How to Solve a Cold Case: And Everything Else You Wanted To Know About Catching Killers

By Michael Arntfield

Shortlisted for The Brass Knuckles Award for Best Nonfiction Crime Book, Crime Writers of Canada Awards

Get inside the mind of an elite cold case investigator and learn how to solve a murder.

Despite advances in DNA evidence and forensic analysis, almost half of murder cases in Canada and the US remain unsolved. By 2016, the solved rate had dropped so significantly in the United States that it was the lowest in recorded history, with one in two killers never even identified, much less arrested and successfully prosecuted. And the statistics are just as bad in Canada.

As a sought-after global expert and former detective, Arntfield has devoted his career to helping solve cold cases and serial murders, including the creation of the Western University Cold Case Society, which pairs students with police detectives to help solve crimes.

In How to Solve a Cold Case, Arntfield outlines the history of cold case squads in Canada and the US, and lays out the steps to understanding and solving crime. Arntfield shows you what to look for, how to avoid common mistakes, recognize patterns and discover what others have missed. Weaving in case studies of cold crimes from across Canada and the US, as well as a chapter on how armchair detectives can get involved, How to Solve a Cold Case is a must-read for mystery fans and true crime buffs everywhere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781443459389

Michael Arntfield

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD is a cop-turned-criminologist and professor at Western University, where he founded the Cold Case Society, an unsolved-crimes college think tank. He is also a director with the Murder Accountability Project in Washington, DC, has served as a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University and has trained police around the world on cold case serial homicides, including as a speaker at the FBI Academy in Quantico. The author of over a dozen true crime books and criminology textbooks, he makes regular appearances on the Discovery Channel, Investigation Discovery and Oxygen, and is a staple expert on crime in both American and Canadian media. Visit him at michaelarntfield.com. 

Book preview

Introduction

The Killer Inside Us

No one saw it coming. Rather, no one saw him coming. No one even knew he existed. And then, all of sudden, everyone did. Sort of. His name was just about everywhere.

He went from being a hardscrabble nobody, already doing life at California State Prison for the murders of three women everyone had long since forgotten, to being mainstream news—a household name for all the wrong reasons. Samuel Little came out of nowhere and caught everyone flat-footed. The overtime bill on damage control for the police publicity machine across the United States went through the roof. The PR disasters and police shootings of 2020 that led to the Defund the Police mantra were one thing (a thing I will discuss again later), but this was something else entirely. A failure that was more insidious. A multi-generational failure that had no accompanying body cam or smartphone footage primed to go viral, but that was, at least for those paying attention, just as damning. Sam Little was a microcosm of the murder problem in North America, one which most people don’t even know exists.

The FBI’s own official mantra, more of a recurring credo, is still that only one in every one hundred murders, solved or not—about 1 percent on average—is the work of a serial killer. Ask the chief or commissioner of just about any major metropolitan police department in America if they have a serial killer on the loose or are looking to connect any unsolved cold cases to a serial killer who has since slipped off their radar, and you have few, if any, who’d agree to such a notion. They would cite that same credo and dubious statistic—that serial killers are a statistical rarity and otherworldly criminal anomaly—to quell anxiety and tamp down public panic. Serial killers, they’d say, are a known quantum, and they simply don’t exist in your town. Maybe in other towns, but not in your town. But then Sam Little came along. Or rather, not so much came along, but was asked the right questions by the right cop and finally spilled the beans. It’s amazing how many cases still get solved that way.

In May of 2018, Little, a former gravedigger and ambulance attendant who had been confined to a wheelchair and suffering from advanced diabetes while professing his innocence since being convicted for three murders in the fall of 2012, finally realized the jig was up. He eventually copped to not only the three sex slayings for which he’d been properly tried and convicted in California, but also, in speaking to a firebrand Texas Ranger named James Holland, with whom he’d go on to have a key confessional relationship, to the 1994 murder of a woman named Denise Brothers in Odessa, Texas. That was the first time Little’s involvement in a cold case came to Holland’s attention, and his line of questioning soon got the ball rolling on dozens of other unsolved murders and unidentified Jane Doe cases in cities and towns across the United States. Soon, it seemed, Little couldn’t stop talking.

