Shannon Hodder serves as a Senior Assistant District Attorney with the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office in Decatur, Georgia, where she leads the Cold Case Task Force and prosecutes complex homicide cases, including those that have remained unresolved for decades. She has tried more than thirty murder cases to conviction—several of them cold cases, including a serial rapist and killer whose crimes spanned five states, a 20-year unidentified child homicide, a no-body murder, and a rape and double murder from 1990 involving Investigative Genetic Genealogy (IGG).
A founding member of the DeKalb County Cold Case Task Force, Ms. Hodder collaborates with the FBI, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), the Medical Examiner’s Office and private lab partners to bring resolution to long-unsolved cases. She has been instrumental in securing more than one million dollars in federal grant funding to advance cold case investigations and to identify unidentified human remains through IGG. She is FBI-trained and certified in IGG, bringing cutting-edge forensic techniques into the courtroom.
In addition to her trial work, Ms. Hodder frequently presents at national and regional conferences on cold case prosecution, forensic genealogy, and strategies for engaging communities in long-term missing persons cases. Her expertise has been featured on A&E’s Killer Cases, Oxygen’s Snapped and America’s Crime Lab Podcast.
Ms. Hodder holds both a Juris Doctor and a Bachelor of Arts in History and Philosophy from Georgia State University. She has dedicated over 15 years of public service to the pursuit of justice, with a particular focus on giving a voice to the voiceless and bringing long-awaited closure to victims’ families.
