COLD CASES SOLVED

On a summer night in 2009, nineteen-year-old Edric Hinton was senselessly gunned down outside a Lansing apartment complex in a tragedy that haunted his family and community for seventeen years. With the perpetrators unidentified and the murder weapon nowhere to be found, local investigators refused to let the case go cold, pursuing fragmented leads across nearly two decades. A critical breakthrough finally emerged when a confidential informant directed detectives to a shotgun buried underground, providing the physical link that forensic scientists matched directly to the fatal crime scene. This investigative triumph—supported by multi-agency forensic support, federal firearms tracking protocols, and de...

When eight-year-old April Tinsley vanished from a Fort Wayne neighborhood in 1988, a community was plunged into a decades-long nightmare marked by sinister, handwritten threats. For thirty years, local detectives and federal profilers pursued a phantom who taunted investigators while leaving behind vital biological clues. The deadlock finally shattered in 2018 when advanced investigative genetic genealogy traced the killer’s DNA through public family trees straight to a quiet mobile home. This case highlights how pioneering forensic science and relentless interagency persistence unmasked John D. Miller, permanently transforming the pursuit of cold cases.

In November 2011, 33-year-old Florida mother Michelle Parker disappeared on the same day an episode of The People’s Court aired featuring a dispute with her former fiancé, Dale Smith Jr. For nearly 15 years, investigators searched for answers, but Michelle’s body was never recovered. In October 2026, Orlando police arrested Smith and charged him with second-degree murder following a renewed investigation that included a review of digital evidence. This episode examines the disappearance, the unusual television connection, and how investigators can build a homicide case even when the victim’s remains have never been found.

In 1962, Charles Hale and Lester McCollum were murdered near Battle Ground, Washington, leaving investigators with a mystery that would remain unresolved for more than six decades. Despite the passage of time, two seemingly insignificant pieces of evidence, cigarette butts and twine, would eventually help investigators identify two suspects. In October 2026, the Clark County Sheriff’s Office announced that modern DNA analysis pointed to Barton Stebbins and Walter Stain, both teenagers at the time of the murders. This episode examines how forensic technology brought new answers to a 64-year-old double homicide and why the suspects will never face trial.

In 1960, eight-year-old Gloria Kowalewicz was abducted and murdered in Chicago, leaving investigators with a mystery that would endure for more than six decades. In October 2026, police announced that modern forensic techniques had identified their suspect, a former Chicago homicide detective named Thomas McInerney. Preserved evidence, DNA analysis, and decades of investigative work helped expose a secret that remained hidden long after the suspect’s death. This episode explores how investigators reopened the case, the forensic breakthroughs that brought answers, and the disturbing questions raised when a murder suspect once wore a police badge.

When remains are too badly damaged for visual identification — burned, skeletonized, or decomposed beyond recognition — the work of putting a name to them falls to forensic anthropology. This episode examines how specialists reconstruct identity from what little is left: estimating age, sex, and stature from bone structure, and extracting usable DNA from material that fire or time has severely compromised. We look at how dental records and forensic odontology provide another critical point of comparison when bones alone can’t tell the full story. Finally, we explore why matching unidentified remains to missing-person databases remains one of the most persistent challe...

n 1929, seven men were murdered in a Chicago garage, and suspicion fell on Al Capone’s organization. Forensic ballistics provided important investigative leads, but the perpetrators were never convicted. Explore what investigators established and why the historical case remains unresolved.

In 1969, a 16-year-old girl was murdered in California, leaving investigators with a mystery that would span more than half a century. Decades later, renewed investigative work helped identify Joanne Yvonne Burdick and brought attention to a suspect known as the Crew Cut Killer. This episode explores how old evidence, criminal profiling, and persistent detective work can revive a case long believed to be beyond resolution.

For more than six decades, he was known only as the “Boy in the Box,” one of America’s most haunting unidentified murder victims. His battered body was discovered outside Philadelphia in 1957, but despite thousands of leads, investigators could not determine who he was. Generations of detectives worked the case, while advances in DNA technology slowly created possibilities that investigators in the 1950s could never have imagined. In 2022, forensic genetic genealogy finally gave the child something investigators had been searching for for 65 years: his name, Joseph Augustus Zarelli. But identifying Joseph solved only one mystery, because the question of who killed...

In October 1986, 23-year-old Teresa Ann Houck left the Baltimore club where she worked and was never seen alive again. Hours later, she was found shot to death in Druid Hill Park, leaving investigators with evidence but no identified killer. Nearly four decades later, a routine DNA database search produced the match prosecutors say finally gave the cold case a name.

