In a freezer at police headquarters in Elmmyra, New York, there was a 12-year-old girl’s clothing.
It went in that March in 1964.
There was a skirt, a blouse, and the rest of what she had been wearing.
It was collected, cataloged, [music] and kept cold.
It stayed cold through 11 presidents.
It stayed cold through decades of detectives who retired and handed the file to younger ones.
It stayed cold through the deaths of many of the people who had worked the case.
When that clothing was put away, no one anywhere had ever solved a crime with DNA.
That would not happen for more than 20 years.
The people who saved it had no way of knowing what they were saving it for.
On her skirt was something that did not belong to her.
For almost 40 years, no one could read it.
When they finally could, it matched no one.
And when the answer did come, it did not come from a living man.
It came out of a grave in the same city where she was buried.
The girl was Mary Teresa Simpson.
She disappeared on Sunday, March 15th, 1964.
Her killer was named on February 10th, 2026.
That is 61 years, 10 months, and 26 days.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has called it the oldest case ever solved with DNA.
That is not quite true, and later we will look at exactly why.
But it is one of the oldest murders in America ever closed this way.
And it came down to a speck of evidence too small for anyone in the room to see.
It was a speck that could be tested exactly once, and it nearly didn’t survive the trip to the one lab that could test it.
This is the story of a city that kept one girl’s clothes cold for six decades, waiting for a science that did not exist yet.
It is also the story of the man who was living among them the entire time.
To understand why that clothing mattered, you have to start with the girl who wore it.
Welcome to Cold Case Reckoning, where we go through the full record on cases that waited decades for an answer.
If you want these stories told completely and carefully, subscribe now because this one begins with a shy 12-year-old and an ordinary Sunday.
Now, let’s go to Elmyra.
Elmyra sits in the Shimong River Valley in the part of New York State people call the Southern Tier, a short drive north of the Pennsylvania line.
In 1960, it was a factory city of 46,365 people.
The Remington Rand plant on the south side made typewriters and adding machines and employed about 3,000 [music] of them.
American Lef France built fire engines here.
Thatcher Glass had a plant just outside town.
During the Second World War, by one count, nine in 10 people in Elmmyra worked in manufacturing.
It was a city built on shifts and payrolls.
It was also a city with a long memory.
During the Civil War, Elmyra’s rail junction made it a military depot and the site of a notorious prison camp for captured Confederate soldiers.
Mark Twain spent his summers riding here and is buried here.
By 1960 though, the city was quietly shrinking as families moved out to new houses in the suburbs while Shimong County around it kept growing.
Mary Teresa’s own family was spread across the east side of the city.
Her grandfather lived on Sier Street, an aunt and cousins lived nearby, and in February of 1964, the Beatles had just arrived in America for the first time.
Mary Teresa Simpson was born in Elmmyra to Ellsworth and Rose Simpson.
She had an older brother, an older half-brother, and an older sister named Linda four years ahead of her.
Over the next six decades, the police officers who worked her case would come to call her by both of her names fondly.
They called her Mary Teresa.
When they were younger, Linda says the two of them were very close.
She remembers a childhood made of ordinary things.
They played kick the can in the street with the other neighborhood kids.
They roller skated up and down the block on metal wheels that clamped onto the soles of their shoes and tightened with a key.
The two sisters went to the neighborhood house together.
They went to Girl Scouts together and to camp.
We took dancing lessons together.
Linda said she was a very active person and she was very shy.
She was a good student.
She wore cat eye glasses.
She loved to dance.
The word that comes up again and again is shy.
In the days after she vanished, the Almyra Star Gazette ran a headline quoting her relatives, calling her a quiet, good girl.
The next day, the paper printed her mother’s description of her.
Active, shy, quiet.
Six decades later, her sister was still reaching for the same words.
She would never get in a car with a stranger at all.
She was very shy.
Linda said their father had raised them never to talk to anyone they didn’t know.
Sometimes, Linda remembered, Mary Teresa wouldn’t even get into a car with one of their own relatives.
By the spring of 1964, her family had come apart.