Little wasn’t the first serial killer to revel in the process of jailhouse confession writ large. Not by a long shot. Fellow serial murdering contemptible and ensuing media darling Ted Bundy, as well as Deadly Drifter Henry Lee Lucas—someone you’d think was straight out of central casting for 1970s hillbilly horror movies—both confessed to (or at least hinted at) other victims all over the map. In the case of Lucas, his confessions included literally thousands of victims of various sex murders he claimed to have committed as part of a psychopathic attention-seeking ruse that has, in large part, fuelled the urban legend that serial killers want to be caught and are primarily driven by publicity. Not true. False confessions by Lucas-type killers, while rare, are driven for the most part by the same pathology that leads them, when not in jail, to bombard their co-workers, friends, neighbours, and lovers with overstated achievements, fake credentials, and manufactured successes for much of their lives. These are the hallmarks of a psychopath, and psychopaths are, at least anecdotally, thought to be responsible for most serial murders and, by extension, are behind most crimes that become cold cases. More on that later, too.

Psychopaths like Bundy and Lucas and many others have confessed to crimes they didn’t commit in order to serve their own egos and rational self-interest: to make themselves invaluable to law enforcement or to delay their executions for the killings for which they’d actually been arrested and convicted. Such manipulators string cops along with specious stories just detailed enough to be believable, but also just vague enough to merit further interviews, so they can spend their days in the comparatively comfy confines of an interview room, enjoying taxpayer-funded McDonald’s meals and Marlboros, rather than in a prison cell. In Bundy’s case, his subterfuge and delay tactics became increasingly obvious, and he rode the lightning as scheduled in the Florida electric chair on Friday, January 24, 1989—a day coined Fry Day by the celebratory tailgaters gathered outside the prison walls. Lucas, on the other hand, eventually had his death sentence commuted to life in prison. He later died of a heart attack, long after his thousands of confessions, taken at face value by cops eager to clear cold case murders nationwide, turned out to be completely false. Nonetheless, Lucas was no small-timer. He might not have killed the thousands he claimed, but he was likely good for at least a dozen murders, most of them sex slayings. His first victim was his own mother.

Samuel Little turned out to be different. Since the heyday of phony confessions in the 1980s, the process for vetting prisoner confessions and identifying false ones has improved, and digital record management systems have emerged among law enforcement agencies. So in 2018, Little’s stories, even with spotty details, were more easily corroborated by investigators. Given the history of convicted serial killers trying to inflate their body counts, some skeptics naturally first thought Little might also be toying with police. But before long, his stories of sex crimes spanning the entire nation over three decades took on the unmistakable ring of truth. Soon Little had accounted for more than ninety victims across at least fourteen states between 1970 and 2005, victims consigned to the dustbins of history in a nation consistently clocking upwards of sixteen thousand criminal homicides a year—every year.

We can now accurately estimate that serial killers like Little are likely responsible for about one in twenty of these cases, not one in one hundred as stated in earlier FBI publicity materials. One in twenty may not sound like a lot, but the damage is cumulative, both to the communities these killers ravage and to the criminal justice system as a whole. It also means serial killers are responsible for far more murders, including unsolved murders, than previously estimated. The net result is that they create an overall drag on the annual solved murder rate while at the same time generating a disproportionate number of cold cases; they distract, misdirect, and introduce chaos into an already chaotic and disorganized criminal justice system. Many jurisdictions are still rooted in moving around paper and fail to report annual murders to the federal government, meaning annual murder statistics are more estimates than concrete, verifiable numbers—and it’s getting worse.

By virtue of their abnormality, unpredictability, and disruptive nature, serial killers also leave an unmistakable mark within the larger haystack of annual murders that distinguishes their crimes from thousands of other killings, most of which, fortunately, do get solved. In other words, serial killers are inextricably entwined with unsolved murders that ossify into cold cases. And they forever will be.

