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Reviewing 3,000 cold cases, one by one
By Christina S.N. Lewis
(Court TV) -- The case of the Lover's Lane Bandit had been ice cold for more than 40 years. Whoever ambushed four teenagers, raped one of the girls and then gunned down two young police officers when they stopped him for running a stop sign was still out there, somewhere. That somewhere turned out to be an affluent suburb of Columbia, South Carolina. Early Thursday morning a retired gas-station owner was arrested at his home and charged in the 1957 El Segundo, California, crime spree. The story of how fingerprints lifted from the stolen 1949 Ford police believe the killer was driving were matched to George F. Mason, 69, using a national FBI fingerprint database may seem fantastic, but is increasingly common in these days of improved forensic tools and national databases being used to examine old cases. As crime rates have dropped nationwide over the past decade, and the murder rate has decreased by nearly a third since 1992, police departments have been able to devote more resources to older, tougher cases. Many have formed cold case squads who are free to focus on unsolved crimes. One of the largest and most systematic efforts to solve cold homicide cases is at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, which supervised the El Segundo investigation. In July 2000 the department, which polices the large area surrounding the city of Los Angeles, launched an aggressive review of all the county's cold murder cases dating back to 1980. There were 3,000 of them. Six former homicide detectives were hired to read through every open case file in the last 20 years and identify those that might benefit from new technology. With nearly two-thirds of the cases reviewed so far, 29 have been solved, 23 cases are awaiting physical evidence testing and 65 are awaiting DNA testing, said Captain Frank Merriman, head of the homicide department. Another 100 have been flagged for the re-interviewing of witnesses that could produce new leads. "It's worth the time and effort," Merriman says. "It's going to take a long time to finish this, but at the conclusion of it we will be satisfied that we have done all that we can do for these cases." Like many large metropolitan counties the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department already had a detective unit that focused on unsolved murders. Before the systematic review, however, the process to reactivate a case was somewhat haphazard, said Sgt. Paul Mondry, who supervises the unsolved homicide unit. "Typically people would call in. Witnesses would come forward. Sometimes certain cases would be featured on unsolved mysteries," Mondry says. "That's typically how unsolved cases would come back to the forefront." (In fact the re-opening of the El Segundo case began with a phone tip that turned out to be incorrect, but prompted investigators to take another look at the fingerprints.) Many of the closed cases were solved using DNA testing. "DNA technology has changed so much in the last 10, even five years. It is so much better now," Merriman said. "The more advanced it gets the more cases we solve. Science is great." Police officers are now able to get more information from smaller amounts of evidence. In the past bloodstains had to be at least the size of a quarter, and labs could only identify the blood type. "The problem is about half the population is type O. If your suspect is type O and the victim is type O, the information you can gather is extremely limited," says Ken Sewell, the supervisor of the department's biological testing, "We need a bloodstain about the size of a head of a pin to do a full profile now," he said. "We tell the detectives: 'If you can see it, we can type it." One hindrance to solving the cases quickly is that there is now a large backlog of cases awaiting DNA testing, despite the fact that the Los Angeles County crime laboratory is one of the largest in the nation. "Our requests for DNA [typing] are doubling about every year," Sewell says, but while the requests are going up exponentially, our ability to handle these cases is pretty much linear. We're still working through the growing pains." Sewell says that because DNA testing has become so exact it can help investigators even when they have no other leads in the case. "We used to have them pretty well trained that if they didn't have a suspect not to call us," he says. "And now the tables have turned." Since the review began, Mondry says that he has more leads than his unit can handle and he spends most of his time trying to funnel cases to investigators. "It's become a lot more administrative," Mondry says somewhat ruefully. "I try to get the most important cases pushed through the system."
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