One of the Cold Case guys posted this in the comment section.

“Three homicides that happened on Christmas day (RoseMarie and Thomas Uva and Nickolas Guido) have been investigated by the Queens Cold Case Squad and arrests have been made.”

Good work, Queens Cold Case!!

I looked at the unsolved murders between 1985 and 2003, and found that 54% of the cases that went cold happened in the street, on a subway, in a park, or in an abandoned building. Places where a witness, if there was one, most likely didn’t know or recognize the murderer or the victim, and evidence is harder to collect.

Later, at John Jay College I found a 1994 doctoral thesis about unsolved murder that said, “murder in residences not only accounted for the most frequent murder location but stood the greatest chance of being solved when compared to other locations.”

As a last resort, some families put up billboards asking for information and offering rewards. I’m collecting pictures of these kinds of billboards for a presentation. If you have pictures to share, thank you, and please email me.

Below is a more homemade version. Five children went missing from the West Virginia home of the Sodder family in 1945. I’m working on a story about this. The family kept the billboard up for 44 years, and only took it down when both parents were dead. People who grew up in the area still talk about what happened. The Sodder children are the West Virginia version of Etan Patz, a 6-year-old boy who went missing in New York in 1979. If you grew up seeing the signs asking for information, you never forgot it.

A police poster for Etan Patz (still missing, presumed dead).

You can register in advance for the “100 Years of Unsolved Murder” panel by calling: 212-817-8215. The program number is 6048.

Or, you can go here: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/cepp/courses/history.html#11

Find the listing for “The Restless Sleep,” click on the name, and then chose one of several options offered there. The event is $15, $10 for students.