As of this writing, the vast majority of Little’s ninety-plus confessions have been independently corroborated by law enforcement, including an FBI task force that has fact-checked all of his claims and determined that they are accurate and match unsolved cold case murders starting in the seventies, mostly of other drifters, drug addicts, and women on the margins. In addition, Little’s confessions have been verified through DNA and other forensic evidence, and he has disclosed details that only the killer would know, sometimes known as holdback evidence. Details held back from public disclosure might include the weapon used, body disposal site, clothing or other items taken from the victim, and obscure facts that can’t be faked or consistently and accurately recalled—especially decades later—by anyone but the actual offender. In an effort to help police link victims whose names or precise dumping spots he couldn’t fully recall, Little relied on his near photographic memory of these victims—almost exclusively Black women of all ages. He was able to render a series of crude but also eerily detailed pencil crayon portraits of how they looked before he sexually assaulted and then strangled, stabbed, or bludgeoned them to death in hotels, motels, rooming houses, and parked cars across the Lower Forty-Eight. In nearly every case, he then unceremoniously dumped his victims’ bodies in isolated wooded areas along the various US routes he trolled as a killer drifter and hitchhiker for more than three decades.

Relying on a largely photographic, or eidetic, memory of how his victims appeared and were dressed before he raped and murdered them, Sam Little’s eerie pencil crayon sketches of the dozens of Jane Doe victims he left strewn across the United States over the decades were investigators’ only lead to work with in trying to corroborate his confessions. (Source: FBI)

Despite Sam Little’s trail of rape and wanton destruction of life—thousands of collateral victims and families having also been destroyed in his wake—no one ever went looking for him. Police didn’t even know he existed. No one connected the dots between Little and the victims until he was already incarcerated and an enterprising James Holland became involved, with a solid hunch and an intellectual curiosity that eludes far too many investigators. Holland saw a potential link to an unsolved cold case murder from twenty years earlier, committed over a thousand miles away from the place Little was by that point calling home—the Golden State penitentiary system. Before the Ranger took an interest, no one had considered that all these crimes might be in some way linked. Nor had the federal offender tracking system known as the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) connected the murders. ViCAP is supposed to function as a type of software-based coast-to-coast dragnet to track the modus operandi (usually just called an MO) and other key behaviours of itinerant offenders like Little, regardless of city, county, or state. This system, as I’ll discuss, has more failures than successes. Colossal failures, at that. Samuel Little is just one of the more recent.

But perhaps the most unsettling discovery, given that Little was one of America’s most prolific and longest-running serial killers, is that, when all was said and done, few seemed to care. At last count, Little’s confessions, including the unidentified Jane Doe victims depicted in his homicidal portraiture, have led investigators to believe he was responsible for over a hundred murders committed across the country. By comparison, a malignant thrill-seeker named Tommy Sells, a lesser-known serial murderer who was given the media moniker the Coast to Coast Killer, had only three confirmed victims and another six suspected murders under his belt before he was arrested after the slaying of his final victim and later sentenced to death. Still, even though Little eclipsed Sells by a long shot, the revelation of his crimes didn’t make much of a splash when it first came out. Sure, CNN and NBC ran images of Little’s macabre drawings and to some extent provided details of his confessions, but the narrative of his crimes—and even his own death in prison before all the details could be verified—was eventually paved over by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, during which time, as the murder also rate soared and cities burned, stories like Tiger King were apparently deemed more compelling. There was no prime-time special, no tantalizing alias assigned by the media. Little was Black, and nearly eighty, and his victims were mostly sex workers, drifters, and grifters who were poor and also disproportionately people of colour. Until recently, the media generally haven’t been interested in either killers or victims like that. People may demand diversity in their soft drink ads and sitcoms, but true crime stories still overwhelmingly cover white criminals and their white victims. And for those readers tempted to say aloud, But I know who Sam Little is, I challenge you to name just one of his nearly ninety (to date) independently verified and police-corroborated victims.

Whether as legitimate news items or simple entertainment, most true crime stories tend to follow a cookie-cutter formula, much like the failed investigations that eventually go cold and get retold by true crime pundits. The cycle is perpetual, never-ending. Sam Little certainly didn’t fit the generic true crime formula. The same goes for Chester Turner, George Waterfield Russell Jr., and Darren Deon Vann; the media’s apparent reluctance to cover crimes where the victims and murderers are people of colour has been the status quo for most of the last century. It’s a storytelling strategy that doesn’t give the public an accurate picture of the true incidence of serial murder or of the diversity and variability of cold cases.

