Every “cold case” investigation starts with a resounding NO.

The police say, “No, that information cannot be released, it’s an ongoing or active investigation.”

Are the police really looking into the cold case? Are they truly just one clue away on a good lead, or are they narrowing in on a suspect or following up on a person of interest?

If all investigative leads have been exhausted, no new witnesses have come forward, and forensic evidence has been fully processed without a hit, the general rule is that after one to three years, many agencies will reclassify the case as “cold.”

And, what if the case is 10, 15, or 20 years old?

Is it still ongoing? Is it still active?

Are investigators spending their every waking moment investigating a case that is 10, 15, or 20 years cold?

Again, the answer is a resounding NO.

After one to three years have passed in a missing persons case or an unsolved homicide, the leads are going nowhere, the manpower and effort investigating the case diminish, and the odds of catching an offender or finding the victim — alive or dead — decrease to less than 5%.

Life goes on. More new murders and missing people occur every day. Investigators are placed on the next case and the next case and the next case, to the point that the original case is now 10 years cold in the blink of an eye.

Take, for example, the city of Springfield, Ohio, in Clark County. Springfield is a small Midwestern city (pop. 58K) located off I-70 between Columbus, Ohio (pop. 900K) to the east and Dayton, Ohio (pop. 135K) to the west. From 2004 to 2024, Springfield and its Clark County area have had over 50 women with unsolved murders or disappearances. From 1986 to 2016, another 50. That is more than a century of women — Mothers, Wives, Sisters, Daughters — with no resolution and no justice. It has been 10 to 30 years, and friends and family have no answers, and the police refuse to release the slightest bit of case information — because, “it’s still an active case, it’s still ongoing.”

The city of Springfield has a mandate for 130 police officers. Every year, there are over 8,000 arrests with criminal charges filed. A simple question must be asked: with that much crime, where does one find the time to investigate one cold case, much less 50?

In contrast, when a case captures national attention, the response is immediate and total. FBI field offices mobilize. State agencies coordinate. Multi-county task forces are assembled. Information flows freely and publicly — descriptions, photographs, suspect profiles, direct appeals to the public. Every detail that might trigger a memory or produce a lead gets released.

This is not Springfield, Ohio, where cases gather dust for 30 years and are still declared active investigations. There are no FBI investigations, no state agencies circling the area for clues, no county or city law enforcement task forces searching daily for answers. This is “The Killing Fields of Ohio” — a place where an abundance of unsolved murders and missing women and their cases never see the light of day.

The police say no. We say otherwise.

This is Unsolved Ohio: Dispatches from the Killing Fields.