How Unsolved Cases Are Kept

The first question of this section is whether there is a list to read. Tested office by office, the answer is that this jurisdiction does not publish a cold-case board. The St. Joseph County Prosecutor publishes no cold-case list in the record reached. The office did build the machinery once: in 2002 Prosecutor Chris Toth announced a Cold Case Squad, staffed by retired Mishawaka detective Craig Whitfield — who had worked the 1988 homicide of Theresa Burns — and South Bend Police Lieutenant James Clark, under Special Crimes Unit Commander Mike Swanson, with victims' families present at the announcement, Kathy Pennington, mother of Theresa Burns, sixteen, killed in 1988, among them. No public list or board survives from that squad in the record reached; the squad was an assignment of detectives, not a published roll. The St. Joseph County Police Department likewise publishes no cold-case list. The Mishawaka Police Department maintains a Cold Case Homicide Unit as a subdivision of its Detective Bureau, and publishes no case list from it.

The substitute mechanisms are two, and both are named so the finding is usable rather than merely negative. The state's list — the Indiana State Police cold-case list — is read whole in the next article. The appeals mechanism is Michiana Crime Stoppers, which publishes a rolling "Crime of the Week" archive of unsolved cases: eighty-five records across five pages, read in part whole, carrying a reward of up to $2,500 and anonymous tips at (574) 288-STOP. It is an appeals page that turns over, not a board that accumulates, and it carries no Granger or CDP case. The county's homicide machinery itself, as of the most recent record, is in transition: the County Metro Homicide Unit, created in 1993, was disbanded in October 2021, and South Bend cases have since run through the South Bend Police Violent Crimes Unit. The Tribune's October 2026 account of that change carries a data conflict between the city and the prosecutor, printed whole: the city states the Metro unit closed 53 percent of South Bend homicides from 2016 to October 2021, fifty-six of one hundred three, while the prosecutor's figures give seventy-three of one hundred seven solved, sixty-nine percent, and a solvability rate just under eighty percent for 2003–2021 against a national figure of sixty-one percent; the city counts eighty-eight homicides since the disbandment, eighty cleared and eight open. The prosecutor's office defines "solved" as charges filed, a killing ruled justified or accidental, or the perpetrator dead. A reader of this section should hold the shape plainly: in this jurisdiction the open record is kept in detectives' files and in the state's short list, and there is no board on the wall to consult.