There Are An Estimated 350,000 Unsolved Murders In The US Dating Good In 1965, And Experts Say The Sad Thing Isn’t DNA

Many cold cases are not solved because of the success of the lab. They broke in because the people who were protecting the killer ended up stopping. Here’s how investigators say decades-old murders are actually being solved — and why hacking tools can’t promise families the one thing they’re told to count on.

After decades of thinking the killer is on the loose, a marriage ends, friendships sour, and the person who kept their secret stops keeping it. Investigators say that a case that has been buried for 30 or 40 years finally breaks like this: a person who was once silent decides to speak.

A key witness who leaves can close a murder case for decades. The same passage of time usually solves it.

Joe Kennedy, a retired NCIS special agent and founder of the Carolinas Cold Case Coalition, says physical evidence, witness testimony and confessions are the three most common ways to crack a cold case. What is concrete is that those three things are the ones that stopped cooling: the evidence cannot be tested with current technology, the suspects stop talking, and the clues stop.

Confessions do a lot more work than most people expect. Kennedy says that the suspects often face the crime for many years, turn to alcohol or drugs, sleep badly, and move frequently. “They have nightmares about what they did,” he said. “Part of what happens is they end up admitting it to someone else,” anywhere from a bar to a conversation with a relative.

That’s almost how the murder of Robin Warr Lawrence in 1994, a 37-year-old mother who was found dead in her home in Springfield, Virginia, was finally answered. Detectives identified Stephan Smerk through DNA in 2023, and hours after giving the sample he confessed. “I knew I was going to kill someone,” he told detectives. I didn’t know who I was going to kill. Something was forcing me to do that.

When no one is talking, forensic genealogy can fill the gap, matching crime scene DNA to relatives by using public databases built into services like AncestryDNA and 23andMe. It’s expensive, running $8,000 to $10,000 a case, making it impossible for smaller departments to scale a single investigation against a new police department.

Kennedy is pushing back on the one word families are told to look for. “That person, their mother, their cousin, their brother, they are not coming back,” he said. “They will not be closed. What we can do is to give the families a decision, so that they are not left wondering what happened.”

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