A billboard on the side of the road on California’s Central Coast led Chris Lambert on a detour three years ago from his career as a singer-songwriter and recording engineer. He created a podcast about the 1996 disappearance of college freshman Kristin Smart and it’s taken over his life.
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Dan Dow, the district attorney of San Luis Obispo County, said Paul Flores took Kristin Smart to his dorm room after a party nearly 25 years ago and attempted to rape her, killed her instead and disposed of her body with the help of his father.
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No one has been appointed to a board that is supposed to facilitate the federal government’s release of records about civil rights-era cold cases. The students who helped write the law establishing the board hope a new administration will change that.
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The prime suspect in the disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCann on Thursday lost his bid to be freed from jail, with the European Court of Justice rejecting his appeal against a separate rape conviction.
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For more than five decades, law enforcement worked to identify both the victim and perpetrator of a 1968 murder in Huntington Beach, California. After the half-century manhunt, authorities announced Thursday genetic genealogy tools helped them find the killer and identify the victim as a woman from Maine.
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The popular Netflix docuseries “Tiger King” prompted a Florida sheriff to reopen a cold case involving the missing former husband of the big cat sanctuary owner featured in the show.
Read moreA California jury awarded $50,000 in punitive damages Tuesday to the widow and estate of a crime lab worker who killed himself after being wrongly implicated in a murder investigation.
Read moreA jury of two women and five men awarded the widow of a crime lab worker implicated in a cold-case murder investigation $6 million Friday for injuries caused to the family by a San Diego Police Department detective’s investigation.
Read moreThe wife of a retired San Diego Police Department crime lab worker implicated in a cold-case murder investigation when his sperm turned up on retested evidence decades later asked a jury Thursday to award her $12 million for suffering she claims caused her husband to kill himself.
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John Feit, the former Catholic priest who spent more than five decades shrouded in suspicion for his involvement in the 1960 murder of McAllen schoolteacher Irene Garza, died in prison on Tuesday. He was 87.
Read moreDuring terse questioning by a San Diego city attorney Tuesday, the widow of a crime lab worker said she and her husband didn’t seek a court order for the return of their property seized in a cold-case murder investigation because the detective on the case told them it would be given back.
Read moreAsked to look at the contents of a tattered box set on the witness stand filled with photos and personal items seized under a warrant he signed in the investigation of a cold-case murder, a retired San Diego Police Department detective said Thursday the items should not have been seized.
Read moreA San Diego Police Department detective who investigated one of his own – retired criminalist Kevin Brown – in a cold case murder investigation sat in court Monday in the first day of a wrongful death trial brought by Brown’s widow.
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The two cops — the cold case detective from Virginia and the evidence technician from Alaska — had a mission. Sift through more than a decade of grim stories from this small city set between the Bering Strait and Alaska’s western tundra.
Read moreKeep him talking, don’t interrupt him and, no matter what, don’t ask why he killed his victims.
Read moreA nonprofit group and a computer algorithm are helping Chicago detectives review dozens of cold murder cases by revealing potential connections.
Read moreFor decades, rumors swirled around who was behind the 1960 bombing that killed a black housewife in Ringgold, Georgia. A document recently uncovered by Courthouse News points to the Ku Klux Klan.
Read moreConceived by a group of New Jersey high school students, a bill President Donald Trump signed this week mandates the public disclosure of the FBI’s closed case files on murders of black people during the civil rights movement.
Read moreA Ninth Circuit hearing Thursday focused on what a San Diego detective knew as it considered whether officers who sought a search warrant to investigate a retired criminalist’s home after his DNA connected him to a cold case murder investigation should be entitled to qualified immunity.
Read moreRebuking her colleagues for piercing press-shield laws to help prosecutors close a 22-year-old cold case, a judge accused New York’s highest court on Wednesday of undermining a tradition dating back to pre-Revolutionary times.
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