James Ramsey & Jill Kinkade

Some "Latent Hit of the Year"-winning cold cases can be traced back much longer, as the 2011 case, which dates back to 1969. Diane Maxwell, a 25-year-old phone operator, was attacked on December 14 of that same year as she traveled to her job at Southwestern Bell in Houston, Texas. Before her killer fled in her 1968 Mustang, she was raped, killed, and thrown in an abandoned cottage.

David Maxwell, Diane's brother, joined the Texas Rangers in the years that followed in an effort to one day put an end to the investigation into his sister's death. He renewed the investigation in 1986, but he was still unable to identify the murderer. He did so once more in 2003, turning to Houston PD homicide investigator Jim Ramsey, who took charge of the investigation. He then turned to latent print specialist Jill Kinkade for assistance with the forensics.

The detectives were shocked to learn that the case's evidence had been poisoned over several years, as they had been with the prior entry, but this was worse than simply a few rats. Many pieces of evidence had been simply discarded for unknown reasons, but the crime scene photographs had been removed from the property room and sold to a detective magazine.

Investigators started searching through cold case files in the hopes that some of the evidence had just been misplaced, and after a month of looking, they found anything of value. They discovered the cards with the lifted fingerprints from the Mustang, which had been inadvertently stored in a 1986 file. The only piece of evidence still present in the case, but the only one they required. In just a few hours, Kinkade received the results after running the prints via IAFIS. James Ray Davis, a man who had been in and out of prison since the early 1960s, was their top contender. He admitted to his crime during an interview, and he received a life sentence.

• Year: 2011