For 26 years, Raymond Row was the guy everyone in Lancaster, Pennsylvania wanted at their party.
He called himself DJ Freeze.
He played weddings, proms, sweet 16s, school dances.
He posted photos with celebrities like Paris Hilton and Hulk Hogan.
He organized antiviolence rallies on the town square.
He ran a DJ training store on the main drag and held court at the Chameleon Club, Lancaster’s best known music venue for more than a decade.
If you grew up in Lancaster County in the9s or 2000s, there’s a decent chance this man was the soundtrack to one of the best nights of your life.
And the entire time he was carrying a secret because on a freezing December morning in 1992, a 25-year-old school teacher named Christy Mira was beaten and strangled inside her own townhouse in East Lamper Township 4 days before Christmas.
She had been getting ready for work.
Wrapped presents for her sixth graders were sitting on the floor beside her.
Paperback copies of a children’s novel called Miracles on Maple Hill.
Each one topped with a candy cane and a handwritten note wishing them a merry Christmas and a great 1993.
She never made it out the door.
The police collected DNA from the crime scene that morning.
They loaded it into the FBI’s brand new database.
They interviewed more than 1,500 people over the years that followed.
They tested more than 60 men against the killer’s genetic profile.
And for 26 years, the name that matched that DNA did not exist in any law enforcement system on the planet.
Then in the spring of 2018, a genealogologist named CC Moore sat down at her computer, uploaded that same DNA profile to a public database, and within days had a name.
The most popular DJ in Lancaster County.
The man who had been spinning records at their weddings while a murdered teacher’s family begged for answers.
The man the whole community already knew.
They just knew him as DJ Freeze.
This is the story of how Christy Mira was failed for a quarter century.
And how science, a brother’s relentless promise, and a genealogologist working from a laptop finally brought her killer into the light.
If you’re new to this channel, this is what we do here at Cold Case Redemption.
We tell the stories of the victims [music] who waited the longest for justice.
If that matters to you, subscribe and stay for this one.
Christiey’s story [music] deserves to be heard all the way through.
Christy Anne Mirak was born on November 3rd, 1967 [music] in Shamokin, Pennsylvania.
If you have never heard of Shamokin, that is not surprising.
[music] It is a small coal mining town of about 10,000 people tucked into the hills of North umberland County.
The kind of place where families [music] go back generations and everybody knows everybody’s name.
Christy was the middle child of Vincent and Geraldine Mirack, known to everyone as Jerry.
She had an older sister, Alysia, and a younger brother, Vince, who was four years behind her.
From the time she was a little girl, Christy wanted to be a teacher.
She and her siblings would play school together in the house.
And Christy was always the one standing at the chalkboard pretending to run the classroom.
She was the kid who genuinely loved going to school, who lit up around books and ideas and the energy of a room full of people learning something.
That never changed.
She graduated from Our Lady of Lords Regional High School in 1985.
One of her teachers there, a man named Tommy Ryan, later described her as a polite, refined young woman from the kind of solid coal region family that built that part of Pennsylvania.
She went on to Millersville University in Lancaster County for her degree in elementary education.
Lancaster was about an hour and a half south of Shimoken.
And for Christy, it was the start of a new chapter.
[music] She loved the area.
She put down roots.
After graduating, she landed a position at Rorerstown Elementary School in the Hempfield School District.
She started in remedial reading, which is where a lot of new teachers begin.
Then a first grade teacher went on sbatical and Christy stepped in to cover the class.
[music] She did well.
And when a sixth grade opening came up, she went after [music] it.
The day she got the job, she called a colleague on the phone, barely able to contain herself.
“You know what?”
She said.
“I have the sixth grade job.”
[music] Her students adored her.
Colleagues remembered her contagious enthusiasm and the way [music] she bounced through the hallways with her ponytail swinging behind her.
Her principal, Harry Goodman, called her very kind and very caring.
Friends described her as independent, fiercely loyal, and hilariously funny.
She was the kind of person who would mediate a fight between two friends just to keep the peace and then turn around and defend someone who was being treated unfairly without thinking twice about it.
She loved to dance.
She loved swimming and sunbathing.
And because a starting teacher’s salary didn’t go very far, she worked extra jobs to make ends meet.
Evenings as a waitress at the Konis Stoga Country Club, shifts as a pharmacy assistant at Nefsville Pharmacy.
She was 25 years old, living in a townhouse in the Greenfield Estates development in East Lamper Township with a roommate and building the life she had dreamed about since childhood.
Decades later, her former students still talked about her.
One woman named Laura Atwater Bender remembered crying when she heard the news.
