LMPD''s Cold Case DNA Project

The purpose of this project is to investigate violent crime cold cases with state of the art DNA analysis, successfully prosecute offenders, and provide families with a sense of closure. LMPD has 523 violent crime cold cases. The goal is to actively investigate a minimum of 54 cold cases that have the highest potential to be resolved using DNA evidence.
In order to accomplish this, 50 officers and staff from the Major Crimes Division will be involved in various roles while working 6760 overtime hours. The Cold Case Squad sergeant will act as the project manager, and seven other commanding officers will guide the project. In all, twenty-seven detectives will investigate cases that have been proceeds through a screening process to rate the solvability of each case if state of the art DNA analysis were used on existing evidence. This may require travel to interview witnesses and suspects, and to obtain DNA samples. Approximately twenty Mitochondrial DNA test will be funded during this project, and additional DNA analysis will be provided free of charge by the Kentucky State Police forensics lab.

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