This year marked the 10th anniversary of “Serial,” the surprise smash that introduced podcasting to millions of Americans—and ushered in a renaissance of true-crime content across every conceivable platform. While it might seem like “Cold Case Live!,” a theatrical presentation coming to the Studio at Mizner Park Nov. 23, is a part of this genre, host Joe Kennedy is quick to point out that he is “not in the entertainment business.” He’s in the crime-solving business, and if an entertaining lecture on cold case investigations happens to also thaw even one element of one such case, he’s done his job.
Kennedy is among the nation’s authorities on unsolved murders. During his 28 years with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), Kennedy wrote the methodology and protocol for his organization’s cold case investigations, and he has trained and consulted with cold case detectives across four continents and the Caribbean.
One of the first cold cases he solved, that of slain naval officer Dana Bartlett, took him to Mayport, Florida, and though Kennedy lives in North Carolina, work has often taken him to the darker corners of the Sunshine State, from Miami to Jacksonville. “There’s a lot of emphasis on cold cases in Florida,” he says, noting the excess of 20,000 unsolved murders in the state.
As part of “Cold Case Live!,” Kennedy will likely delve into at least one notable case local to the area, while also exploring such famously chilly cases as the Zodiac Killer and the JonBenét Ramsey homicide—complete with forensic analyses, reenactments and Q&As.
What do you most need to have to be a good cold case investigator? I assume that patience would have to be high on the list.
You have to be very patient, but in the same vein, you have to be very tenacious. But patience is the virtue, because you hit a lot of deadend roads, and you go down a lot of rabbit holes that don’t pan out. So you have to not give up, and that’s where the tenacious piece comes into it, so that regardless of the odds that are stacked against you, you want to do whatever you can to solve the case.
Is there an obsessive quality to the investigator, when it comes to cracking these cases? Does it gnaw at you?
It does. … this word will sound strange, but cold cases are very seductive to investigators, because you just get so seduced by the thrill of the hunt, the challenge. It’s like playing timed chess, where, OK, if I make the wrong move, I can destroy the chances of solving this case. But at the same time, sometimes we have to take some calculated risk to get a case over the hump, and get it solved.
You’ve got to understand the case, because you didn’t have the luxury of being there. When we’re at a hot homicide, we remember the smells; we remember what we heard. But with a cold case, you don’t have the ability to tap into those five senses.
On this tour, are you hoping to recruit citizen detectives who might come forward in the Q&A with insights or information?
Absolutely, with the web sleuths today. Talk about the Golden State Killer [charged in 2018 for at least 13 murders in California between 1974 and 1986—Ed]. All that stuff was sourced from—I hope they don’t get mad at me for saying this—little old ladies sitting in their homes across the country doing genetic genealogy.
Artificial intelligence is making its way into all of our lives, and it will be impactful in criminal investigations as well. Should detectives such as yourself embrace it?
AI is going to be a game changer. We’re already seeing it. We’re testing it; we’re trying to put a case together right now, a cold case that was solved, and then run it through AI to see if AI gets to the correct suspect. One of the more tedious things with cold-case work, and where I think AI is going to help, is the memorization. As a cold case detective, you have to have a super good memory, because you’ve got to remember all the names, the places they were at, the cars they were driving, the towns. So I think AI is going to really revolutionize cold cases.
What continues to fuel the enormous public interest in true crime and unsolved murders?
I think what drives this insatiable appetite for true crime is that people are innately good. And what a lot of people don’t realize is that most criminals don’t get up and plan to go murder somebody. In fact, very few murders are actually planned. That’s the thing with a lot of cold cases. … There are monsters out there—your serial killers, your sociopaths, your psychopaths. But a lot of cold cases do not fall into that category. They’re just incidents in life that went wrong and that ended up in somebody being murdered.
IF YOU GO
WHAT: Cold Case Live!
WHERE: The Studio at Mizner Park, 201 Plaza Real, Boca Raton
WHEN: Nov. 23, 7:30 p.m.
COST: $49.50-$69.50
CONTACT: 561/203-3742, thestudioatmiznerpark.com
This story is from the November/December 2024 issue of Boca magazine. For more like this, click here to subscribe to the magazine.
