I looked at the unsolved murders between 1985 and 2003, and found that 54% of the cases that went cold happened in the street, on a subway, in a park, or in an abandoned building. Places where a witness, if there was one, most likely didn’t know or recognize the murderer or the victim, and evidence is harder to collect.

Later, at John Jay College I found a 1994 doctoral thesis about unsolved murder that said, “murder in residences not only accounted for the most frequent murder location but stood the greatest chance of being solved when compared to other locations.”