‘Case’ warms up to a cold reality

How much does TV’s “Cold Case” resemble real-life investigations of old, unsolved homicides?

Not at all. A little. Quite a bit. In other words, it depends -- on what the TV cops are doing, and how they do it.

“I watched it briefly, when it first came out,” says Max Houck, a forensic scientist who recently founded the Institute for Cold Case Evaluation at West Virginia University. “It’s an interesting idea for a show, and it absolutely has good storytelling appeal.”

But Houck says the show overemphasized the idea that initial investigators “dropped the ball somewhere.” In reality, he says, it’s usually new technology, allowing for a reanalysis of old evidence, that makes the difference between “cold case” and “case closed.”

Not guilty, pleads Jonathan Littman, executive producer of CBS’ “Cold Case.” “One or two [episodes] have been done where it’s an actual plot point” that the detective was lax, he says. “We talk more about a detective’s frustration about not having been able to close the crime.”

Still, Houck agrees, the show does seem to reflect a national policing trend. There are more than 200,000 unsolved homicides nationally dating to 1960, he estimates.

“A lot of jurisdictions are putting efforts together to look at cold cases, to reduce backlogs,” says Houck, who formerly was with the FBI. “What they realize is that a lot of the people who commit these crimes are still out there.”

Because some of them commit multiple crimes, “if they can close one, they can close another.”

Which is where the Institute for Cold Case Evaluation comes in. “It’s a nonprofit corporation that provides forensic resources to cold-case homicide investigators,” explains Houck, its executive director. The institute can review cold-case files from around the country, suggesting a “punch list” of actions that could advance the case. It also can refer local policing agencies to experts who reduce or even waive their fees.

But don’t most places have their own cold-case squads to analyze old files?

“A lot of them don’t, oddly enough,” he says. “There’s probably about 50 cold-case squads around the country I’m aware of.”

The Suffolk County Police Department on Long Island, for instance, with 76 cold cases on file dating back some 40 years, currently has no detectives devoted strictly to solving them. Given staffing requirements in other areas, “What we have now is detectives assigned a cold case with their regular duties,” says Det. Sgt. Vincent Posillico of the homicide squad.

The process sounds kind of like “Cold Case”: “They’ll see whether items of investigation were missed, or [trace] a witness they couldn’t locate” in the initial investigation, Posillico says. “A person who maybe was in the wind 10 years ago we’ll give a second shot.”

Technology also plays a role. Posillico points to two very different results of updated DNA testing in Suffolk County.

In a 1987 case, an Elwood widow was found stabbed and beaten to death in her home, which had been set on fire. The victim, Josephine Rees, also had been sexually assaulted.

While more than two dozen people were asked to give blood samples for testing, forensics could not point conclusively to any one of them. Nearly eight years later, advances in DNA testing linked Michael Ugenti, who grew up with one of Rees’ sons, to the crime. Ugenti was arrested in California in 1995 and pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 1996.

Another case, a 1980 murder in Bay Shore, became cold when there was not enough evidence to try two prime suspects.

Recent DNA testing cleared those suspects. “Which is good, because now we’re not directing our efforts down a blind alley.” But, he acknowledges, because the police haven’t yet got their man, this sort of case “doesn’t make for good television.”

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Lipson is a reporter for Newsday, a Tribune company.