LANSING — The state's latest budget directs $250,000 to the State Police unit charged with solving cold cases in nine counties in and around Lansing, part of an effort to reduce a growing number of unsolved homicides.
The newly budgeted funds, allocated to Michigan State Police's First District Cold Case Unit, come at a time when unsolved homicides have become "an epidemic" locally and throughout the country, State Police Det. Sgt. Larry Rothman said.
"And those numbers are still going up for various reasons, even though we have probably better ways to investigate crimes and things like that, with DNA and all those sorts of things," he said.
Nearly 340,000 cases of homicide and non-negligent manslaughter went unsolved in the U.S. from 1965 to 2022, according to FBI Data shared by The Murder Accountability Project. There are about 19,000 unsolved murders in Michigan spanning from 1980-2019, according to Project: Cold Case.
Rothman, who leads the First District cold case team investigating cold cases in Ingham, Eaton, Clinton, Jackson, Hillsdale, Lenawee, Monroe, Washtenaw and Livingston counties, said the statewide total includes "approximately 63" cases his unit is currently charged with investigating.
"Those are just cases being covered by the Michigan State Police," Rothman said, noting local police departments have their own cold caseloads.
Local police departments did not receive earmarked funding for cold cases.
Read more: 50 years ago, MSU student Henry Baltimore Jr. 'disappeared with no trace'
Read more: Lansing's 67 cold cases each 'a hundred piece puzzle'
Funding is part of a larger appropriation for cold cases
The $250,000 going to the State Police's First District Cold Case Unit is part of $1 million in the $82.5 billion state budget allocated to cold case efforts, said Shanon Banner, director of communications for the State Police. Of that:
- $400,000 will be distributed evenly to the cold case course programs at Western Michigan University and Northern Michigan University for programmatic and operational expenses;
- $200,000 will go to the State Police's Forensic Science Division;
- $400,000 will be allocated to the State Police's Special Investigation Division and $250,000 must be used to support cold case investigations handled by the First District team in Lansing.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed the new budget on July 24. It's still unclear how the First District's cold case team will use the money it's getting. Banner said she was unable to provide those details at this time.
Missing in Michigan: 5 missing-person cases that remain unsolved
'Somebody ... knows something:' 33 years after Paige Renkoski disappeared, a documentary is in the works
Cold cases are time-consuming, challenging
All of the cases Rothman's team is investigating are more than a decade old, and the oldest dates to the 1960s.
The cases are time-consuming, he said. Investigating one often starts with the review of thousands of pages of documentation.
"It's not like a crime that just occurred," Rothman said.
Cold case detectives, of which the First District has two, work closely with the State Police's sole analyst dedicated to cold cases throughout the state to locate potential witnesses and seek them out.
"Whenever you're working on a cold case, a good detective will start from square one, and you have to often re-interview everybody," Rothman said.
It's not uncommon to investigate one cold case for several years, he said.
"The cases are prioritized based on the amount of evidence, the amount of information that we have, whether we still have viable witnesses, whether there are witnesses that are still alive, and can still be interviewed, things like that," Rothman said.
Contact Rachel Greco at rgreco@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @GrecoatLSJ .
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Michigan has 'epidemic' of cold case homicides. State budget targets unsolved Lansing-area murders
Most Popular
Comments / 0