The purpose of this book is to help fill in that picture and explain why what you think you know about cold cases and the true crime phenomenon is, for the most part, illusory. Most people, I’ve found, don’t know how much they don’t know. There have been a few exceptions, mind you—at least with respect to finally and properly telling the story of Sam Little, who has now been confirmed as the most prolific serial killer in American history. Some legitimate media outlets did see the Sam Little story for the momentous and largely overlooked discovery it was. Not only did the most elusive serial killer no one ever went looking for finally have a name, but his crimes—which had never previously been connected—finally began to coalesce. Once word of Little’s confessions went public, a handful of newspapers, newscasts, and websites did contact me for interviews about his crimes and their larger criminological significance. I was happy to oblige and often discussed how Little’s crimes, and the amazing work spearheaded by James Holland, might serve as a clarion call to more vigorously investigate cold cases and their probable links to other cases, including the work of known or suspected serial killers operating in different jurisdictions over the course of their criminal careers. If nothing else, the Little case was a sonnet to the value of an informed hunch and the fact that cold cases are solved not only by science but also by a combination of imagination, intellectual curiosity, and hustle. Industriousness.

But in more than one of these media interviews, I made a minor slip-up. I unconsciously and perhaps instinctively referred to Sam Little as Sam Gray. This, although a Freudian slip, as it’s known, was an innocent mistake but also a kind of tell. The tale of Sam Gray is a story all its own.

If you thought the Sam Little story started out in obscurity, Sam Gray’s remains even less well known. Gray was both a pub owner and the high constable, or chief of police by current North American standards—apparently not a conflict of interest in the early nineteenth century—in the town of Ballybay, County Monaghan, Republic of Ireland. It’s a small place located in what is known as the Border Region, in the Province of Ulster, just a short drive from Northern Ireland. It is an unattractive place with a sombre urban blight to it uncharacteristic of the larger nation—more Akron, Ohio, than Emerald Isle. It also has a dark history with ties to me personally.

Today, on Ballybay’s main street lies a vacant, largely dilapidated, and overgrown two-storey structure that most recently housed a tavern known as Monaghan’s. The former hotel and tavern is an unsettlingly empty place. It’s one of those spooky eyesores that always seems to be there and no one does anything about, like the infamous Myers family home in Halloween or the cursed Los Angeles Murder House in American Horror Story. But in an earlier time—until about 1850, when the party came to an end—things were much more lively at Monaghan’s, then called the York Hotel. Among locals, the dirt floor basement of the York was known as the Black Hole. And for good reason.

Sam Gray was the owner and operator of the York Hotel at a time when it was a well-known inn and tavern. Gray was a bigoted Protestant who for years subjected Ballybay to what was essentially a reign of terror. In addition to being high constable, Gray was responsible for the local collection of tithes and the operation of a local loan fund. He surrounded himself with a merciless gang of armed ruffians to enforce collections. Apart from his armed debt collectors, Gray himself was by nature, not surprisingly, a very violent man. Constantly in trouble with the law, on multiple occasions he was suspected or accused of violent offences, including murder.

In 1824 he stood trial for the murder of an innocent bystander he had knocked down and kicked to death. Despite overwhelming evidence from five eyewitnesses, the jury was instructed to acquit by the judge who, like Gray, was notoriously crooked. Such was Gray’s power that most were afraid to oppose his interests. In 1833 he was acquitted of murdering a farmer whom he had been pressuring to pay a tithe that was owed. There is little question that he committed both crimes—and thereby, by modern definition, qualifies as a serial killer, having murdered two or more victims at different times and places.

In 1840 Gray was again acquitted of killing a man who had given evidence against him in a civil proceeding. Whether he was charged with murder or lesser crimes of violence, acquittal always seemed to be a foregone conclusion. Apart from calling on his henchmen to provide fabricated alibis or other evidence in his favour, Gray often managed to escape conviction by arranging to pack the jury with local cronies.

