The Anderson siblings didn't just wait for the pho…
The Anderson siblings didn’t just wait for the phone to ring.
They spent years keeping NY’s name alive in ways that no one outside the family would have noticed.
Writing letters to Honolulu police, calling the department on anniversaries of the murder, checking in with any detective willing to take the call, searching the internet for anything new about cold case technology that might apply to NY’s case.
For decades, the world moved on.
The Anderson family did not.
There were nine of them.
Nancy was the fourth.
Nine brothers and sisters, all carrying the same unanswered question every day for decades.
Some dealt with it by staying quiet.
Others dealt with it by refusing to be quiet.
Jack Anderson became the family’s driving force.
Jack wrote a book about his sister’s murder called The Brittle Riddle.
It wasn’t a bestseller.
It wasn’t written by a professional author.
It was written by a brother who wanted the world to know his sister existed and that her murder mattered.
The proceeds went to DNA Justice, a nonprofit that helps law enforcement agencies fund DNA testing for cold cases that don’t have the budget for expensive genetic analysis.
Jack wasn’t just mourning his sister.
He was building a system to help other families trapped in the same impossible waiting game.
NY’s sister, Mary Skiatoni, later said the family always had faith.
They would eventually learn who killed Nancy.
They didn’t think the killer would still be alive by the time answers came, but they always hoped for something.
Anything, a name, a reason.
Even a partial answer would have been better than the silence they’d lived with for so long.
Then, in April of 2018, a case on the other side of the country changed everything.
Not just for the Andersons, for cold case families everywhere.
Investigators in Sacramento, California, announced the arrest of Joseph D’Angelo, the Golden State Killer.
D’Angelo was a former police officer responsible for at least 13 murders and 50 rapes across California in the 1970s and 1980s.
He had evaded capture for over 40 years.
Multiple law enforcement agencies had spent decades hunting him.
None of them found him.
The tool that finally caught him was something most of the public had never heard of, investigative genetic genealogy.
The concept was deceptively simple.
Instead of searching a criminal DNA database, which only contains profiles of people who’ve been arrested or convicted, investigators uploaded crime scene DNA to a public genealogy database, the kind regular people use to trace their family history.
They found distant relatives of the killer, fourth cousins, fifth cousins, people who shared tiny fragments of DNA with the unknown suspect.
Then they built a family tree backward from those distant relatives, narrowing the branches until only one name was left.
Joseph D’Angelo, a man who had never been in a criminal DNA database because he’d never been caught.
The Golden State Killer arrest made international news.
It proved that genetic genealogy could do something no other forensic tool had ever accomplished.
It could identify an unknown suspect using nothing more than crime scene DNA and a public database.
No arrest record required, no prior conviction required.
The killer just needed to have relatives, however distant, who had uploaded their own DNA to a genealogy site.
Jack Anderson saw the news and recognized the opportunity immediately.
NY’s killer had been invisible for the same reason D’Angelo was.
No felony record, no DNA in any law enforcement database.
But if genetic genealogy could catch a serial killer in California who’d been free for 40 years, maybe it could catch his sister’s killer in Hawaii, who’d been free for nearly 50.
He found Cece Moore, the chief genetic genealogologist at Parabon Nano Labs in Virginia.
Moore was already the most prominent figure in the emerging field of investigative genetic genealogy, having helped identify suspects in dozens of cold cases across the country.
Jack reached out to her directly.
Moore later said that families almost never contact her.
She typically works through law enforcement, never interacting with the victim’s relatives.
Jack Anderson’s call was different.
When I work a case, I’m not in touch with the family.
So, right off the bat, this made the case very special to me.
Jack’s phone call would become the single most important moment in 50 years of investigation.
It set in motion the chain of events that would finally name NY’s killer.
Jack’s outreach to CC Moore created the bridge.
But for the genetic genealogy work to actually begin, the Honolulu Police Department had to formally authorize it.
Cold case DNA is police evidence.
You can’t just hand it to a private lab without departmental approval, chain of custody documentation, and a formal request through proper channels.
HPD said yes.
The department formally partnered with Parabon NanoLabs and authorized the use of investigative genetic genealogy on Nancy Anderson’s case.
The work fell under HPD’s cold case initiative called IE POA, which is Hawaiian for never forgotten.
The program had been launched in 2018 to systematically review unsolved homicides dating back to the 1960s.
