Cold Case Unit

The morning readers of The Arizona Re-public learned that Truman Capote, the 59-year-old “flamboyant writer,” had been found dead in the Hollywood guesthouse of Johnny Carson’s ex-wife. They read that President Ronald Reagan was resting after his “rousing” speech to end the Republican National Convention in Dallas. They learned that Democratic opponent Walter Mondale was being told to “let his hair down,” while his running mate, Geraldine Ferraro, was celebrating her 49th birthday and the 64th anniversary of a woman’s right to vote.

Those looking for a way to beat the heat were heading to movie theaters to see the first Ghostbusters. Others sought comfort by staying close to their air conditioning or evaporative cooling at home, curling up that night to watch The Love Boat.

Seventy-year-old Arnold Larsen did what he did every Saturday evening in the summer. He and his wife, Ruth, ate supper and watched some television before he made the five-mile drive to the church he helped create on South Central Avenue. He went every Saturday at around 9 p.m. to turn on the swamp cooler, because it would take the over-night hours to fully cool off the Lutheran Church of Hope for the 10 a.m. service.

He and Ruth were always there for Sun-day worship – as they had been since all five of their children were small. And even though the older kids had already moved away, youngest daughter Gail still joined her parents every Sunday. The women always sat in the middle row, and Arnold always gracefully ushered his friends and neighbors to their customary seats.

Everyone in this church knew him, and to many, Arnold was a shining example of what a good citizen should be. He had al-ready spent four decades serving his city, believing that a man had a civic duty to make his hometown a better place to live. He held the Silver Beaver Award, the highest honor given to adults for outstanding service to Boy Scouting, and he had formed softball leagues for children of all ages. This church stood as a testament to his hard work. His children would tell you that he was away from home most nights – at one community meeting or another.

But this night would become a significant night in Phoenix history, because in-side that humble church on that hot Saturday night was a young man attempting to rob the poor box. When Arnold Larsen interrupted him, the kid stabbed Arnold to death.

It would be 19 long years before that murderer was brought to justice and sent to prison. And in all those years, this was one of those “cold cases” that drove the Phoenix Police Department nuts.

Television has popularized the hunt to solve cold cases, and the one thing they have gotten absolutely right is the police detectives’ fervor to nail the killers. It challenges our moral codes to see a person blatantly get away with murder, and for homicide detectives whose careers are devoted to catching the bad guys, it’s like adding insult to injury.

Detectives who have long worked a case carry yet another piece of anguish – they often get close to the families that not only grieve for the loss of their loved one, but also feel that the death has been cheated of justice.

“In the mindset of the police, it is important that a cold case squad exists,” says Sergeant Jack Millward, who heads the Phoenix Police Department’s squad. “Otherwise, a case stays with the original detective until he re-tires, or the case is passed on to another detective with no tie to the case. Just knowing that their police department has a unit like this helps the families.”

Besides, they say, there is special satisfaction in finally arresting someone who skated away on a heinous crime. “It’s a really, really good feeling, especially to get someone who has gotten away with it for years,” Millward adds.

Sergeant Millward heads up a five-man squad that has as many as 3,000 cold cases going back decades. “Working cold cases is like looking at the history of Phoenix,” he explains.

The truth is, you could go all the way back to statehood and find cold cases if you wanted; however, that’s a better pursuit for historians than busy detectives. But they are still pursuing cases from the 1950s – the organized crime heyday in Phoenix – and through all of the decades since.

“We define a cold case as one in which there’s no arrest and nobody who could be held responsible is being held,” Millward explains. “Some agencies say once you identify a suspect, it’s no longer cold, but we don’t – not until there’s an arrest and the person is held accountable in the court system.”

But Phoenix has seen many cases where nabbing one or two people for a murder isn’t the end of the story. Case in point: the car bombing of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles. Although three people went to prison for his murder, the person who ordered his execution was never arrested.

The case of murdered heiress Jeanne Tovrea falls into the same category – even though one man sits on Death Row for her murder, even the jury that convicted him didn’t think he was the “trigger man” or the force behind the “murder for hire.”

Back in the ’50s, there was the gangland murder of Gus Greenbaum and his wife in their Phoenix home. Police say they know it was a mob hit, but they have never identified the specific hit man or the person who paid for the murders.

Those cases are considered “exceptionally cleared.” In other words, as Sergeant Mill-ward says, “We know who did it, but we can’t bring those people to trial.”

They focus instead on cases in which there is hope of finding the culprit. “There are three things that clear a cold case,” he says. “Time, technology and tenacity.”

Each member of the squad has dozens of case files on their desks at any given time. They look at the cases on a 1-to-5 scale: 1 is a case with no evidence, no witnesses and not much to go on. These cases will probably never be solved. Cases with a 5 rating, however, have evidence, good witnesses and something to go on.

Officers start by reviewing the investigation that was done at the time of the crime and then ask what else needs to be done. Is there anything new to help fill in the puzzle pieces? Will it help to re-interview the witnesses, or as Millward puts it, “How do we creatively move the case forward?”

“We run with good, fresh, new information first,” he says.

Although it would seem just the opposite, “time can be a friend” in investigating cold cases, says Detective Bob Brunansky of the Phoenix unit. “Over time, relationships change. We go back 10, 15 years later and there’s new information they never mention-ed because of some reluctance at the time. Maybe they had an emotional attachment or were fearful, and that’s the reason they kept quiet. But that deteriorates over time.”
He remembers a cold case that had 12 female witnesses.

“When I went back to them years later, eight said, ‘Tell us he’s dead and we’ll throw a party.'” Their testimony helped close the case.

According to Millward, “People mature or have children or find religion and need to clear their consciences.”

Added to the passing of time is all the new technology that has emerged in the last few decades.

Since 1991, Phoenix has been computerizing its cold cases, replacing the handwritten or microfilm files of the old days. DNA – the building block of life that is specific to an individual – wasn’t even available until recently. Today, it’s a constant and valuable tool.

Locally, Arizona has joined the national move to gather DNA from known criminals, because law enforcement officials believe that 80 percent of the crimes in the city are committed by 5 percent of the population.

In 2004, the Arizona Legislature passed a new law that requires every individual who is sentenced to the Department of Corrections to give up their DNA. That information is now being gathered and will be added to a national databank.

However, this isn’t as easy as it sounds, Millward explains. It will take Arizona years to gather DNA from all of the prisoners (it is currently 40,000 samples behind). But the national databank – called CODIS for Combined DNA Index System – has already had some satisfying results.

Consider the case of the young Phoenix woman who was raped and murdered in her apartment 20 years ago. Police investigated, but found nothing. Two decades later, as the national databank computer searched through the DNA entered into the system, the system found a match. The man was in jail on an unrelated charge, but was nabbed because his DNA sample proved that he was the killer.

“He was convicted and is doing time and won’t come out except in a box,” Brunansky says. “You have to give a lot of credit to those officers back then. They didn’t know what DNA was, but they preserved this evidence in case something showed up in the future.”

It is the existence and quality of preserved evidence that offers the only hope for solving these crimes. Millward notes that Phoenix’s dry air helps – humidity and moisture destroy evidence quickly – but officers had to be thorough and then carefully protect the evidence for future use. Again and again, you hear these officers praising those who worked these cases decades ago.

In addition to DNA, the other technological advance has been with fingerprinting records. Since September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush has pushed for a system that links all fingerprint databases. It is called IAFIS – Integrated Auto Fingerprint Identification System.

“Phoenix connected to IAFIS in 2002, and they wanted three cold cases to test the system,” says Art Scott, a homicide detective. One of the cases – the sad murder of Arnold Larsen – was the case closest to his heart. He had worked it back in 1984.

“I worked that case over two years, and then it went cold,” he remembers. He never quite let it go, but he had nothing new to help him for so many years. In that time, he kept in touch with Larsen’s family, and he had always prayed that he could solve the case before his retirement, which is quickly approaching this year.

As the new fingerprint database did its searching, it “hit” on a finger-print that was found inside the Lutheran church on that hot August night back in 1984.

It was by fluke that the fingerprint match was there at all. It belonged to a man who had never been arrested for a serious crime and had never sign-ed up for the military. But in 1987, he had been picked up in New Jersey for possessing marijuana, so his prints were on file. The new system took the old prints from New Jersey and the old prints from Phoenix and discovered that they had come from the same person.

Donald Klatzkin was 17 years old that night back in 1984. He never wanted to talk about stabbing Arnold Larsen to death; however, police did learn that he left the church empty-handed because the poor box had been empty. In the interrogation, Klatzkin fingered an accomplice, but police could never tie the other man to the murder.

Klatzkin is currently serving 18 years in prison for the murder of Arnold Larsen.
“My mother didn’t live to see this happy occasion,” says Gail Larsen Cobb, Arnold Larsen’s daughter. (Ruth Larson died in 1997.)

Cobb also says she will never forget the night her father was killed. She was in her 30s, a single mother raising a son, and had gone out that night with a new boyfriend – the man who would eventually become her husband.

They had just gotten home when her mother called, worried that her dad was taking too long at the church. So, Gail and her boyfriend drove to the church and saw the police cruisers and the yellow “crime scene tape” from a block away.

One of the officers at the scene that night was a member of the church. He told Gail that her father was dead. Sometime that night she remembered that her little boy was supposed to be with her dad that evening, but her sister had taken the boy at the last minute. “He was my dad’s shadow,” she says, and she knows that if they had been together, her son would have been in that church, too. Gail can only shudder at the thought of what might have happened.

“My dad was a very loving, caring, soft-hearted man,” she says. “My dad would help anybody. If someone needed money, he’d give it to them. That’s why it was so hard on the family. He was 70 years old – they could have [just] locked him in a closet.

