Students from the Michigan State University School of Criminal Justice played a supportive role in solving a homicide case that had gone cold for nearly 28 years. The students were working on the case as part of the MSP-MSU Cold Case Collaboration. 

The Cold Case Collaboration is a joint partnership between the Michigan State University School of Criminal Justice and the Michigan State Police First District that partners students with detectives to work on solving real cold cases in MSP’s First District.

In 1997, “John Doe” was found deceased in a Blissfield Township cornfield. Based on the condition of the body and the circumstances surrounding the case, police believe that the death was related to international drug trafficking. After a lengthy investigation, investigators had a few leads, but nothing concrete enough to help them solve the case.  

The case went cold. 

In 2014, Larry Rothman (Michigan State Police, Detective Sergeant) was assigned to the case. At the time, he was a detective with the Michigan State Police at their Monroe Post. Rothman worked the case, but due to limited time and resources, he wasn’t able to give the case his full attention. Enter the MSP-MSU Cold Case Collaboration in 2020. Suddenly, he had a team of students, practitioners, and researchers all working together to investigate cold cases – including the case of “John Doe” that he was given in 2014. 

According to Rothman and Allison Rojek (lead Criminologist for the Cold Case Collaboration), students helped on the case of John Doe by doing the same work actual detectives would do to solve a case. The students visited the locations involved in the case, organized and digitized all documents associated with the case, and even acted as mock jurors as MSP prepared their case.  

Regarding the work these students do, Rothman says, “It was the same as a detective would do starting out  – no matter how tedious. They literally started with dragging out giant tubs of files and laying them all out on a table to start making sense of everything they had to work with, then began piecing together the puzzle.” 

Finally, after years of tediously going through case files and tracking down potential witnesses, Richardo and Michael Sepulveda were named as the prime suspects in the case. In 2023, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel charged the Sepulveda brothers in connection with the homicide. Michael Sepulveda pled guilty in 2024 and Richardo was found guilty by a jury of his peers in 2025. 

This story originally appeared on the College of Social Science website.