A new team of homicide sleuths from across Colorado will take on some of the most confounding murder mysteries in the state, searching for new angles that could crack cases dormant for years.
The 26-member team — including behavioral analysts, who might predict whether a killer is likely a student, a homeless person or a doctor — met for the first time at Colorado Bureau of Investigation headquarters Thursday afternoon.
The members come from an array of crime-solving disciplines, including detectives, crime-scene analysts, coroners, prosecutors, a victim’s advocate, FBI and CBI agents and a prison investigator.
Headed by CBI Director Ron Sloan, the team will review cases submitted by sheriff’s offices and police departments from across Colorado.
The group will only take on cases in which investigators have already exhausted all leads.
The crime experts offer expertise not available to many departments, which in some cases don’t have a full-time homicide detective or a medical examiner with special forensic training such as Dr. Mike Doberson, the Arapahoe County coroner, who is on the team.
The team includes FBI agent Phil Niedringhaus, who is trained in behavioral analysis, a field of expertise in which predictions are made based on evidence about what kind of person committed the crime and where to look for them.
Sloan said the group may give preference to cold cases that have a better chance of being solved today than in the past because of advances in technology such as DNA science, in which only microscopic samples are now needed to identify suspects.
The group will brainstorm the cases in all-day sessions and make recommendations for what further investigative steps should be taken and offer observations that could steer the investigation toward a specific suspect, said Steve Johnson, CBI’s assistant director overseeing investigations.
“The panel may say you need to go back to this person and interview him again,” Johnson said. Alliances between witnesses and suspects evolve, creating opportunities that a witness might someday open up, he said.
The formation of the team was the genesis of a cold-case task force formed in 2007 by the Colorado legislature to explore ways to solve 1,400 of the state’s cold cases, said Kathy E. Sasak, deputy executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Safety.
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
Read about many of the cold-case mysteries at .