For decades, investigators could possess a killer’s DNA yet have no suspect to compare it against. Investigative genetic genealogy changed that equation by allowing investigators to search for relatives rather than only exact database matches. The identification of the Golden State Killer demonstrated how a decades-old biological clue could suddenly become the beginning of an investigation rather than the end.

For decades, investigators could possess a killer’s DNA yet have no suspect to compare it against. Investigative genetic genealogy changed that equation by allowing investigators to search for relatives rather than only exact database matches. The identification of the Golden State Killer demonstrated how a decades-old biological clue could suddenly become the beginning of an investigation rather than the end.

Joshua Wayne Crawford was found murdered inside his Maryland apartment on the day he turned 21, leaving investigators with a violent crime scene but no arrest. For 23 years, detectives revisited leads, retested evidence, and waited for forensic technology to catch up with the evidence left behind. Then, in September 2026, investigators announced an arrest—and revealed an extraordinary detail: the accused man’s name had apparently been sitting in a funeral visitation book for more than two decades.

On September 17, 2026, the GBI announced murder and related charges against Rashad Jackson in the 2020 death of Tyler Hall in Norcross, Georgia. Hall, 21, was found shot in his home in August 2020. The breakthrough came from advanced DNA and genealogy work by the GBI Cold Case Unit and Othram. Jackson is charged, not convicted, and the investigation remains active.

May 1973 two New Jersey sisters on a Florida Keys vacation were last seen hitchhiking on Stock Island; the next day their bodies were found in the woods off U.S. 1 in Key Largo. Fifty-three years later, forensic genetic genealogy named David Allen Snyder, a former Key West resident who died in Idaho in 2008. There will be no trial—only a name, a timeline, and the end of an unanswered question.

Two assaults, decades apart and a thousand miles from each other, sat in evidence rooms until the science caught up. In Lawrence, Kansas, a 2009 stranger rape on a darkened sidewalk finally produced a living defendant after a 1-in-848-trillion DNA match. In Fayetteville, North Carolina, a 1990 home-invasion rape at gunpoint was closed by genetic genealogy—only to find the Fort Bragg soldier already beyond the reach of a courtroom.

In 1986, a masked intruder terrorized East Jefferson homes and vanished. Nearly four decades later, a Georgia inmate already serving life was linked by DNA and a palm print to six aggravated rape counts. A Jefferson Parish jury needed only 45 minutes to convict him — a cold-case win built on evidence someone chose to save.

Irasema Chavez was stabbed more than 100 times in her Arlington, Texas, apartment in January 2012. After CODIS produced no hit, FBI investigative genetic genealogy pointed to her friend Mayra Velasquez; police later matched crime-scene blood to DNA from a discarded fork. Velasquez was charged with capital murder, has pleaded not guilty in public, and the case now turns on what a single stain can—and cannot—prove.

In May 1991, 30-year-old mother Sherrie Bridgewater was raped and strangled in her Las Vegas apartment. Decades later, the same DNA profile tied her death to the 1975 slaying of Teree Becker in a Westminster, Colorado field. Investigators identified Thomas Martin Elliott only after genetic genealogy and the exhumation of a man who had already taken his own life.

After more than three decades, San Francisco prosecutors have charged Ricky Dawson in the 1992 rape and strangulation of Nancy Hernandez, a 45-year-old woman found dead in a Chinatown alley. Dawson, already serving life for a 1996 Denver murder and previously convicted in a Florida killing, has now been linked by DNA to at least four deaths spanning California, Colorado, Florida, and possibly Washington. This episode examines how cold-case DNA technology connected the crimes, the pattern investigators see across state lines, and what the charges mean for a case that sat unsolved for 34 years.

: In 1987, the murder of 82-year-old Opal Weil in her Pinellas County home left a community in fear and her family searching for answers amid a cluster of similar attacks on elderly residents. Despite the collection of critical forensic evidence at the time, including dozens of hair samples, the case languished as an unsolved cold case for more than three decades. Advances in DNA technology, combined with the relentless determination of investigators and surviving family members, ultimately led to the identification, trial, and conviction of the perpetrator, offering long-awaited accountability.

October 1975, the partial remains of a 73-year-old Tucson man named William Reginald Sipfle were found in a landfill near Ryan Airfield, with no identification, no missing person report, and no answers for the family he left behind. Fifty-one years later, forensic genealogy and DNA technology cracked open the cold case and pointed investigators directly at Sipfle’s own stepdaughter, Carol Ann Beall, now 79, who prosecutors allege killed him and collected up to six hundred thousand dollars from his pension in the decades that followed. This episode breaks down how the case went cold, how modern forensic science brought it back, an...

