A cold case reopening is usually reported as a step towards an answer, and the answer implied is always the same one: the name of the killer. In this archive that is mostly not what came back. Ten cases were reopened, re-examined or resubmitted for modern DNA testing, and between them they produced a victim's name, an exclusion, a second offender, the conviction of a man who never killed anybody, and in three cases nothing at all.
Only rarely was the question the lab answered the question the case had been opened to settle.
## Three times it named the dead instead
John Wayne Gacy was executed in 1994. In 2011 the Cook County Sheriff's Office reopened the case, not to establish who had killed the thirty-three young men, which was not in doubt, but to find out who some of them were. Families of men who had vanished in Chicago in the 1970s were asked to submit DNA.
Herb Baumeister shot himself in Ontario in 1996 to avoid arrest, so there was never a trial. In 2022 the Hamilton County coroner reopened the identification work on some ten thousand bone fragments recovered from his property using modern DNA, and has since put names to further victims. That work is still going on.
Terry Peder Rasmussen died in prison in 2010, having been convicted once, of a murder in California. In 2017, seven years after his death, DNA linked him to the four bodies found in barrels near Bear Brook State Park in New Hampshire, and the state Attorney General has since named him as the man responsible for all four. He was never charged with any of them.
In all three the reopening was an identification exercise rather than an investigation. Nobody was looking for a suspect. The dead were the unknown quantity.
## Twice it took a series apart
The Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders were a series of at least seven deaths in northern California in the early 1970s. In 2021 investigators announced that DNA had connected one of them, the killing of Jeannette Kamahele, to a separate offender. The reopening did not identify the killer of the series; it removed a case from it.
The Chicago Strangler is a disputed cluster of more than fifty deaths from 2001 onwards. DNA has connected some of them to different men, and the Chicago Police Department has consistently maintained that there is no evidence of a single offender at all, that the deaths span too long a period and too wide an area. Here the testing worked against the premise of the case rather than towards a name.
## Once it cleared the suspect, and once it convicted a man who had killed nobody
The Alphabet murders in Rochester, New York remain unsolved. The principal suspect died in 1986. The most persistent of the others was Kenneth Bianchi, one of the Hillside Stranglers, who had been living in Rochester at the time and drove for an ambulance company. DNA excluded him in 2007. Both of the case's leading candidates are now gone, one to death and one to a laboratory result, and there is no third.
The Yorkshire Ripper inquiry was misdirected for years by a hoaxer who sent the police a cassette recording, and Peter Sutcliffe, a Bradford man, was interviewed nine times and released each time partly because the voice on the tape was from Wearside. He was convicted of thirteen murders in 1981. In 2006, twenty-five years later, DNA identified the hoaxer as John Humble, and he was convicted. It is the one reopening in this group that ended in a conviction, and the man convicted had not killed anyone.
## Three times it produced nothing
The Freeway Phantom killed six girls in Washington in 1971 and 1972 and has never been identified. The case was reopened in 2018 and again in 2023, with congressional interest and a re-examination of the surviving evidence for DNA. It is still open.
The New Bedford Highway Killer left eleven bodies along the roads of southeastern Massachusetts in 1988 and 1989. The case was reviewed in 2019 and evidence was submitted for modern DNA testing. It remains unsolved.
Wayne Williams was convicted in 1982 of two murders and the Atlanta child murders were closed on the strength of it. The fibre evidence has been criticised, several of the victims' families have never accepted the closures, and by some accounts killings continued after his arrest. In 2019 the City of Atlanta and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation reopened the evidence for modern DNA testing. Nothing has been resolved either way.
## What the ten say together
The phrase modern DNA testing implies a case waiting to be finished, and there is a version of the cold case story in which the box comes down off the shelf and the name is inside it. The archive supports that version far less often than it supports a quieter one.
What these reopenings mostly recovered was administrative. Who the body was. Which case did not belong in the series. Which suspect could be crossed off. Whether the conviction on file would survive being looked at again. Three of the ten concerned men who were already dead when the testing began, and could not have been charged whatever the result.
The evidence had been sitting in storage the whole time in every one of these cases. What changed was not the material but what could be read from it, and what could be read from it turned out to answer the smaller questions first.