Another former student, Anita Charles Deninger, said Christy had so much energy and such a great personality that she was one of the reasons Anita eventually became a teacher herself.
A woman named Anne Sherk said she had no memory of Christy without a smile on her face.
And Christina Butler, another student from that sixth grade class, said Christiey’s death shaped her in ways she didn’t fully understand until years later.
It pushed her to become a reporter.
That’s who Christy Mirra was, not a case number, not a cold case statistic, a young woman from Coal Country who worked three jobs because she loved teaching enough to make it work.
If you think stories like Christy’s deserve to be told the right way, hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.
We cover a new case every week.
The night before she died, Christy sat in the living room of her townhouse at 2071 William Penn and wrapped Christmas presents for her students.
It was Sunday, December 20th, 1992.
She had bought paperback copies of Miracles on Maple Hill by Virginia Sorenson.
Every book was topped with a candy cane.
Everyone had a handwritten note in Christy’s handwriting that said the same thing.
Wishing you a very merry Christmas and a great 1993.
Love, Miss Mirac.
Those gifts were the last thing she ever made.
Monday morning, December 21st was 4 days before Christmas.
Christiey’s roommate left their townhouse at around 7:00 a.m.
Christy was up and getting ready for work.
Same as always.
She usually left for Roarerstown Elementary between 7:30 and 7:45.
She was the kind of teacher who was always at school early.
Always.
Colleagues could set a clock by her.
Sometime between 7:10 and 7:20 that morning, two neighbors walking near the Greenfield Estates townhouse complex heard a scream, a high-pitched unexpected sound coming from inside one of the units.
They didn’t investigate.
They kept walking.
Around the same time, witnesses noticed a white Toyota Celica or a small white coupe that looked like one parked along the road near Christy’s building.
It wasn’t a car they recognized.
By 800 a.m., Christy hadn’t arrived at school.
That alone was alarming.
She never missed a day without calling.
Principal Harry Goodman tried her apartment phone five times.
No answer.
He called her mother, Jerry, up in Shimoken and asked if she’d heard from her daughter.
Jerry hadn’t.
Goodman got in his car and drove the roughly 15 minutes from the school to Christiey’s townhouse, hoping to find something simple.
A flat tire, a dead battery, anything with an easy explanation.
When he pulled up, her car was still in the lot covered in ice.
It hadn’t been moved, and the front door of her townhouse was slightly open.
He walked inside calling her name.
Christy.
Christy.
Christy.
Just after 900 a.m., Harry Goodman found Christy Mira’s body on the living room floor.
She was still wearing her coat and gloves.
She had never made it out of the house.
Around her, scattered across the floor were the wrapped Christmas presents she had prepared the night before for her sixth grade class.
Goodman ran out of the townhouse and went to the nearest neighbor’s door, the home of a man named Anthony Orsy and his wife.
He was shaking.
He asked to use their phone.
He kept repeating the same words.
Her face.
Her face.
I know she’s dead.
Police arrived within minutes.
The crime scene told a violent story.
There were scuff marks across the floor.
A wooden cutting board believed to have been used as a weapon was found near Christiey’s body.
She had been beaten severely and strangled both manually and with her own clothing.
The then district attorney Joseph Modensbacher theorized that Christy may have grabbed the cutting board to defend herself and her attacker had turned it against her.
There was no sign of forced entry which meant one of two things.
Either the door had been left unlocked or Christy had opened it herself.
An autopsy [music] the following day confirmed severe blunt force trauma to her neck, back, upper chest, and face along with a fractured jaw.
The cause of death was strangulation.
And critically, investigators collected DNA evidence from the crime scene, biological material that the killer had left behind.
In 1992, DNA forensics were still in their early stages.
The FBI’s Kodus database was a pilot program, but the investigators knew that if they preserved that evidence carefully enough, it could one day point to a name.
They just didn’t know it would [music] take 26 years.
Back at Roarerstown Elementary, the morning had already unraveled.
Teachers had noticed Christiey’s absence.
The substitute plans she always kept on file hadn’t been activated because there had been no call.
Goodman’s frantic phone calls to the apartment and then to Shimokin had set off alarm through the faculty [music] even before he drove to the townhouse.
When word finally came back that Christy was [music] dead, the school faced an impossible task.
How do you tell a building full of children 4 days before Christmas that their teacher has been murdered?
Administrators gathered Christiey’s sixth graders and told them there had been an accident and that their teacher would not be coming back.
They shielded the students from the details.
One former student, Michelle Frasier, remembered the scene decades later.
Teachers crying, students crying, chaos.
She said it was just chaos.
