The Cold Case Program at Western Michigan University assists the Michigan State Police in solving years-old crimes. Last year, the state budget included $200,000 in funding for the program. Now lawmakers must decide whether they'll renew it another year.
The WMU Cold Case Program was founded in 2020 by Ashlyn Kuersten, a professor in the criminal justice studies program at WMU. The program is staffed by undergraduate students who go through a rigorous application and background-checking process.
Once accepted, students work for college credits and assist MSP by digitizing and analyzing files, conducting research, transcribing interviews and more.
"One of the reasons that I wanted to start this program is, I think we have way too many cold cases. Because every one of those cold cases is a victim that we don't know what happened to them," Kuersten said.
When she started the program, Kuersten said she never dreamed it would become so successful. But the Cold Case Program has helped MSP solve six unsolved cases, leading to seven arrests since the program began.
"It doesn't cost a lot"
In 2024, the program received $200,000 in funding from the state budget as part of a $1 million line item that allocated funding to several cold-case efforts. Kuersten said for the past year, that money has made up the entire Cold Case Program budget.
"It doesn't cost a lot to operate a program like this, but it does take space — it takes computers, a lot of computers, a lot of scanners," Kuersten said.
That funding runs through fiscal year 2025, which ends on September 30. Kuersten is hopeful that the Michigan legislature will renew funding for fiscal year 2026. But they haven't given a clear signal.
The proposed executive budget for the upcoming fiscal year, put forth by Governor Gretchen Whitmer, deleted the entire $1 million line item for cold case programs as it stood last fiscal year. That included $200,000 in funding for the WMU program, $200,000 for the Northern Michigan University Cold Case Program, and funding for MSP's special investigations division.
The Senate has approved a proposed budget that would renew the entire line item in full, but the House has yet to approve a full budget proposal.
Because the $200,000 makes up the whole Cold Case Program budget, Kuersten said she's worried about what might happen if funding isn't renewed. She said the work the students do makes a real difference.
"One thing that the public doesn't necessarily realize is how big these cold cases are. Often they're multi-decades old and they've been reopened multiple times in the decades. And so to put one detective on a case file, let's say, that's 75,000 to 100,000 pages long is a really daunting task," Kuersten said.
A pipeline for state troopers
Because students in the program work so closely with MSP, they get immersive training and are able to visit crime scenes, attend autopsies and more. Miranda Rowland, a senior at WMU who works on the Cold Case Program, said the program is a great opportunity to prepare students for future careers in law enforcement.
"That's what makes this a really amazing and unique program is that it's giving us an experience that we're not going to find elsewhere and it's going to make our future just that much better when we try to go into these law enforcement fields," Rowland said.
At MSP, Detective John Moore works closely with CCP students on cold cases. He said the program has become a useful recruiting tool for the agency to find new troopers.
"The best thing that comes out of Western Michigan, I mean, aside from solving a case, is the fact that we actually have four current troopers in the Michigan State Police that have gone through the academy, gone through all the background stuff that were former CCP students. And that's huge," Moore said.
Lawmakers already missed a July 1 deadline to approve the state budget. Now, the legislature has until October 1 to pass a budget or face a government shutdown.
Copyright 2025 WMUK
