Bill would create cold case task force

Cliff Backmann was killed five and a half years ago. No one has been arrested. Now his son, Ryan Backmann, is using the legislative process to help solve the state’s cold case homicides.

Backmann is the force behind Sen. Aaron Bean’s SB 1482, which would establish a Cold Case Task Force within the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

“I hope this legislation gives a lot of people hope because that’s all we have,” said Backmann, the executive director of Project: Cold Case, an organization serving the families of unsolved homicide victims. “At this point there’s no one looking for the guy that killed my dad, there’s no one looking for a lot of murderers out there right now.”

The bill would establish a task force with 19 members, including sheriffs, police chiefs, victim’s families, a crime scene evidence technician and the executive director of FDLE. They would evaluate policies and procedures used by law enforcement agencies to investigate homicides and cold cases and would establish best practices for policies and procedures, according to staff analysis. The task force must also submit a report to the governor and the Legislature.

Bean, a Jacksonville Republican, said there’s no universal definition of cold case or even a central location for cold case data.

“You watch TV and you watch murder shows you think that we solve all of our murders and that murders are served within 60 minutes,” he said. “But in reality that’s not the case. Hundreds of murders go unsolved each and every year.”

The Tallahassee Police Department considers a case cold once it has been without an active lead for more than a year, said TPD spokesman Officer David Northway. The Leon County Sheriff’s Office considers a case cold, but not closed, when all investigative leads have been exhausted and there’s no new information to consider, said Lt. James McQuaig, LCSO spokesman.

Cliff Backmann was working alone on a Saturday in a Jacksonville building when someone came in, shot him in the back, took his wallet and left, Ryan Backmann said. After about a year and a half, investigators told him they had run out of leads in his father’s killing and there was nothing left to investigate.

“I had tried to prepare myself for the fact that the person that killed my dad might not be caught,” he said. “But I never was able to prepare myself for the fact that somebody would stop looking. You always think somebody’s out there looking for these bad guys and that’s just not the case.”

Backmann says his dad’s is one of 15,000 unsolved Florida homicides since 1980. He and Bean would like to see a websitewith facts on cold cases so law enforcement can develop new leads.

“I hope it, the bottom line, puts bad guys in jail that have committed a crime that they thought they got away with,” Bean said.

The bill unanimously cleared the Senate Criminal Justice Committee on Tuesday morning. It has two more committee stops. An identical bill (HB 1115), sponsored by Rep. Janet Adkins, R-Fernandina Beach, has not been placed on a committee agenda.