COLD CASES SOLVED

Forty Years Later: How DNA Closed Jefferson Parish’s Airline Park Rape Spree

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...

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A Drop of Blood, a Plastic Fork, and Fourteen Years

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...

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: The AA Meeting Killer: DNA, a Grave, and Two Murders Sixteen Years Apart

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...

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A Serial Killer Across Four States: DNA Links Ricky Dawson to a 1992 San Francisco Murder

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...

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Silent Evidence Awakens: DNA and Persistence Resolve the 1987 Murder of Opal Weil

: 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...

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51 Years, a Landfill, and a Pension: How DNA Finally Caught a Killer in Tucson

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...

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Shadows in the Bottling Plant: The Long Road to Justice in the Sun Drop Murders

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...

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Unmasking Bundy: New DNA Evidence Closes a 52-Year-Old Utah Cold Case and Opens Doors to Others

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...

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Predatory Drift —How Serial Killers Change Hunting Grounds and Vanish Into Cold Cases

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...

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45 Years Later: How Genetic Forensics Solved the 1981 Murder of Lois Marshall

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...

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Closing the File: The 2007 Murder of Carrie Hicks in Acworth

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...

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Case solved after 30 years-Locked in Flames: DNA Justice for the 1992 Weimar Murder of Alwin Schoefer


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...

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The Cindy Wanner Cold Case: Behavioral Persistence, Sexual Predation, and the Forensic Psychology of Delayed Justice

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...

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Justice After 18 Years: The Arrest in Tucson’s 2008 Cold Case Halloween Party Murder of James Noriega

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...

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Cold Threads: How a Killer Was Unraveled Decades Later

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...

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Botanical Forensics: The Case of the “Guilty” Tree

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...

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Husband of Missing Woman Arrested in 36-Year-Old Cold Case Killing

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GBI Announces Arrest in 16-Year-Old Cold Case Death of Sandra Robinson in Coffee County

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Arrests made in 2020 Vacaville homicide, after missing person case reclassified last week

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Random discovery could’ve solved a decades old cold case homicide

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