2 New York cold cases dating back to 1970s solved thanks to DNA evidence: police

What they're not telling you: DNA Solved Two Cold Cases From 1970s New York—But The Real Story Is How Long Justice Took New York police announced this week that DNA evidence has finally identified perpetrators in two separate homicides dating to 1975 and 1977, cases that remained unsolved for nearly fifty years while victims' families waited for answers that institutional indifference made nearly impossible to obtain. The cases—both involving murders that occurred during the mid-1970s in New York jurisdictions—were closed only after DNA technology became standard investigative practice, meaning that for decades, the evidence necessary to identify the killers existed in the biological material collected at crime scenes but remained untested and catalogued in evidence storage. The New York Police Department and the District Attorney's office handling these cases never initiated the DNA analysis until very recently, a delay that raises immediate questions about case management protocols, evidence preservation standards, and the prioritization of cold cases within the criminal justice system.

What the Documents Show

What the mainstream reporting on these "solved" cases glosses over is the institutional lag time itself. DNA profiling became widely available to law enforcement by the early 1990s and was legally validated before that. Yet these cases sat in evidence lockers for twenty to thirty years after technology existed to identify the perpetrators. The question is not whether DNA works—it clearly does—but why two separate New York prosecutorial offices did not proactively review their decades-old homicide files for testable biological evidence once that technology became routine. The NYPD and the District Attorney's office involved in these cases did not volunteer to conduct this testing.

Follow the Money

There is no public record indicating that an internal review or cold case initiative triggered the DNA work. The reporting suggests that circumstance, not systematic case review, finally prompted the analysis. This distinction matters enormously: it means that hundreds—possibly thousands—of other cold cases from the same era in New York and across the country may contain untested evidence that could identify perpetrators today if someone made the deliberate choice to prioritize that work. The families of the 1975 and 1977 victims have now waited nearly half a century for identification of their relatives' killers. During that time, they had no closure, no court proceedings, no opportunity to confront the accused or hear evidence presented. They were not failed by DNA technology or by forensic science.

What Else We Know

They were failed by a prosecutorial and police bureaucracy that did not treat their cases—which involved the deliberate killing of human beings—as worthy of systematic investigative attention once the initial leads ran dry. This is not negligence. This is a choice about resource allocation that values convenience over justice. --- THE TAKE --- What strikes me most about these "solved" cases is that they are not actually solved—they are merely identified. The real institutional failure is that New York law enforcement had the capacity to identify these perpetrators for three decades and chose not to. The pattern here is straightforward: when cases go cold and initial investigative work stalls, prosecutors and police move on to new cases that offer easier closure metrics and better resource efficiency.

Primary Sources

• Source: Google News (True Crime)
• Category: True Crime
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