There is often a common thread when meeting those family members who have lost a loved one to a homicide and the case remains unsolved.
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There's a pain in their eyes which continues down through the years. It's an ache which never fully subsides. Even decades later, the smallest things trigger snapshot memories and reopen emotional floodgates.
With no closure to missing and cold cases, it's the families left behind who suffer.
There are at least six unsolved homicides being progressively reviewed by an ACT team of detectives, assessing cases dating back as far as the 1966 murder of six-year-old Allen Redston.
The circumstances surrounding the Redston murder were simply awful.
Allen was an adventurous and inquisitive young boy. He used to play at the Curtin tip and that was his intended destination when he was last seen 54 years ago.
His body was found a day after he was reported missing.
Allen's tiny hands and feet were bound, and his body rolled up in a carpet and dumped in a creek bed in Curtin. He had been strangled to death.
As late as 2003, police thought they had a bona fide suspect living in Queensland but they couldn't build a strong enough case to take it to prosecution.
Convicted child killer and sadist Derek Percy, Victoria's longest-serving prisoner before his death from cancer in 2013, was also a strong suspect for the Redston murder, as well as numerous other unsolved child homicides around the country. But nothing was ever proved, nor any admissions made.
ACT police have offered rewards of up to $500,000 for information which help could resolve these cold cases.
Particularly troubling about the Keren Rowland unsolved homicide almost 50 years ago is that her case is listed among a succession of young women who have inexplicably gone missing without a trace, or have been found murdered down through the years.
Long-haired student Elizabeth Herford was 18 when she left the ANU Bar on June 13, 1980 and a person matching her description was last sighted hitch-hiking south on Commonwealth Avenue. She was never seen again.
in 1984, 17-year-old Megan Mulquiney was last seen outside Woden Plaza where she worked. Her home was just 10 minutes away but she never made it.
In 2002, 23-year-old Kathryn Grosvenor was murdered by persons unknown and her body, weighed down by a concrete bollard, found by a canoiest in Yarralumla Bay.
No matter how slim the chance of uncovering fresh evidence, it is important to the families that police keep these files open and subject to regular review.
