cold case #3
NYTからの表現です。cold caseは、かつてはアメリカの一部の州で導入されている時効制度の一種を表していましたが、TVドラマ『コールドケース 迷宮事件簿』 のせいか、今では「未解決事件」の意味で用いられることが多いようです。（GP）
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/A30/20100927/1285597231
When Cold Cases Stay Cold
FERRIDAY, La. — In the spring of 1965, the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington received a letter from Concordia Parish in northeastern Louisiana. Addressed to the bureau’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, the letter pleaded for justice in the killing of a well-respected black merchant.
STILL OPEN Frank Morris, wearing a visor at center, suffered fatal burns when his shoe-repair shop in Ferriday, La., was set on fire in 1964. No one has ever been prosecuted for his death.
A few months earlier, the businessman, Frank Morris, had come upon two white men early one morning at the front of his shoe-repair shop, one pointing a shotgun at him, the other holding a canister of gas. A match was ignited, a conflagration begun, and Morris died four days later of his burns without naming the men, perhaps fearing retribution against his family.
The letter expressed grave concern that the crime would go unpunished because the local police were probably complicit. “Your office is our only hope so don’t fail us,” it concluded. It was signed:
“Yours truly, The Colored People of Concordia Parish.”
Nearly five decades later, the Justice Department has written back — not directly to the family of Mr. Morris or to the black community of Concordia Parish, but to dozens of other families who lost loved ones during this country’s tumultuous and violent civil rights era.
Several years ago, the F.B.I. began reopening cold cases from that era — 112 at last count — raising hopes among some for justice. In all but about 20, though, the families of the long dead have received letters, often hand-delivered by F.B.I. agents, that say their cases have been closed, there is nothing more to be done — and please accept our condolences.
Simultaneously intimate and bureaucratic, these letters serve as epistolary echoes of an increasingly distant time. To some, they reflect the elusiveness of resolution in cases decades old; to others, they represent another missed opportunity for a full accounting of what happened, and why.
Grace Hall Miller, a retired school board member in Newton, Ga., received one of these letters two years ago. It recounted a day in March 1965 that she hardly could have forgotten, when a man named Cal Hall Jr. fatally shot her husband, Hosie Miller, a farmer and church deacon, in a dispute over cows. Mr. Hall, who was white, shot Mr. Miller, who was black, in the back.
