Have you ever wondered what happens to the all those cases police haven't solved?

Here in Idaho Falls and Bonneville County Idaho police never let a serious felony go cold.

Whether detectives are sifting through old files or following up on new leads, a homicide is never dead.

"Here we may get two or three a year so we have the ability here to keep working on a case where in LA they don't have the man power to hunt a case until its over," says Detective Jim Hoffman.

"You'll find that detectives when they get a case its their case. You put a lot of hard work, your heart and soul into the case and you want to see it through to the end," says Detective A. Prudent.

One example is the 10 year old Angie Dodge murder case. Detectives are still actively searching for answers.

"We get information about a case like that all the time. So we follow up on that information," says Hoffman.

But then again, not all crimes are created equal.

"You have to look at the case. If it's a crime against a person and that person's in jeopardy or you've got a violent offender that's out that could endanger somebody else that's going to be your number one priority. Unfortunately, the property crimes, the vehicle burglary may get put on the back burner," says Prudent.

And many end up unsolved and inactive.

"There's literally thousands of those in the system," says Hoffman.

Some of those most recently to make the list: the Salvation Army and Rentmaster burglaries, and remember this elderly lady, who watched a thief steal her TV, no one has found him either.

"What makes a case inactive is the fact that there are no leads or anything else to follow up on," says Prudent.

Cases like these get logged into police data bases with the hopes that eventually something will pop up.

"In the future if we get anything that needs to be followed up on we can do basic searches in our reporting system and pull up that case again or anything that matches that and compare it to the information we have," says Hoffman.

And while it can happen.

"I had a case that was assigned to me that was a horse trailer that was stolen. The case went inactive because they didn't have any leads and two years later the victim was driving down the road and recognized the trailer and at then the case gets activated and we get the trailer recovered," says Prudent.

That's often not the case.

"Property crimes, yeah, there's a lot and I think you'll find that with any agency. Burglaries you don't have any leads to go on. There's no physical evidence. You're just kind of stuck," says Prudent.

Despite the setbacks and number of cold cases, detectives are constantly corresponding with agencies across the nation trying to solve the unsolvable.