Joseph Patrick Kenda (born November 14, 1946)[2][3] is a retired Colorado Springs Police Department detective lieutenant who was involved in 387 homicide cases over a 23-year career.
[4] He was featured on the Investigation Discovery television show Homicide Hunter, on which series he recounted stories of cases that he had solved.
His father, William, served as an intelligence officer in the United States Army during World War II and ran a trucking business.
in political science, Kenda earned a master's degree in international relations from Ohio State University in 1970.
[4] Kenda credited his ability to close cases to being a student of human nature and being good at telling when people were lying.
[1] In its ninth season, Homicide Hunter was Investigation Discovery’s top show, averaging 1.7 million viewers each week in the third quarter of 2018.
Kenda's family appeared in two episodes of the Homicide Hunter, "Married to the Job", which aired on February 6, 2019, and in the series finale "The End" on January 29, 2020.
[16] After his retirement, two unsolved cases that Kenda had investigated during his career were finally solved in 2021 with the use of DNA: the homicides of Darlene Krashoc in 1987[17] and Mary Lynn Vialpando in 1988.