Goodman was standing in a doorway in complete shock.
He later said he didn’t know how he got up the next morning and went back to work.
That the school became his salvation, the only reason he could keep functioning.
The Christmas presents that Christy had wrapped sat in an evidence room.
Her students never received them.
The investigation into Christy Mirra’s murder was enormous from the start.
East Lampider Township Police took jurisdiction with Detective Sergeant Ronald Savage leading the effort alongside Pennsylvania State Police Sergeant Carl Harish.
Lancaster County detectives, the sheriff’s office, and the FBI all joined the case.
First, Assistant District Attorney John Kenneth led the prosecution side.
The DNA samples collected from the crime scene were loaded into Cotus.
No match came back.
That was the first wall.
In 1992, the database was tiny.
It held a fraction of the genetic profiles it would eventually contain.
The killer’s DNA was in the system now, waiting.
But there was nothing to compare it to.
So, investigators went to work the old-fashioned way.
Interviews, hundreds of them.
By late March of 1993, just 3 months after the murder, police had spoken to more than 500 people.
By October of 1995, that number had grown past 1,500.
More than 60 men had been eliminated solely through forensic testing, comparing blood types, and body fluid samples against the crime scene evidence.
Detective Savage said that blood tests, alibis, and polygraphs had ruled out more than 50 of Christy’s acquaintances by mid 1993.
The case file was getting close to 3 ft thick in paper alone.
The FBI developed a behavioral profile of the killer, first published in 1993 and reviewed again during a second consultation at Quantico in 1995.
The profile described one man, likely between 25 and 35 years old, who had known that Christy would be alone at approximately 7 in the morning on that Monday.
He was described as someone who wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, an observer rather than the life of the party, someone who probably hadn’t killed before, but who may have committed previous acts of violence against women.
The profile suggested the attacker may have gone into a rage when Christy resisted.
Investigators initially believed the killer knew her given the absence of forced entry.
The early investigation zeroed in on several persons of interest.
The most prominent was a man named Ken Luff.
He was Christiey’s boyfriend, though almost nobody knew about the relationship.
Luff was married about 20 years older than Christy and had been a president of a local Teamsters chapter.
She had met him at a bar and they had been seeing each other for roughly 4 years.
The day after the murder, Luff appeared at Roerstown Elementary carrying flowers and told staff he hadn’t known she was dead.
[music] He cooperated fully with investigators, took multiple polygraph tests, and passed everyone and was cleared.
Records confirmed he was in Virginia at the time of the killing.
Principal Harry Goodman, the man who found her body, was also questioned.
Some people found his concern suspicious, the way he had driven to her house so quickly.
Goodman was cleared by his alibi.
He had been in a meeting that morning [music] and his DNA did not match the crime scene evidence.
A 31-year-old man identified early as a prime suspect was cleared in March of 1993 after his DNA and hair samples came back negative.
Christiey’s family offered a $10,000 reward in April of 1993.
Her mother, Jerry, told a reporter at the time that maybe the money would bring somebody out.
She was grasping for anything that might help.
Fear spread across East Lampider Township in a way that changed how people lived.
Friends of Christy moved out of the area entirely.
Others bought guard dogs or installed new locks.
Women living alone made arrangements to never leave their homes before daylight.
Witnesses who spoke to journalists insisted on anonymity, afraid that the killer was still nearby and might target anyone who talked.
The murder came just one year and one day after the killing of a 16-year-old girl named Lorie Show in the same township, which added another layer of dread to a community that was already on edge.
Two violent murders of women in the same small jurisdiction in 13 months.
For residents of East Lamper, the question wasn’t academic.
It was personal.
Is it the [music] same person?
Am I next?
Christiey’s funeral mass was held at St.
Stevens Catholic Church in Shimokin presided over by Reverend Joseph Lots.
Two of her students, Anita Charles and Laura Rank, read from the Bible during the service.
Art teacher Daniel Burns led a prayer.
Reverend Lots addressed the cruelty of the timing in his remarks, saying it was a cruel irony that they gathered in the Christmas season in the midst of bright lights, flowers, [music] and the nativity scene to mourn a life taken so violently.
She was buried at All Saint Cemetery in Ellisburg.
Detectives kept working.
The tips kept coming for a while.
Then they started to slow down.
The flood of tips became a trickle.
What had been dozens of calls a week became one a week, then one every few months.
The case was never officially closed, but it drifted into that cruel liinal space where cold cases go to wait.
Still open, still active technically, but no closer to an answer than it had been the day after the murder.
The investigation passed through a succession of detectives over the years.
