The television show Cold Justice was recently filming in Columbus hoping to turn over new leads in a 14-year-old murder case.
Declared missing Aug. 4, 2007, Salina McCoy, then 17, was found dead by the railroad tracks near Warren Street off Bell Avenue after being missing for 20 days. The case remains unsolved and open.
Cold Justice seeks to crack murder cases that have lingered for years without answers or closure. Kelly Siegler, the show’s star, said the series was attracted to Columbus after reviewing the case files and talking with the Columbus Police Department officers. The episode about McCoy’s murder will air when the new season premiers nationwide on the Oxygen network in November, the date to be determined.
“What happened to Salina was terribly sad,” Siegler told The Dispatch on Wednesday. “The potential of so many witnesses having information to actually solve the case is really huge. The Columbus Police Department and Chief (Fred) Shelton couldn’t have been any nicer. So, you know, you put all those things in the pot together, and it seemed like a great town to go to and a great case to work.”
Shelton said the investigation into McCoy’s murder has been ongoing since 2007. He said Cold Justice reached out to offer assistance in the case.
“We’ve been investigating this case for years and trying to bring some resolution,” he said. “The case is not closed. No case is closed to us until we find a resolution.”
The show offered a fresh pair of eyes to review the case.
“You know, what? You always hope that our fresh set of eyes looking at a case from a different angle years later with the passage of time and people growing up and technology getting better, that with all that thrown in the mix something big might change or happen to where you can finally get an arrest on a case — that’s always our hope,” Siegler said.
The show went to various locations and examined police files in its pursuit of the truth.
“What we do is that the police give us permission to see the entire case file, which is the first step, because a lot of these TV shows talk about revisiting cases, but they just read all the articles and look at old footage,” Siegler said. “We look at every single word of the original case file in the police report, every witness statement, all the evidence logs, every interview, all that.”
Looking at cases ‘like a prosecutor’
Siegler is an attorney and former Texas prosecutor who successfully tried 68 murder cases in her 21 years on the job, including 20 capital murder death penalty cases in which she secured the death penalty in 19 of those trials. She explained how her methodology is shaped by her career as a prosecutor.
“If there’s a name in the report mentioned, we try to find if that person is still alive years later, what their memory is like,” she said. “What do they remember in 2021 that’s admissible in the courtroom? I’m a former prosecutor, so I’m putting this case together as if it were going to be my case to take it to trial. So when I’m reading the file, I’m looking to see if I can put this case together again. And that’s how we started off with this case. And with every case that we work.”
Chasing leads meant talking to people and asking questions to everyone who knew McCoy.
“There were a lot of names in the file from back then, and we found almost all of them,” Siegler said. “Then when a new name would pop up in the investigation, we would go try and find that person too. So we followed every name we could. We followed every trail in question and rumor. And this case had an extraordinary amount of rumors and gossip, bad rumors connected with it.”
Siegler had high praise for Columbus Police Department.
“Working with the Columbus Police Department couldn’t have been any more pleasant,” she said. “They were prepared and they were professional. You can tell from reading the file how much work is put into a case.
Siegler said when McCoy was murdered in 2007, Columbus police did everything they could to solve the matter. When new case leads were discovered, police reopened the case.
“You could tell in 2014 how the police tried very hard again to get something big to break,” she said. “Then they let our show have access another seven years later in 2021. They never quit trying, and they’ve now made three good attempts at this case, so I think no one can fault the Columbus Police Department for their efforts in trying to solve this case.
Finding cases to solve
Cases for the show come from tips gathered from law enforcement agencies across the nation and from the show’s viewers.
“We have a team of people whose job it is to call police departments and sheriff’s departments all around the country, while other tips come from word of mouth and family members who send me emails every day saying, ‘Please work my case,’” she said. “We’re probably way, way more well known in law enforcement circles. Cops know about us and they call. So between all those different ways, we get a lot of calls on a lot of cases.”
Siegler admits that not every cold case has a happy ending, but she is optimistic about possibilities that may evolve from reopening McCoy’s case file.
“Most of these cases, I know from reading about them, that they can’t be solved,” she said. “There’s just too much that’s happened that was bad in the first place where they’re never going to be solved, but this was a case where police really thought we had good potential.”
Shelton added, “We want the public to know all cases are important to us and that we work every case until the very end.”
To submit a tip to Cold Justice, see: oxygen.com/tips
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