JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Providing new hope for local families whose loved ones have been killed, the State Attorney’s Office for Florida’s 4th Judicial Circuit has been awarded a $470,000 grant to take another look at cold cases.
The three-year grant, provided by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance, will provide funding to help Jacksonville-area prosecutors re-examine DNA evidence to investigate and prosecute cold cases dating back decades.
Unsolved homicides are considered cold cases after three years.
In the grant application, prosecutors said they identified more than 740 pending cold cases between 1995 and 2016. Ninety of those were “close contact” homicides containing DNA.
“Family members never forget. And neither do we,” said State Attorney Melissa Nelson, whose office began its Cold Case Initiative in 2017. “Cold cases are challenging to investigate and rewarding to solve. This funding will help us continue our search for truth and bring answers to their loved ones.”
Nelson also told News4Jax her team already has cases that she thinks this will help solve.
“This is important work,” she said. “Obviously, the Department of Justice has recognized its importance, and I feel very good about the team of lawyers and detectives in our work with FDLE (Florida Department of Law Enforcement), the state lab.”
University of Florida law students are also a part of the project, providing a fresh set of eyes on older cases.
To prioritize the cases, prosecutors have a scale based on solvability, so the cases with the most promising evidence will be looked at first.
Nelson’s office pointed out DNA has already helped solve several high-profile local cases, including the 1984 sexual battery and murder of a 10-year-old girl and the 1998 kidnapping of a newborn from a hospital.
“Yes, they’re cold cases. They are. But they’re still people,” said Michelle James, whose mother Valerie Ames was stabbed to death in a Riverside apartment in 1996.
The killing of the 31-year-old mother of two is still unsolved. James, who was 5 when her mother was murdered, is holding onto hope the grant may bring her family closure.
“I want justice. I want an arrest. Yes, I do. More than anything, I want a name so I can put that name to that face,” James said. “There’s so many facts and things that we know about what happened to my mother that leads us to believe that, yes, there’s plenty that could be brought to the table to solve her case.”
Ryan Backmann is the founder and executive director of Project Cold Case, a nonprofit that works with police, prosecutors and families. He started the organization after his father Cliff Backmann’s 2009 murder, which remains unsolved.
“The technology is advancing so quickly that DNA tested two years ago might already be ready to be retested,” Backmann said.
He thinks this could help police and prosecutors get new leads and suspects, noting Jacksonville has more than 1,500 unsolved homicides.
“All of this new technology is state of the art, but it’s also extremely expensive, so when you have a grant that’s willing to cover that stuff, that’s no longer an excuse,” Backmann said. “So we can go right to the nitty-gritty of getting any of these cases that have DNA tested with the latest technology.”
Anyone with information about unsolved cases can call First Coast Crime Stoppers at 1-866-845-TIPS (8477). Tipsters can remain anonymous and could be eligible for a reward if an arrest is made.