A unique program at Western Michigan University is helping to solve cold cases across the state while providing students with hands-on investigative experience.

Since its inception in 2020, the WMU Cold Case Program has helped solve seven cold cases, with students working alongside Michigan State Police (MSP) detectives to bring justice to victims and their families.

The program was launched by Professor Ashlyn Kuersten, who said the primary goal is to support detectives by digitizing case files and creating useful documents.

"Mainly their job is to make the detectives' lives easier," Kuersten said. "They create documents, they digitize case files, whatever the detective finds would be most useful for their investigation."

Among the cases the program has helped solve is the 1987 murder of Roxanne Wood in Niles Township. Wood was assaulted, raped, and murdered, and a suspect was arrested and convicted in 2022.

The program also contributed to solving the murder of Cathy Swartz, a 19-year-old found dead in her Three Rivers apartment in 1988. A suspect was arrested 35 years later, but died by suicide in jail.

Students have also worked on active cases, such as the disappearance of Brittany Shank in 2018. Shank went missing after a car crash in Sturgis, and her whereabouts remain unknown.

"I'm really surprised, I didn't expect that we would see results like that," Kuersten said. "I just thought this would be a wonderful experience for my students."

WMU students in the program say the experience is invaluable.

"It's much different than studying for exams every week," Gabriella Tesin, a student in the program, said. "It's cool to be able to get my hands on the case file."

Halli Warner, another student, worked shoulder to shoulder with detectives performing critical tasks, including digitizing thousands of case documents into secure databases, creating detailed timelines, and building family trees to uncover new leads.

The collaborative effort gained national attention for its role in identifying suspects in decades-old homicides, including the 1988 murder of Cathy Swartz and the 1987 killing of Roxanne Wood, the latter of which led to a conviction.

The program's success has prompted a significant financial investment from the state, including $200,000 in new funding as of late 2024 to expand its reach and empower more student cohorts.

This investment underscores the program's dual mission of bringing justice to victims' families and training the next generation of law enforcement professionals, many of whom graduate in high demand by agencies like the FBI.

As of 2024, students were assisting detectives with at least 14 additional unsolved homicide and missing persons cases, continuing their work to organize and analyze evidence that had remained untouched for years.