The morning of October 16, 1999 started out bleak, as if to portend that dark news was at hand. Suddenly, the upscale Cooper’s Hill community in St Andrew was jolted awake by a spine-chilling scream.

A member of Madame Rose Leon’s staff had stumbled upon the grim discovery that the 87-year-old former government minister had been murdered in her home somewhere between bedtime and dawn.

Earlier that same year, retired civil servant, consumer advocate and broadcaster, Tess Thomas, was shot and killed in gruesome circumstances at her Maryland, St Andrew home.

The two high-profiled murders are among the thousands of deaths estimated to have gone unsolved in Jamaica, many of them dating back decades, and calling into question the ability of the police to bring murderers to justice.

If the murders of such well-known citizens have not been solved, what of the large number of little known individuals who have been killed, asked Susan Goffe, chairman of the human rights watchdog group, Jamaicans For Justice (JFJ).

“The fact that so few of these are solved speaks to the greater issue of just how many of the hundreds of murders committed annually are solved by the police,” said Goffe in an interview with the Sunday Observer.

“Some of them (police officers) have so many cases to investigate that they are not allowed enough time to properly investigate,” Goffe also complained.

Requests by the Sunday Observer for an update on some of the celebrated murder cases were not immediately granted by the office of deputy commissioner in charge of crime, Lucius Thomas.

But a senior police officer estimated that the number of unsolved murders – of ordinary and high-profiled Jamaicans – run into the thousands, many with no hope of ever being solved.

Many suspects and investigating officers have since disappeared, retired or died.

“It’s a tragedy that many cases have followed the path of the detectives assigned to them initially. Some have died, retired or left the force. And so have some files,” said the officer who asked not to be identified.

Some of the murder cases that come more readily to mind are: Tess Thomas; Madame Rose Leon; Vhonnel Powell; the mother and brother of former government minister O D Ramtallie; Clinton (Jingles) Davy; former University of the West Indies lecturer, Dr E V Ellington; and former principal of the Norman Manley Law School, Dr Aubrey Fraser.

Though no culprit has been caught, some of the cases, police insist, have been solved, based on the formula used to declare a case “cleared up”. “Migration, failure to identify a suspect in a line-up, the death of a suspect or the conviction of a suspect for another crime, are among the definitions used by the police to deem a case cleared-up,” Opposition spokesman on justice, Delroy Chuck, said.

Arguing that the cleared-up method “is scandalous”, Chuck said that even at that, only about 50 per cent of all crimes generally were cleared up, and he cited a 2003 World Bank Report saying that only 43 per cent of murders are cleared up by the police.

Jamaica has been running at an average of 900 homicides annually in the last five years.

Using the current formula, a case deemed to have been cleared-up is that of late journalist, Hugh Crosskill Jnr, who was killed nearly three years ago by a security guard.

The guard has since died and the cop who was investigating the case was himself murdered just over a year ago, as he stopped at a traffic light in Manor Park.

Another case declared closed is that of former permanent secretary in the Ministry of Housing in the 1970s, Andrew “Ted” O’Gilvie, who was shot and killed at his Sunrise Drive home in St Andrew as he came home for lunch.

O’Gilvie’s briefcase, which was taken, is believed to have contained damning information about a government project by the housing ministry in the eastern Kingston community called McGregor Gully. Two men were said to have ridden from the scene on a motorcycle. An underling from the ministry was arrested and convicted on a conspiracy charge, but no one was ever held on the capital charge.

The Ramtallie double murder case was an exception, in that two persons were convicted for the heinous crime.

According to family members, one of the convicts escaped prison and was killed by cronies and the second was so badly beaten in prison, for cutting the throat of an old woman, that he went insane.

JFJ’s Goffe said the inability of the police to solve the relatively few high-profiled cases, underscored the need for more dependence on forensic science.

Goffe believed one of the deterrents to crime-solving had been the police’s focus on crime-fighting, and not on the thorough collection of evidence from secured crime scenes.

She questioned whether the police had sufficient forensic units and the capability to make intelligent assessments based on the evidence gathered from each murder scene.

In any event, Goffe worried the high murder rate left the officers with many more cases than their counterparts in other jurisdictions.

Chuck said the failure by police in any jurisdiction to have a cleared-up rate of less than 60-70 per cent, was a signal to criminals that they could get away.

“The major deterrent to crime in any jurisdiction is the police’s ability to apprehend, arrest and charge someone,” said Chuck, who is also an attorney-at-law.

Former police commissioner, Trevor MacMillan, said when he was in the job, the formula used was the arrest of, or death of a suspect, similar to that of Trinidad and Tobago.

But MacMillan believed that “Jamaica and Trinidad are not so bad, because they take it further than some other jurisdictions”, including parts of the United States.

“Once there is a suspect, the case is declared cleared-up by the police there,” said MacMillan.

Chuck said many of the cases remain unsolved, because they were either poorly investigated or just left to die like the victims.

He chided investigators for failing to provide the State with cases that were strong enough to secure a conviction.

Acting Director of Public Prosecutions Brian Sykes acknowledged that the role of the prosecutor was to assist the police in gathering the evidence to make it admissible in court.

Sykes noted, however, that the police were not lawyers, but with time and experience, they learnt the intricacies and nuances of the law, which helped them to become better at making their cases.