Cases in which all investigative leads appear to be exhausted are frustrating for both investigators and victims’ families. Cold cases can range from those only a few months old to others that go back for decades. Presenting profiles and actual case histories, Cold Case Research: Resources for Unidentified, Missing and Cold Homicide Cases illustrates how investigators can successfully apply resources that will enable them to reopen and solve cases gathering dust in the file room. Today’s investigators have found that, to solve cold cases, they need to be internet savvy and make the best use of the rapidly changing methodologies of the twenty-first century, but they also have to be time travelers and open the door to the past. This volume weaves together the nearly forgotten skill sets of traditional historical researchers with the latest online tools, including TLO, a premier investigative system; and NamUs, the revolutionary database for missing persons and unidentified remains. Along with practical applications, Cold Case Research gives investigators the tools they need to save time and money and to jump-start their cold cases, while keeping others from going cold in the future. Topics discussed include: Implementing cold case units People searches and working with databases Overlooked DNA in PKU cards The plight of the missing and unknown Applying historical and geographical context Online and off-line newspaper research Public and published records The use of volunteers Contact with co-victims Cold-case review teams and information-sharing resources Taking advantage of the media Using a thinking-outside-the-box approach, this volume helps fill major gaps in traditional cold case investigation training and techniques, enabling investigators to confidently reopen and crack the mystery of cases long thought unsolvable. Silvia Pettem was quoted in a January 29, 2012 article on missing persons in the Colorado Springs Gazette.

A cold case. A locked room murder. Can he keep her from being the next to vanish? Vanessa Whitman moves into her eccentric local celebrity uncle’s remote castle he inherited from his wife to ghostwrite his memoir, seeing it as her chance to start over and escape a stalker. But then Sheriff Ty Coleman discovers a body in a locked room of the Colorado castle, transforming everyone in Vanessa’s family into potential killers. On top of that, a twelve-year-old unsolved disappearance may hold the key to the murder. Can Ty protect Vanessa and discover the truth before the killer strikes again? Mills & Boon Intrigue — Seek thrills. Solve crimes. Justice served.

Sole survivor of a mission gone wrong, Griff left the Navy to recover from his wounds and grief. The one woman he’d grown to love had left San Diego while he'd been deployed and hadn't returned or reached out. When Jake Cogburn offered him a job in Colorado, he agreed to check it out, never expecting he’d find the one who ditched him upside down in a ditch near the headquarters of Brotherhood Protectors Colorado. When her sister was murdered in Colorado, Rachel West left her job as a California Highway Patrolman in San Diego and left the man with whom she’d been falling in love. In Fool’s Gold, she joined the sheriff’s department to protect others from a similar fate. In the background of doing her job, Rachel works the cold case of sister's murder. Finally onto a clue, she has become the target of the killer. She turns to Brotherhood Protectors for help. On her way to meet with them at the Lost Valley Ranch, her car is run off the road and flips upside-down. The one person she never thought she’d see again pulls her from the wreckage. Though he’s still struggling with PTSD and afraid to expose his heart again, Griff can’t leave Rachel unprotected. He offers to take her as his first assignment. As they close in on the truth, their love rekindles, and danger closes in on them.

When thirteen-year-old Oz Keiller finds a dead body in his family's Santa Fe, New Mexico, restaurant, he is determined to solve the mystery in which his older brother is implicated, but which also involves their long-dead father, who was accused of being a spy.

The case of Robert Charles Browne, who may be one of America’s most prolific serial killers, was supposed to be a cold one. But that was before three retired buddies took it on. “The score is you one, the other team 48,” wrote Robert Charles Browne in March 2000, from his prison cell in Colorado, where he was serving a life sentence for a girl’s murder. “Seven sacred virgins entombed side by side, those less worthy are scattered wide.” No one in local law enforcement knew what to make of this message. Then three friends, volunteer members of the El Paso Sheriff’s Department cold case squad, decided to write back to Browne. Browne boasted about having killed as many as forty-eight people in a cross-country murder spree spanning twenty-five years. As the old friends parsed the riddles, investigators followed clues leading to a confession and the closure of another heartbreaking case. This is their story. Includes photographs

In 1996, six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was tortured and murdered in her family home. Twenty-five years later, Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist Paula Woodward revisits the cold case to share new insider information on the heinous murder that gripped the nation. After the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, rumors and misinformation planted by Boulder, Colorado law enforcement sped rapidly around the world. Suspicion immediately fell on the family as police sought to exploit her death in the media. Prosecutors and law enforcement intentionally manipulated existing evidence and ignored inconvenient evidence. Child beauty pageant photos of JonBenét whipped the case into a judgmental frenzy. Paula Woodward was one of the few journalists who reported the family’s side of the story. She’s still investigating the 25-year conspiracy to convict John and Patsy Ramsey by law enforcement who acted with arrogance, insecurity, incompetence, and benign neglect. In Unsolved, the follow-up to Woodward’s award-winning and acclaimed true crime exposé We Have Your Daughter, Woodward explores outstanding questions still swirling around the cold case: Who wrote the baffling ransom note? What was found in the 11 pages of exclusive police report summaries backgrounding the Ramseys? And why has the case languished for years? Included in the book are new, exclusive interviews with John Ramsey, his wife Jan, and his son John Andrew as they look back at the case, 25 years later, and react with stunning candor. New photos and reports from JonBenét’s teachers, friends, and family cut through the sensationalized headlines to show who JonBenét really was. Interwoven throughout the book is expert commentary on what the actual evidence shows, and whether the killer might ever be caught. With never-before-released evidence from a now-passive investigation, Unsolved presents the known facts of the killing of JonBenét Ramsey, the bizarre yet intriguing aspects of this ongoing mystery, and gives you rare insight into whether a family member or an intruder savagely murdered JonBenét.

Attorney and true crime writer examines the unsolved 1969 murders of two female college students whose bodies were left off the Garden State Parkway. In the early hours of May 30, 1969, the brutally stabbed bodies of two nineteen-year-old friends, Elizbeth Perry and Susan Davis, were dumped near Ocean City, New Jersey. This is the story of their case. Among the numerous suspects author and attorney Christian Barth identifies are infamous serial killers Ted Bundy and Gerald Eugene Stano, who were living within an hour’s drive from the murder scene. The killers also resided next to one another on Florida’s Death Row, and indirectly confessed to the double homicide. A culmination of more than nine years of research, Barth’s book is compiled from multiple sources, including interviews with retired New Jersey State Police detectives, law enforcement officials from other jurisdictions, federal agents, possible witnesses, victim family members, as well as information gathered from FBI case files, letters, journals, libraries, newspaper articles, and university archives. In scintillating detail, Barth presents the case, including previously undisclosed information surrounding these brutal murders, as well as an examination of recent technological advancements in crime scene analysis and FBI serial killer profiling that could help identify the killer. When all is said and done, the reader is asked to consider: Why hasn’t this cold case been solved? “The definitive book on the case of the coeds murdered on the Garden State Parkway…Barth has done a remarkable job of gathering all of the information and putting it into a readable narrative.”—William Kelley, Jersey Shore Nightbeat