Joseph Geese worked the case for a long stretch, carrying it the way some investigators carry the ones that never leave them.
Sergeant Renee Schuler trained for 11 weeks at the FBY Academy at Quantico in 1995, hoping to bring fresh techniques back to the case.
In December of 1994, police consulted criminal experts in Philadelphia.
Every time they thought a new approach might work, it led somewhere that ended in another dead wall.
In May of 2002, something strange happened.
An unidentified man called the Sunday News, a local Lancaster paper, and made derogatory remarks about Christy Morac on the phone.
FBI agent James Fitzgerald analyzed the call and said the caller might be the killer, expressing remorse maybe, or rationalizing what he had done.
The timing lined up with the national news coverage of Chandra Levy’s remains being found, [music] which may have triggered something in the collar.
Investigators tried to trace the call, but never identified who made it.
While the investigation stalled, Christy’s family lived inside a grief that never got to close.
Her mother, Jerry, called the police regularly for updates.
She described the experience as feeling like she was on the outside looking in, watching a system grind forward [music] without her daughter’s case moving at all.
By 2002, Jerry Mira was battling cancer.
She gave [music] what would turn out to be her final interview that year, telling a reporter that she hoped for justice before she died.
She wanted to see whoever did this to her daughter held accountable.
She wanted to know why.
Jerry Mir died on November 4th, 2002, one day after what would have been Christiey’s 35th birthday.
Her son Vince believed that [music] his mother’s broken heart had weakened her against the cancer, that the years of waiting and wondering and never getting an answer had taken a physical toll that medicine couldn’t fix.
After his mother’s death, Vince Morack took up the fight alone.
He made a promise to Jerry before she passed that he would never let this go.
And he did not.
In December of 2007, Vince put up a billboard on Route 30 near the Route 283 interchange in Lancaster County.
It had Christiey’s photo and a plea for information.
In 2009, he created a Facebook page in her name to keep the case in front of people.
He put up roadside signs.
He called [music] reporters.
He called police.
He did everything a private citizen could possibly do to make sure the world did not forget Christy Mirra.
For Vince, it was not just about finding the killer.
It was about making sure people still said Christiey’s name.
Cold cases die when people stop talking about them.
When a victim becomes an old newspaper clipping that nobody remembers, Vince refused to let that happen to his sister.
Every year around the anniversary, he would contact [music] local media and remind them.
Every time a new detective took over the case, he would call and introduce himself [music] and start the conversation over from the beginning.
He carried the case the way some people carry faith as a daily obligation that he would not set down no matter how heavy it got.
The years ground on 2005, 2008, 2011, 2014.
The DNA sat in the evidence locker.
Cotus still had no match.
The behavioral profile still described a ghost, someone who would not stand out in a crowd, [music] an observer, a man who could blend in.
In 2015, East Lampider Township, after consulting with the Pennsylvania State Police Criminal Investigation Assessment Unit, made a decision that would eventually change everything.
They transferred the entire Mirac case to the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office under District Attorney Craig Steedman.
It was an acknowledgement that the case needed fresh eyes and different resources.
Assistant District Attorney Christine Wilson, who had been a high school senior at the time of Christy’s murder, felt a personal connection to the case.
She began pouring over thousands of pages of investigative files during nights and weekends.
Years had passed.
Families were frustrated.
Investigators were frustrated.
And the public [music] was frustrated.
Wilson and Steman decided to start the case over from the ground up.
They took the entire file.
They took all the evidence and they began again.
If you are still with us and you are feeling the weight of what this family went through, take a second and hit the like button on this video.
It genuinely helps more people find these stories, and cases like Christy’s deserve that reach.
While Christy Mirra’s case sat frozen for 26 years, the man who killed her was living the most public life imaginable.
Raymond Charles Row was born in 1968, making him 24 years old in December of 1992.
He had attended JP Mckowsky High School in Lancaster, but left in 1988 without graduating.
Later earning his GED through an intermediate educational unit.
In the early 1980s, when he was barely a teenager, he started break dancing.
He got good at it.
He moved into DJing, won local battles, and started getting invited to house parties across Lancaster.
By the late 1980s, he was a fixture.
By the early 1990s, he was a brand.
Ro became the house DJ at the Chameleon Club, one of Lancaster’s best known live music venues, and held that position for about 15 years.
He opened a retail store downtown selling music, clothes, and DJ equipment.
In 1997, he opened what he claimed was Lancaster’s first DJ training store.
He built his company, Freeze Entertainment, into a machine that booked roughly 150 events a year, weddings, proms, [music] corporate events, sweet 16 parties, school dances.
