Authorities hope to heat up Cold Cases by pitching playing cards to prisoners. The Kansas Department of Corrections debuted its Cold Case deck this morning. It’s a deck of real playing cards, but each of the cards features an unsolved homicide or missing persons case. The idea is to get the decks in front of people already in jail and prisons, and spark conversations that could lead to the tip needed to crack the case. The prison population plays cards frequently and the hope is to create some awareness and generate some conversation about who may have witnessed something or overheard a conversation and have information that could solve the case.
The idea for Cold Case Decks started in Florida, where tips led to arrests in three of the featured cases in the first three months. More than 20 states now have them. The 52 cards represent 59 individual cases with the oldest from 1976, the most recent from 2020. One of those cards has information about an unsolved homicide in Franklin County, the case of Doris Branson, and another from Osage County.