In May of 1963, Ellsworth and Rose separated.
Mary Teresa stayed with her father.
Late that year, he moved with her to Hammondsport, a village on Cuca Lake in the next county over, and from then on, she saw her mother about once a month.
Linda says that even then, living with their dad, her little sister kept going to school and kept up with everything she loved.
Then, in the first half of March 1964, Ellsworth found a new job back in Elmmyra, and he brought her home.
When she disappeared, she had been back in her own city for less than 2 weeks.
Her mother, Rose, was pregnant at the time.
Mary Teresa was about to become a big sister.
That winter, she was 12 years old and shy.
She had been uprooted twice in a matter of months.
First to Hammondsport and then back to Elmmyra.
She was living with her father and seeing her mother on a schedule.
She had a big sister 4 years older and a baby was on the way.
Linda, 16, was out of town.
She was not there for any of what happened next.
Much of what she knows about that weekend, she would later explain, she pieced together afterward from family and from what she was told.
Years later, she said one detail had always stayed with her.
She had heard that her sister went missing a week before her birthday.
Mary Teresa was [music] 12.
In about 7 days, she would have been 13.
On Sunday, March 15th, 1964, at about 3:00 in the afternoon, she told her father she was going to visit her cousin.
Then she walked out of his apartment and into a cold Sunday afternoon.
If Mary Teresa already feels like someone you knew, like this video.
The next few minutes are the hardest part of her story, and they are also the part that has to be told most carefully with nothing added and nothing left out.
Now, let’s return to that Sunday.
According to the Star Gazette’s reporting that October, Mary Teresa did not go straight to her cousins.
She went first to her mother’s house.
Her father did not know.
She stayed about an hour.
From there, she went on to her relatives on the east side.
By evening, she had been with her cousins near her grandfather’s house on Cherry Street.
At about 6:30, she was seen at the corner of East Market and Harriet Streets heading home.
At about 7, a friend saw her in front of a store.
Mary Teresa told her friend she was going home.
That is the last time anyone is known to have seen her alive.
She never arrived.
Somewhere between 7:00 and the time her father picked up the phone, 3 or 4 hours passed.
Late that night, Ellsworth Simpson called the Elmyra Police Department and reported his daughter missing.
The father, who had raised his girls never to talk to [music] strangers, was the one who had to make that call.
At first, police were not especially worried.
On Monday, officers checked several empty houses and contacted [music] some of her friends.
They found nothing.
That same Monday, the department told the district attorney that the circumstances did not look normal.
Monday became Tuesday.
Tuesday became Wednesday, and still there was no sign of her in a city she had only just moved back to.
By March 18th, police were treating it as foul [music] play.
They searched vacant buildings, abandoned homes, and junkyards.
Police departments across New York and Pennsylvania were sent her description.
Volunteers joined the [music] search.
On Thursday, March 19th, 4 days after she disappeared, a local man was out walking with his two sons in the town of Southport, just outside the city near Combmes Hill Road.
Off that road ran an old logging road through the woods, a road commonly used as a lover’s lane.
Light snow [music] covered the ground.
That is where they found her.
Her body was frozen.
She was fully clothed.
She had been covered with twigs, branches, [music] leaves, and dirt.
And on top of all of it, four heavy stones.
The largest weighed about 110 [music] lb.
The Star Gazette later put the total in a headline.
320 lb of rocks.
When the man and his sons came upon the spot, only part of a hand and a sneaker were visible.
The Shimong County Medical Examiner determined that Mary Teresa had been strangled.
Investigators concluded she had been killed in or near the place where she was found.
Whoever did it had then spent time and effort hiding her, gathering branches, scraping up dirt, and moving heavy stones into place over her.
By Saturday, the story was on the front page of the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester.
By Sunday, one week after she disappeared, the Star Gazette was printing a dayby-day chronology of the investigation, trying to account for every hour since she was last seen.
How she got from a street corner on the east side of Elmmyra to a wooded hillside outside the city has never been explained.
