NCIS cold case squad never forgets victims - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

NCIS cold case squad never forgets victims

The case was cold. Ice cold.

Some time during the overnight hours of March 25, 1982, 23-year-old sailor Pamela Ann Kimbrue disappeared while on duty as a message courier at Naval Station Norfolk, Va. The next morning she was found, her hands bound and her body seat-belted into the back seat of a car that was pulled out of adjacent Willoughby Bay.

Kimbrue had been beaten with a soda bottle, but the cause of death was drowning. She’d also been raped. Investigators found a smudged fingerprint and some body hair, and recovered a semen sample. The now-common comparison of DNA samples to match such evidence with a suspect was four years from coming into practice. About 800 people were interviewed over the next two months, but none bore fruit.

In early 1995, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service formed its Cold Case Homicide Unit, the nation’s first on the federal level. Within a few months, its agents were re-examining the Kimbrue case. An initial suspect, Richard Whittle, emerged as a strong possibility. DNA testing was now a reality, and a plan to snag a sample from Whittle, also a sailor, was hatched.

A female agent posing as a door-to-door canvasser went to Whittle’s Burbank, Calif., home the following spring. When he came to the door, she asked him a few questions about his shopping preferences, placed his answers in an envelope and asked him to seal it to ensure the integrity of the “survey.”

He licked it and, like others in the neighborhood, was given a dollar for his trouble. The DNA taken from the envelope was a circumstantial match, meaning he couldn’t be eliminated as a possible source of the semen. In June, agents met Whittle at a nearby hotel, got him talking and outlined their version of events. He confessed, pleaded guilty and is serving two life sentences for Kimbrue’s murder.

“It was a great case,” said Mike Keleher, NCIS’s division chief of Criminal Investigations, Violent Crime and Cold Case Homicide and an original member of the CCHU. “It highlighted the amount of imagination that we get to bring to a cold-case approach.”

One measure of the unit’s success is the 62 cases solved over nearly 18 years of work. Yet another is the respect accorded the unit by civilian law enforcement agencies; the CCHU is regularly asked to conduct training at law enforcement seminars for both state and federal agencies.

Success also bred imitation in the form of the Hollywood treatment; “NCIS” and a spinoff show are two of the top-rated dramas on network TV. Mike Sullivan, program manager for the CCHU, said the popular show mirrors the daily routine within the unit.

“It’s same-same — there’s no change,” he says, deadpan — before breaking out in laughter.

“I used to tell people, in every show, there’s a nugget of reality in there somewhere,” Keleher said. “And I was always surprised to see those show up.”

A retired NCIS agent has advised the show “from Day One,” Keleher said. “Sometimes they go his way, and other times they say, ‘We have to make a television show.’ … But we like to watch the show, and most of us have met many of the character actors. They’re very nice people, and very appreciative of what we do in the real world.”

The CCHU began life with 24 full-time special agents. That total has shrunk to eight, scattered around the U.S. — just a fraction of the agency’s 1,100 agents.

“We had to downsize a bit” after 9/11, said Sullivan, noting the changes in overall Navy security requirements launched by the terrorist attacks. “But we’re still up and running and have had some very good successes.”

There have been times in the past where the unit felt pressure to produce results, Sullivan said, a “what-have-you-done-for-me-lately” attitude. That’s not the case now, he said, but it’s understandable.

“This stuff is an ebb-and-flow thing,” Sullivan said. “We’ll be investigating cases and not closing anything, and then all of a sudden … in a period of six months [ending] about four months back, we closed four homicides. … And that’s just the nature of the business.”

“It’s a long-term commitment,” Keleher said. “And everybody up the chain, to include the director and the deputy director, they’re all for it. … They understand the whole cold-case concept. They understand that it takes time. … We’re not getting pressure from outside sources, or above.”

‘It’s not easy’

Although the unit is relatively small, agents can draw upon the entire pallet of NCIS capabilities, from forensic consultants to psychologists and criminal analysts — as well as other local agents.

“We use everything we’ve got,” Keleher said. Cases are selected using a “triage” system; outside investigators sometimes bring cases to CCHU’s attention, Sullivan said.

NCIS, which investigates Navy felonies, is heavily involved in criminal cases that come through the naval justice system. But that’s a rarity for the CCHU, whose cases typically end up in civilian court because most of the suspects it chases are long gone from the Navy.

It’s challenging work, Keleher said.

“The standard of evidence is the same,” he said. “The problem is, these cases went unsolved for many, many years. … Witnesses are always an issue; over the passage of time, their memories may have faded. Some of them don’t lead very good lives and … drugs and alcohol have taken their toll. They may be dead. And we’re having to work with recorded documents made years before. And any prosecutor who takes on a murder wants to win.

“We acknowledge that it’s not easy,” Keleher said. “If it was easy, it’d have been done years ago.”

Agents keep three basic concepts in mind as they go about their work, Keleher said. Relationships change over time — a former friend or ex-wife may decide to cooperate. New science and forensics are always being developed, such as the newfound ability to develop a DNA profile from shed skin cells, known as “touch DNA.” Finally, it’s often true that the solution to the cold case is already in the file, and all that’s needed is a fresh set of eyes.

“It’s 100 percent accurate,” said Keleher, who borrowed the concept from the Miami-Dade County Police, which is credited with inventing the cold-case concept in the early 1980s. The perpetrator, Keleher said, “may not have been a suspect; they might have been a witness; they might have been a neighbor; but they’re in there somewhere. … Your suspect is part of the surrounding environment. It’s just, you might not have seen them as such back in the day.”

Sullivan pointed back to the Kimbrue case.

“The new agent that was looking at the case noticed that the suspect was checking in [at] his workplace, the same as our victim’s workplace, on [his] days off,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but we don’t do that. But no one had noticed that before. So that analytical piece started the ball rolling to start looking at Whittle. … It was there all the time.”