“I had to go home and tell my mother. Our minister went with us, and then we had to start locating the family.”

The “enormous funeral” for her father is something the family will remember forever. “The church could not hold them all,” Gail remembers. “People were there we didn’t even know. From young to old, they came to honor my dad.”

On the day of the funeral, her future husband gave Gail a gold good-luck charm. “He told me, ‘Here, you wear this, because someday this will all end and they will find him.’ I’ve never taken it off,” she says.

She was wearing the charm on the joyous morning she got the call from “Scottie,” as she calls Detective Scott. She remembers him saying, “This is probably one of the happiest days of your life.”

“And it was,” she says. “I was hysterical. I cried. In the back of my mind, I thought this day would come because I believe God takes care of people who believe.”

Gail attended every court hearing when Klatzkin finally faced the music, and she eventually had her say in court, too. “I broke down, but I wanted the judge to know what kind of life was taken,” she says. “I brought a picture of my father to court. I wanted him to know we appreciated everything the state had done and we more than appreciated Detective Art Scott. Scottie and I became very good friends. He’s a very intelligent, thorough and caring man. He saw in me what it meant to solve this.”

After Klatzkin was sentenced, Gail went to her parents’ graves to share with them the news – even though it took 19 long years, justice was finally served.

For the past four years, Phoenix has focused on a specific area of cold cases: sex-related homicides. Detective Bill Stuebe spent eight years investigating sex crimes after he became a homicide detective and noticed the high number of unsolved cases. With the help of a federal grant, he and another officer started concentrating on them. Since then, they have arrested eight people. Four have been convicted and the rest of the cases are pending.

“Our job is to put the bad guys in jail,” Detective Stuebe says.

One of the bad guys that he put in jail is Frank Dale McCray, who had escaped justice for 15 years.

Back in 1987, Chestene Cummins, who was in her 20s, was home getting ready for a trip with her boyfriend. She was assaulted and strangled, and her apartment was ransacked. Detective Mitch Rae, who is now re-tired, investigated that case. Stuebe praises him for doing “an excellent job.” “It’s a team effort,” he says. “If they didn’t do a good job back then, we would not have a whole lot to go on now.”

Stuebe went through the old evidence and learned that saliva and blood had been found that could lead to a DNA match. They ran the samples through CODIS and it fingered McCray, who was in custody in Arizona on an unrelated charge. He was tried in late November 2005 and sentenced for first-degree murder.
Cummins’ sister, brother and boyfriend from back then attended the trial.

Throughout the Valley of the Sun, police departments are trying to solve the cold cases that speak to the infamy of their communities. Although most other departments have cold case squads much smaller than the squad in Phoenix, they’re all keeping these cold cases alive.

In Paradise Valley, Detective Dennis Dodd still hopes to solve one of the most painful cases in the town’s history – the murder of Helen Marston, who is often described as “one of the most beloved town founders.”

In 1975, Marston went out to get her hair done and then went grocery shopping. When she returned home, she apparently startled a burglar who had entered her home through a bathroom window.

She had been the original town clerk of Paradise Valley, and was “like a town mom.” She was strangled and thrown onto her bed. Jewelry boxes were ransacked, purses were emptied and dresser drawers were tossed aside in the apparent burglary. The murderer left with her 1973 Impala, which was later found in West Phoenix.

Marston’s son found his mother’s body that night. Police found fingerprints at the scene, but have not yet been able to find a match. Nor have they matched the shoe-prints that were left in the home.

Paradise Valley police eventually considered the possibility that it was not a random burglar, but rather, it was a staged murder, or perhaps the killer had known Marston.

Detective Dodd has worked the case for several years, and the town recently put out an alert in the hopes that someone might come forward with more in-formation on the case.

In neighboring Scottsdale, the most unsettling cold case is that of Robert Fischer, who is charged with killing his wife and children and setting their home on fire before disappearing. Authorities believe he is still on the run.

Perhaps even more famous is the killing of actor Bob Crane, of Hogan’s Heroes fame. His friend, John Carpenter, was tried for the murder, but was eventually acquitted. Carpenter has since died. Officials say this is one of those cases that will probably never be completely resolved.

In Tempe, detectives still hope to find out what happened to Cookie Jacobson, whose body has never been found. Her teenage children claimed she died of natural causes and they dumped her body in a garbage can, but an exhaustive search of the landfill found nothing to support their claim.

The town also would like to solve the case of ASU coed Fiona Yu, who was raped and murdered back in 1997. They have never identified a solid suspect.

Meanwhile, back in Phoenix, the officers of the cold case squad continue to go through the thousands of cases that still need resolution. Sergeant Jack Millward says there is a simple reason he likes coming to work every day.

“We’re talking about the most heinous crime mankind can commit – the killing of another human being – and we’re after the person responsible for the crime. Is it satisfying work? Very much so.”