But on a road known as a lover’s lane, a parked car after dark was the most ordinary thing in the world.
Officers collected everything.
They took her clothing, her purse, hair samples, her cat eye glasses, and a fan club card found at the scene.
In 1964, collecting physical evidence was simply established practice for the investigation and for any future prosecution.
Her clothes were labeled and they went into a freezer at police headquarters.
This seemed small at the time.
It was routine.
No one in that building had any idea what was on the fabric [music] of that skirt or what it would one day be possible to do with it.
Whoever killed Mary Teresa Simpson had left part of himself on her skirt.
And in March of 1964, no laboratory on Earth could read it.
If this case is getting under your skin, subscribe to the channel.
What comes next is 300 [music] interviews, decades of dead ends, and a man whose name never appeared once in any of it.
[music] Back in Elmyra, the investigation was only beginning.
By October 1964, police [music] had questioned 300 people.
By October 1964, a local radio station and the Star Gazette had raised a $1,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.
By October 1964, [music] there was still no arrest.
By 1972, the reward had grown to $5,000.
It changed nothing.
Over the years, names surfaced.
People called in tips.
Possible suspects came up, were looked at, and were cleared.
In 2019, Elmyra Police Chief Joseph Kaine said calls still came in, but many of the people whose names had come up over the years were dead and every lead was harder to check than [music] the last.
Only a couple of weeks before he said it, someone had called offering information that might be important.
Sorting out what was still checkable after more than half a century was the hard part.
It’s very much a part of this department, Cain said of the case.
It’s not going away.
Part of the problem was simply the year.
In 1964, the idea that a few cells left on a piece of fabric could identify one human being out of billions did not exist.
DNA would not be used in a criminal investigation anywhere in the world until the mid 1980s in England.
Elmyra police would later put the arrival of DNA as a forensic tool at around 1986.
And part of the problem was time itself.
The case file grew to thousands of pages, all on paper.
The detectives who knew it best retired.
Witnesses moved away.
Witnesses died.
With every decade, the people who could answer questions about that Sunday became fewer.
The science was moving, though slowly.
Around the year 2000, the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center found DNA on the blouse Mary Teresa had been wearing.
That sounded like progress, but Chief Kaine himself pointed out the problem, and it was a fair one.
A trace of DNA on a piece of clothing does not prove much on its own.
It could come from anyone who had handled it, even the person who washed it or folded it.
In 2003, the department sent her clothing, her purse, and the hair samples back to the state lab.
This time, cutings from her skirt revealed biological evidence of a very different kind.
It was not a stray trace from laundry or handling.
Investigators believed it had been left by the man who killed her.
The lab built a DNA profile and entered it into the FBI’s combined DNA index system, the national database that compares crime scene DNA against the profiles of known offenders.
But the national database can only find people who are already in it.
New York’s DNA datab bank had only begun limited operations in 1996.
And at first it took samples only from people convicted of homicide and certain sex crimes.
It was expanded in 1999, again in 2004, and again in 2006.
Not until 2012 did it cover every felony and every penal law misdemeanor in the state.
If a man had never been convicted of a qualifying crime after the datab bank existed, his DNA was simply not there, no matter what else he had done.
The state’s own numbers show how wide that gap was.
Until 2006, only about 14% of convictions in New York required a DNA sample at all.
State criminal justice officials found that offenders eventually linked to crimes through the datab bank had on average three earlier convictions that had not required a sample.
The net was built to catch certain people and it had enormous holes.
The 2003 search came back empty.
There was no match.
That year, 2003, would turn out to matter more than anyone knew.
In November of 2014, the clothing went back to the state lab, and this time, analysts focused on the male DNA alone.
They searched again.
Again, there was no match.
In 2019, Chief Kaine said the department was still trying to learn whose DNA it was, and that even with a name, investigators would still have to show that person had been involved in her death.
The profile stayed in the system, searchable, waiting.
The clothing went back into the freezer, and the murder of Mary Teresa Simpson became what the Elmyra Police Department would later describe as its only cold case.
Now, pay attention to this next part because it explains everything that happened after.
