In this age of cold case squads and the CODIS database, I'm wondering what everyone's oldest case is that they took to trial (original trial, not a retrial) with a favorable result.

I am sure there are plenty of prosecutors out there that have tried an older case than this. But, to start the discussion, I tried a case in the 248th District Court in Houston in September of 1992. The defendant, Raymond Durand, murdered his wife in 1968. Her body was found in a field and never identified. Durand was having an on-going affair with another woman and he, his small children (who were told that their mother left them) and the girlfriend moved to California. The smallest child, an infant at the time of the murder, grew up believing that the girlfriend, who the defendant later married, was her birth mother. The case broke open in 1991 when the older daughter, she was about 5 at the time of the murder, told a District Attorney Investigator in California about the suspicious disappearance of her mother while they were living in Texas and that she did't believe her father's explanation. The investigator calls the Texas Rangers and they wind up putting the case together. The girlfriend, who was not involved with the murder, cooperated with the Ranger and told him that the defendant made a statement that implicated him in killing the wife. Of course, the fact that Durand left the girlfriend a couple years earlier for another woman in North Carolina probably helped the flow of that information.

It was an interesting trial. The defense was that the identification of the body was flawed and that it wasn't our victim. Defense even had the defendant's brother testify that he spoke with the victim on the telephone a year after the body was found. They even put into evidence 1969, 1970 and 1971 Houston phone books with a name, identical to the victim's. listed at an address in Houston to bolster the testimony of the brother. M investigator, Ken Rogers, who is still with the Harris County D.A.'s office, found that person overnight and we put her on the stand the following morning. That ended that defensive issue.
The jury gave the defendant thirty years. The case was affirmed in 1994.

Dallas has tried some old ones in the last few years.

Old phone books are an excellent resource for cold cases and reinvestigations. You should be able to find them at your public library. We were able to track down a witness in a DNA case this way.