Three-ring binders overstuffed with witness and suspect interview transcripts rest on the table inside a small conference room at the Fairbanks Police Department. It’s the afternoon of March 16, and the spread also includes things more common to an upper-level college seminar, like colorful water bottles and empty coffee cups.
But it’s the beefy stacks of paper that required students to complete a Criminal Justice Information Services background check, not the highlighters or half-eaten bagel.
“I need to get more binders,” says Derik Stone, as he looks out at the table.
Stone worked as a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 23 years, 18 years of which were in Fairbanks. He retired last September and now teaches at the University of Alaska Fairbanks as an assistant professor of justice. Seven students fill the chairs around Stone, and he gives tips and pointers on what to keep an eye out for in the documents.
The class is midway through the first semester of a pilot criminal justice course Stone helped create in which UAF students dig into FPD’s cold case homicides.
“They’re just looking for one piece of information to push this case over,” Stone tells the students. “And that’s what they’re hoping we’ll find.”
The students are looking into just one of FPD’s 19 cold case homicides this semester. The case dates back to the 1980s, and it’s the oldest one on the department’s books, according to Lieutenant Amy Davis.
“These cases just – they don’t get the attention that they should have,” Davis said in an interview.
Davis has been at the department for six years. She’s assigned to the detectives unit, which handles major crimes. She said, before her time with the department, there was a detective who solely worked cold cases – but not anymore.
“It’s just a resource thing,” she said. “We work on them when we can, but it’s not getting, like, a lot of focus.”
Davis helped bring the class to life after reading an article in the June 2025 issue of Police Chief Magazine about Western Michigan University partnering with police agencies so students could work cold cases.
She then started putting out feelers for information and expertise to figure out how to replicate the program in Fairbanks. Davis got in touch with an attorney who’d tried to start something similar at the University of Alaska Anchorage that never quite materialized, she said, and meetings with the justice department at UAF and people involved with the WMU program followed.
“We’re not recreating a wheel or anything, so it came together pretty quickly,” Davis said.
FPD Public Information Officer Teal Soden declined to say which case was selected for the students, and in interviews, Stone and Davis also didn’t provide identifying details. In December, FPD Chief of Police Ron Dupee told the Fairbanks City Council the department keeps a list of the cases ranked by solvability. A public records request for that list was denied. But Davis said they picked a case they think is solvable, and that detectives believe they know who did it.
“We just need a little confirmation. Maybe a piece of evidence that didn’t get tested – or maybe there’s new methods to test DNA that they didn’t have back when this happened,” she said.
The city council voted in December to set aside $25,000 in the fiscal year 2026 budget to pay for those tests, if needed.
Crime scene photos and page after page of interview transcripts make up most of what the students had reviewed so far, Grahm Jones, one of the students, told KUAC.
“Because of the particulars of this case, I would liken it to reading a 2,500-page novel, basically,” he said.
Jones is in his fifth year in the University of Alaska system. He’s studying music composition and plans to continue into graduate school to, hopefully, become a music professor. Justice is only his minor, he said.
“I might not ever get the chance to really work in a field of justice, and so this is my chance to kind of experience it and experience what it’s like before I might move on to different things,” he said.
Jones said he’s confident his classmates’ fresh eyes could help crack the case – though he’s not as confident that’ll happen before the spring semester ends.
That pretty much mirrors the opinion of Stone, his professor, but Stone said it’s not for lack of effort.
Titled “Police Investigations,” the course is scheduled to meet twice a week for an hour and half both days.
“But most of the students are here an hour or two hours early, and they stay an hour or two hours later,” Stone said, adding that some of them even worked on the case over spring break.
Stone said each of the seven students will write an essay at the end of the semester about whom they think the most probable subject is, which will be turned over to FPD. But he said the course likely won’t end there – at least, he hopes not.
“It’ll be interesting to to see the future of this,” Stone said. “I mean, I’m brand new to the faculty, so as long as I’m here, I’m going to continue to push for this.”
The course could transform to become two semesters long in the future, he said, or perhaps even an internship.