The man whose DNA was on that skirt was not hiding.
He was not on the run.
He was living in Elmmyra.
His name was Alfred Raymond Murray Jr.
He was born in December of 1931.
And like Mary Terresa Simpson, he was born and raised in Elmyra.
But where she was given 12 years, he was given 72.
And he spent 40 of them free in the same city where her sister would live her entire life.
He served in the United States Army from 1951 to 1959, including the Korean War.
He drove a truck for Mayflower Van Lines, the moving company.
He married and had three children and later grandchildren.
He stood 5′ 4 in tall and weighed about 145 lb.
The heaviest stone on Combmes Hill weighed about 110.
In March of 1964, he was 32.
During those same decades, while her clothing sat frozen at police headquarters, Alfred Murray was living his life in the same city.
He was 40 when the Star Gazette raised its reward to $5,000 in 1972.
He was 64 when New York’s DNA data bank opened in 1996.
Through all of it, the evidence that could identify him sat in a police freezer in his own hometown waiting for a test that had not been invented.
And he was not unknown to the police.
When investigators finally named him, Sergeant William Goodwin of the Almmyra Police Department said Murray had a long criminal record stretching back decades.
Police have declined to release any detail about that history, and the chief and the district attorney would not say which laws prevented them from saying more.
Elmmyra police knew his name from other investigations.
But in the Simpson case, it never came up, not even once.
It does not appear anywhere in the thousands of pages of case [music] files.
Retired Sergeant William Maloney joined the force the year after Mary Teresa died and worked the case over the years.
We all walked a beat in those days and I met a million people.
He said, “I never heard that name mentioned.”
Now, think about that 2003 search for a second.
[music] When the profile from her skirt went into the national database and came back empty, Alfred Murray was alive.
He was in his 70s living in Elmyra.
His DNA was not in the system, so the system had nothing to compare.
He died on March 16th, 2004.
That was 40 years and 1 day after Mary Teresa Simpson disappeared.
And no, [clears throat] that’s not a typo.
His obituary described an Army veteran of the Korean conflict, a husband, a father, a grandfather.
He was buried in Elmyra.
Investigators believe he and Mary Teresa had never met.
He did not live in her neighborhood.
Police would call it a crime of opportunity.
He had lived an entire life in plain sight.
He had blended in completely.
No one alive had connected him to her.
But one woman in Elmyra had never stopped asking.
Linda Galpin was 16 when her little sister was murdered, and she was away from home when it happened.
She rushed back to Elmyra.
What she remembers most is the funeral.
“I couldn’t believe she was in a casket,” she said.
“I tried to jump in it.
I wanted to be in there with her.
Her father had to pull her back.
She never left.
Linda has lived in Elmmyra her entire life.
Mary Teresa is buried close by at the cemetery Linda calls St.
Pete’s.
And she goes there to put flowers on the grave.
She has said she lived through it for [music] years, crying, carrying the heartache the entire time.
The losses kept coming.
In 2017, Linda’s son was killed in a car crash.
The next year, in September of 2018, their mother, Rose, died.
Rose had waited 54 years to learn who killed her daughter.
She never found out.
Linda lost her son and her mother within about a year of each other.
And the question that had hung over her family since she was a teenager was still [music] there.
In early 2019, Linda sat down with a local television reporter and said what nearly every family in a cold case [music] eventually says.
She did not understand why police had never found anything.
She knew it was hard for them.
She knew that a lot of the people involved were gone.
She kept pushing [music] anyway.
When a local author named Christina Finelli spent a year researching the case for a book, Linda worked with her, taking her calls again and again to check facts and add what she remembered.
She hoped the book would reach far enough to bring the case back into the light.
By then, she had been waiting more than [music] 60 years for someone to be held to account for her sister’s death.
But the Almra Police Department had not let go either.
[music] Dozens of officers worked the case over the decades, many of them now long retired.
Each new chief inherited it.
On the 60th anniversary, March 15th, 2024, the department issued a press release with its tipline number asking [music] once again for anyone who knew anything to call.