NY’s case was one of the oldest in the queue and now it had something none of the other cases had.
A family that had personally recruited one of the best genetic genealogologists in the world.
HPD detective Michael Ogawa was assigned to the case.
He would become the central figure on the law enforcement side, the one writing affidavit, coordinating with outofstate police departments, and piecing together the chain of evidence that would eventually lead to an arrest warrant.
In 2020, Parabon’s first step was DNA phenotyping, a technology that can predict physical appearance from a DNA sample.
Using the male genetic profile recovered from the blood stained towel, they created a digital composite Parabon calls a snapshot.
It showed what the suspect likely looked like at approximately 25 years of age, which is roughly how old he would have been in 1972.
The composite predicted his ancestry, eye color, hair color, skin tone, freckling patterns, facial structure, and estimated body mass index.
It was a computerenerated portrait of a man nobody had ever seen.
A face attached to 50-year-old blood left in a dead woman’s apartment.
Phenotyping can narrow a suspect pool.
It can confirm whether a suspect matches the predicted physical profile, but on its own, it cannot put a name to a face.
You can’t search a database for light-skinned male with brown hair and a BMI of 22.
The snapshot was a piece of the puzzle.
It wasn’t the answer.
The real breakthrough came from CC Moore’s specialty, not phenotyping, genetic genealogy.
The same method that caught the Golden State Killer.
Moore uploaded the unknown male DNA profile to a public genetic database, the kind used by millions of ordinary people researching their family trees.
She wasn’t looking for the killer directly.
She was looking for his relatives.
Anyone who shared enough DNA to be a distant cousin, a second cousin, a third cousin once removed.
The wider the net, the better the chance of building a family tree backward toward the source.
What she found was ancestry from two distinct lineages.
One branch traced to southern and central Italy, including Sicily.
The other traced to Romania.
That combination is unusual in the United States, and it’s extremely unusual in Hawaii.
Most people with roots in both Italy and Romania don’t end up living on a Pacific island in the early 1970s.
If you’re searching for someone in a specific city at a specific time, an uncommon ethnic background narrows the field dramatically.
And this is where the story takes a turn nobody expected because CC Moore did something no genetic genealogologist had done quite like this before.
She pulled a Honolulu city directory from 1972.
Not a genetic database, not a government record, a city directory.
The kind of book that used to sit in library reference sections listing residents by name, address, and sometimes occupation.
Moore began flipping through it, searching for people who lived in Honolulu in 1972 and had Italian or Romanian surnames.
It was an analog solution to a digital problem.
She was cross-referencing 21st century genetic science with a 50-year-old phone book, and it worked.
She found a name, Tutor Cherila.
The surname was Romanian.
He was listed as a Honolulu resident in 1972.
Moore’s team built the genealogical family tree outward from that name, connecting it to the distant relatives who had appeared in the public genetic database.
Every connection they tested held up.
The branches matched, the ancestry matched, the geography matched, the timeline matched, the family tree that grew from the blood on the towel led directly to the name in the city directory.
In December of 2021, HPD detective Michael Ogawa received the information pointing to Tutor Cherila Jr.
as the likely suspect.
Investigators confirmed that in January of 1972, Cherila was a 26-year-old graduate assistant living in Honolulu, less than 3 mi from apartment 704 on Aloha Drive.
After 50 years, they had a name.
Now they needed proof.
only a DNA sample could provide.
Pay attention to what happened next because it explains how the final piece fell into place.
February of 2022, Detective Ogawa contacts the Reno Police Department in Nevada with an unusual request.
He needs someone to covertly obtain a DNA sample from a 76-year-old retired attorney living in Reno.
Tutor Cherila doesn’t know he’s a suspect.
if he finds out he could destroy evidence, flee, or lawyer up before they can confirm the match.
Reno police Sergeant Laura Conklin assembled a surveillance team.
For weeks, they watched Cherila’s apartment in Reno, waiting for him to throw something away.
A coffee cup at a restaurant, a napkin in a trash can, a water bottle left on a park bench.
Anything he touched and discarded would carry his DNA.
And under established legal precedent, abandoned items are fair game for collection.
Cherila didn’t cooperate.
Not intentionally.
He simply didn’t go anywhere.
He was 76 years old, retired, and apparently a homebody.
He didn’t eat at restaurants.
He didn’t sit in coffee shops.
He didn’t leave water bottles or used napkins on park benches.