On a quiet Friday morning in June 2008, an armed intruder entered the Sun Drop Bottling Company in Concord, North Carolina, and brutally murdered office manager Donna Barnhardt and job applicant Darrell Noles in a calculated robbery. For nearly eighteen years, the double homicide remained one of the city’s most haunting cold cases, devastating families and challenging investigators. In May 2026, persistent detective work and new forensic leads culminated in the arrest of suspect Johnny Steven Talbert, offering accountability and highlighting the enduring power of forensic persistence and human resilience.

In a groundbreaking forensic breakthrough, advanced DNA technology has definitively linked notorious serial killer Ted Bundy to the 1974 murder of 17-year-old Laura Ann Aime in Utah. This episode examines the decades-long investigation, the science behind the match, and how a complete Bundy DNA profile may now help resolve other suspected cases in the state. Join us for a detailed exploration of justice delayed but not denied.

Why do some serial offenders suddenly abandon one hunting ground and reappear hundreds of miles away years later? In this deep forensic investigation, we examine the phenomenon of “predatory drift” — the geographic and psychological migration patterns of violent offenders whose anchor points, routines, victimology, and operational zones evolve over decades. Drawing from behavioral profiling, geographic profiling, environmental criminology, and real cold case dynamics, this episode explores how killers adapt, why investigators often miss the pattern, and how modern forensic analysis is reopening cases once thought permanently unsolved.

For nearly five decades, the brutal 1981 murder of 22-year-old Lois Marshall in Galveston, Texas, remained an icy cold case with no answers. In a stunning breakthrough, modern forensic technology and newly resubmitted fingerprint analysis finally unmasked a shadow suspect hiding in plain sight. Discover how meticulous detective work and cutting-edge DNA profiling broke a 45-year silence to deliver ultimate closure to a grieving family.

In February 2007, 25-year-old Carrie Hicks was found dead in a rural New Hampshire home with two gunshot wounds to the head, launching a nearly two-decade-long cold case investigation. New forensic analysis by the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit has now identified 51-year-old Wayne Ring as her killer, resolving the case as a murder followed by an attempted suicide. This episode examines the evidence, the victims’ stories, and the power of persistent investigation in delivering long-overdue closure

In August 1992, 85-year-old Alwin Schoefer was brutally beaten, stabbed, and shot inside his Weimar, California home, which was then deliberately set ablaze with the exterior doors padlocked from the outside in an apparent effort to conceal the crime. The investigation remained cold for nearly 34 years until advanced DNA testing in 2025 linked the evidence to Joseph Foster, a local man already serving multiple life sentences for prior Weimar-area murders. This episode examines the horrific details of the case, Foster’s pattern of violence spanning decades, and the recent sentencing that delivered long-overdue accountability through modern forensic science.

A 34-year-old cold case resurfaces with the arrest of a previously convicted sex offender—revealing critical failures in risk assessment, offender monitoring, and early forensic limitations. This episode applies forensic psychology, behavioral profiling, and modern DNA science to analyze how violent offenders persist, adapt, and evade detection for decades. A deep dive into sexual homicide typologies, psychopathy, and investigative breakthroughs at the intersection of psychology, law, and forensic science.

Tucson Police have arrested Rafael Alvarez in the long-unsolved 2008 cold case murder of 20-year-old James Noriega, who was shot five times while leaving a crowded Southside Halloween house party. For nearly two decades the victim’s family pleaded for answers as the case went cold, until this shocking breakthrough brought first-degree murder charges and a $1 million bond. This episode explores the tragic night, the years of unresolved grief, and what the recent arrest means for justice in Arizona true crime.

A true crime and forensic psychology podcast exploring how decades-old evidence—gloves, clothing, and biological traces—helped solve a 1988 cold case through modern DNA analysis and investigative techniques. This episode examines the conviction of Aloysius Winthrop James, highlighting cold case forensics, DNA evidence, criminal profiling, and long-term investigative strategy. Ideal for listeners interested in violent crime, forensic science breakthroughs, legal evidence standards, and the psychology of offenders who evade justice for decades.

In this episode, we explore botanical forensics through the compelling concept of the “Guilty Tree,” where plant growth rings and microscopic pollen grains serve as silent witnesses in long-cold criminal cases. Dendrochronology and palynology allow investigators to pinpoint burial sites and timelines with remarkable precision, even decades after a crime. The discussion highlights how these natural records provide objective, tamper-resistant evidence that has solved cases where traditional forensic methods failed.