MONTPELIER, Vt. — Vermont police are supporting a new bill in the state legislature that would establish a force dedicated to cold cases to restart old investigations and potentially give families of victims of unsolved murders some of the answers they are looking for.
Major Glenn Hall, the commander of the state police Bureau of Criminal Investigations, on Wednesday described for lawmakers what cold case families go through.
“They wake up every day wondering what happened, they go to sleep every night wondering what happened,” Hall said. “And that’s the truth, they live that. It’s really nothing you can really imagine unless you’ve been through it or if you have somebody that’s close to you that’s been through that.”
The bill’s sponsor, Berlin Republican Rep. Patti Lewis, said her motivation is to help families who are involved in those type of cases obtain closure.
“If it was my daughter, I would want to know,” Lewis said.
Unsolved homicides are an important issue for the state, according to Hall.
Vermont has at least 57 unsolved homicides and more than 30 inactive missing person cases dating to 1946, according to police data. Hall said the bulk of those cases are from the 1970s and 1980s.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
-
Politics
How Maine’s members of Congress voted last week
-
Arts & Entertainment
Andra Day astonishes as Billie Holiday in Lee Daniels’s maddeningly uneven biopic
-
Columns
Black History Month: The past shows the way forward
-
Arts & Entertainment
Portland filmmakers hope to build on success at Sundance
-
Local & State
Maine takes vaccinations to seniors in independent living facilities
Success. Please wait for the page to reload. If the page does not reload within 5 seconds, please refresh the page.
Enter your email and password to access comments.
Hi {SUB NAME}, to comment on stories you must . This profile is in addition to your subscription and website login.
Already have one? .
Invalid username/password.
Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.
Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login to participate in the conversation. Here’s why.
Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.