The same release described two things already underway that would matter enormously.
Grant money for new DNA testing and a partnership with a college center for unresolved cases.
60 years on, the department still had exactly one cold case, and it was hers.
The case eventually landed with Sergeant William Goodwin of the Detective Bureau.
And what Goodwin had to work with was the thing every officer before him had protected without knowing what it would become.
It was the freezer and her clothing inside it, still cold, still intact, and still carrying a profile that [music] matched no one.
In 2022, the department, working with the FBI, won a grant from a nonprofit called Season of Justice, which funds [music] testing in unsolved cases.
The money would pay for a kind of DNA analysis that in the year Rose Simpson died had only just burst into public view when it was used to identify the Golden State Killer in California.
If Linda’s persistence and six decades of officers who would not let this go mean something to you, like this video.
The next part is where a freezer, an ice storm, and a single chance at a match decide everything.
Now, here is how the science works.
The DNA test most people have heard of, the one behind the national database, looks at 20 specific locations in a person’s genetic code, called short tandem repeats.
20 markers is enough to say with near [music] certainty that two samples came from the same person, but it can only find someone who is already in the database.
If the man is not there, the database has nothing to say.
The newer approach reads far more.
A Texas laboratory called Oram uses what it calls forensic grade genome sequencing, looking not at 20 markers, but [music] at tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of them.
Tiny single letter variations in the genetic code called SNIPS.
With that much information, you no longer need the man himself to be in any database.
You need his relatives.
Uploaded to public genealogy databases where ordinary people have chosen to share their own DNA to find family.
A profile like that can turn up distant [music] cousins.
Genealogologists then build those cousins family trees backward to a shared ancestor and forward again, generation by generation, until the branches narrow to one man.
It was exactly what this case [music] needed.
There was one serious problem.
The amount of DNA left to work with was about 4/10 of a nanog.
That is 4/10 of 1 billionth of a g invisible to the naked eye.
And sequencing it would use it up.
When DNA testing is performed, the DNA itself is consumed in the process.
Goodwin explained, there are no doovers.
If the lab failed to build a usable profile, the remaining DNA evidence in the case would most likely be gone for good.
After careful consideration, the department decided that Aram’s record with tiny damaged samples gave them their best chance.
FBI special agent Kenneth Jensen, who was assisting Elmyra police, packed the evidence in dry ice inside a cooler and shipped it by FedEx to Aram’s lab in the Woodlands, Texas.
Its route ran through Memphis, home of the largest FedEx hub in the world.
And while the package was in transit, an ice storm shut that hub down.
The shipment was stranded.
If the dry ice ran out, evidence that had been kept cold since 1964 could be ruined in a warehouse.
Jensen could not even reach anyone at FedEx.
I was petrified, he said later, that my act of shipping it through FedEx was going to lose the only chance of solving it.
He called fellow agents in Memphis.
As it happened, the bureau had a liazison to the FedEx hub and that agent went searching the stormbbound building for one cooler.
It was a massive scavenger hunt to find it.
Goodwin said the agent found it in time, put the evidence in an FBI freezer until the storm ended, and then sent it on its way.
It had spent nearly 59 years in the keeping of the Elmyra police and a few days in a federal freezer in Memphis.
In February of 2023, it reached the lab.
Aram had been founded only in 2018.
It describes itself as the first private laboratory built specifically to apply modern genome sequencing to forensic evidence and its scientists [music] specialize in pulling usable DNA out of trace amounts of degraded contaminated material.
This sample would test that claim about as hard as a sample can.
It worked.
Other scientists built a profile from that sliver of material and uploaded it to genealogy databases.
The FBI’s genetic genealogy team began building family trees, narrowing the candidates by age, by location, by historical records.
Somewhere in those trees, a man began to take shape.
Investigators called him John Doe.
By Aram’s count, this would become the 18th case in New York State in which officials publicly identified someone using its technology.
At the same [music] time, starting in 2023, students at the Criminal Investigation Resource Center at Russell Sage College, directed by criminologist Dr.
