Suwannee Valley Unsolved to host cold case meeting 

Investigators with the Suwannee County Sheriff’s Office and the Lake City Police Department will partner for a special presentation on how cold case homicide investigations are handled.  

The free two-hour event will be held at Branford’s Hatch Park Community Center (403 SE Craven St.). The doors will open at 5:30 p.m. 

It will be a two-part presentation discussing how a cold case investigation is handled and prioritized, and what it takes to work toward resolving a case decades later. 

The event will be hosted by Suwannee Valley Unsolved and the Suwannee River Regional Library System in an effort to allow the public inside the investigation and ask questions about it. It is also an opportunity for the public to see how forensic technology has evolved over the years. 

The cold case presentations will be handled by investigators Chuck Tompkins of the Suwannee County Sheriff’s Office and Greg Burnsed of the Lake City Police Department. 

Tompkins was recently assigned to investigate some of Suwannee County’s cold cases and has a long career in law enforcement, including his time as an investigator for the Live Oak Police Department. 

Burnsed’s career in law enforcement began in 1992 and he has worked for agencies such as the Florida Department of Corrections and the Baker County Sheriff’s Office. He has dedicated a lot of his time to solving some of Lake City’s coldest cases.  

Afterward, the news media’s role in getting cold cases to the public will also be presented. Special guest Katie Kaplan, an award-winning investigative journalist with WCTV Eyewitness News in Tallahassee and host of WCTV’s “Unsolved” series, will be on hand to deliver this presentation. 

A Q&A session will be held after the presentations by Suwannee Valley Unsolved Executive Director Jason Futch.  

For more information regarding this event, please reach out to Suwannee Valley Unsolved at SuwanneeValleyUnsolved@Gmail.com or the SRRL Branford location at 386-935-1556.