Four retired detectives with a century's experience behind them have been working quietly to unearth new evidence behind the 1998 murder of Suzanne Jovin, the Yale University student murdered while jogging in New Haven, Conn. While that unsolved murder may be the best-known cold case in Connecticut, it underscores the work of a small, 11-year-old unit that Chief State's Attorney Kevin T. Kane has fortified over the last couple of years. In fact, the unit, which began in 1998 by concentrating on unsolved homicides in the Hartford area, has expanded throughout Connecticut, using local detectives and prosecutors to re-examine a variety of the estimated 400 to 600 cold cases. In Milford, Conn., they're looking into two homicides, including the May, 2001 murder of 28-year-old Kelsey Monahon. The unit is also probing the August, 1984 murder of Matthew Margolis, 13, murdered while fishing in Greenwich, Conn. In Newtown, Conn., they're investigating the disappearance 20 years ago of Regina Brown, then a 35-year-old flight attendant. At a time when the state's budget crunch is reaching all agencies and the recent retirement-incentive program has resulted in reducing staff in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and the State Police forensics unit, Kane said last week that priorities for investing resources in cold cases comes from local police and prosecutors. That's how the team of retired detectives united around the Jovin murder and recently came up with a new drawing of a potential suspect. New Haven police and prosecutors believed there was enough new evidence to revive the dormant probe of the murdered Yale undergrad, the last high-profile homicide on the Yale campus before the death last week of graduate student Annie Le. 'Four retired State Police detectives volunteered to do that on their own time, without getting paid,' said Kane, declining to reveal their identities beyond their varied expertise. Kane later appointed them special inspectors, to give them some pay, legal authority and insurance coverage for job-related injuries. 'They're working a lot more hours than they're putting in for,' said Kane, who two years ago became the state's chief prosecutor. About a year-and-a-half ago he started beefing up the cold-case unit. 'We got several police departments to assign veteran detectives who worked overtime, solved a bunch of cases and made a bunch of arrests,' he said. The investigators, working with prosecutors, concentrated on cold cases where they could gather enough evidence to pursue criminal charges. Now, the unit's expanding into the eastern and western sections of the state. 'We're prioritizing it by departments,' Kane said, noting that Bridgeport, Conn., police recently started their own independent initiative to search for Bianca LeBron, who's been missing since 2001, when she was 10. Jim Rovella, chief inspector for the Division of Criminal Justice, said last week that the key to cold cases is to not only work from an investigative standpoint -- bringing fresh eyes to solving crimes -- but a focus on arresting and prosecuting suspects. There's no centralized list of cold cases in Connecticut, so it's hard to even get a handle on how many potential homicides and disappearances are out there, he said, adding that the oldest file might be the 1971 murder of Thera Wilson, whose body was found in the parking garage of a Hartford hotel that no longer exists. There's also a waiting list of cases for the unit, which once had a staff of 14 but now is down to a half dozen. A part-time unit is working a couple days a week in southeastern Connecticut. 'We chip away at it but it's like throwing sand against the tide,' Rovella said in a phone interview. 'We don't take a case from a police department and they don't give it away. We do it jointly using their detectives and our inspectors, with resources not available to local detectives.' 