Overview
- The initiative, announced Wednesday in Miami, pairs the Attorney General’s Office and FDLE with private lab Othram to reopen long-stalled cases.
- Uthmeier urged police agencies across the state to submit cold cases for review and said his office will prosecute regardless of a case’s age.
- Officials said early work will prioritize multi-homicide investigations from the 1970s and 1980s and cases with DNA that can still be tested.
- The backlog includes more than 21,000 unsolved murders, nearly 900 unidentified human remains, and about 2,500 missing-persons cases dating to 1965.
- Othram’s methods can read tiny or degraded DNA and build family trees to identify suspects or victims without a direct database match, a technique Florida used in 2024 to name a victim decades after her murder.