Everywhere, all over America, the percentage of unsolved murders has been slowly creeping up. Right now, more than a third of all murder cases go cold. And yet, as fewer and fewer murders are solved, and the number of cold cases increases, all around the country police departments are allowing their Cold Case Squads to also slowly disintegrate.

But not everywhere. For the past year I have been putting together a list of Cold Case Squads.

Two years ago, Major John Newsom and the detectives of the Warren County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Squad began re-investigating the 1999 murder of Troy Temar. On Tuesday they arrested a brother and sister for the murder.

From yesterday’s Cincinnati Enquirer. “When Donna Temar received a detective’s call that her son’s 6-year-old homicide may have been solved, she felt like a “1,000-pound weight” had been lifted from her heart.”

Donna Temar’s son Troy.

Good work, Warren County.

The NYPD says this is their first mugshot. I found an 1857 New York Times article announcing a Daguerreotype Gallery of Criminals at the Detective Police Office, though. I wish the police department were hoarders. What a treasure that collection would have been if only they had saved it.

“I know that we actually made a difference and we really did put evil people away. I take great satisfaction from that. Not everyone can say they brought evil men to justice, but we did. I still go on line to the NY Department of Corrections web site and check where all my bad guys are.” – Vinnie Nitti, retired Cold Case Squad detective.

He’s talking about Inmate Lookup. I used that a lot while researching the 1951 case I wrote about in this book. I was sure that some of the people the police questioned back then would one day end up in prison.

Click here to look up Federal inmates.

Click here to look up New York State inmates.

I can’t post them all, but if you want to find prisoners in your state, go to Google and, depending on where you live, type: California inmate lookup, etc.

On the evening of 9/11 I walked downtown along the Hudson River, thinking I would sneak into ground zero and somehow help. I was stopped at Pier 40, at Houston Street. Only recovery workers could go below Houston.

Pier 40 was one of the command posts where rescue workers came to rest before going back in. I ended up staying there most of the night. Every few minutes someone like myself would come up to see if they could help (or if they could go home). Everyone was turned away, but before heading back up the highway they’d shake a rescue workers hand and say “thank you.”

Now it was mostly cops at Pier 40, and there has always been an adversarial relationship between the public and police here in New York. So the cops just stood there completely dumbfounded. They didn’t know what to make of it. “No one’s ever thanked us before,” they’d say. But they were beyond belief pleased, embarrassed and touched, and at the same time they were trying very hard not to show it. It had always been “us vs them” and now here was “them” making these macho guys choke back tears.

The next day I came back and there were about a half a dozen people on the highway, holding up handwritten signs that said “thank you” to every rescue worker coming in and out the the site. Remembering the reaction I saw the night before I joined them. So did hundreds, sometimes thousands of others. The cheers and the clapping became a roar. I went back to the highway and held up thank you signs every day or night for the next couple of months.

It was intense. You could smell the fire on the guys who passed by on foot. No one was bothering to hold back tears anymore. They’d take one look at the signs, burst into tears, and say, “You’re welcome.” I will never forget one cop driving by slowly — traffic often moved slowly because there were so many people heading in to help — and she was just sobbing, all the way down into what was then called the pile (later it became the hole).

But usually, if they were in trucks or some sort of emergency vehicle, they’d make the most noise they could. Convoys of dumptrucks and cranes, blaring their horns, miles of ambulances and emergency vehicles from all over the country, sirens going, us screaming, “Thank you Sanitation,” (Dept. of Sanitation) or “Thank you NYPD,” depending on who was going by, and everyone giving everyone else the thumbs up sign. We were saying to each other, “We’re going to get through this.”

9/11/05. Every year, on the corner of Christopher Street and the highway, people come back and hold up thank you signs.