Kansas City, Mo. ? To the family members of the city’s hundreds of unsolved homicide victims, Pam Bell has a message: Have patience, because with DNA, a break can come at any time.

“Don’t give up hope,” Bell said. “You’ve got to have hope.”

Bell’s sister, Debbie Blevins, joined the ranks of the hundreds of homicide victims in Kansas City whose deaths remain a mystery to police when her nude body was found in 1986.

But her file left the cold case cabinet this past weekend when authorities announced they had charged Lorenzo J. Gilyard with the slaying of 12 women, including Blevins, whose bodies were discovered between 1977 and 1993. And the advances in DNA evidence that led to his arrest could be the key to cracking the hundreds of other crimes lingering in the city’s cold case files.

“I’m hopeful,” said Kristine Olsson, a senior criminalist in the city’s crime lab, “because DNA is such a powerful technology, and there are several samples that have been retained and are always available to be returned to. So hopefully this will lead to greater things.”

Long odds

Most of the 80 to 100 homicides recorded annually in Kansas City are solved by police, but every year, several languish without a suspect. When the Kansas City Police Department formed a cold case squad in December 2002, 956 open homicides were on the books.

Last year, Kansas City’s cold case squad identified suspects in 16 homicides. So far this year, it has cleared 22 more cases, including the killings prosecutors have charged Gilyard with committing. Facing 10 counts of first-degree murder and two counts of capital murder, Gilyard made his first appearance in court Tuesday at a hearing that lasted about a minute. He was ordered held without bound.

A year after the cold case squad was formed, a federal grant provided the department with the funding it needed to begin using the latest in DNA technology to test evidence from dozens of unsolved cases, some of them decades old.

Testing breakthrough

In Gilyard’s case, police said they connected two of the alleged victims to a common suspect in 1994 but were unable to link the other slayings until the grant allowed them to test evidence from more old cases. As more cases were connected to a common suspect during a 10-month period, police continued to pore through old case files.

Police said Gilyard was identified as a suspect after the analysis of a blood sample taken from him in 1987, when he was a suspect in the death of one of the women he is now charged with killing.

While police in Kansas City are saying very little about their ongoing investigation into Gilyard and his actions, Chief Rick Easley said Monday that detectives weren’t going to stop just because they have charged Gilyard with 12 deaths; there are more cases where similarities will be studied.