Roxanne Wood.Photo: south bend police department
A group of criminal justice students atWestern Michigan Universitygot more real-world experience in one semester than they ever dreamed they would when they helped detectives solve a 35-year-old murder - the students' first cold case ever.
For years, authorities searched for whoever killed Roxanne Wood, 30, who was found dead on the kitchen floor of her home in Niles Township, Mich., lying in a pool of blood with her throat cut after a night out bowling with her husband and their friends on Feb. 20, 1987.
She had been stabbed multiple times and raped.
The case went cold for decades until Michigan State Police detectives with the help of tenacious students inWestern Michigan University’s new Cold Case Programand their professor used genetic genealogy to identify Patrick Wayne Gilham, 67, as the killer.
Arrested on February 18, 2022, Gilham pleaded no contest in mid-March to second-degree murder in Wood’s murder,Michigan State Police announced in a release on March 18.
He agreed to a minimum sentence of 23 years in prison.
Patrick Wayne Gilham.
“I would call it highly successful in that the first case that we worked together, we were able to, as a group, make an arrest on a case that had been cold for 35 years,” said Michigan State Police Det. First Lt. Chuck Christensen, who began investigating the case in 2001,WMU Newsreports.
Dr. Kuersten began working on the case with two doctoral students in Jan. 2021, when she launched the university’s Cold Case Program in partnership with the Michigan State Police and began developing the program’s curriculum.
“This is a great experience for anyone who wants to go into law enforcement,” Kuersten tells PEOPLE. “It’s important that students have real-world experience.”
Under Kuersten’s leadership, doctoral students Ashley Chlebek and Carl Huber worked more than 1,200 hours over the course of eight months in 2021 digitizing “boxes and boxes” of files, notes and other documents detectives had collected since the night Wood was murdered, Kuersten says.
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Instead of rifling through boxes and boxes of paper, “detectives were then able to take the digital database we created and do an immediate search for a person’s first name or a license plate or a certain surname whatever piece of information they were looking for,” says Dr. Kuersten.
“It’s been a game-changer,” she says.
Students were also given unlimited access to the case files and one-on-one time with detectives where students shared information and leads they’d uncovered.
“My students would say to the detectives, ‘Did you interview this person?'” Dr. Kuersten says.
“The detectives in turn would ask them, ‘Can you find out who lived in this house on this date?'”
Students also made use of the library to comb through old issues of local newspapers for clues.
“This is why we still need libraries,” she says. “They still matter.”
“But Gilham had been convicted of a felony before CODIS was created, so he wasn’t in CODIS,” she says.
Detectives were then able to use DNA found at the crime scene along with info in public DNA databases – and the mountain of data the students helped organize - to narrow the killer down to Gilham and two of his brothers in the fall.
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Gilham was identified as a potential suspect in Wood’s murder from original evidence left at the scene, MSP said in its statement.
While they were surveilling Gilham, he discarded a cigarette that detectives scooped up, using DNA from the cigarette to confirm that DNA found at the crime scene belonged to Gilham, Det. Christensen said,NBC Newsreports.
When Kuersten learned that Gilham – who’d been convicted of raping a woman decades earlier - was arrested in February, “it was such a great feeling,” she says.
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Now that she and her class have helped solve their first case, they are taking on other cases, which give students invaluable experience – and then some.
“It’s one thing to teach a class,” she says. “This is a whole different ballgame.”
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go torainn.org.
source: people.com