Gray’s comeuppance came about 1841, when he was facing his latest charge of wounding. Those in high government circles, fed up with his manipulation of the system, shamelessly decided to turn the tables by themselves packing the jury. A conviction was at last obtained. Gray, his power and hold on Ballybay gone, went on to die in relative obscurity in 1848 at the age of sixty-six. One of his sons was exiled to the British penal colony in Australia in the meantime for purported connections to his father’s crimes. What lived on, however, was the local legend that the tunnel beneath the tavern—the Black Hole—in which Gray had from time to time locked up his opponents, also contained the walled-up or buried remains of numerous other murdered men, crimes for which he was never charged or even suspected. These men had simply up and disappeared, just as they later did at a hotel an ocean away. The Murder Hotel in Chicago was built, owned, and operated in the nineteenth century by a serial killer using the sobriquet H.H. Holmes. His hotel—a custom-designed death-trap in the vein of Saw meets Psycho—was more elaborate and sadistic than the York Hotel but was also a place where some guests checked in only to then never check out. Today people know the name of H.H. Holmes, not that of his predecessor, Sam Gray.

The aging exterior of Monaghan’s, once the York Tavern, is all that remains of the so-called Black Hole, where one-time owner and proprietor Sam Gray is said to have murdered and walled up his adversaries in Ballybay, Ireland. (Photo courtesy of author)

Although the family connection is somewhat elliptical, Sam Gray, I regret to say, was my great-great-great-uncle. I am his blood and he is mine. I was already a young cop before I realized I had a distant familial relationship to a serial killer. If local lore is accurate, he may well have also been a mass murderer, depending on the circumstances of the deaths of those allegedly buried or walled up in the cellar of the York Hotel. A serial killer, as I mentioned, is someone who claims two or more victims in different places at different times, while a mass murderer is someone who kills four or more people at once in a single incident, or in rapid succession at one or more locations.

While I might not share Gray’s name, I do share his DNA. In fact, since a leading genealogical testing service indicates that nearly 99% of my DNA can be traced to Ireland, this link becomes all the more important. There has long been speculation that a hereditary murder gene exists—an intergenerational predisposition to extraordinary criminality. The suggestion of a murder gene, even a serial killer gene, shows up in everything from lightweight dramas like Riverdale to more serious works of literary fiction like the 2012 novel Defending Jacob, along with countless documentaries and editorials of varying degrees of repute. In some cases it has been the subject of rigorously peer-reviewed medical, psychological, and criminological journal articles. The MAOA gene, which encodes an enzyme called monoamine oxidase A, is known, along with its variants, to be associated with dangerous impulse control and sensation-seeking behaviours ranging from hypersexuality and psychopathy to extreme violence. Maybe I have the gene—I certainly believe Sam Gray likely had it—and maybe I don’t. It’s one of those things you don’t really want to get tested for. At this time, it’s not even possible to be tested for it. Scientists can tell if your genetic blueprint predisposes you to multiple sclerosis, a preference for salty snacks, or a widow’s peak hairline, but not this. Not yet, at least.

There is, mind you, another way of knowing who is capable of violence. It’s called instinct. Every human is genetically hardwired—a vestigial gift from our common primate ancestors—to recognize danger and predators in our midst. That’s the purpose of the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol: they’re our fight-or-flight response to threats. And the human eye can distinguish more shades of green than any other colour, the legacy of our ancestors adapting to their environment to be able to scan the forests and trees for stalking predators camouflaging themselves among the foliage. These traits are just some of the ancient hand-me-downs from early humans on the African savannah, such as Homo erectus and Homo habilis. Threat assessment manager to the stars Gavin de Becker calls our inherited instincts our shared biological gift of fear; it is a gift that helps us make informed decisions to avoid being victims, not of the wild animals our forefathers feared, but of modern-day human threats whose methods may have evolved but whose motives have not. Predators like Sam Little and Sam Gray. This gift, de Becker says, teaches us that, since many people are not who they appear to be, much less who they publicly profess to be, you need to trust your visceral instincts. The gift allows us to see through physical and social camouflage and go with our gut—to see all the shades of green.

