In Baltimore, it’s not hard to get away with murder. Those who commit murder have a 43 percent chance of never being caught, and three out of four killers, if they ever see the inside of a jail cell, will serve no more than 10 years in prison, according to The Examiner’s four-month investigation into every city homicide between 1998 and 2007.

In the past nine years, 2,479 men, women and children have been shot, stabbed, strangled or beaten to death on the streets of Baltimore. And only slightly more than half of these victims have received justice. The rest? Unsolved — 1,065 cases that have run into dead-ends.

Among them is the death of 1-year-old Tamia Washington, who detectives found poisoned to death in 1998. Skyy Cole was 2 years old in 2003, when she became a victim in a double murder. There’s the quadruple homicide of four men in 2004, and this year’s strangling death of college student Sintia Mesa, who was found in the trunk of her car. The bodies have been found in every district in Baltimore with no place immune to violence — even the Inner Harbor.

Many of the killers? They are still out there.

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Police Commissioner Leonard Hamm freely admits his department just can’t avenge them all.

“Some you catch and some you don’t,” he says.

The numbers and the pain are staggering

The Examiner reviewed hundreds of internal police files and court records, interviewed law enforcement officials, victims’ families and criminologists, and pored through records on every murder within Baltimore’s borders since 1998. The Examiner tracked whether anyone was caught for the crime and what happened after the suspect’s arrest

The Examiner learned:

» 1,065 — or 43 percent — of the previous nine years’ homicides remain unsolved.

» 87 percent of the victims in the unsolved cases were shot to death.

» 98 juvenile homicides, including four children less than 4 years old and eight senior-citizen homicides, remain open.

» If the victim is black, the police are 13 percent less likely to make an arrest than if the victim is white.

» If the victim is male, the police are 28 percent less likely to make an arrest than if the victim is female.

» Homicide detectives have solved 68 percent of 2001’s killings but only 44 percent of 2006’s slayings.

» In connection with the 2,479 homicides, 931 people have been convicted; 660 were sentenced to prison terms more than 10 years.

“We’re well beyond cold cases,” says Walker Gladden, a community activist who counsels youth at the Rose Street Community Center. “These murders have become unsolved mysteries.”

Behind the body counts, statistics and spools of yellow tape are mothers like June Brown who say the cases — and the lives of their children — don’t seem to count. They say if their pain and loss receives any notice at all, it’s a few words in the media about a criminal record, a troubled youth and a violent death.

But mostly, they say, they’re ignored.

“I believe the police can solve any crime they want to solve, but it has to be a person of a certain status,” Brown says. “You have to be of higher importance. They have so many cases going on, they get backed up.”

But Brown, against all odds, still holds out hope.

One day, she just knows, the people who killed her 24-year-old son, Clarence, in 1994 will walk into a police station and give themselves up.

“I’m hopeful that one day, somehow, they’ll decide to tell it all,” she says.

Brown says she hopes for a miraculous confession because she believes no active investigation into her son’s death is going on at the Baltimore Police Department. She hasn’t heard from detectives since 1999. The case has gone cold.

Brown is one of hundreds of grieving mothers who visit Kim Holmes, the director of the Family Bereavement Center, a program of the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office.

Holmes says Brown’s feelings are not unique. Parents of unsolved murder victims often feel a sense of hopelessness, a sense that life isn’t treating them fairly.

“They hear something on the news that there was a murder one day and an arrest another,” Holmes says. “They feel that more effort is being put out depending on who the victim was.”

Baltimore City State’s Attorney Patricia Jessamy says she empathizes with the victims’ families.

“These families believe that because their loved one had a criminal record that no effort on the part of law enforcement — or very minimal effort — is being put forth, because that’s the message that’s going out there in the community,” Jessamy says. “That’s not a good message. ... Any life lost is a tragedy. Those individuals were somebody’s son, father, mother, sister, someone they cared about.”

Baltimore Police Department spokesman Matt Jablow says detectives try to keep in contact with victims’ families as much as possible.

“Our homicide detectives are fully aware how painful it is to have a loved one murdered,” he says. “They call the families whenever they have new information. The fact is, we cannot actively investigate all of our cold-case homicides. When there’s new information to investigate, we will actively pursue it.”

Jablow points out that Baltimore’s four-member Cold Case squad has solved 12 old cases last year alone, including some “very old” crimes. For instance, in December, Sgt. Roger Nolan, head of the Cold Case squad, solved the nearly 22-year-old killing of a 26-year-old nurse, whose body was dumped in a wooded area of Baltimore.

“In the last couple of years, we’ve solved cases 40 years old, 30 years old and 20 years old,” Jablow says.

Criminologists interviewed by The Examiner said the nearly 1,100 unsolved homicides during a nine-year span in Baltimore is not excessive, given the tough conditions homicide detectives face.

John Jay criminal justice professor Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer, says he believes Baltimore’s culture of witness intimidation makes it difficult for officers to solve crimes.

“Even the victims don’t want the cases solved,” he says. “The first shooting I handled there, the victim knew who shot him and he wouldn’t give me his own name. It’s so hard to win cases if you don’t have anyone who wants to get involved in it.”

But police detectives and victims’ families worry that every unsolved killing leaves a guilty man out on the streets, feeling empowered to do it again.

“I can’t bring my son back,” Brown says. “Nobody can bring him back. But it’s very important to me that they solve it. If this person is still on the street, they’re doing other bad things. As long as they keep getting away, they’re going to keep on killing.”

CASE CLOSED

By year, the number of homicides in Baltimore, number of open cases and percentage of homicides closed

» 1998: 313 / 121 = 61 percent

» 1999: 305 / 126 = 59 percent

» 2000: 261 / 92 = 65 percent

» 2001: 256 / 82 = 68 percent

» 2002: 253 / 101 = 60 percent

» 2003: 270 / 116 = 57 percent

» 2004: 276 / 127 = 54 percent

» 2005: 269 / 145 = 46 percent

» 2006: 276 / 155 = 44 percent

» Total: 2,479 / 1,065 = 57 percent

Source: Baltimore police and court records as of February 2007

Examiner columnist Michael Olesker and researcher Bryan Mann contributed to this article.

lbroadwater@baltimoreexaminer.com

sjanis@baltimoreexaminer.com