Special Police Squads Focus on Long-Unsolved Murders

Dave Hatch sits alone, a solitary researcher in a library of death.

The shelves around him hold scores of black vinyl three-ring binders, each with a tale of murder unsolved--the woman raped and killed behind the Las Vegas Hilton in 1981, the prostitute murdered in her room in 1976, the Boston thug dumped in the desert back in 1969.

The names of the dead are typed neatly on the spines of the 300-plus binders, stark black print on white labels.

“VICTIM: BRUCE FISHER.”

“VICTIM: PATRICIA MARGELLO.”

“VICTIM: KIMBLEE ELLINGTON.”

Old murders are Hatch’s beat; the 27-year police veteran opened the Las Vegas Police Department’s cold-case squad in July 1997. The binders date to 1943; the detective scours each for fresh leads on cases long since stale, chasing killers long since convinced they had beaten the rap.

“Smoking guns? Those aren’t even a challenge,” said Hatch, whose left biceps sports a skull tattoo. “These cases are challenges. You’ve got to track everybody down, make sure of what they can remember.”

In Las Vegas, Hatch works alone, but the number of officers doing similar jobs is increasing nationwide. With the national murder rate plunging 28% since 1993, and with the proliferation of high-tech crime-solving methods, cold-case investigators are appearing from Newark to New Orleans, from San Antonio to Seattle.

Hatch has closed dozens of cases since taking the job--”closed” meaning anything from a suspect’s confession to his arrest to his death to (in one instance) his turning up in the federal witness protection program.

Other cold-case squads nationwide have racked up similarly dramatic numbers, relying on a combination of instinct and evidence--much of it unusual. Dog hairs, a religious conversion, a traffic ticket, a 23-year-old fingerprint, a Cajun chef--all have helped resolve antique cases, producing these results:

* In New York City, the squad has cleared 280 cases in three years. A 1980 double murder was solved when a Georgia traffic ticket tipped police to the suspect’s whereabouts. “OK, you got me,” the reputed drug dealer said upon his arrest in 1996.

* The Washington cold-case squad closed 157 old homicides and several high-profile attempted-murder cases in its first five years.

* The Los Angeles squad, formed two years ago, has closed 35 cases in the last six months. In a 1995 murder, detectives used a lab comparison of dog hairs to secure an arrest and indictment.

* The New Orleans squad has solved 113 cases in three years, including one prompted by an unsolicited tip from a chef at a local restaurant.

* The Massachusetts state police cold-case squad opened for business two years ago, reopening investigations into 25 murders. Three arrests have resulted.

* In Newark, N.J., the cold-case squad opened last September and scored an almost immediate hit: arresting a woman for her mother’s 1971 slaying. Two other arrests quickly followed, with several more cases on the verge of resolution.

Newark’s two-man detective team approaches its task with almost religious zeal. The master book that holds details on murders dating to the 1940s is called “the bible,” and detectives talk of “resurrecting” forgotten victims.

“It’s not up to another human being to snuff out the life of an 8-year-old child or 80-year-old woman,” said Det. Rashid Sabur. “That’s God’s decision. We step in and represent the victims, because these people are calling us from the grave.”

Good News for Families

Those calls can lead to strange places.

Detective Rick Marks, head of the LAPD squad, reopened a 1995 murder investigation. Derrick Sims was suspected of murdering his girlfriend, but the probe had bogged down. The cold-case squad tried a new tactic: They went after Sims’ dog.

The squad took hair samples from the pet pooch; they were compared with dog hairs collected from a blanket that was wrapped around the victim. After the FBI crime lab scored a match, Sims was arrested. He goes on trial for murder later this year.

The renewed interest in crimes from the past is good news for surviving families seeking closure. “Just as rewarding as putting the cuffs on a murderer is telling family members that you have the guy who did it,” said Lt. Ray Ferrari, head of the New York squad.

The response from suspects contacted years down the road? “Surprise” doesn’t quite cover it.

“I tell them, ‘Well, we never go away.’ Then I add ‘em to my Christmas card list,” said Hatch, smiling like the cat that ate the homicidal canary. “There are killers that you always want to make sure know you’re around, and you’re never going away.

“It’s good to let ‘em know.”

Cold-Case Frustrations

Hatch is a typical cold-case investigator--a veteran who investigated about 600 murders during 17 years in homicide at Las Vegas PD. The New York squad’s officers each have between 15 and 30 years on the job; in New Orleans, the range is 16 to 23 years.

Hatch could have been born grizzled. His graying hair features a Parris Island buzz cut, with a matching salt-and-pepper beard. His sentences are short, blunt, salty. He is the institutional memory of the 14-member homicide division.

“He is a great resource,” said Lt. Wayne Peterson, head of the Vegas homicide bureau. “His knowledge and experience make him a superior investigator.”

Already, Hatch has perused cases between 1943 (three years before mobster Bugsy Siegel brought the mob west to the Flamingo hotel) and the early ‘80s.

