VISALIA (KMJ) — Two new Detectives have been brought into Tulare County Sheriff’s Department, to help bring criminals who think they’ve evaded the law to justice.
The Cold Case Homicide Unit will be using techniques that weren’t available back when the incidents took place. It’ll be staffed by Detectives Christopher Dempsie and Dwayne Johnson, who between them have 70 years of experience.
“It can narrow the search from millions and billions to a family tree,” said Johnson. “Not that person but someone within that family”
Christopher Dempsie is formerly of Porterville Police Department, while Dwayne Johnson is formerly of the FBI. The pair will be working through old evident to determine what they can discover with modern techniques.
“[Evidence] wasn’t packaged to preserve DNA”, said Dempsie. “They weren’t trying to preserve something they didn’t know existed”.
The unit is something Sheriff Mike Boudreaux was eager to establish.
“I was the Captain over at the homicide unit, there’s cases that are dear to my heart”, explains the Sheriff. “Some that I believe can be solved, if we can just get that little bit of information”
One of those cases will be the 1994 abduction and murder of a 10-year-old girl from a Visalia swap meet.
“There’s a lot of different witnesses that we would like to re-interview, there’s forensics, DNA, upgraded evidence technology that’s come together in recent years, and we hoping that begins to tip that domino in solving that case”.
Hear the report from KMJ’s Dominic McAndrew as it aired:
