I’ve been hard at work preparing the following event. This is the one to go to — I got four incredible people to agree to participate.

Wednesday, November 16, 7:00PM
100 Years of Unsolved Murder in New York
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Public Programs, 365 Fifth Avenue (between 34th and 35th). $15, $10 for students.

I’m the moderator, and the panelists are:

Vito Spano, former Cold Case Squad Commanding Officer, now a Chief Investigator for the Office of New York State Attorney General.

Dr. Robert C. Shaler, former head of Forensic Biology, Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, New York City, now the director of the Forensic Science Program at Pennsylvania State University, and author of Who They Were: Inside the World Trade Center DNA Story (Free Press).

W. Mark Dale, former Director of the New York State Police Laboratory System and the New York City Police Department Laboratory, now the Director of the Northeast Regional Forensic Institute at Albany.

David Feige, former Trial Chief of The Bronx Defenders, and now on the faculty of the National Criminal Defense College, David is currently at work on the forthcoming book, Indefensible (Little, Brown & Co., 2006).

I was just posting about the holidays on my personal blog, and it reminded me that 59 of the murders that went cold in New York (since 1985) happened on Christmas Eve and Christmas day, and 18 on New Year’s Eve.

Happy holidays.

Based on the number of homicides in America, I estimate that 6,000 murder cases are going cold every year.

(My computer is in the shop, by the way. That’s why I am posting less, and will be posting less for the next week. Hopefully it will only be a week.)

This is Bill Miller, the last person to see Jean Sanseverino alive in 1951. (I wrote about Jean in the book.) For the longest time I didn’t know who this was. The picture was in the case files without a caption or explanation. Then, a year into my research I read a witness statement that described Bill Miller as missing three teeth and part of his thumb.

The 1951 detectives narrowed their search down to four persons of interest (these are people detectives are not ready to call suspects). Bill Miller was one of their favorites.