Cold Case Investigations: The Reality vs. Fiction and the Rise of Locate International
When it comes to cold cases, crime dramas get a lot wrong. “In reality, you’d never reach the end in nine neat episodes, all wrapped up, with a timeline that moved nicely along, building tension,” says Dave Grimstead, who spent more than 30 years in the police. Real cold cases are rollercoasters of false leads, rabbit holes and dead ends. “They’re never solved by one heroic detective, either,” Grimstead adds. “It requires a much bigger team than you see on TV.” But one cliche does ring true – the detective who can’t give up. Most will have at least one unsolved case that stays with them long after the spotlight has moved elsewhere. In a free moment, they will find themselves following a lead, putting in calls. Decades later, they might still wake up thinking about it.
One of these cases, for Grimstead, was the disappearance of Melanie Hall in June 1996. Hall was 25 and never came home from Cadillacs, a nightclub in Bath where she was last seen arguing with her boyfriend. Grimstead was a detective constable in Avon and Somerset’s major crime team at that time, and what began as a missing person investigation soon began to resemble a murder inquiry. Hundreds of hours of interviews and CCTV footage, searches, reconstructions and TV appeals failed to reveal what had happened to Hall. In 2009, one of Grimstead’s supervisors, Mike Britton, was still investigating it, fitting it round his caseload, when her body was found in a bin liner beside the M5. Although this happened just days before Britton’s retirement, he cancelled his plans so he could work on the case as a civilian investigator. It is still unsolved.
In 2012, Grimstead retired, too, but cold cases such as Melanie Hall’s, and their impact on families, as well as colleagues, stayed with him. “Investigations move on really quickly,” he says. “There’s the next case and the one after, but these families are still in that place, frozen in time. Time doesn’t move on in the same way for them. They may have been told something, or learned new information but, 10 years later, it can be difficult to find support to follow it up. And then, inside the police, there are always people like Mike Britton, still trying to find answers while under pressure not to spend too long on it, to be careful with the resources available.”
On holiday in Cornwall, sitting in St Ives harbour, watching a crew go out on the lifeboat of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), Grimstead had the beginnings of an idea. “The RNLI are specialist-trained people drawn from the community who respond when they’re needed for people lost at sea,” he says. Would a search-and-rescue service work for people lost on land, too?
This was the starting point for Locate International (LI), which Grimstead founded in 2019. Volunteers are carefully trained, organised into online teams and allocated cases that involve a long-term missing person or someone who has died and never been identified. These, says Grimstead, are the two types of cases most likely to fall down the “slippery slope” of resource constraints and attention spans.
Grimstead’s book Someone Must Know tells the stories of some of them. One is that of Karen Milsom, a Bristol-born care worker, who, aged 52, went missing from her home in south-west France in August 2019. Another is “Sligo Man”, a man in late middle age who checked into a hotel on Ireland’s west coast in June 2009, using a false name and address, and was found dead on a nearby beach four days later. He still hasn’t been identified. There’s “Wembley Point Woman”, who jumped from the 21st floor of an office block in north-west London more than 20 years ago. So many are steeped in sadness and mystery, and seem utterly unsolvable; yet each now has a team of people, aged from 18 to 77 – lawyers, librarians, social workers, mental health professionals, project managers, coroner’s officers and former detectives – all trying to find an answer. LI’s last application window for volunteers, which closed in May, brought 200 more potential recruits. There are no paid staff.
For Grimstead, 62, it is a return to the start of his policing career as a cadet, working with communities in east London. He grew up in Bristol and joined the police at 16. “It was a choice between that or Bath College of Sport to become a PE teacher,” he says. In London, he spent a year at Profumo House in Whitechapel, a community hub that operated for decades. “It was the energy of the groups there and the sense of duty that I was inspired by,” he says. “Care for the elderly, meals at lunchtime, legal advice, language schools, translation services – if these volunteers weren’t doing it, no one else would. It was just amazing how it all knitted together.”
After two years as a cadet, Grimstead became a regular police officer with the Metropolitan police, gravitating towards neighbourhood policing. He was involved in setting up one of the first neighbourhood watch schemes. After meeting his wife, who was a special constable (volunteer police officer), he moved back to Bristol. Their daughter is now a police officer, too. Most of his subsequent career was spent on organised crime.
Throughout his time in the police, the hardest part was always leaving an unsolved case behind. “It’s that point where you have to move on,” he says, “because new cases keep coming in.” Long-term missing persons and people who have died unidentified will always be lower priority for police, he says, as, unlike the case of Melanie Hall, very few will involve a crime. “Is there sufficient capacity to spend resources when there is no crime, when you’ve got vast numbers of unsolved sexual offences, violent offences?” On average, local police forces receive 12 to 18 missing person reports daily and 90% will return within 48 hours. But 10,000 have been missing for more than a year.
Another frustration for Grimstead was the lack of learning from these. “You have inquests if someone dies. If there’s a child death, there’s a child death review process,” he says. For a long-term missing person, there’s just a void. “There are thousands of cases but no attempts to extract the learning.”
