Joe Kenda Opens Up On His New Special 'Homicide Hunter: Never Give Up'
Lt. Joe Kenda is back with the new special 'Homicide Hunter: Never Give Up.' He spoke with Sling about his career and much more.
Lt. Joe Kenda is an exceptional policeman. As fans of his long-running series Homicide Hunter know, Lt. Kenda closed 92 percent of the 387 homicide cases he was assigned during his 23-year tenure with the Colorado Spring Police Department. Observant, thorough, and blessed with eidetic memory, Lt. Kenda has all the traits you’d want in a detective, and he can rest easy at night knowing he’s made a real difference in the world.
But Lt. Joe Kenda does not rest easy. Not when there are 31 unsolved homicides on his watch.
“The thing about police work is, policemen have a policy: We don’t forgive, and we don’t forget,” Lt. Kenda says in his trademark deadpan baritone. “No matter how long it takes.”
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Lt. Kenda is speaking to Sling TV about his new special on ID and discovery+, Homicide Hunter: Never Give Up. It’s the first of three planned feature-length specials that promise to reveal “chilling new details of career-defining cases” that Kenda was involved in. And the case certainly is chilling, as it focuses on the sexual assualt and murder of Darlene Krashoc, a 20-year-old active-duty soldier whose body was found behind a Colorado Springs resturant in March 1987. The investigation took a number of unexpected twists and turns before it eventually went cold. But that’s not the end of the story. WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW.
Thanks to Lt. Kenda’s meticulous methodology and his persistence in preserving DNA samples (which in 1987 was an expensive and largely unproven tool of law enforcement), CSPD was finally able to identify a suspect in Krashoc’s murder more than three decades after her death. In 2019, 58-year-old Michael David Whyte was charged with the killing and in 2021, he was sentenced to life in prison for the murder, thanks in no small part to the surprise testimony of a star witness: Lt. Joe Kenda.
“There’s no statute of limitations on homicides; you kill, you’re going to pay for that,” Lt. Kenda says. “And DNA has provided us with the means to collect a debt on behalf of the victim.” With Homicide Hunter: Never Give Up now available to watch on-demand with ID (and ad-free on discovery+), here are excerpts from our interview with the legendary lieutenant. To watch the full special, use the link at the bottom of this page to sign up for Sling Orange + Blue.
Sling TV: From your perspective as a detective, is it better or worse to get a DNA match with someone who was never investigated?
Lt. Joe Kenda: I think it’s probably better that he wasn’t [a suspect] because we didn’t overlook him or misunderstand what we were dealing with. You know, when you kill, you’re a ghost. You’re a shadow in the night. And the whole purpose of the investigation is to identify that person, and if you never have the opportunity [to speak with them] then we certainly can’t identify them.
So the fact that his name never appeared in the 2,000 pages of this report is in some ways gratifying. We didn’t overlook the [killer]. We never knew this guy. We never identified this guy. So it’s truly by scientific means that we obtained his identity.
Sling: This murder was especially heinous, but the suspect wasn’t a serial killer or seemingly even mentally disturbed; he was just some guy living a middle-class life in the suburbs of Denver. How do you square the evil of this crime with the seemingly ordinary life of the person who committed it?
Lt. Joe Kenda: Human nature is violent by nature. Picture yourself on the Serenghti plain millions of years ago in Africa, and before you is the animal kingdom. You see this creature, four feet tall, covered in hair that walks erect. And he’s surrounded by other creatures similar to him and they grunt at each other and there seems to be some sort of a language, they’re able to communicate.
You are looking at early man. Now, while you admire this little creature, you determine, by observation, that he and his friends are capable of making weapons and killing animals three or four times their size. Before you are struck any further by the cleverness of this thing, it would not be in your interest to try to pet him.
And it still isn’t.
The [extreme] level of violence is in all of us. All of us. When I taught a class at the police academy, I would say, ‘what do you think a murderer looks like?’ And [cadets] would all chatter off something that came out of a Hollywood movie as to the appearance of the killer. I said, ‘do you know what they look like?’ ‘No sir.’ ‘They look like you, and you, and me.’ Because we’re humans, and we’re the most dangerous animal on this planet.
Sling: After your career in law enforcement, you hosted ‘Homicide Hunter’ for nine seasons. What did you enjoy most about hosting the show?
Lt. Joe Kenda: What I liked the most was [its] therapeutic nature, for me. I’ve said more to that camera than I’ve ever said to my wife, let alone anybody else. It was a chance to release some of the horrors I’ve seen over my career. And after doing this for as many years as I have, I feel better than I’ve ever felt, because I’m able to discuss things that I had never discussed with anyone.
Unfortunately, in my line of work, you witness the violence of humans. You can never understand it, you just have to realize it’s happening, and it’s going to happen again. It’s the way things are. But it's a moment for me to be able to feel somewhat better about having seen what I’ve seen. I’ve seen death by every means except a nuclear weapon, I’ve never seen that. Pick any other method and I’ve seen plenty of examples.
Sling: What did you think of the actor who played you in the reenactments?
Lt. Joe Kenda: I’m always curious about that, because my family thinks that he looks like me. And maybe he does at that particular point of time in my life. But I’ve never paid a lot of attention to that, it’s kind of embarrassing in a way. It’s like, ‘come on, let me tell you what happened, we don’t need all the rest of this to go with it.’
But he doesn’t appear much in this for a reason: We’re telling the story, we’re not showing you the story. I think he does a great job. I think he is consistent in terms of how he looks at things. He’s very quiet and doesn’t say much; I never did either. I would give people instructions, but I would often talk to myself at crime scenes. My [staff] all thought I was nuts. ‘Oh there he goes again.’ I’d look at something that a perpetrator had done, and out loud I would say, ‘Why did you do that? Why did you break that? Was that important to you? Was it part of something you wanted to destroy?’ All of the thoughts that you have about who is doing this and why. And a lot of guys and girls that worked for me would go, ‘uh, I’m leaving now, because the boss is losing his mind.’ I actually had lost it a long time ago. But I was pretty good at this. And I did love it so.