police officers working for free; on-duty detectives and members of dedicated cold-case units; and sometimes even civilian consultants who earn the trust of police forces to work a case.

The work, investigators who have experience with such cases say, is not for everyone, involving a lot of hours and sleepless nights. Investigators have to interview witnesses multiple times and work with new technology to uncover leads in ways that were not possible when the case first opened.

And there can be many discouraging moments, investigators say — for example, when new clues or pieces of evidence go nowhere. Sometimes, politics within a police force can complicate matters, with detectives facing pushback from officers who had originally taken on the case and do not want their work to be scrutinized. And then there’s the emotional toll, especially when informing a victim’s family that there’s no news.

Still, many choose to take on the cases, sometimes out of a sense of obligation to victims’ families, or out of pure interest. Some also like a challenge, they said.

“It was better than serving Meals on Wheels,” Elfmont said.

A few months after the lunch with the local sheriff, Elfmont was sworn in as a deputy in the Gallatin County Sheriff’s Office. In March 2023, he got to work on Danielle’s case, starting with two moving boxes’ worth of files.

He learned that Danielle, who went by Danni, left her home in Belgrade, Montana, on a September morning, telling her parents she would take the car to a river access point nearby. Later that night, her body was found face down in shallow water. Elfmont said an autopsy suggested that she had been raped.

Now came the tedious routine of a cold-case investigator: Elfmont reviewed and tried to retrace each step taken by previous detectives, interviewing witnesses again and looking into where new technology could be used.

People sometimes think investigations unfold “in 30 minutes and a couple commercial breaks,” said Lindsey Wade, a retired detective in Tacoma, Washington, who started working on cold cases in 2006. The reality is less glamorous, she and other investigators said.

Scott Bonner can speak to the dreary nature of the work. A retired captain at the Heflin Police Department in Alabama, Bonner took over a room at a local recreation center to work on all four of the agency’s cold cases in 2021. He filled the room with case files and poster boards to keep track of discrepancies and notable findings.

As investigators go through case files for the umpteenth time, they can encounter hurdles, like a lab having lost key evidence, or a potentially significant witness having died.

Adding to the challenges is that investigators are often juggling cold cases on top of active cases that take priority. So making progress often requires working overtime, which can overwhelm detectives during busy periods, according to Devon Coffer, a homicide detective in Arlington, Texas, who worked on the case of McAdams, a 22-year-old woman who was found beaten to death in her apartment in 1985.

But because of forensic investigative genetic genealogy, a relatively new technique that uses DNA matches to find potential suspects, there’s more hope that some of these cases could be solved.

Genetic genealogy was used in 2018 to identify the Golden State Killer, who was accused of raping and murdering dozens across California. In that case, investigators found distant relatives of a suspect in an online genealogy database, then used genealogical research that eventually led to the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo. (DeAngelo was sentenced to life in prison in 2020.)

Since then, the method has been used to clear nearly 700 homicides and sexual assault cases. That has helped lead to more discoveries at a pace that would have been unlikely a decade ago, according to Joe Kennedy, who founded the cold-case unit at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service in 1995.

“Years ago, we relied on the murder weighing so heavy on the offender that they would ultimately confess to us,” Kennedy said. Now, smaller amounts of DNA can yield insights, and genetic matches allow investigators to build family trees that can ultimately lead to a suspect.

The success of genetic genealogy and other DNA technology — including in all of the four cases that made significant headway this month — has made headlines, but the reality of America’s unsolved homicides is daunting. According to the Murder Accountability Project, which tracks homicide data nationwide, nearly 300,000 people have died in unsolved homicides since 1980.

“These occasional genetic victories are much less than a drop in the bucket,” said Thomas Hargrove, founder of the Murder Accountability Project.

In many cases, there’s no DNA evidence at all, so genetic genealogy is not an option. Others are sitting in jurisdictions with not enough detectives to investigate them. And some law enforcement agencies simply don’t have the funds to conduct DNA analysis.

But sometimes, the pieces fall into place.

A few months into working on Danni’s case, Elfmont learned that four hairs recovered from her body had never been tested. With the help of a California detective, Elfmont sent the hairs to a lab.

Then a genetic genealogist stepped in to use the findings from the lab to look for genetic matches on a database. The genealogist located distant cousins of a possible suspect and used historical records to build family trees stretching back to the 1600s.

That led to one man who had a Facebook page that showed he had moved to Montana shortly before Danni’s murder. With the help of local officials, Elfmont tracked down the man and collected his DNA sample from a coffee cup.

Hours after Elfmont interviewed him for the first time, the suspect — a 55-year-old man named Paul Hutchinson — killed himself, according to authorities. On Aug. 8, the Gallatin sheriff’s office declared Danni’s case resolved.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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