Dashed Hopes and Big Breaks: What It’s Like to Work on Cold Cases

Thomas Elfmont, a retired Los Angeles police officer, was living in Bozeman, Mont., when the local sheriff invited him to lunch. Over Mexican food, the sheriff described the murder of a 15-year-old girl that rocked a nearby small town almost 30 years ago and had never been solved. The sheriff asked: Would Mr. Elfmont take it on?

Fascinated and believing he could make a difference, Mr. Elfmont accepted.

“I was just determined, even with the roadblocks that I faced, that I was going to get the guy that did this,” Mr. Elfmont said.

In a span of eight days this month, law enforcement announced key breakthroughs in at least four homicides after decades without arrests. In California, the police charged a 75-year-old man in the 1973 murder of Nina Fischer. In Texas, the police named suspects in two separate murders — of Susan Leigh Wolfe and Terri McAdams — from the 1980s. And in Montana, Mr. Elfmont believes he found who killed Danielle Houchins in 1996.

This series of discoveries may seem like an encouraging turn of events in the world of cold cases. But in reality, even with advances in forensic technology, such breakthroughs are rare. Many American law enforcement agencies have no teams dedicated to such cases, and there remain hundreds of thousands of unsolved homicides across the country.

Among the ranks of America’s cold-case investigators are retired police officers working for free; on-duty detectives and members of dedicated cold-case units; and sometimes even civilian consultants who earn the trust of police forces to work a case.

The work, investigators who have experience with such cases say, is not for everyone, involving a lot of hours and sleepless nights. Investigators have to interview witnesses multiple times and work with new technology to uncover leads in ways that were not possible when the case first opened.