The Starkville Cold Case Arrest Gives Hope To Other Departments

LOWNDES COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – The arrest in the Labor Day Cold Case is not only a win for the Starkville Police Department, it could have a ripple effect through the local law enforcement community.

A crack in a cold case is obviously something every investigator and department is after.

It means they can finally close the case and get justice for the victim and their families.

“Even if you get it 20 years later, you’re still trying to piece together a puzzle that somebody else started.”

Midge Ponds. Kaila Morris. The five elderly men and women killed in the 90’s.

Those are some of the cases that still haunt investigators in Columbus and Lowndes County.

“When you’re working the case, you go into it and you’re trying to find those pieces that somebody else may have missed. You’re trying to put together something that somebody may have overlooked. A lot of these cases have been looked at by a lot of eyes. A lot of them, they did a really good job on there, there’s just not enough to piece it all together.”

Lowndes County Detective Brent Swan has been a part of 30 to 40 different cold cases throughout Columbus, Lowndes and Monroe Counties.

He says working cold cases becomes personal.

“When you imagine somebody coming in and committing a crime against your grandparents or your family members, you can put yourself in their shoes and see how important that is. That helps fuel us also to want to try to solve it, even more for them because we can’t imagine that this could be my grandmother that, that happened to. This could be my grandfather,” said Swan.

Swan and the sheriff’s department are currently working on several cold cases, including the 1986 disappearance of Midge Ponds, who was last seen at a convenience store before she vanished.

“There’s been a lot of work done in the past, prior to me coming to Lowndes County, but there’s been a lot of extensive work also that’s been done in the past year, trying to develop leads, not only that one, but there’s some missing person cases. There’s some other cases that we’re just trying to piece together and find that new lead that we need to be able to solve it.”

The public may see them as “cold” cases, but to the detectives they’re still very fresh.

“We’re still having current things that go on. We’re still having active cases that come in day to day that we have to stay on top of, but you always have to shuffle your schedule enough to be able to go back and look and not forget the fact that, you know, there’s a family out there that still has lost a loved one and the fact that there’s a case out there that needs to be solved.”

And when those cases get solved, hope follows right behind.

“When one of us has a successful case, especially like the case that just happened in Starkville, twenty-eight years later, that gives us hope that, ‘hey, my case is not that old,’ or ‘hey, I’ve still got a lead that I could possibly develop something, so we can solve this case.’ ”

Swan helped solved the cold case of one of the elderly homicides.

About a year and a half ago, an arrest was made in the 1996 murder of Mack Fowler.