‘So much pain’: Families say Boston Police are silent on loved ones’ cold cases (2025)

For almost 20 years, a Boston mother has lived in the shadow of unimaginable loss. Her 22-year-old son was killed by a person with a gun in Dorchester, and just two years later, his younger brother met the same fate.

In all that time, the brothers’ killers have remained free, and their mother, Mahogany Payne, has heard from the Boston Police Department about her sons’ cases only once.

She’s all but lost hope for justice.

“I’ve kind of gave up on wanting closure on their cases,” Payne said.

Her words were recorded in a new report investigating the Boston Police Department and how it handles cold cases, or unsolved homicides.

Conducted by Northeastern University law students in partnership with the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, the investigation began seven months ago and involved interviews with law enforcement and families of homicide victims, and a review of unsolved homicide policies.

The report revealed “major gaps” in the police department’s consistency with its unsolved homicide investigations, and deep frustration from families looking for better communication with officers on their loved ones’ cases.

Additionally, “BPD’s relationship with Black Bostonians remains fraught” despite “major gains in violence-reduction,” the report said. Survivors’ feelings of neglect from racial disparities were shown through their interviews, the report read.

With a backlog of between 1,700 and 1,800 unsolved homicide cases and less than 10 officers assigned to the Unsolved Case Squad (UCS), Boston police are strapped, and survivors are the ones who ultimately suffer, said Northeastern professor and lawyer, Andrew Haile.

Boston’s homicide arrest rate was 50% over the past decade, in line with the national 50% national average, according to a Washington Post study included in the report.

“Behind every one of those murders are survivors, family members who are devastated. Families that have been broken up, real trauma and grieving without any closure,” Haile, who supervised the student law class in their investigation, told MassLive.

“This report was written through a survivor lens with the Peace Institute, and we wanted to take that lens and zoom even further out ... that’s 1,700 murderers who are still out there,” he said.

The report made a series of recommendations to the Boston Police Department, the City of Boston and the Massachusetts Legislature.

These recommendations have goals to streamline and bring more resources to investigation processes, and improve survivors’ protections and communication with police. The report also encourages the city to create a civilian oversight board for UCS.

Members of the Boston police, the district attorneys’ offices from Suffolk and Middlesex counties, and Unsolved Homicide Ambassadors from the Peace Institute, who are family members of unsolved homicide victims, had conversations with the students beginning in September 2024.

The department was aware of its participation in the report to offer perspective on its work, a Boston police spokesperson said.

“We understand the heartbreak of the loved ones of any victim of homicide, and for those cases where no one has yet been held accountable, the pain and frustration is unimaginable. Our homicide detectives are dedicated to solving all instances where a person’s life was taken in the City of Boston,” part of a statement from the spokesperson read.

But the students’ findings require action, President and CEO of the Peace Institute Clementina Chéry said.

The 64-year-old mother lost her own son, Louis D. Brown, to gun violence three decades ago, and since made it her mission to support other survivors.

On April 17, Chéry will lead a group to the Massachusetts State House to hold a legislative briefing and begin conversations between survivors and lawmakers on their needs. The event will come four days after Brown’s birthday.

“If we don’t work that report, then it was just an exercise. And for me, after 30 years, it’s not just an exercise — we’ve known it, and here’s the document to prove what we know and what we feel ... it’s time for us to move forward," said Chéry.

The report

In all the time her sons’ cases have gone unsolved, Mahogany Payne has never gotten back either of their personal belongings from Boston Police.

Rashod Payne was shot on Geneva Avenue in 2006 and died from his injuries two years later. Then, in 2010, Lloyd Payne was killed by a gunshot wound to the heart when he was sitting in his car on Mallon Road in Dorchester.

Whenever their mother tries to learn more, “it reveals so much pain,” she said.

Including six interviews of survivors, the report explored Boston’s troubled history with homicide and unsolved cases.

The police department’s Unsolved Cases Squad (UCS) was created in 1993 to address its then-backlog of 837 unsolved homicide cases, after a mayor-appointed commission called out police the year prior for “rampant corruption, a lack of coherent policies and ineffective management,” the report read.

Boston had just come out of its worst year of homicides in history, with 152 people killed from 1989 to 1990. Nearly 85% happened in Dorchester, Mattapan or Roxbury, which prompted an aggressive crackdown on violence by police in those three historically-Black neighborhoods.

Homicide survivors said the department’s relationship with Black Bostonians hasn’t fully recovered since, and some feel their race has played a role in getting cases solved.

A 2024 Harvard survey said Black Bostonians are significantly more likely to report feeling the Boston Police Department does not “take complaints of people of [their] racial group seriously.”

However, a lot of the work detectives do “comes down to witness cooperation,” and the UCS depends on “people being willing to work with us and bring us information we need,” said Boston Police Lt. Det. David Duff, a report interview subject and current head of UCS.

Therefore, the work of UCS is “undermined” in Dorchester, Mattapan and Roxbury — where 70% of Boston homicides happened over the most recent decade.

If no arrests have been made in a case after 10 years, it will be referred to the UCS, according to the report. This is unusual, it read, as “many municipalities” in Massachusetts and nationwide will “designate an unsolved case as ‘cold’ much sooner.”

The UCS solves an average of 1.6 cases per year since it was reinstated in 2008, as part of the department’s 40-person Homicide Unit, the report said. Initially, UCS solved 40 cases in just two and a half years before being shut down in 2001 due to “scant resources, a lack of manpower, and budget constraints.”

