Nearly 185,000 U.S. homicides since 1980 remain unsolved

Every year in America, 6,000 killers get away with murder. The percentage of homicides that go unsolved in the United States has risen alarmingly even as the homicide rate has fallen to levels last seen in the 1960s. Despite dramatic improvements in DNA analysis and other breakthroughs in forensic science, police fail to make an arrest in more than one-third of all homicides. National clearance rates for murder and manslaughter have fallen from about 90 percent in the 1960s to below 65 percent in recent years.

The majority of homicides now go unsolved at dozens of big-city police departments, according to a Scripps Howard News Service study of crime records provided by the FBI. "This is very frightening," said Bill Hagmaier, executive director of the International Homicide Investigators Association and retired chief of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit. "We'd expect that -- with more police officers, more scientific tools likes DNA analysis and more computerized records -- we'd be clearing more homicides now with more resources," Hagmaier said. "But the clearance rates have fallen drastically." Nearly 185,000 killings went unsolved from 1980 to 2008.