Patience, Legwork and a Bit of Luck: Investigating Cold Cases Without DNA

In the world of cold cases, some unsolved crimes are chillier than others. In general, more recent open cases are likely to benefit from technological advances like forensics and DNA testing, along with laws permitting evidence in court. Typically, older cold cases can require a lot of additional legwork.

A&E takes a look at three high-profile cases investigated in the last two years without DNA forensics.

In September 2004, 22-year-old Rebekah Gould went missing while on a weekend trip home from college in Melbourne, Arkansas. Days later, a search team found her badly beaten body along a rural highway outside Melbourne. From the beginning, investigators had no solid leads, and her case quickly went cold.

Nearly two decades later, true crime author and podcaster George Jared and trained criminal investigator Jen Bucholtz dug into the case and managed to help lure Gould's killer out of silence.

Bucholtz says that she first learned about the Gould case from Jared, who was featured on a true crime podcast. She reached out to him in early 2019.

They quickly connected, teamed up and started their own Facebook group, "Unsolved Murder of Rebekah Gould." Along with Gould's father, they also helped get a new investigator with fresh eyes, Mike McNeil, assigned to the case. Once on board, McNeil joined the Facebook group under a fake profile to monitor activity.

Shortly thereafter, a man named William Miller joined the Facebook page, and a colleague of Bucholtz and Jared discovered Miller was a cousin of Gould's boyfriend at the time of her murder.

A tipster who’d seen Miller in the Facebook group messaged Bucholtz that Miller had been in Melbourne the weekend of Gould's murder, and he and his family had fled the state days after she went missing. Bucholtz then put the tipster in contact with McNeil. Ten months later, McNeil arrested Miller, who provided a full confession of how he conned his way into Gould's home, beat her with a piano leg and dumped her body.

Miller pleaded guilty in 2022 and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Another cold case initially cracked after 26 years without DNA was the murder of Jasmine "Jazzy" Porter.

In February 1996, Porter was brutally raped and strangled in her Bronx apartment in front of her 5-year-old son. The case went cold until 2021, when recorded jailhouse chatter about Porter's murder was passed along to Bronx Detective Robert Klein.

Even though the conversation didn't lead directly to a suspect, it became the key to a break in the case, because it pushed Klein to reexamine the old case files and discover fingernail clippings that could be forensically tested. The DNA evidence matched a Bronx man, Gregory Fleetwood. Police say Fleetwood and Porter didn't know each other at the time of the murder.

After Fleetwood's arrest, Klein told the New York Daily News, "For families like the Porters, this [case] was never cold. Every birthday, every holiday, every anniversary of her death, every milestone with her son—it was never cold."

Fleetwood was indicted by the Bronx County D.A. in September 2022 for the second degree murder of Porter.

Investigators in the murder of a young Pennsylvania girl identified and tried a suspect after 48 years with no DNA.

In August 1975, 8-year-old Gretchen Harrington disappeared while walking to a local church for Bible camp. Her beaten body was later discovered, but with no significant evidence left at the scene, the case went cold until 2023. That year, a woman—who had also attended the Bible camp—came forward with a story of abuse and a similar near-abduction by the church's then-pastor, David Zandstra.

Authorities tracked down Zandstra with the primary purpose of getting his DNA to compare with existing evidence in the case. To their surprise during the video recorded interview, he confessed to both abusing the woman and to murdering Harrington.

In a July 2023 NPR article after Zandstra’s arrest, Pennsylvania State Police Lt. Jonathan Sunderlin stated, “Justice does not have an expiration date. Whether a crime happened fifty years ago or five minutes ago, the residents of the Commonwealth can have confidence that law enforcement will not rest until justice is served.”

But at a May 2024 pretrial hearing, Zandstra’s defense attorney disputed the confession as coerced. Zandstra went on trial in January 2025 and was acquitted.

Despite the acquittal, investigators are comparing Zandstra’s DNA to open cases in other states where he lived and ask anyone with additional information about Zandstra’s activities to contact the Pennsylvania State Police.

According to Bucholtz, working on cold cases is different than investigating current cases.  "[With current cases], new information is coming in every day and most of it remains fresh in your mind," says Bucholtz. "Digesting and absorbing the information from an older case file—that's often thousands of pages long—takes a significant amount of time and attention to detail."

Many police departments don't have the manpower or resources to dedicate one detective to a cold case, and when they do, the detective can only work on the cold case when not working current cases, so attention is intermittent.

Additionally, the more time that passes with a case that's gone cold, the more likely people associated with the case have died, relocated or become difficult to track down. And for those who are accessible, some have faded memories.

Another challenge is evidence. It can be lost or stored incorrectly, while DNA can degrade to the point of unidentifiable profiles. And if the case file itself wasn't digitized, it may have missing or deteriorated pages.

But most importantly, Bucholtz says, DNA technology can't replace an investigator's training, reasoning abilities and professional experience.

Follow-up by an investigator still must be conducted to confirm the validity of information obtained through the DNA technology. Traditional investigative methods like autopsies, neighborhood canvasses, interviews and interrogations remain vital.

Social media, too, can help authorities connect with outside experts who may be able to provide valuable insight into a case, help raise awareness, and interest and assist in locating people who may have critical information.

While advances in forensics can shed new light on cold cases, traditional investigative methods aren't going away. They're still being used every day to get cases closer to being solved