About Coldcase
Coldcase is the world's first collaborative investigation platform. We give citizens the same tools that institutions use — document analysis, relationship mapping, evidence management — and let communities do what agencies won't.
There are over 250,000 unsolved murders in the United States. Every year, roughly 6,000 more are added to that number. The national clearance rate for homicides has collapsed from 93% in the 1960s to barely 50% today.
Meanwhile, the institutions tasked with solving these cases have repeatedly failed the public. The FBI sent Congress pre-redacted Epstein files. A 2024 Inspector General report found 47% non-compliance on child abuse cases. The DOJ settled for $138.7 million after the FBI failed hundreds of Larry Nassar's victims. 377 officers responded to Uvalde. They waited 77 minutes.
At the same time, citizens have been quietly doing the work. A Reddit user cracked the Brown/MIT murder case. Podcast investigations have led to exonerations. College students have identified suspects in decades-old cases. The Golden State Killer was caught because of citizen genealogy work.
The talent is there. The motivation is there. What was missing was a platform — a real investigative workspace where communities can organize evidence, map relationships, and collaborate at scale.
That's what Coldcase is.
When evidence is organized and accessible, cover-ups become harder. When the public can see what agencies have — and haven't — done, the pressure to act becomes impossible to ignore.
A nurse spots a medical inconsistency. A contractor recognizes a building in a photo. A retired analyst notices a pattern across cases. Different backgrounds produce different insights. That's the power of collective investigation.
We approach every investigation with respect for victims and their families. Speculation without evidence hurts people. Responsible investigation means being rigorous, ethical, and compassionate.
Investigative journalism is dying. FOIA requests cost money. Research takes hundreds of hours. Coldcase lets investigators monetize their work so the best researchers can keep doing what they do.
Coldcase started with a simple frustration: public records that should have been public weren't. Court documents were buried in paywalls. FOIA responses came back so redacted they were useless. The people who cared most about these cases — families, journalists, amateur investigators — had no centralized place to work together.
We saw scattered communities across Reddit, Discord, Facebook groups, and podcasts. Brilliant people doing incredible work in isolation. Evidence in one spreadsheet, theories in another, documents scattered across Google Drives. No way to see the connections. No way to collaborate at scale.
So we built the platform those communities deserved. Not a forum. Not a wiki. A real investigative workspace — with document management, relationship mapping, evidence boards, timelines, and AI-assisted search across thousands of pages.
The institutions won't save them. But a community of citizen investigators just might.