When District Attorney William Whitesell spent his first day in office in 1994, retired Oakland High School teacher Lorene Mackey asked him to charge suspect Kyle Gilley with her daughter’s murder.

Mackey’s daughter, MTSU student Laura Salmon, was murdered 10 years earlier. Gilley, who was Salmon’s former boyfriend, was a suspect but investigators could not gather enough information to charge him, moving the probe into the cold case murder files. The mother’s plea “had a profound affect on me,” Whitesell said, prompting him to promise her if enough evidence was obtained, he would prosecute.

Several years later, Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office appointed Detective Lt. Bill Sharp and Sgt. Dan Goodwin to investigate Salmon’s murder fulltime. DNA evidence and witnesses’ testimony helped convict Gilley of first-degree murder in 2006. Gilley is serving a life sentence. Whitesell spoke about the unsolved murder during the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Homicide/Death Scene Investigators Conference this week at DoubleTree Hotel in Murfreesboro. Scripps News reported in 2010 nearly 185,000 murders since 1980 remain unsolved. More than 60 investigators and prosecutors from Maine to California, Canada and the sheriff’s office, Murfreesboro, Smyrna and La Vergne police departments attended the class to learn how to solve those cases.

Chief Deputy Randy Garrett credited Sheriff Robert F. Arnold, Sharp and Goodwin for developing the class and obtaining the instructors to gain knowledge about solving unsolved murders. “You can’t put a price tag on that to the families of those victims,” Garrett said. The class featured “top notch instructors,” Garrett said. “It was an excellent school.”  One of the witnesses in the Mackey case was Jerry Finley of Georgia, who analyzes blood patterns. He addressed the conference Thursday. Other speakers included Dr. Bill Bass, forensic anthropologist who founded the Body Farm in Knoxville, FBI Supervisor Lydia Pozzato and Dr. James Adcock, who spoke about creating cold case evaluations and follow-up strategies.

Whitesell credited the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office for allowing Sharp and Goodwin the flexibility to thoroughly investigate cold cases. About 14 murders remain unsolved. Since the early 2000s, the sheriff’s office has solved six old unsolved murders with two more cases pending.  Some of those cases relied not on physical evidence or DNA evidence but testimony from witnesses, some in cases some 20 years ago. In one example, sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Mark Di Nardo and Detective Jim Tramel solved the murder of Lynn Orrand, who was fatally shot in 1982, by “old-fashioned police work,” he said.

Detectives must get to know the victim through the family and friends, “think outside the box,” determine a motive and locate witnesses who may have waited years for a detective to question them. Initially, the victim’s survivors may be traumatized but they become invigorated because “someone cares,” he said. "A good investigator makes good cases,” Whitesell said. Dr. Bass showed photographs of murder investigations and exhumations, explaining how evidence collected helped him determine the manner of death. In the case of a missing Clarksville teen, Dr. Bass used her teeth to help identify the girl from her skull.

He discussed the decaying process to help determine how long ago a person died. "We didn’t solve all of them but we solved many of them,” Dr. Bass said. “The hardest cases are those you can’t identify.” Dr. Michael Tabor, a dentist who helped identify victims from the 9-11 terrorists’ attacks, discussed how dental records may be used to positively identified victims. Tabor identified a missing 2-year-old Smyrna girl, whose skeletal remains were found in the county, by comparing DNA in her teeth to her mother’s DNA since the girl had never been to the dentist.

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