Paul Holes And Billy Jensen Are Looking For A Squad To Help Them Solve Crimes 

If you've ever wanted to feel like you’re solving crimes alongside retired cold case investigator Paul Holes and investigative journalist Billy Jensen ... now is your chance.

Holes and Jensen are planning to put their roughly 50 combined years of experience solving cases in their new podcast “The Murder Squad.” It will feature solved and unsolved cases of missing persons or murders. 

Holes, who retired from the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office, has a background in law enforcement and forensics. Meanwhile, Jensen is known for using social media to solves cases like the death of Marques Gaines, who was run over by a cab in Chicago after being beaten.

The duo first connected through writer Michelle McNamara, who was researching the Golden State Killer case. Holes was working on the case at the time and using DNA profiling techniques, which helped lead to an arrest of a suspect in the case.  Then, after McNamara sadly passed away, Jensen helped finish her true crime book “I’ll Be Gone In the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer.”

Now with each new episode of their podcast, they are looking to use their expertise on more cases and get help from listeners. The hope is that the podcast listeners will feed in tips or theories, which Holes and Jensen will follow up on. 

“We want to pick cases that have actionable items that people can help solve,” Jensen told Oxygen.com while in New York City recently for the Death Becomes Us true crime festival. “True crime fans or murderinos or whatever you want to call them, they want to look into these things and they want to just help start solving crimes as opposed to just sitting on the sidelines. So those are the cases that we’re gonna pick, ones where there are threads that we’ve seen that can take you out of the maze and towards justice.”Jensen hopes people listen to the podcast — and then talk about it to their friends and families.

"'Do you remember this person? Does this person look familiar?'" Jensen envisions fans asking. "I know you lived in this area at this certain period of time. If you show those photos or put out that information to enough people you’re going to get answers.”

Holes said law enforcement has always asked for public assistance in solving crimes.

“You’ll say, 'Hey we need your help. Here’s the wanted poster.' Now, we’re doing it in a different way,” Holes said. 

The concept of mobilizing citizen detectives is not new for Jensen. He outlines rules and steps on how to solve a murder in his audible book "Chase Darkness with Me: How One True Crime Writer Started Solving Murders."

Although working in crime can at times be overwhelmingly dark, the podcast will feature a segment called “The Weekly Distraction,” where the pair will talk about what’s distracting them from crime in their daily lives, to offer some balance and levity. 

Jensen and Holes were tight-lipped about what's to come on the podcast. They did offer up a hint about the subject of the first episode, though: Jensen said it will deal with the “Bradford case.” If you want to find out which one, “The Murder Squad” launches on Monday, April 1 and is available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.