The Case That Almost Went Cold — Until AI Stepped In
Cold cases rarely stay cold because detectives don’t care. More often, they stall because modern investigations generate overwhelming mountains of digital evidence — phone calls, videos, device data, and reports that can take months or years to fully review.
In the latest episode of Breaking Battlegrounds, hosts Sam Stone and Chuck Warren spoke with Aaron Zelinger, CEO of Closure Intelligence, and San Luis Obispo District Attorney Dan Dow about how artificial intelligence is beginning to change that reality.
The central takeaway is clear: AI is not replacing investigators. It is helping them finally keep up with the explosion of evidence in modern criminal cases — and in some instances, helping deliver justice far faster than traditional methods allow.
The Reality of Modern Investigations
Zelinger emphasized that today’s law enforcement agencies are drowning in data. Every case may include:
Thousands of recorded jail calls
Massive cellphone data dumps
Digital communications
Surveillance footage
Smart device data
For smaller or rural departments especially, the challenge is not lack of effort — it is lack of time and manpower.
Closure AI is designed to act as what Zelinger calls a “force multiplier,” helping investigators quickly sift through lawfully obtained evidence to identify the most relevant leads.
A Case That Might Have Slipped Away
One example shared during the interview underscores the stakes.
In a rural California case, investigators were dealing with a brutal sexual assault. The victim had been abducted and held for days. Critically, there was initially insufficient evidence to move forward, and the victim declined to cooperate — a situation that often causes cases to stall.
Later, the suspect was arrested on unrelated charges. With his permission, investigators obtained access to his cellular data and jail phone calls.
Here’s where the scale of the problem became clear: the suspect had made thousands of recorded calls from jail.
Manually reviewing that volume would have taken enormous time and resources.
What the AI Found
Using AI tools to analyze the recorded calls, investigators were able to identify key statements in which the suspect discussed:
Details of the crime
His patterns of behavior
Passcodes and passwords to devices already in police custody
That information opened the door to a lawful search of his phone data, which led investigators to yet another device stored at his home.
On that device, authorities discovered video evidence of the assault.
The result: a 35-to-life plea deal, still moving through the courts.
According to Zelinger, the key advantage was speed and validation. Investigators could quickly surface relevant material and then manually verify the evidence to ensure accuracy.
Why Alaska Is Paying Attention
The conversation also highlighted work with the Anchorage Police Department’s Special Victims Unit.
Alaska faces some of the highest rates of sexual violence in the country, particularly involving women and minors. At the same time, recruiting and retaining investigators in Alaska’s harsh conditions is uniquely difficult.
Departments there have been open about using AI tools to help their existing detectives handle overwhelming caseloads.
The goal is not automation for its own sake — it is helping experienced investigators focus their time where it matters most.
The Bigger Picture
The discussion on Breaking Battlegrounds points to a broader shift happening across law enforcement.
The core problem: Evidence is growing exponentially.
The core promise of AI: Help humans find what matters faster.
Supporters argue that tools like Closure AI:
Reduce investigative backlogs
Help surface exculpatory evidence
Speed up justice for victims
Maximize limited law enforcement resources
Critics, of course, continue to raise important questions about safeguards, privacy, and oversight — debates that are likely to intensify as adoption grows.
But one thing is becoming increasingly difficult to dispute: the era of small, paper-based investigations is over. Modern policing is now a data problem.
And AI is rapidly becoming part of the solution.
Transcript
Sam Stone: All right, welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. We’re continuing on right now with Aaron Zelinger and San Luis Obispo District Attorney Dan Dow. We’re talking about the use of AI and particularly their new tool, Closure AI, in solving cases. Gentlemen, what are some of the, if you can talk about it, what are some of the cold cases or other cases that this technology has been critical in helping close those cases?
Aaron Zelinger: Yeah, absolutely. I can take a first stab at this. And I just want to preface this by saying that we as the technology provider don’t like to get ahead of our customers, especially with actively adjudicated cases. So we were very thoughtful about that. But just for one example that might be useful, there was a brutal sexual assault, unfortunately, in a rural town in California where an individual abducted a woman, this victim, and just brutalized her, unfortunately.
And I apologize for getting grotesque, but these are the realities of a lot of these cases.
Sam Stone: I hate to say this, but our audience’s history suggests they like the grotesque. Our number one feature on this program is our true crime special.
Aaron Zelinger: In that case, you know, and this has been relayed from us. We as the technology provider can’t actually see the data in these cases. We do that for compliance reasons. But we’ve been told by the agency that woman was suffered terribly, and was kept in captivity for multiple days, released. And there was just insufficient evidence to bring a case and she refused to cooperate. They were able to pick this guy up on some other charges. And during that time, with his permission, got access to his cellular devices and to other evidence from phone calls he was making during his imprisonment in jail.
And in those phone calls, which he made thousands and thousands of phone calls, they were able to start learning more about his pattern of life, learning more. And these are, these are all calls that are recorded and he’s aware that these are being recorded. And yet he still talked about the details of his case. He started talking about, the what he had done to the victim.
He was talking about specific passcodes and passwords to technology that he had already provided law enforcement, which gave a huge opening in this case that they could go into his phone, which had been lawfully seized during the course of the investigation and appropriately look through for any evidence related to this crime. On that case, they were able to find reference to a different device that was still stored in his home, they went, they found that device and were able to find the actual video, the horrific video of the event taking place.
Now, this, this team, this investigative team, this rural agency doesn’t have a lot of resources. And it’s not as if they’re getting more detectives and law enforcement officers or prosecutors anytime soon. So perhaps they could have found this without the help of AI, but I think what was useful here, and what we heard the feedback on the ground was that they got it much faster. They could validate any raw evidence to make sure that there wasn’t any hallucination.
There wasn’t any issue with the validity of the evidence, what was being alluded to. And that led to a plea deal of a 35 to life, which is still being adjudicated today. These stories, there’s so many of them. I can talk about our work with Anchorage police department. They’ve been very open about it. Their sexual victims unit, Alaska has some of the most horrific rates of sexual abuse in the country, lots of violence against women and in particular minors.
And those guys are just hard at work. You can imagine it’s not easy to hire detectives or law enforcement in Alaska. And the conditions there are particularly tough. And they’ve been very, very open that they are using AI to force multiply their existing detectives to dig into these cases.
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