Retired forensic detective James M. Adcock launches Minnesota crime podcast

A retired forensic detective now living in rural Minnesota has turned decades of homicide and cold-case work into a new podcast, and the local angle for Otter Tail County is whether James M. Adcock will eventually turn that expertise toward unsolved cases closer to home.

Adcock is the host of The Forensic Investigator, a show that he launched in early 2026 after moving to Minnesota. A trailer for the podcast was posted Feb. 13, 2026, and episode 004, The role of Evidence in Forensic Investigations, followed on April 22. The podcast description says Adcock has nearly two decades of experience as a forensic and criminal investigator and spent years training detectives on homicide and cold-case work.

That background matters in Minnesota, where unresolved violent crime remains a real law-enforcement burden. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension says a cold-case playing card project highlights 52 violent unsolved cases across the state from the past 50 years. For residents in Otter Tail County and across west-central Minnesota, that is a reminder that the true-crime interest driving podcasts and streaming video has a hard edge: families still wait for answers, and older files still need attention.

The investigative tools have also changed. The Federal Bureau of Investigation says ViCAP is the nation’s largest investigative repository for major violent crime cases, giving agencies a place to compare patterns and leads across jurisdictions. The National Institute of Justice says modern DNA analysis and other updated forensic methods can now solve cases that once seemed out of reach, and it created best-practices guidance to help agencies build sustainable cold-case units.

Minnesota already has one county-level example of that approach. The Anoka County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Homicide Unit says it uses updated technology, information and resources to pursue unsolved homicides. That model gives Adcock’s podcast an especially local resonance, because the same forensic methods he discusses online are the ones that can still move an old case in the right direction.

For Otter Tail County, the unanswered question is whether The Forensic Investigator will stay broad or dig into Minnesota cases with local connections, including crimes residents still remember and unresolved files that have never fully gone away.