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There are over 100,000 cold cases in America.

Only 1% are ever solved.

This is one of those rare stories.

It's 2001 in Lansing, Michigan, and Eric Schroeder is an officer with the Michigan State Police. That summer, Eric walks into the department's evidence room and begins to look around.

I thought this would probably be a really good time to try to go through some of this evidence

on these cases and submit it back to the lab and see if they could do anything further on it

or any type of testing that would give us some DNA analysis results.

Of all the cold cases in this room, one is of particular interest to Schroeder, the 1969 murder

of a University of Michigan student, Jane Mixer.

Because I had worked on the mixer case when I was posted down at the State Police Post in

Ipsilani, that was kind of always one that was near and dear to my heart, so it was one of the

first ones that I pulled out.

Detective Schroeder begins to work the case, more than 30 years cold.

Well, I was a, we call it today a forensic scientist. I was a detective sergeant, sworn officer for the Michigan State Police. On March 21st, 1969, Don Bennett responds to a call about the body of a young woman

lying on top of a grave.

When I got here that morning with the fellas from our crime scene crew, we saw that there

was a heel print.

And then from that heel print leading kind of into the cemetery

were some scuff marks, some drag marks, not very deep or distinct, but you could see them.

Beyond the drag marks, there was a body lying in front of this headstone that says William Downing

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