Week after week, the surveillance team watched and waited.
And week after week, Cherila stayed inside his Reno apartment, giving them nothing to collect.
It was maddening.
They had a name.
They had a genealogical match.
They had 50 years of blood evidence sitting in a Honolulu lab.
And they couldn’t get a DNA sample because an elderly man in Nevada wouldn’t go out for lunch.
By March of 2022, Detective Ogawa changed his approach.
He needed a different path to Cherila’s DNA.
He contacted the Newport Beach Police Department in Southern California.
Cherila’s son, John Cherila, lived in Newport Beach.
Detectives approached John and explained the situation.
They told him his father was a suspect in a 50-year-old murder in Hawaii.
They asked if he would voluntarily provide a DNA sample.
A son’s DNA can confirm whether a suspect is in the right family line, even if it can’t serve as a direct match for a criminal charge.
John agreed.
The results confirmed that John Cherila was the biological son of the man whose DNA was found on the bloodstained towel in Nancy Anderson’s bedroom.
The DNA on the towel belonged to J’s father.
Jon also confirmed something investigators already knew.
His parents had lived in Honolulu before he was born.
The case was now one step from confirmation.
They had a familial DNA match which established that the killer was Tutor Cherila’s bloodline.
But for an arrest warrant and a murder charge that would hold up in court, they needed Chirila’s own DNA, not his sons, his.
On September 1st, 2022, Reno Detective Dave Neville obtained a search warrant and seizure order authorizing the direct collection of Tutor Cherila’s DNA.
5 days later, on September 6th, Reno police arrived at Cherila’s apartment and collected the sample.
Then they waited for the lab.
On September 12th, 2022, the results came back from the lab.
Tutor Cherilla Jr.
‘s DNA matched three separate samples recovered from the bloodstained towel found in Nancy Anderson’s bedroom at the Coral Terrace Apartments.
Three matches from one towel.
Not a partial match, not a statistical probability.
Three confirmed genetic matches linking a 77-year-old retired attorney in Reno, Nevada to blood left at a murder scene in Wiki, Hawaii on January 7th, 1972.
50 years between the crime and the confirmation.
50 years of the Anderson family writing letters, making phone calls, petitioning police chiefs, and contacting genetic genealogologists.
50 years of Tutor Cherila living as a free man, practicing law, running for office, testifying in federal court, and sleeping in his own bed every night.
The blood he left behind the day he killed a 19-year-old girl in a Wiki apartment had been waiting for him in an evidence locker since Richard Nixon was president.
Since the Vietnam War was still being fought, since the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were still under construction and it had finally spoken.
2 days after his DNA was collected on September 8th, 2022, Tutor Cherila attempted to take his own life.
He survived.
When his booking photograph was taken days later, bandages were visible on his neck.
He knew what was coming.
On September 12th, the DNA match was confirmed.
That same day, Hawaii issued an arrest warrant.
On September 13th, a Reno detective took Cherila into custody at a Reno hospital.
He was booked into the Wo County Jail on a fugitive charge and held without bail.
On September 21st, Cherila appeared in Reno Justice Court in a wheelchair.
He told the judge he wanted to fight extradition to Hawaii.
His argument centered on the DNA collection.
He claimed it was unconstitutional.
He said the officers who came to his apartment implied they could use force.
He told the court he’d been recovering from eye surgery and was terrified they would hit his eye.
He framed the compelled DNA sample as a violation of his right against self-inccrimination.
And then he said something that would be quoted in every news article about the case.
Oh, your honor, I want to go to Hawaii.
It’s so beautiful.
The problem is I don’t think the arrest was constitutional, which looking back was either the most tonedeaf thing ever said in a courtroom or a calculated attempt to appear unserious about the charges.
For a man who spent decades as an attorney, it landed badly.
Justice of the peace, Scott Pearson, was unmoved.
He ruled that any constitutional challenge to the evidence had to be raised in Hawaii, not Nevada.
Extradition proceedings are not the venue for challenging the legality of a DNA collection.
That’s a question for a Hawaiian courtroom.
Pearson appointed Cherila a public defender and kept him jailed without bail.
Wo County Deputy District Attorney Amos Stei began pursuing a governor’s warrant to formalize the extradition process.
Meanwhile, back in Honolulu, the case was moving even faster.
2 days after the courtroom appearance on September 23rd, 2022, an Oahu grand jury reviewed the evidence and handed down an indictment.