He worked across Pennsylvania and into New York, New Jersey, and the Philadelphia area.
He cultivated a public image that was impossible to ignore.
He posted photos with Paris Hilton, Hulk Hogan, and Shawn Paul on his social media.
He waved fees for milestone weddings as a gesture of goodwill.
He described himself as an advocate [music] for first responders.
He was married four times.
He was a father.
People who knew him described him as devout, charming, and magnetic.
A wedding videographer named Derek Diner once said that if you met Ray Row, it didn’t take long to understand why he was successful.
It was his way with people.
And here is the detail that makes this story feel like something out of a dark novel.
In August of 1992, 4 months before he killed Christy Mira, [music] Raymond Row co-organized a stop the violence antiviolence rally on Lancaster Square with his then fiance Monica Figareroa.
He stood in the center of town and publicly called for peace.
4 months later, he beat and strangled a young woman inside her own home and walked back into his life as if nothing had happened.
The connections were there the entire time, invisible.
In 1992, Ro lived four miles from Christy’s Greenfield Estates townhouse.
He worked for a cleaning company called Servicemaster that operated right down the street from her home.
He drove a white Toyota Celica, matching the description of the car witnesses reported seeing near her building on the morning of the murder.
And he was the DJ at the Chameleon Club.
When police found Christiey’s wallet, there was a membership pass for that same club inside it.
Nobody put it together.
There was no reason to.
His name never came up in 1500 interviews.
He was never tested against the DNA.
He existed in the same community, in the same geographic circle, occupying the same spaces, and the investigation never found him.
The FBI behavioral profile said the killer would not stand out in a crowd, that he was an observer, not the life of the party.
That description could not have been more wrong.
Raymond Row was the life of every party in Lancaster County.
The profile was built from statistical patterns of similar crimes, and it pointed investigators in a direction that led away from him.
There is something else worth noting.
An ex-girlfriend named Emily Noble later described Ro as controlling and emotionally abusive during their relationship.
Another acquaintance said he occasionally referenced what he called his hoodlum past and posted angry content on social media that contrasted sharply with the gregarious persona he maintained in public.
There were cracks in the image if you knew where to look.
But in a community where he was known as the man who made every wedding reception unforgettable, nobody was looking.
He was not hiding in the shadows.
[music] He was standing under the spotlight.
And the entire time, the DNA that would eventually destroy him was sitting in a police evidence locker less than 10 miles from the Chameleon Club dance floor.
For two and a half decades, the DNA from Christy Mira’s crime scene sat in evidence storage, waiting for a technology that hadn’t been invented yet.
Traditional forensic DNA testing, the kind used in Coodis, examines roughly 20 genetic markers.
It can confirm a match when you already have a suspect’s profile in the database.
But when the suspect isn’t in any database, as was the case here, it hits a dead end.
In 2017, the Lancaster County District Attorney’s [music] Office tried something new.
They had heard a presentation from a company called Parabon Nanolabs at a law enforcement conference and decided to commission a service called Snapshot.
Using the [music] crime scene DNA, Parabon scientists could predict what the suspect looked like based on his genetic code.
It was called DNA phenotyping.
On October 31st, 2017, the district attorney’s office released the results publicly.
The composite depicted a white man with dark hair, a fair to light brown complexion, and brown or hazel eyes rendered at approximate ages of 25, 45, and 55.
The images generated [music] tips, but they didn’t produce an arrest.
Then in the spring of 2018, something extraordinary happened on the other side of the country.
On April 24th, 2018, police in Sacramento, California, arrested a 72-year-old former police officer named Joseph James D’Angelo.
He was the Golden State Killer, one of the most prolific serial offenders in American history, and he was caught using a brand new investigative technique.
Law enforcement had taken crime scene DNA, uploaded it to a public genealogy database called GED Match, found partial matches to distant relatives of the suspect, and then built a family tree that led them to his door.
The arrest made national news.
[music] It was a thunderclap in the world of cold case investigation.
And Vince Mira, still fighting for his sister after all those years, watched the coverage and asked the question that changed everything.
Why can’t they do something like that with Christy?
On May 1st, 2018, a forensic artist at Parabon named Tom Shaw picked up the phone and called Detective Christopher Herb at the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office.
Shaw pitched a newer Parabon service, Snapshot Genetic Genealogy.
Same DNA, completely different approach.
On May 9th, District Attorney Craig Steedman authorized the lab to rerun the crime scene carpet sample through the new genetic genealogy process.
The science works like this.
Instead of looking at 20 genetic markers the way traditional forensic testing does.
