We like a program through the Northern Michigan University Criminal Justice Department that assists law enforcement agencies in solving real-life crimes. We’re referring to the cold case program, which has recently helped solve a 39-year-old cold case from 1986, back far enough to be considered investigative permafrost.

The cold case program has been in operation since 2022, instructor Christopher MacMaster told The Mining Journal. It helps local police agencies do something that most simply don’t have the resources to undertake, he said.

“Police and local agencies have limited resources,” said MacMaster. “They need to handle what comes in the door. The time, effort and resources needed to look at these cold cases is just not there. They just don’t have those resources available.”

The department looks at one cold case a semester, but has just recently expanded it to two. The program is not allowed to analyze actual evidence of the case so they use pictures and paper work. One of the main challenges with working on a cold case is how dated they are, most of the time all of the paper evidence and reports are held in boxes, making the first challenge to digitize them and adapt them to modern technology and then to utilize more modern techniques to make headway.

“Regarding the case we solved, when the case happened the DNA was not in existence in terms of investigative purposes. As time went along, state police did do follow up work on this case … on the DNA and were able to clear the suspects in 2010,” he said. “But at that point in 2010, forensic investigative genetic genealogy was not in play and did not exist. So all investigative leads were exhausted.”

Eventually when the case was assigned to the NMU group, they used forensic investigative genetic genealogy to solve the case.

This is an outstanding way for a public institution such as NMU to actually get involved in local police work in solving pending cases, no matter how cold they are. We wish them continued success.