Over the last two years journalism faculty and students in the BYU School of Communications have worked with the Utah Cold Case Coalition, telling the stories of unsolved murders and missing persons.
As of summer 2020, “The Cold Case Collaboration” has involved more than 30 students both inside and outside of classes, comprising about 15 shorter-form and longer-form journalism projects, multimedia and social media pieces. Projects have ranged from student-only and faculty-student collaborations to faculty-only professional development.
One of the first projects, published in partnership with the Deseret News, was about the 1995 abduction and murder of six-year-old Rosie Tapia. The story eventually placed in the top 20 in the prestigious national Hearst Multimedia Enterprise Competition. The same cold case was also examined by another student who studied the ethics of true crime as entertainment:
A more recent intro-to-video student project looked at the BYU/Utah connection to Henry Lee Lucas, the subject of a popular Netflix documentary:
“We, I, love working with BYU students. I find the caliber of BYU students to be above the bar. Their professors encourage them to be creative and inspire them to think outside the box. As a result they go deeper in depth, and produce greater work product,” said Jason Jensen, a private investigator and co-founder of the Utah Cold Case Coalition.
In terms of pedagogy and providing learning and growth opportunities for students, I have seen a number of benefits from this collaboration that are worth highlighting:
Narrative/Storytelling: What I like about covering true crime and cold cases is they generally have a strong narrative. They are also generally slow-moving. Thus, it allows me to teach narrative structure in a natural fashion because these stories generally have a beginning, middle and end. Compared to some other story types, cold case narratives are easy to “see” (but difficult to investigate). This is important to help students move beyond basic news writing story structures.
Real-life experiences: This helps students to get off campus and experience hands-on journalism at press conferences, visiting and investigating crime scenes, as well as interviewing family members of victims. We have also brought Cold Case Coalition members on campus to do in-class mock press conferences about real events. Beginning journalism students were excited to engage in real content in an introductory class.
Diversity/Compassion: Violent crimes may happen to people from a variety of socio-economic classes and other backgrounds. Thus, this is an excellent opportunity to help students interact with individuals who are different from themselves, which is one goal of diversity efforts. It also teaches being sensitive and having compassion for crime victims — understanding that story sources are real people and not just names on a page.
Research: Digging up old newspaper clippings, trying to find phone numbers of sources from 20 years ago, or locating addresses and locations that may not even exist anymore; this type of research goes beyond journalism research basics.
Ethics: Doing these types of written and visual stories allows students to confront the issues of true crime as entertainment versus helping victims find justice. And to understand and debate the differences between the two. This is especially important in light of the huge popularity of true crime podcasts.
Our collaboration with the Utah Cold Case Coalition continues to provide compelling topics and stories that matter as well as opportunities to serve the community at large by shedding light on these long-forgotten victims and cold cases.