Genetic genealogy examines hundreds of thousands of markers across the entire genome.
That expanded profile is then uploaded to public databases like GED Match where millions of ordinary people have voluntarily shared their DNA to explore their own ancestry.
When the crime scene DNA partially matches someone in the database, it means that person is a biological relative of the suspect.
Maybe a second cousin, maybe a third cousin.
The match is distant, but it’s a thread.
From there, a genetic genealogologist takes over.
They build the family tree of the matched relative backward, sometimes to great-grandparents, and then build forward again through every [music] branch, mapping children, grandchildren, and descendants until they narrow the list to a small number of people who fit the right age, sex, geography, and ethnic background.
The person Parabon assigned to the Mir case was CC Moore.
She was their chief genetic genealogologist.
Self-taught with no formal scientific degree, she had built her reputation reuniting adopes with their birth families and had appeared as the genealogologist on the PBS series Finding Your Roots.
She later said she felt drawn to Christy’s case, [music] that Christy seemed like someone she would have liked.
Moore uploaded the DNA profile and quickly found several matches to distant relatives.
She began building backward through the family trees to identify common ancestors.
Then she built forward.
She noticed something important in the genetic data.
The suspect had mixed ancestry, [music] part Northern European, part something else.
She narrowed the search to a target family in the Lancaster area, and that’s when the second piece fell into place.
The suspect also had Puerto Rican heritage.
Moore dug through archived Lancaster newspaper records and found an engagement announcement.
The son of a woman from the target family and a father with a Latin American name.
The son was half Puerto Rican Raymond C.
Row.
On May 14th, 2018, Parabon CEO Steven Armen Trout relayed the news to the Lancaster County detectives.
CC Moore had determined that Raymond Row was a strong viable suspect.
After 26 years of dead ends, the genealogologist had turned a name and a face over to investigators.
The key connection came through one of Rose’s halfsisters, [music] who had uploaded her own DNA to GED Match without any idea that it would link her family to a murder.
Moore later said it took her just a couple of days, 26 years of investigation, 1,500 interviews, 60 men tested, and a woman with a laptop and a public genealogy database found the answer in 48 hours.
That’s not a criticism of the detectives who worked the case.
They did everything that the technology of their era allowed.
It’s a testament to how completely genetic genealogy changed the rules of the game.
The investigators had a name.
Now they needed proof.
You don’t walk up to a homicide suspect, particularly one accused of a crime this violent, and ask for a DNA sample.
District Attorney Craig Steedman was clear about that.
They needed to get Rose DNA through what is called surreptitious collection, which means taking something the suspect has thrown away in a public place.
A cup, a napkin, a cigarette butt, anything with biological material on it that was voluntarily abandoned.
On the evening of May 31st, 2018, Ro left his home around 5:00 p.m.
With his daughter to work an endofyear dance at Smoketown Elementary School in Lancaster County.
It was a party for sixth graders who were about to move on to middle school.
Take a moment to absorb that.
A man suspected of murdering a sixth grade teacher 26 years earlier was DJIing a sixth grade party.
The investigation that had started with a group of devastated 11-year-olds in 1992 was about to end at a celebration for a different group of 11year-olds in 2018.
An undercover Pennsylvania state trooper went into the school that evening.
He dressed like a parent.
He blended into the crowd of kids and families.
He smiled, made small talk, and watched Raymond Row work the room the way he had worked thousands of rooms before.
The trooper’s job was simple.
Wait for Ro to discard something.
By the end of the night, Row had thrown away a Kirkland brand water bottle and a piece of chewing gum.
The undercover trooper recovered both items.
They were sent to the Pennsylvania State Police Crime Lab for analysis.
Eight days later on June 8th, 2018, the lab confirmed what investigators already suspected.
The DNA from Raymond Rose’s discarded water bottle matched the DNA collected from Christy Mirak’s body and the carpet beneath her at the crime scene in 1992.
The match was conclusive beyond any statistical ambiguity.
The probability that anyone else in the Caucasian population had left that DNA was 1 in 200 octillion.
That’s a number with 27 zeros.
District Attorney Steedman put it in perspective at the press conference that followed.
There are only 7.6 billion people on Earth.
It was him.
After 26 years, the ghost from the FBI’s behavioral profile finally had a face.
On the afternoon of June 25th, 2018, Raymond Row was outside his home at 249 Whittier Lane in Lancaster doing yard work when law enforcement arrived.
Detective Christopher Herb, assisted by Detective Larry Martin, placed him under arrest and charged him with criminal homicide in the death of Christy Mirac.
When the officers told him the arrest was for the murder of Christy Mirac, Rose’s response was two words.
