10. Jessica Lynn Keen - Solved After 18 Years
The defrosting of the Jessica Keen case was owed not to one individual or new evidence but to a change in Ohio law nearly two decades after the crime took place.
In 1991, Jessica Keen, a high school honor roll student interested in drama and music, was living at a counseling center and home for teens in Columbus. On March 15, she was waiting at a bus stop when she was abducted and taken to a nearby graveyard. Her captors beat her with a 30-kilogram (70 lb) gravestone. Her body was found two days later.
The case grew cold until the state passed a law 18 years later forcing all felons convicted of violent crimes to submit DNA samples to a state database. Prisoner Marvin Lee Smith, incarcerated for two other assaults in the Columbus area, gave a sample that matched evidence from the crime scene, and police charged him with the crime.
On February 27, 2009, Smith pleaded guilty to the crime and received 30 years to life in a federal penitentiary.
9. Cynthia Epps - Solved After 20 Years
In June 1994, Buffalo man James Fountain reported that he had found the remains of 29-year-old Cynthia Epps stuffed into a side table in his garage. He said he had no idea how the corpse had gotten in there, and he cooperated fully with the police. An investigation revealed that Epps had recently had sex before being stabbed to death. Her body had been mutilated in an apparent effort to dispose of the remains. She had been almost decapitated.
In 2010, Detectives Charles Aronica and Lissa Redmond of the Buffalo Police Department reopened the investigation and looked further into the past of Fountain, now aged 50. By this time, he had numerous rape convictions and a conviction for manslaughter. He had even spent time in the Central New York Psychiatric Center. Police compared his DNA to evidence taken from a rape kit of the 1994 murder. It matched.
Fountain pleaded guilty when confronted with the results and was sentenced on July 1, 2013 to 23 years to life in prison.
8. Amy Weidner - Solved After 23 Years
Sgt. Bill Carter was a 14-year veteran of the IMPD's Nuisance and Abatement Unit in 2012, having never worked a homicide case in his career. That changed when a cold case file from 1989 piqued his interest.
Amy Weidner, 16, had been found in her Indianapolis home, beaten, raped, and strangled. She had been home babysitting her sick little sister the previous night. The home had also been burgled, with her brother John-Paul's stereo missing.
With no leads but a bloody palm print (virtually useless in the low-tech '80s), the case collected dust for over two decades. Carter became involved when a colleague asked him to help navigate a memorial page for the victim on Facebook. Once he spoke to the victim's family and saw that they had all but lost hope, he resolved to uncover the truth behind the brutal murder.
A man familiar with the family and the case gave Carter a list of names of people he should talk to. One was Rodney Denk, a friend of John-Paul Weidner, 18 at the time of the crime. Carter obtained his prints the following day after Denk failed to show up to a meeting. They were a perfect match for the bloody handprint left at the scene.
Denk was tracked down to a friend's house on the east side of Indianapolis. Knowing the jig was up, he cut his own wrists. His suicide attempt failed, and Denk was sentenced to 65 years' hard time for his crimes.
Amy's mother prepared a written statement for the press outside the courthouse the day of his conviction, saying, "I thought I was going to see a monster, but who I saw was Rodney. For 23 years, seven months and one day, we believed a stranger had come into our home."