There are frustrations: He has opened binders and watched misfiled fingerprint cards waft into his lap. One binder held an unidentified woman’s jewelry--potentially key evidence. A bag of bloody clothes was invaded by maggots.

“Now you’ve got bug DNA in there,” Hatch deadpans.

Such problems are quickly forgotten when Hatch gets his hooks into a hot case.

In December, Hatch was reinvestigating the April 1981 rape and murder of a local woman when an unsolicited letter arrived in the mail from California.

“I suspect my ex-husband murdered a woman about 15 years ago,” the letter began, quickly getting Hatch’s attention. “I don’t know her name. She died about a year before I met him.”

Hatch connected the letter to one of his binders, matching victim and details. The letter contained potential new evidence; Hatch began poring over the old material. Police are quietly putting together a case, hoping to close out the 18-year-old murder.

“So this old case is not such a dead case,” Hatch says. “You just start looking, and all of a sudden, there you go.”

Shoe Leather and the Internet

Improved technology is a key cold-case component, providing crime-solving tools that didn’t exist when many of these crimes were committed: DNA testing, national fingerprint databases, enhanced crime-scene forensics, ballistics databases.

It was a single bloody fingerprint left 23 years earlier that convicted Anthony Lowe. Gerrit Weynands, a 46-year-old Seattle timber salesman, was shot once in the back of the neck during a February 1973 robbery. He died on the street, his pockets turned inside out by the bandit.

Several years after the murder, Lowe, 45, was arrested on a drug charge. He was fingerprinted, and his prints were added to the database.

When the cold-case squad reopened the Weynands case in 1996, they ran the old fingerprint through the new database. The result: a match and a murder conviction.

Sometimes it’s that simple.

The San Antonio Police Department posts “featured cold cases” on its Internet site, hoping that another new investigative tool--the World Wide Web--can help to solve crimes.

A simple point-and-click can turn up details of the Nov. 20, 1986, murder of Michael S. O’Donnell, gunned down while shooting pool inside the Blue Sky Lounge. Tips can come in via e-mail.

But the Space Age hasn’t usurped shoe leather. “It’s still knocking on doors, talking to people,” said Sgt. John Rice of the New Orleans squad. “It’s not all technology today.”

Time Leads to a Telltale Heart

Rice recently solved an old case based on a lunchtime tip. “I was talking to a chef I knew, and he introduced me to a man whose cousin was killed many years ago,” Rice recalls.

Rice interviewed the cousin, who provided new information on the slaying. Rice hit the streets and quickly made an arrest; he says decisions to cooperate years after the crime are fairly common.

Call it the “telltale heart syndrome.”

“When you’re 19, you’re invincible,” Rice says. “You can’t tell a young man anything. But people change. As he gets older, as he has children, he thinks, ‘Maybe I ought to come forward.’ ”

In Newark, Sabur and partner Keith Sheppard solved a 1995 murder when they tracked down an eyewitness--a former drug dealer. She had since gone into rehab and become a born-again Christian; she viewed the interview as a chance to atone for past sins, and identified the killer.

“She had a change of heart, thanks to Jesus,” Sabur says.

That the nation’s police officers can investigate old crimes is partially attributable to a drastically decreased crime rate. Nationally, murder is down about 28% in the last five years; overall crime is down 7%.

In New York, the figures are even more stunning: a 70% drop-off in homicides in the last five years. That allowed creation of the cold-case squad, a luxury that was once impossible in a city with 2,245 homicides in 1990, when detectives had just four days to clear a homicide before catching another case.

The story was much the same across the Hudson River in Newark, where the 1997 murder rate hit its lowest level in 30 years. One year later, the cold-case squad opened for business.

“Twenty years ago, homicide investigators couldn’t invest the same quality time,” said Newark Police Director Joseph J. Santiago. “But we drastically reduced homicides, and it kept the investigators from having to deal at the same pace.”

The Newark squad works in an annex behind City Hall. Its existence is still somewhat of a secret within the department; two phone calls and several transfers were needed to reach one of its detectives.

But the squad had almost instant success.

In its first five months, it solved three cases: a 1973 slaying, the 1995 born-again Christian case, and the 1971 murder of Maylon Johnson. The last case generated headlines when Johnson’s daughter--14 at the time of the crime, now a 41-year-old married woman with three children of her own--confessed after a two-hour emotional interview.

The cold-case squads share common woes: witnesses who disappear or die, suspects who do the same. Memories are no longer fresh. Hatch said closing out cases can involve just acknowledging that the prime suspects are dead, themselves murder victims.

“I know 15 murder cases where the four or five principals were all killed,” Hatch said. “Drug crazies--everybody involved is now dead.”

But there are other cases, plenty of them, where the suspects are still out there. And as Hatch likes to remind those folks, the cold-case squad never goes away.

“The nice thing about murder,” Hatch says evenly, “is there’s no statute of limitations.”