Thursday, June 8, 2006 | 7:31 a.m.
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Dixie Dean was found with her hands tied behind her back, her pants pulled down and her head hidden under a rug - dead from a gunshot wound in her Vegas Heights trailer.
Dean's neighbor discovered her and ran half a mile to the nearest phone to call police, who arrived at the scene and launched an investigation. Today, 54 years later, it's still unsolved.
The death of Dixie Dean, killed Oct. 15, 1952, is Metro's oldest "cold case," one of approximately 450 unsolved homicides more than 10 years old that police investigators are slowly trying to solve.
It is also one of 15 cases that two investigators, both former Metro officers who came out of retirement, are working. Kevin Manning, a former homicide sergeant, and Jim Chaney, former director of crime scene investigation, are Metro's Cold Case Detail, and their work focuses on the aging contents of a locked repository down the hall from the homicide bureau.
"Will it come to a wonderful conclusion?" says Manning, referring to the Dean case. "I don't know yet. The older you go, the more information you have to try and glean from other sources."
Dean's case file is no more than 200 pages of typewriter paper now more like crepe; police reports, witness statements, interview transcripts, telegrams, all clipped together in a metal-mouthed folder. A handful of crime-scene images were captured by a newspaper photographer whose shadow is cast over shots of Dean's trailer, a rounded flash attachment in silhouette.
Also included in Dean's file is a letter from the FBI confirming receipt of evidence for scientific exam, including underwear Dean was clutching in her hands. The letter is addressed, "My dear Sheriff" and signed in blue ink across the bottom: J.E. Hoover.
If the FBI evidence still exists, it might be cold case investigators' best hope.
"DNA is the holy grail of what we are doing today," Manning says. "These cases are all cold for a reason - there was no progression of evidence or there were no witnesses. Our hope in moving back and looking at these cases has to do with technology."
Dean was sexually assaulted before she died and any biological evidence the investigators can retrieve might lead back to someone who was involved with the death, he says. To that end, the cold case investigators hope the FBI, Clark County coroner or Metro's own evidence vault can turn up any physical evidence from the 1952 homicide scene. So far, nothing has surfaced.
Manning says among the biggest virtues cold case investigators need is patience: "It's just finding this minute sentence in a report that jumps out at you, that takes you down the right road."
Until last November, the cold case investigators had spent most of their time cataloging and organizing the cases, which have been stored at different times in a basement below City Hall or a rented storage shed.
Now, with rows of black binders arranged by victim, they say they've finally started gumshoeing the cold cases, seeking out old evidence, old witnesses and any family members of the victims they can find. (Suspects are named in only about a quarter of the cases, Manning says.)
"When I am able to reach out to the family, 25 or 30 years later, and say that we haven't forgotten, it's actually made it joyful, being able to do this - touch these people in this way as opposed to when I left before and kind of had that little bit of bitterness," Manning says. "It's nice to deal with the families. It's been kind of an epiphany, I guess."
In mid-May, Metro launched a cold case Web site. It has a handful of cases detailed with images of the victims, and the investigators plan to add six cases weekly to the site. Chaney says the Internet provides yet another technology to tap for leads.
"These are cold, cold cases, unless I can get some kind of source or information," he says. "If we get some kind of viable information, an anonymous phone call or e-mail or letter or whatever, we'll stop what we're doing and start working on that case right then."
In some of the cases, however, the enemy isn't as much the evidence as it is the quality of the investigation.
In the Dean case, a neighbor who found the murder victim is referenced only by last name in police reports, presumably because she was known around town at that time, Manning says.
And a report on another case tells of a crime scene investigator who found a discharged bullet at the crime scene and stuck the slug in his pocket for later analysis.
"At least he saved it," Chaney says.
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