To our prehistoric ancestors, the potential threats were predators, but I would argue that that term is misapplied when used to describe violent criminals. You see, predators are a product of the food chain, of what evolutionist Charles Darwin described as natural selection. They are inevitable and, in an ecological sense, very much necessary to the natural world. There are no vegan coyotes or gluten-averse saltwater crocodiles for a reason. Animals behave and act as they are engineered to, in order to survive, whereas humans have the privilege to hunt, eat, and prey—or do none of these things—according to their socio-economic status, location, ideologies, religion, and personal preferences. Animals are quite simply what nature made them. The worst of them, then, in submitting to their nature, are what we might call a natural evil. If a surfer is killed by a great white shark in Bali or a missionary dies from a spider bite in Brazil, it’s simply an example of the random unfairness of the world, to which no one is immune, in much the same way as when a tornado levels a family farm or bankrupts an entire town, or a tsunami floods a village, killing everyone in the process. These are all examples of natural evil in the world. Natural evil is a random, unpredictable assumed risk of living on this crazy planet. The coronavirus pandemic’s wake of destruction is a recent and very raw reminder of that.

But people who of their own free will set out to brutalize, hurt, humiliate, and extinguish the life of other people, not for rational survival but for their own visceral pleasure, are outside of any kind of natural order. They act on, and always will act and thrive on, their ability to cause harm, and they typically gain reward or pleasure from that harm. Such conduct can be characterized as moral evil.

As the only species with the capacity for moral evil, the capacity to kill for any purpose other than food, territorial protection, or other forms of survival—the only species to kill, maim, and injure for thrill or pleasure—we humans have clearly forged a unique path. Murder, and by extension mass murder and serial murder, are solely human endeavours, unknown to other life forms of varying complexity that have existed on this planet for an estimated four billion years. The serial killer gene is not, therefore, only potentially in me; it’s also potentially in you. It’s potentially in all of us. It’s part of our hardwiring—our collective DNA. To be human is, quite simply, the biggest risk factor for moral evil. Every once in a while, a Sam Little or a Sam Gray comes along and reminds us of that. Like a mobile phone app running in the background and subtly draining the life from your battery, moral evil is always there. It’s omnipresent.

Various works of fiction have explored this troubling and often conveniently denied duality of the human condition with remarkable accuracy. Examples are seen in Dr. Henry Jekyll and his indulgently homicidal alter ego Edward Hyde, Harvey Dent and Two-Face, and Henry Haller as the eponymous Steppenwolf. The 1986 graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke, a darkly compelling work exploring the murky origin story of serial killer the Joker, Batman’s archnemesis, explains the descent into homicidal madness with brass tacks candour. Author Alan Moore observes that we’re all just one bad day away from our internal tipping point—just one day from moving the needle over the line, deferring to our biology, caving to our primordial and homicidal hardwiring, and embracing the uniquely human capacity for moral evil. At any given time, in the United States alone, a few million people are straddling this line. It’s no wonder, as I’ll explain in greater detail later, that there are probably three thousand active serial killers at large in the country today, only about one-tenth of whom are being tracked or whose crimes are even known to law enforcement.

Going back to a time before Batman: The Killing Joke, but after The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in 1952 a charming alcoholic and nihilist from Oklahoma named Jim Thompson wrote the novel The Killer Inside Me. The book is a twisted crime opus that unfortunately went unrecognized as a modern classic until well after Thompson’s death in 1977. Today, the work endures as perhaps the most starkly unflinching, albeit semi-fictionalized, insight into the serial killer gene (though it doesn’t specifically call it that). Thompson’s novel reminds us that the genetic hardwiring for mayhem lies dormant in all of us until it’s disturbed, after which it is, for the most part, not retractable. It’s a one-way trip. The killer inside us is the equivalent of the asbestos of the human condition—hazardous only once awakened or disturbed, and then forever dangerous and deadly.

In Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, outwardly likeable and disarming Sheriff Lou Ford, overseeing law enforcement in a small rural county in Texas, is a twenty-nine-year-old, generally unremarkable country boy in a steady relationship with a local schoolteacher. On the inside, however, Lou has what he calls a festering sickness: a set of bizarre sexual predilections—what are known today as criminal paraphilias—that have led him to place great erotic value on violence and to conflate sex with pain, suffering, and gore. Understanding paraphilias is perhaps among the most critical skills in cold case investigation, so it will be discussed in great detail later in the book, complete with case studies that will probably ruin your week.

While Lou