Cracking the case: NKU students help detectives with cold case investigations

Select Northern Kentucky University students were given the opportunity to work with the Boone County Sheriff’s Office cold case unit to help crack cold cases.

The NKU students submitted resumes and interviewed to be a part of the class, which worked in tandem with detectives in the cold case unit. Students spent eight hours each week during the semester at the Boone County Sheriff’s Office, bringing cases from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s up to 2024 standards and bringing the cases closer to getting solved.

“This is a rare opportunity for a sheriff’s department to open their doors and invite students in to review confidential, sensitive information and be open,” NKU Professor of Criminal Justice Melissa Moon said. “I mean truly open. Given their experience level, to listen to what a college kid has to say and recommends. It’s very rare.”

Detective Coy Cox with the Boone County Sheriff’s Department, who worked with Moon and the students, said this is the first time a class like this has been held in Kentucky.

“It is extremely rare in Kentucky; no one’s ever done this before,” Cox said. “But it’s also rare in the United States. There are only a few agencies out there across the country that have done this, and I haven’t found one yet that said, ‘Yeah, I wish I would have never done that.'”

He brought the partnership idea back to Northern Kentucky after attending an international homicide conference in Oklahoma City and hearing that the Michigan State Police had done something similar.

Cox said he was near retirement, and there were cases in boxes that needed to be looked at and scanned, so there was a digital copy for the next person who came behind him and thought some interns could help. After connecting with Moon, she suggested they turn the idea into a cold case class.

“I wasn’t real keen on that in the beginning just because the last thing that I would ever, ever, ever want to do is to re-victimize our victim’s families,” Cox said. “The last thing I would want to do was—if I were a family member of someone who was murdered, I wouldn’t want to sit and think that someone—some kid knows more about what happened to my family member than I do.”

Moon said she wanted the partnership to be a class because she wanted to take it and put it in a real-world setting to address real-world problems. Moon said she is always trying to find ways to bridge the gap between students’ real-world experiences and what they learn in the classroom.

The class consisted of majors from criminal justice and law to biology.

“So, very unique academic backgrounds, which I think contributed overall to their learning and understanding how to process case files, understanding the information in the case files,” Moon said.

The students were paired in twos but sat in cubicles next to one another so they could ask questions about different interpretations or understandings and how they would organize things.

Due to the nature of their work, the students had to remain anonymous, were not allowed to speak about the cases they looked at outside of the sheriff’s department, and had to leave all electronic devices, including cell phones and Apple watches, in their vehicle before coming to class. Further, the students had to sign an agreement that they understood that they were giving their permission to be searched if the detectives thought they had something they shouldn’t have on them.

Cox said concealing the student’s identities was vital because they are working on murder cases where the killer is still free.

“Someone is out there going free, and they have gone free for years, and they’ve never been held accountable for the worst crime that can possibly be committed,” he said. “So, if their identity were known, that would be subjecting them to someone who is willing to kill people.”

That was why the students could only work on the cases at the sheriff’s office and couldn’t talk about their work outside the class.

“They were only allowed to work on it there. They couldn’t take anything out,” Moon said. “So, they had to think about it there, discuss it there, but the minute we left and those double doors closed behind us, no discussion. Period. I was just amazed at how they were able to synthesize all the information and provide multiple concrete recommendations.”

Cox said not only did the class turn out well, but the students were remarkable.

“They were amazing,” Cox said. “They offered a lot more than what I wanted to use for the scanning. However, they did that, and that was something that was very tedious. At a minimum, the smallest case that we had given them had at least 1,000 pages of documents that had to be scanned. Audio recordings, as well as some video audio recordings of interviews that they sat for hours and listened to, made notes, but most importantly to me, they copied those from being on a microcassette tape and put them in digital form into a case file.”

The students also brought a different perspective to the cases. Cox said he has worked in the business for 40 years, and some human experiences can’t be ignored when examining a case.

When the students finished the case they were working on, they presented it to the detectives. Cox said he would have them tell him the top five things that they would do if they were working on the case today. He said their notes and findings give detectives a good place to start when they review them.

“It was interesting to see some of their comments and what they saw when they looked at evidence compared to what we would see and maybe some of the things that were jaded by our human experiences,” he said.

The Boone County Sheriff’s Office is Kentucky’s only law enforcement agency with a full-time cold case unit. Cox said this is because it is a real commitment. He said most agencies are not willing to make that commitment and allow someone to work on those cases when, in their mind, it’s more important to work on the cases that are coming in today.

Six students out of 24 who applied were selected to take the class.

One of those students, who LINK nky will refer to as “the student,” said they were interested in the class because many of the internships and classwork they have done are straight from a textbook or hypothetical.

“Especially from the law backgrounds that I’m getting ready to start, I really wanted to see the police perspective, but also getting the chance to work on something real that’s not just something that a professor came up with for an exam or a class project was really neat and really interesting,” the student said. “A lot of my friends who did internships through police departments and stuff like that are just sitting up front, saying hi to people, and doing ride-alongs. You’re not really getting to work on anything real.”

The student said they had already planned to practice criminal or constitutional law before taking the class but now said they had the police’s perspective.

“A lot of my professors were either staff attorneys that work for judges, or they’re defense attorneys,” the student said. “So, it was nice getting to actually work with the police because that’s something you don’t really get a lot in undergraduate law classes. Even in law classes, almost all of my professors that I’m getting ready to have this semester are prosecutors, staff attorneys. So it was definitely a missing perspective that I got to add that solidified what I want to do.”

Moon said the class allowed students to network with the detectives and sergeants. They received professional references, and one student has already secured a job that Moon said was directly related to taking the class.

Cox said he would hire any one of the six students from the cold case class.

“Someone had asked if we think that maybe they helped any of the cases to get closer to being solved, and I said they helped all of them get closer to being solved,” Cox said. “They are in a much better spot than they were before because they got to put eyes on it for an extended period of time, and we have not had that opportunity to do that with all of the cases.”

Cox said they intend to continue the class with at least one more that has been officially contracted.