Christina Lane, were organizing and digitizing six decades of Elmyra’s paper files, reviewing the suspects, the forensics, and the scene.
That same center was part of the effort that in October of 2025 allowed Albany police to name the killer of Katherine Blackburn, another New York woman murdered in 1964.
Through 2024 and into 2025, the FBI, the New York State Police, and Elmyra detectives interviewed people in John Doe’s family tree.
One of them was a man believed to be his son.
He agreed to give a DNA sample, a simple swab from the inside of his cheek.
The state police lab compared his DNA to the evidence the department had cataloged all those years ago as item 7A.
The result confirmed a paternal relationship.
The man who left his DNA on Mary Teresa’s skirt was this man’s father.
Here is why that works.
Every child inherits half of their DNA from each parent.
A son’s DNA can show with great confidence whether a given man is his biological father, even if that father is long gone.
But a son can only tell you who the father is.
He cannot stand in for him.
To close a murder case, investigators wanted the man himself.
His father had been dead for more than 20 years.
So, investigators went to the Chimong County Court, and the court authorized them to open his grave.
On November 4th, 2025, in a cemetery in Elmmyra, a crane lifted a coffin out of the ground.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children paid for the exumation and brought in a forensic anthropologist from Detroit, Michigan.
Biological samples from the remains went to the New York State Police Lab.
The DNA from the grave matched the DNA from Mary Teresa’s skirt.
The probability of selecting an unrelated person who would match that evidence was less than 1 in 320 [music] billion.
That is roughly 40 times the number of people alive on Earth today.
On Tuesday, February 10th, 2026, at 1:00 in the afternoon, the Almra Police Department, the FBI, and the Shimong County District Attorney’s Office gathered at the District Attorney’s Office on Lake Street.
The news conference was closed to the public.
Current and former officers and investigators filled the room along with representatives of the FBI and of the Russell Sage Center, whose students had spent years inside the file.
Mary Teresa’s sister, Linda, was there with her uncle, Dwayne Bowman, and her cousin, Ronnie Bowman.
Police Chief Kristen Thorne, opened by explaining something about 1964.
[music] DNA did not exist as a forensic tool then, but officers had collected her clothing, her personal effects, and evidence from the scene anyway, because that was how police work was [music] done.
Then, Sergeant Goodwin walked the room through the chain that followed.
He covered the blouse in 2000, the skirt in 2003, the empty searches, the grant, the lab, the ice storm, the sun, and the [music] grave.
He walked through 61 years of evidence and then put a name to the man investigators had known only as John Doe.
That name was Alfred Raymond Murray, Jr.
District Attorney Weeden Wetmore offered one sentence, “The wheels of justice move slowly.”
It is worth being honest about what this was and what it [music] was not.
It was not a trial.
Murray could not answer.
He had no lawyer, no cross-examination, no jury.
His criminal record, which police cited as part of their reasoning, has not been made public, and police said nothing more would be released without a formal freedom of information law request.
Even Goodwin, describing that record, drew the line himself.
While no single incident proves responsibility, this history is consistent with the forensics findings and the circumstances of this homicide.
And Chief Kane’s caution from years earlier still applies to any case built on DNA from clothing.
Finding someone’s genetic material does not on its own explain how it got there.
Those are real limits and they deserve to be said out loud.
But look at what the evidence actually is.
It is not a stray trace on a blouse.
It is biological evidence on her skirt of a kind that laundry or casual handling cannot explain.
[music] It was confirmed twice independently.
First through his son and then through his own remains.
And there is no connection of any kind between Murray and the Simpson family that could innocently explain it.
On that record, police said they could state with confidence that Murray was responsible for her murder.
If Mr.
Murray were still alive.
Chief Thorne said the district attorney’s office would seek criminal charges against him for murder.
This is an official determination by police and prosecutors.
It is not a conviction and it never can be.
It is as far as the law can go with a dead man.
[music] Chief Thorne put it plainly.
The department had taken the case as far as humanly possible and it was now closing it.
