County public television helps solve cold cases

Hudson County, N.J. is tapping into a popular entertainment genre to help investigators close cold cases.

The county's new public access television program Hudson County's At Large, tapped into a true-crime craze that has been building since the Fall 2014 debut of the true crime podcast Serial and right before the conclusion of HBO's The Jinx.

The show won't be confused with the other slickly-produced works of journalism, and Assistant Prosecutor Gene Rubino admits that he and Capt. Keith Lamont Stith the half-hour show's host probably shouldn't quit their day jobs. But Rubino is confident that information will reach the right people to make a difference in their investigations.

"With a lot of cases, our leads have gone cold, but that's because they're out of people's minds," Rubino said. "We can get these details out in front of people's eyes and get them talking about the cases and hopefully we'll reach someone who has a tip that can help us.

"We just need a tip here or there and we can examine, knead it and figure out where to go next. These cases can turn on someone remembering something that seems like it's not important until they think about it a certain way."

After airing the first episode in early February, the prosecutor's office received calls from people interested in having the show document their family members.

"That's what we want participation," Rubino said. "People are watching, talking about this, getting the word out."

The somewhat-limited viewership Hudson County doesn't worry Rubino. In fact, the scope is attractive to him because of the amount of control his office has over the information and context in the stories.

"If you had some national TV series looking at one of our cases, it would be a few minutes and they'd have all of the control in telling the stories," he said. "We decide what goes in and we can include simple but important details, like a phone number where people can call in tips. With some other shows people might try calling into the station and the tips might never get where they're supposed to go."

The first airing included Stith's describing unsolved crimes, but Rubino has ambitions for the show's evolution. He wants to take the production to shoot on-location at crime scenes, which he feels will bring some credibility to the show it won't have if it remains in the studio. He wants to make use of visuals and take on a more narrative style.

Ru

b ino also sees the show as an opportunity to demonstrate what roles his office performs.

"County offices have different responsibilities, and our prosecutor's office is a little different," he said. "In Hudson County, we investigate homicides, but other counties' prosecutors don't do that."

The Hudson Media Group, which produces other public access shows, does most of the technical work, but Rubino and Stith received a crash course in television work, and Rubino hopes they can refine their production to draw in more viewers.

"I'm excited about where we can go from here," he said. "We're getting calls and ideas for what stories we can tell and we're hopefully growing our audience, and the bigger the audience, the more tips we will be able to generate."