MURRAY EVANS
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Having helped solve a handful of cold cases through the years, Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agent Gary Perkinson has seen the sense of gratitude on the faces of crime victims and their family members to whom justice has been brought.
Thanks to a federal grant to his agency announced Wednesday, Perkinson said he hopes to help solve more such cases in the coming months.
Perkinson will be the agent in charge of the agency's newly created cold case unit, which will be funded with an 18-month grant of about $500,000 from the National Institute of Justice.
The Washington, D.C.-based NIJ did not immediately respond to phone or e-mail messages seeking comment.
OSBI spokeswoman Jessica Brown said she didn't know how many other states or agencies have received similar grants, but that a requirement of receiving the grant is that the reopened cold cases must have DNA available for a suspect profile.
"DNA is one of the premier crime-fighting tools in the world," Perkinson said. "You take cases back in the '70s, where we didn't have that technology, and over the last few years, you've seen case after case where a suspect profile is located on a piece of evidence. Before, you just didn't have the technology to identify a suspect."
Perkinson said the OSBI will hire two more staffers to help investigators go through about 400 cold case files dating to the early 1970s looking for that DNA evidence. He said it's not unusual for even decades-old case files to have such evidence.
DNA evidence proved invaluable in a 1986 Oklahoma County homicide case, in which authorities said a DNA match from the victim's car matched that of a current Oklahoma prison inmate. Prosecutors filed a murder charge against the inmate earlier this year.
"If you solve one case with DNA, it means everything to that family," Perkinson said.
"Some of them almost give up hope. But when you're able to make an arrest in a cold case, it's extremely satisfying to them. It's extremely satisfying to the agent. They are very excited about it and overwhelmed that somebody continued to care enough to look into the case."
After the grant expires in early 2011, Perkinson said the OSBI hopes to have it renewed or to receive state money to continue the cold case unit's work.
