Homicide Cold Case Repository: Are Cold Case Files Public by State?

Rechecked every agency link in the state-by-state table and updated 11 that had moved, including the Minnesota, Austin, Cumberland County NC, Henrico County VA, Mesa, San Antonio, Fort Worth, Charlotte and Portland entries. Corrected the Louisiana entry, which had wrongly described the Sleuth and Justice case index as unavailable when it is in fact browsable by parish. Added a section on NamUs, the Justice Department national database for missing and unidentified persons, and grouped North Little Rock and two Oregon counties into a note covering jurisdictions whose agencies no longer publish a cold case page.

Independently fact-checked against the cited primary sources

Link-maintenance review of the state-by-state table. Rechecked every agency link and updated 11 that had moved: Mesa AZ, the Minnesota BCA unsolved cases list, Somerset County NJ, the South Jersey roundup, Charlotte NC, Cumberland County NC, Portland OR, San Antonio TX, Austin TX, Fort Worth TX and Henrico County VA. Removed three rows whose agencies no longer publish a cold case page, preserving each in a note under the table with a live route to an investigator: North Little Rock AR, plus Marion and Jackson counties OR. The Marion County cold case URL returns an authorization error and the Jackson County one now redirects to the county homepage, and neither office lists a cold case unit among its divisions. Corrected the Louisiana entry: an earlier draft of this review reported that the Sleuth and Justice case index was not browsable, which was wrong. The index is live and organized by parish, and the RETURNING SOON banner appears only on the site homepage. The row now points at the index and states its real limitation, which is that most of the six case pages are still placeholders. Added a section on NamUs (namus.nij.ojp.gov), the Justice Department repository for missing, unidentified and unclaimed persons, and split the opening key takeaway so it no longer implies that no national resource exists. Stripped a stale Java session token from the Colorado database link and corrected the government-source flag on seven official city and county sites that use .us rather than .gov domains. Roughly 22 agency sites in the table refuse automated requests but load normally in an ordinary browser, so a blocked fetch was never treated as a dead link. The CrimeWatch PA aggregator, San Diego County Sheriff and New York State Police citations stayed in place as unverified rather than being removed or swapped.

Fixed 159 broken links left over from the original WordPress migration, where markdown link text had been stripped and replaced with bare URLs mid-sentence throughout the state-by-state table (the worst instance of this bug found sitewide). Verified all 155 external agency links individually: 97 were still live and got restored as proper linked citations, 47 had moved and were updated to their current live URL, and 6 with no working replacement were removed (Fort Smith AR, Jefferson Parish LA, Fayetteville NC, Carter County OK, Monroe County PA, Sioux Falls SD). Fixed 3 broken internal cross-links (VPN explainer, murder-degree, and [manslaughter](/difference-between-first-second-third-degree-manslaughter)-degree pages). Corrected a duplicated URL (Wisconsin's Polk County row was pointing to Kenosha County's page), a mislabeled Kansas row that pointed to a Missouri agency's URL, and a Washington County, Oregon row mislabeled as Washington state. Added a Key Takeaways summary and corrected the truncated, en-dash-containing page title.