ABSTRACT
There are many advantages to reviewing a case that is “cold” rather than “hot”: chief among them being that in most cases, a homicide has occurred and the body of the victim has been recovered and identified. Conversely, in cold cases involving missing persons, although the victim’s identity is known, the body has not yet been recovered. The lack of a victim’s body presents daunting challenges to investigators. First, without a body it is unclear if the victim is deceased. Second, without a victim’s body investigators may not be able to determine where the individual originally disappeared from, thus they cannot make an accurate assessment of the crime scene and the risk level of the offender. Additionally, if the body of a victim is not recovered at the time a case review is commenced, it is impossible to narrow the field of suspects when considering who may have had access to the site where the victim disappeared from, the homicide site, and the dump site (if in fact all these locations are independent of one another). Last, without the recovery of a body, there is often a complete lack of physical, forensic evidence.
