January 20, 2000
Web posted at: 1:13 a.m. EST (0613 GMT)

In this story: Case histories Thousands get away with murder RELATED STORIES, SITES

From Correspondent Garrick Utley

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Unlike television dramas -- where investigators track down criminals in a half-hour or hour at most -- it can take years before some real crimes are solved. And some never are.

"What I have found over the years, working on a lot of cases ... is that there is very often a particular detective on the case or a cop on the case who just can't let it go," said author Dominick Dunne.

Dunne wrote the novel "A Season in Purgatory," which was loosely based on the Martha Moxley murder case. A suspect in that case was arrested Wednesday, almost a quarter-century after the crime was committed.

In another case, it was not dogged detective work that brought Katherine Ann Power into a courtroom in Massachusetts -- she gave herself up.

Back in 1970, Power belonged to a group of self-styled revolutionaries. When they robbed a bank, a policeman was killed. Power fled and assumed a new identity, family and life in Oregon.

Twenty-three years after the crime, Power pleaded guilty to being an accessory to murder and served six years in prison.

A television show led to the capture of John List.

His trail had been cold for more than 17 years after List shot and killed his wife, mother and three children in his New Jersey home in 1971.

After the television program "America's Most Wanted" publicized the case in 1989, List -- who had moved to Denver, changed his name and married again -- was found, convicted on five counts of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Besides publicity, or the luck of an unexpected piece of evidence turning up, cases can be solved by the simple determination -- as Dunne points out -- of prosecutors or detectives who won't give up.

Civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi in 1963.

Byron De La Beckwith stood trial twice for Evers' murder, but both all-white juries deadlocked, leaving Beckwith free for 30 years.

But prosecutors in Mississippi revived the cold case in 1994, and Beckwith was retried, convicted and sentenced to life.

When it descends to murder, or mass murder, crime knows no legal or moral statute of limitations.

Trials of Nazi-era war criminals are still held, and investigations of others are still pursued.

As police and prosecutors pursue individual murderers, how successful are they?

In 1998, in the United States, there were 13,134 instances of murder and what the FBI calls non-negligent manslaughter.

Of these, nearly one third (31.7 percent) remained unsolved, with no arrests as of October 1999.

More than we might suspect, criminals -- as many as 4,000 in a single year in the United States -- are getting away with murder.

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