Cold Case Unit in Asheville, NC

Although television plays up police work with sex appeal and fast action, real life police work involves plenty of research and even more patience.

“There’s somebody that knows something,” said Detective Yvonne Cobourn of the Asheville Police Department. “It’s just them, at some point, they’re recollecting their memory, guilt. Perhaps they think, ‘Well, you know, I think I saw this that night, but, you know, it’s pretty horrifying, and I don’t want to get involved or I really don’t want to think about that.’”

Cobourn works in the cold case unit. The APD started the unit in July 2008. The unit focuses on both unsolved murders and active homicides.

“Well, our youngest cold cases are 2007,” she said.

A case becomes cold depending entirely on the available evidence, according to Criminal Investigations Division Capt. Tim Splain.

“There’s no timeline,” Splain said. “It’s just that when there is no longer any workable evidence, any leads that can be followed, any contemporary work that can be done, then it’s considered cold.”

Currently, Cobourn and partner Kevin Taylor investigate 23 cold cases. But in reviewing the case files for further investigations, Cobourn said they started looking at old cold case files.

“We just started reviewing cases and as we reviewed the cases, and found that there were still things to follow up on and things to do, we started actively doing those things,” she said.

Splain further elaborated on how the unit started.

“Some of the ones that went back 20 years or more were in file boxes and were somewhat disorganized. That was their (the detectives) first job was to take all that information in and catalog it and put it together,” he said. “After that, there was a look through, and start looking at the cases based on solvability factor. You know, what did we know about the victims, what did we know about potential suspects. You know, did we still have people involved in that case that were still living that we could talk to.”

The third person in the unit, Frances Morris, deals with the forensics side of solving the cases, according to Cobourn.

“And then that’s where Fran Morris comes into play, where we will tend to locate the evidence that we may have and look at it, process it with new techniques if it hasn’t been done,” Cobourn said.

After that, the detectives decide whether or not to send the evidence to the lab, which includes the SBI and FBI, according to Cobourn.

Working with forensics since 2001, Morris said her job involves more than just collecting DNA.

“It’s our job to document by photos, video or sketches, to preserve physical evidence through careful packaging, to collect physical evidence and to process,” she said.

Forensic technicians collect fingerprints, impressions from tires and shoes, as well as various types of DNA including blood, semen, hair, fiber and touch, according to Morris.

“I see the use of technology becoming an important tool in forensic analysis, such as DNA, fingerprints, shoe/tire tread impressions,” she said. “The biggest problem I see is computer incompatibility. For example, there (are) multiple companies that produce software for fingerprint databases, but if different agencies have different systems and they aren’t compatible, that’s extremely limiting in the amount of information one can access.”

Processing DNA can take a lot longer than what many television shows portray, according to Splain.

“That’s one of the things that works against us. There’s a big public perception now with the media that we can do all these great and wonderful things, and the reality is if I send any evidence off to be analyzed, it will probably be a year before I hear about the results. That’s just because of the backlog from the State Bureau of Investigation,” Splain said.

Although DNA helps solve cases, the detectives usually do not know how the case will end, according to Cobourn.

“We never know what’s really going to solve it, you know, until we get into it and we start working on it. It could be DNA, it could just simply be time,” Cobourn said.

Additionally, at least one person knows something about the crime, according to Cobourn. This information, Cobourn said, solves the cases.

“Not if or who, we know there is somebody out there,” she said.