LI has identified certain patterns. Research part-authored by one volunteer, the criminologist Dr Cheryl Allsop, showed that missing person cases involving murder disproportionately affect women. While they make up 28% of murder victims as a whole, women account for 63% of murder cases that start as missing person inquiries. When it comes to LI’s unidentified bodies, a striking number – 33% – are men found in remote, rural or scenic locations. They died, or chose to die, isolated from society. “We really need to understand the personal stories behind each one to work out where improvements can be made and how to prevent this happening in future,” says Grimstead.
Some of the subjects in Someone Must Know seem to have done everything in their power to prevent this, to remain anonymous, to be forgotten. Sligo Man is one. During his stay in Sligo, CCTV shows him leaving his hotel numerous times with a full bag, always returning with nothing; it’s believed he was getting rid of his belongings, methodically erasing his identity. He had asked for a one-way ticket to Rosses Point beach, where his body was found the following morning, still fully clothed. Every item he was wearing had had the labels removed. He hadn’t drowned, and his body contained no traces of drugs, poisons, or even over-the-counter medication, although it was established that he had advanced cancer and must have been in severe and constant pain. The official cause of death was acute cardiac arrest. There are now hundreds of online sleuths, Reddit posts, and even a (quite beautiful, haunting) documentary dedicated to this mystery.
Is Grimstead concerned by the current true crime craze, and the growth of “armchair sleuthing”? The charity Missing People has recently backed a campaign against “tragedy trolling” by the family of 19-year-old Jay Slater, whose disappearance in Tenerife in 2024 sparked staggering levels of online speculation. “More people are becoming interested in cases involving missing and unidentified persons, and many genuinely want to help families find answers,” says Grimstead, “but involvement must be responsible. Parts of true crime culture can become intrusive, spread misinformation, wrongly accuse individuals and cause significant distress to families. Our approach is very different.” LI volunteers are carefully recruited, trained and work alongside police and specialists as well as families, with strict safeguards in place. Grimstead doesn’t accept, however, that the mysteries surrounding Sligo Man and similar cases should be left unsolved, even when it seems to have been their wish.
“I don’t think we’ve found a case yet where there wasn’t someone who cared and wanted to know what happened,” he says. “Often, speaking to family, you find there’s been an almost accidental disconnection over time, but providing an answer still makes such a difference. There’s a wider public health issue, too. Without understanding what happened, it’s difficult to learn.”
Some of LI’s successes depend on dogged detective work. One involved a woman who had been missing for two years, the only clue her profile picture on a social media account, standing on a London balcony made from panels of glass. The LI team found the company that manufactured them, looked at its website, identified the buildings it had supplied and were able to line up the skyline in the picture with the precise apartment. The information was passed to police and it turned out that this woman had been trafficked from an African country to be sexually exploited. In other cases, the answer lies in a misspelled name, or a DNA match that had been in the police file all along, but was simply never followed up.
Many, though, seem unsolvable. “North Sea Man” involves an unidentified body that was found by a German coastguard floating face down near Heligoland in July 1994. He was 6ft 5in and well dressed, wearing expensive shoes handmade in England and a striped tie from Marks & Spencer. However, an isotope analysis, which looks at biological markers from the food we eat and the dust we ingest, found him to be Australian.
North Sea Man had a catastrophic wound to the back of his head and was weighted down by metal shoe lasts tied to his waist. The detective with the Lower Saxony police who was a young recruit when the body was found is now nearing retirement and still trying to solve the case. Nevertheless, Grimstead is confident the facts will eventually come out.
“When we first started on North Sea Man, we had nothing,” he says. “We know more now. There’ll be more advances in forensic science, and genealogy. If we can keep it at the forefront of the public imagination, one day somebody looking into their family history might see the photographs and recognise it.”
LI has restored the optimism that Grimstead had as a young cadet. “Years of policing changed me,” he says. “I saw what violence leaves behind. Offenders often showed no respect for life or suffering. People in power who could have made things better often chose not to. But working with LI has shown me people who give their time to help strangers. In policing, I often saw exploitation and indifference. With Locate, I see ordinary people who choose compassion, effort and persistence because they believe someone matters.” He is now working on a pilot project in Devon and Cornwall where trained volunteers are embedded within the police and have greater access to information and lines of inquiry.
The case that, for Grimstead, encapsulates LI’s best work is that of Vincent Akpiroroh, who was found dead from exposure on a London street in February 1994. There was only a scrap of paper in his pocket written in spidery capitals – a name and “No fixed address”.
The name led nowhere and for 30 years, he remained anonymous, an “unknown male” on his death certificate, a “mystery vagrant” and “down and out” in a short local newspaper report. Using digital enhancement, an LI team established that Akpiroroh’s name had been misrecorded back in 1994, then used the correct spelling to find his family in Nigeria and friends in London. They learned that Vincent Akpiroroh had been deaf and unable to speak, which is why he carried that scrap of paper. He’d been bullied in the past. He loved to draw and wanted to go to art school. “A name recorded wrongly led to a family not being able to find answers and a person stripped of dignity and humanity,” says Grimstead. “We were able to find out so much more about his life, his hopes, his passions and what went wrong for him. That’s the case I come back to the most.”
Someone Must Know: The Search for Missing People and Lost Identities by Dave Grimstead is published by The Bodley Head on 11 June, price £22
