Why a Case Goes Cold—and What It Takes to Reopen It

As a detective with more than 20 years of experience investigating violent crimes, Aaron Benzick believes in the power of citizen sleuthing. Hence why he founded nonprofit Solve the Case, an organization devoted to finding missing persons and solving cold cases of murder and other serial offenses using the power of the internet.

“We're empowering and growing our platform on how can we serve victims,” Benzick tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “Keeping these cases from being forgotten is really important.” 

For September’s National Cold Case Month, Benzick and Solve the Case want to bolster their unique crime-solving model—which involves creating case pages for open investigations, spreading the word on social media and working with law enforcement to pursue tips from the online community—in hopes of giving victims’ loved ones more answers. 

“There's not one particular month where these cases are important. These cases are important every day of the year, but we want to keep highlighting that this model works,” says Benzick, who partnered with A&E for a PSA to increase National Cold Case Month awareness. “Law enforcement really wants these cases to be worked on, wants them to be solved and would love to help families get answers. There's just not enough time. We want law enforcement to take this month, go through, get your cases updated. ”

Benzick shares how Solve the Case’s “outside the box” approach impacts investigations, how to get a cold case reopened and the one investigation he can’t stop thinking about. 

Why do some cases sit untouched?

It's simply a numbers game. Law enforcement would love to help families get answers. There's not enough bodies in law enforcement to help. The new cases don't stop coming in. When that 911 call comes in, when an incident happens, patrol's responding, detectives are following up. They're doing that 48-hour push of, how do we make sure we don't lose any evidence? But these older cases are sitting there unsolved, and they mean just as much as a current case to a family. I would argue that some of these older cases can be even more important because those families are stuck without answers for so long. That lack of follow-up from law enforcement [leaves] some of the families thinking that cases are being looked at when they may not be.

How can loved ones follow up about a cold case?

Sometimes it takes families being vocal on these cases to get 'em looked at again, but we want to do it in a productive way. It's really easy as families have concerns, have a theory they want pursued, it's really easy to get emotional about that and react, especially if you see law enforcement not reacting as snappy as you hope they would be or pushing. And it kind of leads to this stalemate where law enforcement can't constantly be updating on things when there is nothing new on there. But when we empower families to [say], “Hey, here's things we should be talking about on a missing person case,” there is a level of persistent communication that can be responsibly done. 

What does that communication look like?

Being pushy a little bit can lead to some of these wins. We empower families to [say], “Hey, here's things we should be talking about on a missing person case.” It costs law enforcement nothing to collect a DNA sample, but a lot of our missing person cases, these are things that we're not doing. You have to have some of these hard conversations with lab and forensic people of, what can we do? We check for DNA, nothing found. We check cartridge casings, nothing found. Bringing fingerprints, nothing found. Okay, nothing found at that time. What do we have to go back and revisit? One of our biggest breakthroughs in technology helping a cold case is going to be DNA. A lot of times it's not the funding problem, it's the law enforcement even knowing, what do we have on our case? What old evidence do we have? Just getting a case organized and evaluating the evidence going, oh wow, I didn't know we had this blanket still at the medical examiner's office connected to that case. There's nothing that we can do to promise families that this case is 100% going to be solved, but what we want to happen is we want everything that possibly could happen on this case to be looked at.

How have you seen DNA lead to case breakthroughs? 

The biggest breakthrough in cold cases isn't coming from DNA work. It's actually coming from people who know something coming forward, detectives following up in interviews, knocking on that door, following up on a witness [who says], “Hey, I've been waiting for you to follow up on this for years.” This seems kind of silly to think about. If you've been waiting on it, why didn't you reach out? Why didn't you say something? But it's hard. Human nature is kind of inclined to be quiet. And then when someone shows up and puts it in your face, that information comes forward. And so that's where we think that public component of organizing a case and making it publicly visible is really important. That's something we've built into the Solve the Case platform. If we can't do anything else for a case, we want to be able to have that victim not be forgotten by having a homepage form that people can see. 

Why are case pages important to an investigation? 

When you Google that name, something comes up, and if one of those people who knows something who's been sitting there, they've grown up, they've gotten married, they've had kids, they look at life differently. They've been sitting with this information for a long time. They see something on there, click that button, add in some information on there. And we found that recently being very successful and getting information from people who knew things. Even law enforcement organizing these cases, just knocking on some of these doors and following up, “Hey, we're just following up on this case. Your name was listed in a report.” You never know what's going to pop out on there. So that's one of the things we're finding is very important for these cases.

Do you ever feel that a case has reached a dead end and won’t be solved? How do you determine which cases to take on?

From a law enforcement perspective, it should be all of them. There's things we can do to organize all of the cases. We want to empower every single case. We think every single victim of missing persons, unsolved murders and identified persons, we want every single one of those to have a case entered onto our site. 

How can someone be an effective citizen detective and contribute meaningfully to the case?