Who’s that?
He denied committing the crime.
He denied knowing her.
District Attorney Craig Steedman held a press conference that same day, and the words he used carried the weight of 26 years of frustration from an entire community.
This killer was at liberty from this [music] brutal crime for longer than Christy Mira was on this earth alive.
He left her assaulted and dead on the floor, strangled to death, and shut the door.
And walked back into his life and he stayed there for 26 years until we caught him.
Ro was held without bail.
The community’s reaction was something between shock and nausea.
This was not a stranger.
This was not a drifter who had passed through town.
This was the DJ at their weddings, the entertainment at their children’s school dances, the guy at the prom.
People who had paid him thousands of dollars to celebrate the happiest moments of their lives now had to sit with the knowledge that they had been dancing to the music of a murderer.
Wedding vendors across Lancaster County scrambled to help couples who had row booked for upcoming events.
Some had events scheduled well into 2020.
Deposits paid, contracts signed.
The logistical mess was minor compared to the emotional fallout.
One detail in particular landed like a gute punch.
Anita Charles Deninger, one of Christiey’s former sixth grade students, the one who had become a teacher partly because of Christiey’s influence, had married a man named Ryan Deninger.
When they were planning their 2012 wedding, they tried to hire DJ Freeze.
He was unavailable.
A scheduling conflict was the only thing that kept the man who murdered their teacher from playing at their wedding reception.
Rose’s fiance at the time of the murder, Monica Figureroa, had married him just months after the killing.
She lived with him for years as his wife, sharing a home, building a life, raising a family with no idea that the man she had married had killed a woman 4 months before their wedding.
She had stood beside him at the antiviolence rally in August.
She had watched him become one of the most popular entertainers in the county.
She learned the truth in 2018 when state troopers sat her down for a 3hour interview.
Imagine sitting in a room while investigators explained to you that your former husband, the father of your child, the man you built years of your life around, had been a murderer the entire time.
That the life you thought you were living was built on top of a crime scene.
And there was one more piece of grim timing that couldn’t be scripted.
Joseph Gei, the retired detective who had carried the Myra case for years and never let it go, even after he left the force, died on June 26th, 2018.
He was 82 years old.
He died one day after Rose’s arrest.
The case that had weighed on him for the final decades of his life was solved the day before he passed.
Whether he knew is unclear, but the timing felt like something beyond coincidence.
On January 8th, 2019, Raymond Row stood in Lancaster County Court and pleaded guilty.
The charges were first-degree murder, three counts of rape by forcible compulsion, two counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and burglary, seven counts in total.
President Judge Dennis Reincker accepted the plea and sentenced Ro to life in prison without parole, plus a consecutive 60 to 120 years.
His defense attorney, Patricia Spots, stood beside him in the courtroom and said the words out loud.
He has told us that he did it.
The person standing beside me has admitted his guilt.
In later testimony, it was revealed that Ro had told his lawyers that he snapped and lost it.
He attributed the violence to what he described as the thug part of his life when he was using cocaine.
No definitive motive was ever established.
Prosecutors noted the circumstantial connections.
The commute that took him past her townhouse every day.
The servicemaster job down the street, the white Toyota Celica, the Chameleon Club membership pass in her wallet, the peeping Tom reports at the Greenfield Estates complex in the months before the murder.
District Attorney Steedman said he could not prove that Ro and Christy had ever met.
The DNA was conclusive.
The motive remained avoid.
What made the sentencing hearing unforgettable was not the legal outcome.
It was the family.
Vince Mirac stood in that courtroom and addressed Raymond Row directly while their elderly father Vincent wept in the gallery and Alicia Christiey’s older sister leaned against him for support.
Vince’s words were measured and devastated.
If not for the grace of modern technology and divine intervention, you probably would have stayed in Lancaster and basted in [music] your fame.
But most of all, you took our Christy.
He paused.
I made a promise to my mom before she passed away to never let this go.
He had kept that promise.
Christiey’s father, Vincent, had prepared a statement of his own.
He walked toward the podium.
He tried to speak.
He couldn’t.
He collapsed into Alicia’s arms and said, “I can’t talk.”
His grief, 36 years deep by that point, was beyond language.
The courtroom sat in silence.
Ro turned to the family and spoke.
I’m sorry, sir.
To the family.
I can’t imagine what you’re going through.
I apologize.
He offered no explanation, no motive, no reason for why he had walked into a 25-year-old woman’s townhouse on the Monday before Christmas and taken her life.
District Attorney Steedman addressed the press afterward and said something that captured the horror of the case more precisely than any courtroom argument.
