LAS VEGAS -- Cold case murders are some of the toughest cases for police to crack when leads dry up, witnesses vanish and justice is put on hold.
Investigators are using DNA technology and a cold case grant in helping local police to bring suspected killers to justice that wasn't possible 10 years ago.
Barbara Ann Cox was 22 years old when she was raped and strangled in Las Vegas back in 1978. The body was found but the investigators case went cold and her killer remained at large.
Claude Cox said his little sister's murder haunted him and his family for more than 30 years. Three months ago, police tracked down suspected serial killer Nathan Burkett through his DNA.
"Outgoing, fun, pretty, beautiful, you know, just lively and 22 years old -- full of life," Cox said.
The arrest was made possible through a $500,000 cold case grant that allowed Metro Police to go back through more than 1,000 cold case files for clues.
A team of 13 dedicated scientists work at Metro's forensic lab to unlock the mysteries that have stumped cold case detectives.
"Nathan Burkett may never have been identified without the usage of DNA today," Metro Lt. Ray Steiber said.
DNA manager of the forensic lab for Metro Kim Murga heads up the art lab and said the sensitive business of DNA testing has changed over the last 10 years. Murga added a lot of the breakthrough in the DNA science comes in the aftermath of 9/11.
"The technology has advanced so far, so quickly, that we are able to unlock cases, and obtain genetic profiles from items that just a couple of years ago was not possible," Murga said. "All the work we do on homicides and sex assaults is down the hall."
The FBI and the City of New York vowed to bring those responsible for the terrorist attack to justice. Thousands of damaged DNA samples were analyzed and it pushed the science to its limits. The DNA science quickly evolved and now the amount of DNA needed to get a positive match is getting smaller.
"It was required to have a blood stain the size of a quarter to get a DNA profile," Murga said. You needed about eight weeks, all sorts of radioactive chemicals in order to do so, technology and techniques have evolved so far that now all you need is enough DNA on the tip of a pinhead and literally a day's worth of work to obtain a genetic profile."
The lab has seen its case load jump from just a couple hundred cases a few years ago, to 2,000 cases per year ranging from finger prints in burglaries to microscopic blood stains.
The combined DNA index system or Codis is a nationwide FBI data base that houses millions of DNA samples. Lab technicians said sometimes those matches come up with leads police have been searching decades for.
"They can be a match, and it can provide numbers well over a hundred or a million times the world's population, so they are very individual, very unique," Murga added.
One of the lab's matches also moved another cold case from Metro's shelves to the district attorney's office for prosecution.
Tina Gayle Mitchell's murder in 1994 was also linked to Nathan Burkett.
"A lot of the work that we do associated with the cold cases is actually funded through federal grants and it's done on overtime, so even though people are getting paid for it, people do give up their personal lives to actually work these cases and trying to get them solved and trying to get investigative information to the detectives," Murga said.
Metro said 21 cold cases have seen new leads and the lab expects more breaks to be coming soon.
The money from the Federal Cold Case DNA Grant is close to running out and Metro is preparing to apply again.
Lab technicians said not every cold case with DNA is automatically tested because the process is expensive and time consuming.
