Feb. 13—Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the state’s Department of Justice is launching a cold case unit in hopes of clearing unsolved homicide and sexual assault cases around New Mexico.

During a news conference Tuesday, Torrez said the initiative aims to make recent developments in forensic genetic genealogy methods accessible to police agencies to revisit investigations — including one in Santa Fe — that have gone cold.

Torrez was flanked Tuesday by law enforcement leaders from Santa Fe and the counties of Valencia and McKinley, which he said represent the first agencies to work with the state department’s new unit.

The department’s cold case unit has been underway since the summer and has taken on six cases, Torrez said. The unit is staffed with three investigators who will focus on investigative methods involving DNA genealogy databases to assist New Mexico’s smaller agencies.

Both the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office and Santa Fe Police Department have used DNA databases, such as ones compiled by genetic testing services like GEDMatch or 23 and Me, to close rape and murder cases in recent years, but Torrez said the field is still “relatively new.”

Many cases considered cold in agencies across the state involved the collection and testing of DNA, but that evidence now can be analyzed using genetic genealogy methods to create new leads, he said.

“That information is turned over to a trained genealogist, who takes a family tree and works forward in time from a common ancestor to try to identify a likely suspect that matches the characteristics of a person we believe is complicit in the crime,” Torrez said.

Santa Fe police began its first collaboration with Justice Department’s new cold case unit to revisit the 1995 killing of Annie Tapia, a 72-year-old woman found beaten to death in a liquor store on Cerrillos Road, Chief Paul Joye said during the conference. The department used genetic analysis in 2020 to narrow its search for a suspect and create a genetic profile of the shooter in the 2018 killing of popular local businessman Robert Romero.

Torrez hopes other agencies around the state will see such success and follow suit.

An existing cold case homicide unit within the state police Investigations Bureau focuses on investigations that have run cold, but Torrez said the new unit in the Department of Justice aims to “provide an extra layer of support to those smaller departments that don’t have the kinds of resources that state police have.”

“What we want fundamentally for people to understand is that we are here to partner with your agencies, to work with your communities and to bring every available resource that we can in the service of justice,” he said.