INTERVIEW: ‘Homicide Hunter’ Joe Kenda never gives up … never

Photo: Lt. Joe Kenda’s new TV special is Homicide Hunter: Never Give Up. Photo courtesy of ID / Provided by press site with permission.

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Retired homicide detective Lt. Joe Kenda often has dreams — actually they are nightmares — about the relatively few cases from his illustrious career that went unsolved. The crime scenes and the details of the victims, all lodged within his photographic memory, haunt him at night, even though he’s been away from the Colorado Springs Police Department for quite some time.

Sometimes, thanks to advances in DNA technology and continued investigatory work, Kenda finds out that a so-called cold case from his career has been solved by detectives working the beat today. These cold cases are the subject of Kenda’s new documentary special, Homicide Hunter: Never Give Up, premiering tonight, Aug. 17 at 9 p.m. on Investigation Discovery. Fans of Kenda’s now-retired series Homicide Hunter will likely find the new special engaging and telling, and they can stick around for new episodes of American Detective With Joe Kenda, which plays on the network Wednesdays at 10 p.m.

Did you really think Lt. Joe Kenda was going away?

“They can expect a similar but different experience, and let me explain,” Kenda said in a recent phone interview. “We spent a great deal in the initial series doing reenactments. The focus this time is on the story. There are very little reenactments, very little at all. It’s all about talking about the intricacies of homicide investigation, and we’re showing crime scene video from the actual crime, which we’ve never done before. It is the same in some ways and very different in others. I’ve seen it, the final product, I just saw it the other day, and I’m very proud of it. I think it’s extremely well done.”

Kenda gives the production team some ideas for the cases he wants to profile, and then the producers decide which one is a go for television. On the first Never Give Up special, the case involves the murder of Darlene Krashoc, a 20-year-old active-duty soldier who died in March 1987.

“Now this case has not been presented before because it was unsolved, and Colorado law prevents discussion of open and active investigations, even though they may be inactive or, as the press like to call them, cold,” he said. “But the point being they are active cases, which means you cannot discuss them outside the courts, the police … so they were never presented on Homicide Hunter. So this is all new stuff. That’s another thing that’s kind of interesting is that this isn’t something they heard about before. It’s something different entirely.”

The case involving Krashoc drove Kenda “crazy,” as he put it, which is not out of the ordinary. The retired detective freely admitted to having nightmares about the crime scene details of his unsolved cases, but still he tries to put everything in perspective.

“What did I not do, what did I not see, what question that I failed to ask,” Kenda said. “You blame yourself for it. You do. You think if I had done this right, I would know who did this. Even though I had a solution rate that was very high, you don’t solve them all, and my mission was to solve them all. Out of 387, I solved 356, a pretty good number. If I was a football team, and I was 356-31, I would be referred to as a dynasty. But as it is, I’m just a guy who is stupid and doesn’t know who killed 31 people. That’s how I look at it.”

Having these crime scene details circulate in his mind, thanks to his photographic memory, is both a memory and curse, Kenda said. He remembers the bad along with the good, and that means the grisly details are up there in his brain. “I lived it, and it’s part of me that won’t go away,” he said. “I would love for it to go away. I haven’t figured out how to do that, so it’s just there. It’ll always be there. It’s the price you pay for the work.”

What ultimately helped modern-day detectives learn more details about the Krashoc case were advancements in DNA technology, which Kenda called a game-changer. As the homicide detective said, people lie, but evidence does not.

“At the time this crime occurred [in] 1987, there was a rumor afoot that there was a guy in England, a doctor who had devised a possible solution to unique identification utilizing DNA from a sample of body fluid from an unknown perpetrator,” the retired lieutenant said. “That was a dream that was underway that showed some promise but no guarantees, so I made the decision, along with the department, that we would preserve our physical evidence in a recommended method that would allow it to be examined decades from that moment forward in the event that this system worked or some other system was ever devised. … And in this case, it meant everything.”

He added: “[When] the science was first brought to this country in the early 1990s, you needed a fairly substantial amount of suspect body fluid to get a result. You often didn’t have a substantial amount. You had fragments of it. Step forward 30 years … touch your countertop, and I’ll tell you who you are from the amino acids in your fingerprint, remarkable technology resulting in being able to deeply identify a human to the exclusion of all humans on the planet. It’s you and no one else who left this here.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Homicide Hunter: Never Give Up, featuring Lt. Joe Kenda, premieres tonight, Aug. 17 at 9 p.m. on Investigation Discovery. Click here for more information.