Joe Kennedy’s career has been anything but ordinary. As a longtime investigator for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), he founded its first Cold Case Homicide Unit, chasing killers from the Philippines to Fallujah. But retirement didn’t mean slowing down. In 2014, Kennedy launched the Carolinas Cold Case Coalition, an undercover alliance of active and retired investigators who work anonymously to breathe new life into unsolved murders. Their mission? To find justice for victims long forgotten and to outsmart killers who thought they got away with murder.
Kennedy shared with A&E True Crime how today’s breakthroughs in DNA technology are reshaping cold-case investigations—and why many cases still remain frustratingly unsolved.
Why Cold Cases Go Cold
A cold case is, by definition, a murder investigation that’s either over a year old or has switched detectives without any leads. Disturbingly, there are currently 285,000 such cases in the United States. The odds of solving one are slim: only one in five will uncover a new suspect, and just one in a hundred will end in a conviction.
The reasons are often grimly simple. Evidence can be scarce, especially if the killer left no DNA at the scene. Witnesses’ memories fade or change, sometimes cracking under fear or pressure. And confessions—arguably the most powerful evidence—are rare, often lost because investigators push suspects too hard instead of building rapport. Even the original investigators, overwhelmed by a flood of cases, sometimes miss clues hidden in plain sight.
Reading the Scene: Lessons from a Veteran Investigator
Kennedy’s approach to cold cases hinges on a single belief: every crime scene tells a story if you’re willing to listen. But that patience is a luxury many detectives can’t afford. One of Kennedy’s earliest victories came in 1994, when he was called in to re-examine the murder of a naval officer in St. Thomas. The case was over a year old and stone cold. Kennedy spent 20 days doing nothing but reading reports and autopsy files, piecing together what others had missed. Within 33 days, the case was solved.
It wasn’t glamorous work. “People think cold-case work is glamorous, but it can take weeks or months of reading the files just to get up to speed,” Kennedy admits. But every hour was worth it when a small, overlooked clue—a witness’s nightmares—led them straight to the killer.
The DNA Revolution: Science Catches Up with Crime
If patience is a cold-case investigator’s greatest asset, then DNA is their secret weapon. When Kennedy first started, forensic scientists needed blood or saliva samples the size of a quarter to build a DNA profile. Today, they need less than 20 nanograms—a speck smaller than a grain of salt. This leap forward has allowed investigators to crack cases once thought unsolvable, even extracting usable DNA from decades-old evidence degraded by time and the elements.
One of the biggest game-changers, however, has been forensic genetic genealogy. The same databases millions of Americans use to trace their family trees have become hunting grounds for cold-case detectives. The method made global headlines in 2018 when it led to the capture of the Golden State Killer, a serial murderer and rapist who had eluded police for over 40 years.
Kennedy explains how it works: detectives upload DNA from a crime scene to a public genealogy database like GEDMatch. If they find a partial match, genealogists build a family tree that can point to the suspect. “A genealogist might say, ‘I think it’s one of these three brothers. I’m pretty sure it’s this one,’” says Kennedy. From there, detectives go undercover, collecting discarded coffee cups or cigarette butts to confirm the match. It’s a meticulous, high-stakes game of genetic cat and mouse.
The Invisible Army: Inside the Carolinas Cold Case Coalition
After retiring, Kennedy started getting calls from police departments across the country, desperate for help with their cold cases. That’s when he had an idea: gather an elite team of cold-case veterans who could work behind the scenes, advising detectives without ever stepping into the spotlight. The response was overwhelming.
