Courtesy of the Arlington Police Department
UTA and the Arlington Police Department have partnered to create a cold case investigation course where students will try to help the department get a step closer to solving cold cases.
The program aims to give students real hands-on experience while allowing the police department to have someone actively looking at cases that are not being worked on.
There are 15 students in the course, split into three groups of five, with each group focusing on one case for the entire semester. The students are given all the paperwork, including police, detective, medical examiner and crime lab reports, which they only have access to during class. The only thing the students don’t have access to is the physical evidence from the cases.
Each of the three cases has a homicide detective assigned to it that the students will present a report to at the end of the semester, where they will tell the police department what they would do if they were a detective working the case.
“The goal is for us to take whatever they found and try to solve the case,” said Kyle Dishko, Arlington Police Department assistant police chief and head of the Investigations and Support Bureau.
Patricia Eddings, distinguished senior lecturer for the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice and former forensic analyst, pitched the idea to Lt. Blake Ritchie during October’s CRCJ Week.
Patricia Eddings, director of the forensic applications of science and technology minor program, partnered with the Arlington Police Department to develop a program that enables students to assist in solving active cold cases. The program launched in fall 2025.
During Ritchie’s presentation on a cold case the police department had recently solved, she said she noticed he kept saying he wished they had more time to go over these cases, and she wondered if UTA students could do some of that work.
After Eddings pitched the idea, the process took about six months to get everything lined up, Dishko said.
“This was really a new idea where we were having work of cold cases being done by students who were looking to get into the profession,” Dishko said. “So I thought it was a great idea, and one I definitely supported and wanted to make happen.”
The program allows students to work on three cases full time, something the police department can’t do on its own because it doesn’t have a cold case unit.
“To have a group of students focus on one case for a whole semester is really a unique concept,” Dishko said. “Even our detectives don’t get that kind of time because they’re managing multiple cases at one time.”
Apart from having eyes on cold cases, the program also serves as a way to bring UTA students who want to be a part of the law enforcement profession together with the police department.
“It’s just a natural fit for us to work with the university,” Dishko said. “We work with the university in so many other areas, and to work with the university in actual cold case homicides is really a great opportunity.”
The students’ impact on these cases is not limited to just the reports and the presentations.
“They’re not doing all this work for it just to go back in a case file and sit there,” he said. “We’re going to actually put resources into the case and try to solve the case based on their recommendations.”
For the students, the course is about more than just solving a cold case.
Courtesy of the Arlington Police Department
Jacey Concannon, biology senior with a forensics minor, said the program allows students to feel like they are working in the field and gives them insight into all the information police officers and investigators go through and why some of these cases take as long as they do to be solved.
Preston Schroeder, criminology and criminal justice junior, said the class gives them an opportunity to look for a break that gets them closer to solving the case.
“I recognize that there’s a family and this person’s friends who have been waiting all this time for some closure, and somewhere along the line something happened and they haven’t gotten it yet,” Schroeder said. “Anything that we could do as a group to look into these, I think, would be appreciated by them.”
Six weeks into the semester, the students are already showing enthusiasm and dedication to the class, with some of them showing up almost two hours early and leaving late to get as much time as possible with these cases, Eddings said.
Eddings, who approves which students get into the course, said she looks for students who have already taken certain forensics classes, including crime scene investigation, forensic death investigation and introduction to forensics, to prepare them for what they need to do in the course.
Concannon said working closely with Eddings has been great, and with Eddings’ extensive forensics background, she could not think of a better-suited professor to teach the course.
With Eddings having worked on all three cases during her time as a forensic analyst, this has become a full-circle moment for her.
“It is tremendously rewarding for me to see these students get so excited and work so hard to try to help law enforcement with this task,” Eddings said.
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