If Murray were alive, investigators would have sat him down and asked him everything [music] they still wanted to know.
I hope the family members here know this case was never forgotten.
Chief Thorne said Mary Teresa was never forgotten.
Then Linda Galpin, 78 years old, stood in front of that packed room.
She thanked everyone.
She said she was glad it was finally settled after almost [music] 62 years.
And then she said the thing those 62 years had really been about.
Just wish my mom was here.
Like I told everybody, she said, “I did [music] this for my mom.”
With that, the Almyra Police Department closed the case.
It had been the department’s only cold case.
Some questions will stay open forever.
What happened?
Why her?
Chief Thorne said that we will never know.
But what we do know now is who.
2 months later on April 9th, 2026, the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program issued a national alert on Alfred Raymond Murray.
It listed his height, his eye color, his years in the army, his job driving trucks for Mayflower van lines.
It noted that his DNA profile was now available for comparison in local, state, and national databases, and it asked anyone with information about Murray and his criminal behavior to contact Elmmyra police.
No other case has been publicly connected to him, but investigators are clearly not finished asking.
Christina Finelli, an author who spent a year researching the case, had published a book about it, What Happened to Me?
Exploring the Mary Terresa Simpson cold case in September of 2025, 5 months before the announcement.
Murray had never appeared on her radar.
I was expecting it to be someone related to her, she said.
Not out of the blue.
There is also a correction this story owes you.
The claim that this is the oldest case ever solved with DNA does not hold up.
In 2021, investigators in Montana used genetic genealogy to close the 1956 murders of Patricia Kolitzky and Dwayne Bogle.
[music] And in 2022, Pennsylvania State Police named the killer of 9-year-old Maurice Churella, murdered in Hazelton on March 18th, 1964, 3 days after Mary Teresa disappeared.
At the time, police called that the fourth oldest case in the country solved with genetic genealogy.
Mary Teresa’s case is among the very oldest.
It is not the first.
The parallels with that Pennsylvania case are hard to ignore.
Maurica’s siblings described a sweet, shy girl.
Her killer, a man named James Paul Forte, had no known connection to her or her family.
[music] He had died decades earlier in 1980.
Investigators had to exume his body to confirm the match.
And for more than 50 years, his name never came up.
They were two shy girls killed 3 days apart in March of 1964 by two men who simply went on living.
None of that takes anything away from what Elmyra did.
A police department held on to a child’s clothing for six decades through every ordinary reason to let it go.
And when the science finally arrived, the evidence was still there to meet it.
For Linda, the news was bittersweet.
She said she was glad justice had finally been done and that she would need some time for it all to sink in.
I always said it would never happen in my lifetime.
She said it did.
But the freezer and the databases and the man in the grave were never what this story was about.
At the start of this story, her skirt was evidence.
It was item 7A.
It was a cutting on a lab bench, a profile in a database, and a sample on dry ice in a stranded cooler in Memphis.
At the very beginning, we said the people who saved her clothing had no way of knowing what they were saving it for.
That was true, but they always knew who [snorts] they were saving it for.
Before that skirt was any of those things, it was just the skirt she had on that Sunday.
It was the Sunday she went across town without telling her father to spend an hour with her mother.
It was the last hour they would ever have together.
She was 12.
Her birthday was about a week away.
She wore cat eye glasses.
She went to Girl Scouts and to camp and to the neighborhood house.
She skated up and down the street on metal wheels tightened with a key.
She took dancing lessons with her big sister [music] and she loved to dance.
She was a good student.
She was shy.
She was about to become a big sister herself.
She lived with her father and saw her mother once a month.
[music] And on the last day of her life, she went to see her mother.
Anyway, she is buried in Elmmyra, close to where her sister still lives.
Linda still brings flowers.
Her name is Mary Teresa Simpson, and she deserves to be remembered for who she was, not just how her story ended.
If Mary Teresa’s story stays with you tonight, subscribe and share this with someone who believes old cases are hopeless.
This is Cold Case Reckoning.
Thank you for remembering her with us and we’ll see you in the next one.
