Despite the efforts of police in Colorado, potentially hundreds of murder cases go unsolved every year. Families of the murder victims have it the worst, living their lives not knowing what happened to their loved ones but fearing that a murderer is still at large.
Thanks to a federal grant for Denver’s cold-case unit, more cases stand to be solved and more families might soon get closure.
The $1.5 million grant from the National Institute of Justice will enable police and prosecutors to expand their efforts at solving cold cases with DNA evidence. Advances in DNA testing have made it possible to solve homicide cases that are decades old, which is critical, because some cold cases in Colorado date back to the 1950s.
Denver is one of two counties in Colorado that wisely decided to form a cold case unit within its police department to deal exclusively with murder cases gone cold. Jefferson County is the other. But until now, Denver has had limited resources for investigating cold cases, as do police departments all over Colorado.
In the last legislative session, lawmakers considered — but ultimately dropped — a measure that would have tied cost savings from abolishing the death penalty to creation of a statewide cold case unit to find and prosecute unsolved murders.
Separately, the legislature passed a bill that set up a cold-case unit at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. The unit, formed this summer, is building a database of unsolved murders more than three years old to help local law enforcement know the extent of the problems in their jurisdictions.
The next step is to dedicate the money and investigators to solving the cases. The CBI should move briskly to do just that.
