Inside the Cold Case Foundation: The Volunteer Unit Taking On the Murders Time Forgot

When the Phone Stops Ringing

“You know the sound of a cold case? It’s not the dramatic clicking of handcuffs the thud of the gavel or a siren wailing in the distance. It’s silence.”

The Author, Matthew Jack

It’s the silence of a phone that hasn’t rung in six months. It’s the quiet shuffle of a file folder moving from the “Active” stack on a detective’s desk to the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet that smells like stale coffee and cheap metal. It’s the silence in a mother’s living room when she realizes the detective who promised her the world has retired, and the new guy doesn’t know her daughter’s name.

Every investigator worth their salt has a ghost or two — a case that wakes them up at 3:00 a.m., a face they see in the crowd. We carry them. But carrying them doesn’t solve them.

In this line of work, resources are oxygen. And in thousands of small departments across this country, the oxygen runs out fast. You get a homicide in a town with three detectives. They work it hard for two weeks. Then a robbery happens. Then a domestic assault. Then a fatal crash. The homicide file gets thinner, the leads dry up, and the budget for fancy DNA testing? It was never there to begin with.

That’s where the Cold Case Foundation steps in. They aren’t a TV show. They aren’t a bunch of internet sleuths playing detective in their pajamas. They are the cavalry for the departments that have run out of ammo.

The Origin: Bridging the Gap

The Cold Case Foundation (CCF) didn’t start in a boardroom; it started because a few retired heavy hitters in the criminal investigation world looked at the map and saw a battlefield full of holes. We call them gaps.

The reality of American policing is fragmentation. You’ve got the NYPD and the LAPD with their labs and their dedicated cold case squads. Then you’ve got the other 17,000 agencies. A sheriff’s office in rural Utah or a police department in small-town Ohio might have one detective handling everything from check fraud to murder. When a killer goes quiet, or a victim is found in the woods with no ID, those agencies hit a wall. They don’t lack heart; they lack the three M’s: Manpower, Money, and Methodology.

The Cold Case Foundation (CCF) was built to fill that void. Founded by heavyweights like retired FBI profiler Gregory Cooper, the organization is essentially a “super-squad” of retired experts — profilers, homicide detectives, forensic scientists, and legal minds — who offer their services to law enforcement agencies for free.

Their mission is simple, even if the work is hellishly complex: Assist law enforcement in closing unsolved homicides, missing persons cases, and unidentified remains cases. They exist to make sure that just because a department is small, a victim doesn’t have to be forgotten.

Operations: Not Magic, Just Method

Let’s get one thing straight, because I know how true crime media spins this stuff. The CCF doesn’t swoop in, sprinkle some “profiler dust” on a crime scene, and catch the bad guy in 42 minutes. That’s Hollywood.

Real cold case work is archaeology. It’s reading. It’s hours and hours of reading poorly handwritten notes from 1984. Thinking, it’s always thinking.

When a department reaches out to the CCF, they aren’t getting a vigilante; they’re getting a consultant. The Foundation operates on a few key pillars:

1. Case Review and Consulting: This is the bread and butter. A detective sends over the file (digitized, hopefully). The CCF experts — people who have looked at thousands of crime scenes — tear it apart. They’re looking for what we call “investigative bias.” Did the original detective get tunnel vision on the boyfriend and ignore the creepy neighbor? Did they misinterpret the blood spatter because the science back then was primitive? They provide a fresh set of eyes. And let me tell you, after thirty years in this game, I can promise you: you always miss something the first time. Always.

2. Offender Profiling: This is Greg Cooper’s wheelhouse. Profiling isn’t psychic reading. It’s behavioral analysis. It’s looking at how a crime was committed to understand who committed it. The CCF can look at a thirty-year-old murder and tell a detective, “You’re looking for a local, probably worked in construction, had a history of voyeurism, and likely inserted himself into the investigation early on.” That narrows the number of needles in the haystack.

3. Forensic Funding and Facilitation: This is the big one. The game-changer. We are living in the golden age of forensic genealogy. You’ve seen the headlines — Golden State Killer, etc. But that tech is expensive. A private lab might charge $5,000 to $10,000 to build a DNA profile from degraded bone and run the genealogy. Small-town chiefs don’t have $10,000 in the couch cushions. They worry about keeping gas in the patrol cars. The CCF raises money to pay for this testing. They connect the agency with the top-tier private labs (like Othram or Bode Technology) and foot the bill. They buy the science that solves the case.

