State crime team proposed to work on cold rape, murder cases
OLYMPIA — As detectives closed in on the Green River Killer in the late 1990s, the state Attorney General’s Office had 13 investigators sifting through reports and following up on leads in homicides and sex crimes all around Washington.
Since 2001, when police arrested that murderer of dozens of girls and women, the Homicide Information Tracking System team has dwindled to a total of five employees, where there used to be 16. Meanwhile, the number of unsolved killings continues to move in the opposite direction.
A $1.7 million budget request by state Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s office would beef up the HITS team in 2020, as well as create a new state unit of cold case investigators to help detectives faced with 1,600 unsolved homicides. It’s the first time the office has called for a state team specifically tasked with pursuing cold cases. An ambitious pitch by Ferguson’s office called for eight more senior investigators, an assistant attorney general, a crime victim advocate, a violent crime analyst, a data consultant and a legal assistant.
However, this month a note buried in Gov. Jay Inslee’s supplemental budget proposal suggested a more modest bump of $647,000, with no mention of a homicide unit. It could fund two new investigators and a victim advocate.
Both proposals prioritize following up on leads in cold rape cases. For years, many sexual assault kits have sat untested on shelves, until they numbered around 10,000 in this state, in an egregious failure of the criminal justice system.
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