Cases with DNA evidence are prioritized by UCS as they can be solved quicker, the report found — but UCS has no policies on communicating with family members on its investigations.

The Homicide Unit does have a Victim-Witness Resource Office, which will “help grieving families” and connect them with service resources, public referrals and counseling. A Boston police spokesperson said the office, staffed by Homicide Unit officers, works closely with the Peace Institute and other state, city and community partners.

The Resource Office hosts programs to connect family members with detectives, but some survivors feel these meetings are “disingenuous.”

“They never update me. I always must call and ask,” said Lisa Randolph. Her brother, Torraine Randolph, was 20-years-old when he died in their sister’s arms in 1991. He’d been shot outside a fire station in Dorchester in front of multiple witnesses, who gave police a description of the fleeing gunman.

Randolph went 26 years without hearing from officers, all the while conducting her own investigation into her brother’s death. A fellow survivor advocate finally connected her to the department. Still, seven years later and with Randolph’s collected information, police have not made an arrest.

“[And] when we do sit down with them, they don’t tell us anything. We do more reaching out to them than them reaching out to us,” Randolph said.

The report also called to attention inconsistencies in public information available from Boston Police for annual reports on unsolved homicides.

The Homicide Unit began publishing an annual list of unsolved cases in 2011, but stopped in 2019, and only published again from 2021 until 2023, the report read.

Links to its “Homicide Year End Reports” from 2015-2018 are inactive, the report said, and a page called “Unsolved Homicide Cases 1985 to 2009″ only lists nine names.

Additionally, its “Homicide Clearance Rate Dashboard,” or its statistics on arrests made in unsolved cases to “clear” them, has been incomplete — an issue because the department uses clearance rates to measure its performance, the report said.

As of Feb. 16, clearance rates were only displayed from 2015 through 2020, before the dashboard was updated as of March to include data up to last year.

According to the Boston police spokesperson, the department has been building out a new unsolved section of BPDnews.com, linked from the “homicide” section of the homepage.

As a “work in progress,” this page will have a timeline of the homicides going back to 1963, the spokesperson said. It will have photos of the victim and summaries of their case, the spokesperson said.

“We encourage survivors to share photos with us to assist us in these efforts,” the Boston police spokesperson said.

“We want to reinvigorate interest in helping to solve the murders of these individuals and to encourage information sharing about these crimes to assist our investigators in solving them,” the department spokesperson said.

Additionally, the department has changed its Crime Stoppers Tipi Line, so information shared anonymously can include photos and videos, and can be submitted through text, call, online or through the app.

The recommendations

Since Boston is one of the safest major cities in the country, Chéry believes it should also prioritize support for loved ones of homicide victims.

“We want to make sure that there is a standard practice, procedures and protocol within the police department,” Chéry said.

With goals of improving unsolved homicide investigations, survivor communication and department transparency, the report made a collection of recommendations to Boston Police, the City of Boston and Massachusetts Legislature based on its findings.

The report suggested changes to UCS investigations, including reducing the workload of UCS detectives — which also involve parole board reviews, FOIA requests and officer-involved shootings — and creating university partnerships to allow investigators to solely focus on investigations.

It recommended establishing a clear police protocol and definition for when a case becomes “cold,” setting a new six-year threshold for this designation.

“The current ten-year rule is unusually long... [and] likely hinders UCS detectives in cases that lack robust forensic evidence,” the report read.

Witnesses could move, die or forget details in that time period, the report argued. This change would create a predictable schedule for detectives and survivors, and put “fresh eyes on these cases sooner” to make witness accounts more viable, the report said.

To improve police-survivor communication, the report suggested a “formal procedure” that gives survivors options for how often they want to have contact with either the detective or a Victim-Witness Resource Officer. This could mean case updates once every six months; once a year; only for major updates; or only for arrests, the report said.

A page for “frequently asked questions” on the UCS could also be added to the BPD website, the report said, where survivors can learn how communication will work, how their loved ones’ case will be investigated and what their survivors’ rights are.

Finally, the report called for two publications from the Boston Police: a “complete database” of unsolved homicides in the city since 1960, and an annual homicide clearance report.

The homicide database could be designed as a single web page with victims’ pictures and case information, the report said, similar to the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police “Unsolved Homicides” page and the “Cold Case Files” page made in Colorado.

Resuming the “Homicide Year End Report” would improve transparency, the report said, in a neighborhood-by-neighborhood detailed listing of cases that were solved and their investigation methods, clearance rates and updates on unsolved cases.

Many of the report’s recommendations are designed for immediate results from Boston Police if the department chooses to adopt them, Haile said.

“Some of these things, the BPD could implement right away ... creating a website, or create a protocol for how and when to transfer a case to the UCS, and streamline their responsibilities — all those things could happen right now," Haile said. Some other recommendations would be long-term ideas, he said, like the partnerships with Boston University and Northeastern University’s Master of Science in Criminal Justice programs.

As for the City of Boston and the Massachusetts Legislature, the report specified some supportive steps to help survivors. This included amendments to the Victim’s Bill of Rights — which ensures victims are present, informed and heard as cases progress — for full survivor protections before a trial begins, which takes years for unsolved case survivors.

An oversight board of survivors and public safety exports, created by the City of Boston, to review and approve the Homicide Unit’s annual budget would help ensure UCS detectives has “the resources and accountability necessary” to investigate cases.

It’s not a one-size-fits-all fix for survivors, Chéry said — but she and the students are hopeful that the department will make change.