Tutor Cherila Jr.
was formally charged with seconddegree murder in the death of Nancy Elaine Anderson.
The indictment made history.
It was the oldest cold case murder in the entire state of Hawaii to result in a formal criminal charge.
50 years and 9 months separated the crime from the indictment.
Nothing in Hawaiian legal history had come close.
Prosecutors in Honolulu, led by Deputy Prosecuting attorney Scott Bell, began preparing for extradition.
Honolulu prosecutor Steve Alm publicly thanked the HPD detectives and DNA analysts who worked the case, as well as Parabon Nanolabs, whose expertise provided the lead that solved this case.
On December 2nd, 2022, Tutor Cherila was put on a plane and extradited from Reno to Honolulu.
He landed on the same island where he had lived as a graduate student 50 years earlier.
The same island where he had killed Nancy Anderson and then walked away.
He was returned to it in handcuffs.
6 days later on December 8th, he stood in a Honolulu courtroom before Judge Christine Kuryama and pleaded not guilty to charges of first and seconddegree murder.
The courtroom where he entered his plea was l was less than four miles from the Coral Terrace apartments where Nancy died.
Bail was set at $1 million.
The trial was initially scheduled for February of 2023.
It would be delayed again and again and again.
Cherila’s defense team filed motions.
The prosecution continued building its case, assembling 50 years of evidence into a package that could be presented to a jury.
Pre-trial hearings were scheduled and rescheduled.
The legal machinery ground forward at the pace it always does, indifferent to the fact that the defendant was 77 years old and that the victim’s family had already been waiting for half a century.
Tutor Cherila, who had walked free for 50 years while Nancy Anderson’s siblings grew old, carrying the weight of her unsolved murder, was now sitting in a cell at the Oahu Community Correctional Center, waiting for a trial date that kept getting pushed further into the future.
The trial was eventually scheduled for July of 2024.
Cherila would not live to see it.
By late 2023, Tutor Cherila’s health was deteriorating inside the Oahu Community Correctional Center.
He was 78 years old, suffering from tongue cancer, diabetes, a heart condition, and kidney stones.
According to reports, he refused to eat, drink, or take his medication for 2 days before the end.
On Christmas Day, December 25th, 2023, Cherila was transported from the jail infirmary to Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu.
He died that day.
The family was initially told the cause was cardiac arrest and that no foul play was suspected.
Almost a year later, in December of 2024, the medical examiner’s official report was released.
The actual cause of death was sepsis caused by a urinary tract infection.
The contributing factors listed on the report included his tongue cancer, his diabetes, his heart condition, and his kidney stones.
He simply stopped fighting.
Whether that was a choice or a consequence of his declining health, no one outside that jail infirmary can say.
With the defendant dead, the Honolulu Department of the Prosecuting Attorney had no choice.
Spokesperson Brooks Bayer announced that the office would be moving to dismiss the murder charge.
You cannot try a dead man.
The case was formally closed in 2024.
The courtroom where Tutor Cherila was supposed to face a jury would never hear the evidence that Detective Ogawa and Cece Moore and an entire team of investigators had spent years assembling.
For Nancy Anderson’s family, the news arrived with a weight that 50 years of waiting had prepared them for, but could never fully soften.
They had an answer.
They knew the name of the man who killed their sister.
They knew where he lived, what he did for a living, and that his DNA was an incontestable match to blood found at the scene.
What they didn’t get was a verdict.
They didn’t get to sit in a courtroom and watch a jury say the word guilty.
They didn’t get to look Cherila in the face and tell him they knew what he did.
Mary Skiaton spoke for the family.
She said they were disappointed that Sharila did not live to stand trial, but at the same time they were at peace knowing it was over.
Once he was identified, he spent the rest of his life behind bars.
She acknowledged what the family would never learn.
They may never know the reason why he killed Nancy, whether anyone else was involved, or what exactly happened in that apartment on January 7th, 1972.
Jack Anderson called it poetic justice.
The man who killed his sister and then spent decades inside the legal system ended his life inside a jail cell.
Not a courtroom victory, but not nothing either.
Janet Christensen, another of NY’s sisters, said the words that closed the circle for the family.
Even though he wasn’t found guilty in a court of law, he was found guilty in our hearts.
Deputy prosecuting attorney Scott Bell, who had spent months preparing the case for trial, said publicly that he believed Charila would have been convicted if he had lived.