Having the cases visible is going to attract a certain amount of noise that's going to be helpful and not helpful. It's not that we want community members making calls to people and knocking on doors and inserting themselves into places that could harm an investigation. We want them getting dialed into, what are these cases? Let's keep them from being forgotten. Law enforcement's not talking about some of these cases in your jurisdiction. Then we're starting to add in a component of, who are known suspects in an area? We have suspects who have been not just suspects, there's suspects who are convicted of violent crimes against children or against women. They've been convicted, they're serving prison sentences. We think community members can be tied into that building out their timeline where all they have lived. And our community members are really good at searching open records and records from the community. We think the community members can not only help us find victims that aren't being talked about through open records, but also known offenders in the area that aren't being talked about, and get those responsibly organized in a database that helps piece some of these things together and develop clues that may not have been seen otherwise.

You don't have to be law enforcement, you don't have to be family. You can be part of that force multiplier, that community serving victims. That's kind of the new approach. Instead of just putting it all in the hands of law enforcement, let's open it up to people who are watching these true crime shows. Let's open it up to families as well. We started mobilizing community members help creating a case page for 'em, and that's how we can start all of us working.

Do you feel that social media and the internet exposure has ultimately been a positive in solving these cold cases?

Absolutely. Social media is 100% doing more good than bad. Is there noise out there that frustrates things and affects families in a significant way? 100%. There are some people who take these stories and sensationalize them simply for the views and turn them into entertainment. What social media does is it gets these cases visible and gets it in front of people who are in the area who may have known something. Social media platforms are very targeted to geographic areas. We can absolutely use that for unsolved crimes and cold cases. Getting that in front of people who may have something to do to help or can maybe share it in their community, in their circle, that's going to eventually get to some of these places with the goal being keeping victims from being forgotten.

Is there any one particular breakthrough or lead that's come through the Solve the Case community that stands out to you?

There was a case out of the San Antonio area of Texas that was a homicide that had happened and law enforcement had solved the homicide, but the fugitive had gone on the run. They're still out there, and they're not facing accountability and justice for their actions. That impacts families just as much as unsolved cases. So we had an organization create a case page for the fugitive who's on the run and share that, And a random person that we didn't know had information on that fugitive and they submitted a tip and provided an address directly to us that they hadn't provided to other law enforcement tip channels. People may not be comfortable with some of the other law enforcement channels. It gets a little too official in a government kind of thing. And that's where as a nonprofit, we've been successful in receiving a lot of information.

We funnel it directly to law enforcement. We received that tip on a Friday. By Monday morning, the detective sends us a picture of him walking that fugitive through the jail. That's pretty impactful. 

Is there any one particular case that you're close on that you really want to see solved?

It's a case from 1985 of Jennifer Day. She went missing from a donut shop. She was working as a young girl, 14 years old, working in this donut shop on a Sunday morning. She gets kidnapped, she's missing for multiple days. After three days, she gets found deceased and nude in a field in the city of Plano. Going back and revisiting that case has identified new pieces of evidence that hasn't been DNA tested. It's been literally sitting in an evidence locker for 40 years and we're now able to revisit that. Her brother, who also had worked at that donut shop, he doesn't want his sister to be forgotten. That brother is thinking about that case every day. He's thinking about his sister, what can we do? We're working hard to solve that case, but by talking about it publicly, we're helping keep it alive. Who knows who we're going to reach that could have information tying into some of the other things that law enforcement's doing on the side. 

How has this work changed the way that you thought about justice or crime solving?

One of my cases—it didn't quite reach cold case level, but it was an unsolved homicide—it took two and a half years to solve. I thought about that case every day for two and a half years. I didn't know my victim. I had never met them before. I didn't know their family. I was just a lead detective assigned to this case. I thought about, what evidence do I have in front of me? What am I missing? What should I be doing? What should I keep pursuing? Those thoughts of persistence is what eventually led to solving the case, which was a reexamination of firearms evidence of that case that developed a lead that did solve it by being persistent over two and a half years. Thinking about that case every day made me think about, what is the family feeling on these cases? Mystery was surrounding the case. Social media is talking about things like alternate theories, accusing different people, and there's this whole cloud of what really happened. It really highlighted how I work my cases and think about how we need to be responsibly bringing families into these cases, keeping them from being forgotten and keeping focused who we work for.

What does it mean to your the families you work with that you’ve taken on these cases?

One of them that speaks a lot to me is the case that helped start Solve the Case and helped me highlight that there's things we need to be doing outside law enforcement. That was a case of a missing person, Keith Mann, who is still missing. But through building out our platform and highlighting his case and working for the families, it's allowed me to keep growing, get perspective of how these things are important to families and how having extra news coverage, having extra updates on social media, how it means a lot to the family because they see how cases aren't being forgotten. Families understand that it's just not magic, it's just not going to happen automatically. The No. 1 thing I hear them say is, we just don't want our family member to be forgotten. We can keep these cases from being forgotten.

We're excited about ways that we haven't even thought of working on these cases. We are doing a better job as a community, and I'm excited to see where we go growing forward with this.