It is haunting that he could just compartmentalize this and go back to literally enjoying his life.
26 years of weddings, proms, school dances, celebrity photos, and standing [music] ovations.
26 years of being the most popular man in the room while the Mirak family buried their mother, put up billboards, and begged [music] strangers for help.
When the judge asked during the plea hearing whether he disputed any of the facts presented by the prosecution, Ro said he did not.
He stood there in that courtroom and accepted every word, the DNA evidence, the charges, the sentence.
For a man who had spent 26 years pretending nothing had happened, those few minutes of silence in a Lancaster courtroom were the closest thing to a full confession the public would ever get.
The plea deal spared Ro the death penalty.
It also, according to later testimony, prevented the filing of an unrelated criminal charge that Ro did not want made public.
The full story of what that charge involved has never been disclosed.
Ro will never leave prison.
The sentence guaranteed that.
Life without the possibility of parole means exactly what it says.
There is no hearing.
There is no review board.
There is no second chance.
The man who spent 26 years being celebrated by a community that did not know what he had done, will spend the rest of his life in a cell at SEI Waymart, a state correctional institution in northeastern Pennsylvania, approximately 150 mi from the Chameleon Club where he used to hold court.
The conviction of Raymond Row for the murder of Christy Mira was among the earliest in the United States achieved through investigative genetic genealogy.
It came just months after the arrest of the Golden State Killer and was described by multiple news outlets as the first conviction obtained using the technology.
District Attorney Craig Steedman used the press conference to send a message to prosecutors across the country.
He said he hoped the case would spur someone somewhere [music] to take a second look at a case sitting in their back office.
That’s exactly what happened.
The same partnership between Parabon Nano Labs, CC Moore, [music] and the Lancaster County Authorities went on to crack additional cold cases in the same region.
In 2022, they helped solve the 1975 murder of Lindy Sue Beekler, a 20-year-old woman who had been stabbed to death in her Lancaster County apartment.
A man named David Synopoly was arrested using the same genetic genealogy methods that caught Rorow.
The science that gave Christiey’s family justice went on to give other families the same thing.
Ro, for his part, did not accept his conviction quietly.
Less than a year after his guilty plea, he began filing appeals.
In a 2021 hearing, he testified under oath that he had actually been in a secret consensual relationship with Christy Mirk.
He claimed that they had met at the Chameleon Club, that they had a physical relationship, and that he had been with her the morning she died, but that she was alive when he left.
He claimed someone else killed her.
His former defense attorneys were called to testify.
They told the court that Ro had confessed to them, that he said he lost it on her, and that’s how she died.
Judge Reneer denied the petition, calling Rose’s new account not credible, and noting the overwhelming DNA evidence, the confession to his own attorneys, and forensic details from the crime scene that were flatly inconsistent with a consensual encounter.
The Superior Court upheld the denial.
Ro remains incarcerated at SCIMART, serving life without the possibility of parole.
He is now in his mid-50s.
CC Moore, the genealogologist who cracked the case, later described the Miraculation as one of the first cases she worked with law enforcement and said it was extremely important to her.
The technology she used was less than a year old as an investigative tool when she identified Row.
In the years since, genetic genealogy has been used to solve hundreds of cold cases across the country.
From decades old murders to unidentified remains found in fields and rivers.
Every one of those cases owes a debt, at least in part, to the handful of early investigations that proved the science could work in court.
Christy Mirra’s case was one of those.
Roarerstown Elementary School where Christy taught her sixth graders was eventually torn down.
A new school was built on the site.
Inside there is a sculpture in a memorial garden dedicated to Christy Mirac.
A photograph of her hangs in the building.
The children who walk past it every day may not know her full story, but she is there.
Her name is still on the wall of a school where someone loved teaching so much she worked three jobs to keep doing it.
The night before she was murdered, Christy Mirra wrapped copies of a book called Miracles on Maple Hill for her students.
[music] She wrote each one a note in her own handwriting.
She topped each package with a candy cane.
She wanted those kids to walk into her classroom on the last day before Christmas break and feel special.
Christy Mirak wanted to be remembered as a teacher.
26 years of silence, a mother’s deathbed wish, a brother’s relentless promise, and a genealogologist working from a laptop made sure that she would be not just as a teacher, but as someone whose name was never forgotten, no matter [clears throat] how long the world tried to move on without her.
If you believe that forgotten [music] victims deserve to have their stories told, subscribe to Cold Case Redemption.
We cover a new case every week, and every single one of them matters.
Click the video on your screen now for another cold case that took decades to crack.
We’ll see you there.
[music]