The DNA evidence was overwhelming.
Three matches from the same towel.
50 years of preservation.
The chain of custody was intact.
The science was sound.
A jury would have heard it all.
But the courtroom never got to hear it.
And the questions that only tutor Cherila could answer went with him.
How did he know Nancy Anderson? They lived less than 3 mi apart in Honolulu.
He was a 26-year-old graduate assistant at the University of Hawaii.
She was a 19-year-old working at the McDonald’s in Alam Moana Center.
Did they cross paths at a bus stop, a bar? Did she strike up a conversation with him the way she did with strangers? NY’s siblings described her as trusting.
Too trusting.
Was that what caused her? Why was he in her apartment on January 7th? The knife salesman left before 3:00.
Jodie Spooner went to sleep at 2:45.
Spooner heard a scream around 4:15.
That leaves roughly 90 minutes unaccounted for.
Did Cherila come to the apartment during that window? Was he invited? Did he force his way in? What was the motive? Investigators have never publicly identified one.
There was no evidence of robbery.
The medical examiner found no evidence of sexual assault.
63 stab wounds suggest something beyond a moment of rage.
That level of violence usually indicates personal fury, deep-seated anger, or a loss of control so complete that it goes far beyond what any rational motive can explain.
All of it gone.
Tutor Cherila took every answer to Queen’s Medical Center on Christmas Day and they died with him on the table.
Nancy Elaine Anderson, born November 10th, 1952 in Bay City, Michigan, died January 7th, 1972 in Honolulu, Hawaii.
She was 19 years old.
She was the fourth of 10 children in a family that lost their father too young and held on to each other because that was all they had.
She was the adventurous one.
The one who flew to Hawaii alone with a suitcase and savings from a donut shop.
The one who wanted to see the world beyond Michigan, beyond Colorado, beyond everything she knew.
Her siblings spent 50 years making sure her name didn’t vanish into a police filing cabinet.
Carol petitioned the police chief.
Jack called the genealogologist.
Mary spoke for the family when the cameras came.
Janet found the words that mattered.
All nine of them carried NY’s story forward year after year, decade after decade, long after the rest of the world had stopped paying attention.
Jack Anderson’s book, The Brittle Riddle, was written so that NY’s story would outlast the investigation.
The proceeds go to DNA Justice, a nonprofit that funds DNA testing for cold cases.
Jack turned his grief into a tool for other families in the same impossible situation.
Nancy Anderson’s case is part of a growing wave of cold cases cracked by investigative genetic genealogy.
Since the Golden State Killer arrest in 2018 proved that the technique could work, departments across the country have started sending their oldest, coldest cases to labs like Parabon Nanolabs.
In Hawaii alone, the same science has brought answers to the family of Dana Ireland, murdered on the Big Island in 1991, and the family of Don Mahara, a 16-year-old killed in Honolulu in 1977.
Across the country, CC Moore and the team at Parabon have helped identify more than 340 violent crime suspects and unidentified remains since 2018.
Every one of those cases was once considered unsolvable.
Every one of those families was once told there was nothing more that could be done.
And in every single one, preserved evidence in modern science did what 50 years of traditional detective work couldn’t.
The Honolulu Medical Examiner’s Office is currently using advanced DNA testing to try to identify 58 sets of unidentified remains dating back to the 1960s.
Each case costs about $10,000 to process.
The backlog is long.
The funding is short.
But the science is there and the evidence in many of those cases is still waiting.
The case of Nancy Anderson proves something that matters for every unsolved murder in every filing cabinet in every police department in this country.
Evidence doesn’t expire.
Blood doesn’t forget.
And families who refuse to stop asking questions can change the outcome of a case that everyone else gave up on.
The blood on the towel in apartment 704 of the Coral Terrace apartments waited 50 years for science to catch up.
It did and it spoke NY’s name.
In December of 2024, the case was featured in an episode of People magazine Investigates called The Aloha Murder.
NY’s siblings appeared on camera for the first time, telling the story they had carried for more than half a century.
They were in their 60s and 70s by then.
They had spent more of their lives waiting for answers than they spent growing up with their sister.
And they finally had them.
NY’s family waited 50 years for answers.
Cases like hers are the reason this channel exists.
If you want to keep following these stories, subscribe to Cold Case Redemption.
We cover the forgotten cases that finally got their day.
I’ll see you in the next one.
