As a longtime investigator with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), Joe Kennedy founded the agency's first Cold Case Homicide Unit and led criminal probes from the Philippines to Fallujah.
After retiring from NCIS in 2014, Kennedy founded a training academy for homicide detectives and established the Carolinas Cold Case Coalition, a group of active and retired federal, state and local investigators who pool their expertise to help police departments around the U.S. solve cold cases.
Kennedy spoke with A&E about how advances in DNA analysis have revolutionized such investigations and why many cold cases remain stubbornly difficult to crack.
What is a cold case, and why do some cases go cold?
The common definition of a cold case is a homicide that hasn't been solved within a year or has changed detectives. There are currently 285,000 cold cases in the U.S. Only one in five will ever identify a new suspect. Only one in 20 of those new suspects will ever get charged and only one in 100 of those charged will ever be convicted.
Cases go cold for a number of reasons. There are only three ways to solve a murder: physical evidence, witness testimony and confessions. Sometimes you don't get physical evidence. If the shooter is 20 or 30 feet away, there's no DNA involved, although maybe you can trace the bullets and the cartridge casings. Witnesses change their stories. They become fearful before the case goes to trial or their testimony gets impeached. A lot of cases built on witnesses eventually fall apart.
Gaining rapport with suspects is the key to securing confessions from them. But many investigators spend far too much time trying to get suspects to answer their questions instead of building rapport and listening to them.
Sometimes there's a lot of white noise that distracts the original investigators and sends them down the wrong track. And sometimes there are clues that are overlooked. Every murder will talk to you if you take the time to read the scene. Unfortunately, in some cities, the volume of cases is so high, the police don't have time to sit and really read the scene.
How can you read the scene if a case is more than a year old?
A lot of those details will be in the notes and the crime scene photos and the autopsy reports. We study those and maybe we're able to put together something the original investigators missed. People think cold-case work is glamorous, but it can take weeks or months of reading the files just to get up to speed.
That's what happened with one of the first cold cases I was involved with, in the Virgin Islands in 1994. A ship pulled into St. Thomas and a naval officer was brutally murdered on his way to an ATM machine. The case was 15 or 16 months old when we got it and it took us 33 days to solve it. But the first 20 days were just spent reading the files.
