BARRON – It’s been 10 weeks and counting since 13-year-old Jayme Closs disappeared after her parents were shot to death at their home. Thousands of leads have been checked, searchers have combed the area and digital evidence has been closely examined.

But Jayme’s disappearance —– and the murders of her parents, James, 56, and Denise, 46 — remain unsolved and uncharged.

That begs this question: Has the Closs case gone cold?

Barron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald flatly rejects that notion. Nationally recognized cold case experts agree, saying there are other investigative avenues to explore.

“The case remains the No. 1 priority of the sheriff’s department and we still have the FBI and DCI (Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation) on site working on this case with us,” Fitzgerald stated in a mid-December post on the sheriff department’s Facebook page.

“There is nothing new to report but we continue to follow up on leads and we are trying to build a longer timeline of (the victims’) lives through digital and social records in hopes of leading us to a clue.”

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Kenneth L. Mains, president and founder of the American Investigative Society of Cold Cases who has an extensive record of assisting law enforcement in solving cases, said it doesn’t appear that the Closs case has gone cold.

“When does (a) case go cold? That is up to the police department that is investigating it. I am sure they are working the leads they have to the best of their ability,” Mains said. “But when those leads dry up, they have to go generate leads themselves and not wait on information to come in. You have to actively go and generate leads so the case doesn’t become cold.”

Mains declined to address the Closs case in detail because he isn’t completely familiar with the details of the crime.

“But generally speaking, I would say that a stranger abduction from the victims’ home with two murders inside that home is somewhat uncommon,” he said.

“I would focus my investigation on the missing child and her victimology. Why wasn’t she murdered and left there as well? Not knowing the socioeconomic status of the family, it cannot be a kidnapping for ransom as the parents were killed.”

While sex trafficking can’t be discounted as a possible reason for Jayme’s disappearance, Mains pointed out that “you wouldn’t have to kill the parents in order to accomplish this” because she could have been abducted while coming home from school or when she was alone.

“There is a reason the parents were killed and it may not have to be connected to the kidnapping. What I mean by that is that you don’t have to kill the parents to accomplish kidnapping the victim. You may kill them because they know who you are or because the purpose is to kill them and not the kidnapping. It is an extra, extraordinary step and it is done for a specific purpose not related to the kidnapping,” Mains said.

Jim Trainum, a former homicide detective for the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington D.C. who now serves as a consultant on criminal cases, said creating a timeline of the victims’ lives is an important step by police agencies investigating the Closs case.

Trainum said cases generally go cold “after all of the reasonable leads have been exhausted,” but he doesn’t put the Closs investigation in that category.

“I’m sure they will keep working it for some time — until there is nothing else to follow up on,” Trainum said. “I’m sure they have working theories — more than one.”

Timelines of the victims, he said, “give you such a great understanding of what was going on until that point.”

“(Detectives) concentrate on the immediate time frame and start working back. Most murders are committed by a person who knows the victim. Start with associates and work farther out.

“We’re getting better at knowing the victim. What about them made them a victim? The more that you know about the victim, the better.”