For cold case unit, no dead ends 2.18.11

INDIANAPOLIS STAR

IMPD Sgt. Mark Albert has a huge backload of work, but no one's getting on him about it.

In fact, his unfinished business fills three storage rooms from floor to ceiling. Names of the not-so-recently departed are scribbled on the sides of boxes -- 800 names in all -- and it's his job to figure out what happened to them.

Albert runs Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department's Cold Case Unit, where it helps to be a tortoise, and the "First 48" means something entirely different from the A&E TV show in which homicide cases usually are solved within the first 48 hours.

"First 48 years is good enough for us sometimes," Albert said.

The storage area had one less box Thursday after prosecutors announced that they had made an arrest in the 1986 slaying of 13-year-old Dawn Stuard. A former member of the unit now working with the prosecutor's office, Steve West, had refused to give up on the case.

"As with any unsolved case, there is a reason it is unsolved in the first place," West said. "Regular citizens, as time goes by, forget about it. Assume it was solved, things like that."

The IMPD Cold Case Unit takes homicides everyone else has given up on. Leads have dried up, and people have clammed up. Eyewitnesses have died, and memories have faded.

"It's not like they have to be a certain number of years old before they come to us," Albert said. "They just have to be dead ends."

The unit's oldest case dates to Nov. 26, 1936, when cab driver Arthur Alexander was fatally shot with a .32-caliber handgun in the 700 block of North Sheffield Avenue.

"Nothing new on that one in a while," Albert said, glancing at the file in his small office on the third floor of the City-County Building.

The cases also include a triple homicide in January 1994 and that of Marion County Sheriff's Department Lt. Thurman Earl Sharp, who was killed on Christmas Day 1988.

"Sharp was working off duty in an office park early Christmas morning," Albert said. "There was no one around."

The Cold Case Unit got new life in 2008, when a federal grant for more than $400,000 allowed Albert to hire a couple of retired lieutenants and send more crime scene samples to a lab for testing. The unit now has four police officers and two part-time assistants.

The unit has solved eight homicides, one a double murder, since 2008.

DNA testing has been a "game-changer," Albert said. Police can send samples to the Indiana Department of Correction, which keeps the DNA of every prisoner in the state, to see whether any hits turn up.

That was how the unit solved the 1989 slaying of Mary Emma Dillehay, 68. Danny Saintignon was in prison in Michigan City, and his DNA matched.

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