There are more than 200 cases of people in St. Petersburg that have gone cold.
Their one hope is the cold case unit that Sgt. Tim Montanari oversees.
“These cases are hard to solve and you think about them quite a bit night and day,” says Montanari.
Some of the cases that date back to the early 1960s.
“That’s it. That’s what we start with and you have to build up case from there,” says Montanari.
Thanks to new technology the unit submits evidence for DNA and fingerprint testing that detectives didn’t have years ago.
“We’re cops. We want to solve things. We want to solve them very quickly and there’s a lot of dead ends. To motivate troops it’s more difficult than I thought sometimes and I’ve been doing this a long time,” says Montanari.
Each case the team is working on is documented on their office's wall.
“We always want to make sure we remember victims. Every case we are working. We want pictures up to remind us ultimately who’s boss,” says Montanari.
Along with the victim’s photos, they put together binders with every piece of evidence they may have in hopes one idea — one fingerprint may lead them to the murdered.
“We just want justice done,” says Montanari.
And the case can go from cold to closed.
“We need to do our best to try and solve it,” says Montanari.
The unit just solved its first case with the arrest of Jacobee Flowers for the death of Morgan Martin. They say they are about to solve a few more.
