Victims' families hope for answers in LAPD's homicide library Adrian McFarland awoke in a panic. His brother had come to him again in a dream. In this one, McFarland walked into a bar and there his brother stood, flashing a toothy smile. But Charles had been gone for nearly two decades, shot to death in Los Angeles when he was 27. McFarland, younger by four years, knew little about the crime. The dreams, he thought, were a sign. After all these years, had anyone been caught? A few days later, LAPD Det. Mark Hahn's phone rang. McFarland was on the line from Monroe, La., with questions long unasked. These calls never got easier for Hahn, even after 14 years working homicide: families checking in on the anniversary of a killing or the victim's birthday, their grief renewed by a date on the calendar. Usually, answers would have been hard to come by, especially for a case so old. But this time, Hahn knew where to turn: to the detectives creating the Los Angeles Police Department's first library of homicide. In an office normally reserved for LAPD chaplains at the Ahmanson Recruit Training Center in Westchester, boxes are stacked more than 4 feet high, each labeled with a letter and a number. Two other rooms hold more files; cops call them "murder books." A large lecture room serves as the homicide library's headquarters. It's lined with blue and black binders labeled with names and dates, and in the middle of the room files are neatly organized in rows. This is where Det. Teddy Hammond maintains a spreadsheet tracking the location of each file. "Everything I deal with in that room is about death," said Hammond, a homicide investigator with more than a decade of cases under his belt. The families, the aftermath. People calling. Victims' families not satisfied by the results.... For two years, Hammond and several other detectives have organized the binders, getting them ready to be scanned. They've seen crime scene photos, Polaroids of witnesses, medical reports, notes scrawled on yellowing paper. The task wasn't feasible before because of a lack of resources, but this first-of-its-kind partnership with the FBI will place sought-after information a click away for detectives, who sometimes spend weeks tracking down a file's location. When the database is complete, investigators will be able to search any aspect of a murder book, including license plate numbers and gang monikers. First, the department plans to digitize more than 4,500 files from the southern part of the city - long the deadliest - between 1990 and 2010. Eventually, cases from the entire city will be included. Officials plan to open the doors to a brick-and-mortar library where families can go for answers and detectives can check out files. "No case will be lost," said Tom McMullen, a recently retired LAPD captain, who oversaw the group of detectives who handle the area covered in the database. McMullen called the database a "one-stop shop" that will make it easier to piece together cases involving multiple murders, such as the Grim Sleeper serial killer. The files - solved and unsolved - portray some of the bloodiest years in the city, an era of violence before cellphones and the widespread use of DNA. It was a time when detectives were called from one crime scene to the next, often without pause. Investigators were working 18-hour days and losing sleep, only to return to files piled high on their desks. There's the case of Jane Doe #62, who was discovered in a South Los Angeles park in 1991, naked from the waist down, her face in a pool of blood. Detectives worked leads that stretched to Mexico, but she was never identified, and the case was never solved. In 1992 came the killing of Samuel Lewis Grayson. After running into rival gang members at a gas station, he was followed, then shot with a semiautomatic weapon while driving on Jefferson Boulevard. But suspects were never identified in the case. That year was one of the most violent, with 1,092 killings, more than three times the number of homicides the city sees today. One year later, Joong Kun Lee was shot to death while opening up his liquor store in South-Central. Lee, married for nearly two decades, was found in the back of the store Oct. 23, wedged in the back entrance between the door and the wall. The unsolved case came within weeks of three other killings of Korean American business operators.