4. Training: They teach cops how to work these cases. Because working a cold case is different than working a fresh one. In a fresh case, you’re chasing leads. In a cold case, you’re chasing ghosts. You need a different mindset.

The Impact: When the System Works

The impact of an organization like this is measured in two ways: the cases they close, and the hope they restore.

Take the case of the “Precious Jane Doe.” In 1977, the body of a young woman was found in Everett, Washington. She’d been strangled. For decades, she was just a sketch on a flyer. The Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office never gave up, but technology had to catch up. The Cold Case Foundation helped facilitate the funding and the partnership with Othram to do the advanced DNA work. In 2020, she was finally identified as 17-year-old Elizabeth “Lisa” Roberts. Identifying her didn’t bring her back. But it gave her name back. It allowed her family to stop scanning crowds looking for her face. And once you have a name, you can start looking for a killer.

Or look at the sheer volume of “stranger” rapes and murders from the 80s and 90s. Back then, we thought they were one-offs. The CCF’s experts are masters at linkage analysis — connecting a murder in Idaho to a rape in Utah to a missing person in Colorado. They see the patterns that a local cop, focused on his own jurisdiction, might miss.

They’ve helped clear suspects, too. That matters. If you’ve been living under a cloud of suspicion for twenty years because you were the ex-boyfriend, and the CCF helps prove the DNA belongs to a serial killer who was in town that weekend, they’ve given you your life back.

Friction and Reality

Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s all handshakes and high-fives. The interface between a non-profit and law enforcement is… well, complicated.

Cops are territorial. We are a suspicious bunch by nature. We don’t like outsiders touching our files. We don’t like admitting we need help. There is an ego component to this job that can be deadly to an investigation. The CCF has to navigate that minefield. They have to walk in and say, “We aren’t here to take credit. We aren’t here to make you look bad. We just want to help you close it.” That takes diplomacy. And sometimes, departments say no. Sometimes, a sheriff would rather let a case sit cold than let an “outsider” look at it. That’s the tragic reality of some in the system.

There’s also the expectation gap. True crime fans, bless your hearts, you want everything solved by next Tuesday. You donate twenty bucks and want to see an arrest. Science takes time. Genealogy takes months of building family trees. Old evidence is often degraded, lost, or contaminated. The CCF deals with the hardest of the hard cases. Their batting average is impressive, but it’s not 1.000. Nobody’s ever is.

Why This Matters to You

If you’re reading this, you probably consider yourself a true crime fan. Maybe you listen to the podcasts on your commute, or you watch the documentaries on the weekend. That’s fine. Curiosity is human. But there comes a point where you have to ask yourself: Am I just watching the tragedy, or do I want to help stop it?

The Cold Case Foundation is one of the few bridges between “entertainment” and “advocacy.” When you support an organization like this, you aren’t just buying a t-shirt. You are literally buying a DNA test kit. You are paying for a retired detective’s plane ticket to go interview a witness who is dying of cancer and wants to confess.

You are helping to level the playing field. You’re saying that a victim in a poor, rural county deserves the same justice as a victim in Beverly Hills.

The View from the Back of the Room

I’ve spent half my life in interrogation rooms and the other half in courtrooms. Wait, that’s my whole life. Well, you get my drift. I’ve seen the best of people and the worst. What scares me most isn’t the violence. It’s the forgetting. It’s the idea that if enough time passes, a murder stops being a murder and starts being a “mystery.” It becomes a story to tell around a campfire.

The Cold Case Foundation fights against the forgetting. They operate on the principle that time is not an excuse. When I look at what they do, I see the essence of the job. It’s not about the adrenaline of the chase — that fades. It’s about the stubborn, quiet refusal to let a predator sleep soundly.

It’s about walking up to a cold, gray wall of silence and chipping away at it, one file, one swab, one interview at a time, until the light shines through.

Remember, folks, every crime has a story. My mission. Tell it.

Org Snapshot: Cold Case Foundation

Organization: Cold Case Foundation

Type: Non-Profit (501c3)

Founded: 2013

Focus Areas: Investigative support, offender profiling, forensic funding, and training for law enforcement.

Notable Impact: Facilitating advanced DNA testing for identification of Jane/John Does; providing expert profiling for stalled homicide investigations; training thousands of officers in cold case methodology.

Ways to Support:

Donate: Funds go directly to forensic testing and operational costs for case reviews.

Upload: They advocate for the public to upload DNA to law-enforcement-friendly databases (like GEDmatch) if comfortable, to aid in genetic genealogy.

Advocate: Push local political representatives to fund cold case units.

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