Investigators in Bucks County say they have finally solved the 63-year-old case of the murder of a 9-year-old girl.
CBS Philadelphia reporter Alicia Roberts has the details on how officials cracked the case as well as [music] the family’s reaction.
She was 9 years old and she never passed that church without stopping to pray.
On October 22nd, 1962, Carol and Doherty rode her bike to the library the way she did most afternoons.
And on the way, she stopped at St. Marks one more time. She never made it home.
Her father found her that evening. For the next 63 years, the case sat unsolved through a false confession, a suspect who passed two separate polygraph tests, and a grand jury that came close in 1994 and still couldn’t close it.
It would take a failed DNA test, and a report that sat unheard for decades before investigators finally got their answer.
This is how they got there. A pubic hair recovered from the scene could narrow the field of suspects.
It couldn’t on its own put a name to a killer beyond doubt. And closing that gap without DNA is what makes this investigation different from most cold cases that eventually get solved by forensic science alone.
Bristol Burough, Pennsylvania in the early 1960s was the kind of town where families knew each other by name and children moved through it with a freedom that later generations would never know.
Carol Anne was a fifth grader at the parish school attached to St. Marks. Known as a devoted reader, the kind of child who finished one library book only to already be thinking about the next.
Her parents, Frank and Dorothy Doherty, described a home defined by routine and warmth. She had a younger sister, Kay, not yet three, who would grow up to be the last member of the family left to see this case resolved.
Two of Caroline’s friends were waiting for her outside the church that afternoon while she went in to pray one more time.
Investigators later determined the attack took place at approximately 3:35. By 4:30, she hadn’t come home.
Dinner in the Doherty household happened on schedule without exception and her absence was enough to send her parents out into the neighborhood, retracing her route.
Dorothy found the bicycle first, parked outside the church, exactly where Carolyn would have left it to go in and pray.
She searched the building and found nothing. She went back a second time. Still nothing.
Frank went in himself. Just before 6:00 that evening, he found his daughter’s body on a landing that led up to the choir loft.
She had not survived. Investigators recovered physical evidence at the scene that afternoon, including strands of hair.
In 1962, crime scene evidence collection was still a fairly blunt instrument. Samples were bagged, labeled, and filed away with no real capacity yet to extract identifying information from something as small as a single hair.
What investigators gathered that day would outlast the technology needed to use it by more than three decades.
Bristol police, led by Chief Vincent Farragali, moved quickly. Within days of the murder, three names surfaced.
The first was Frank Zuchero, a 60-year-old handyman known locally as a heavy drinker. He had been seen near the church that afternoon, stumbling in its general direction not long before the estimated time of the attack.
Under questioning by eight officers in a session that stretched on for hours, Zucero gave a confession.
It didn’t hold up. Investigators later determined the statement had been made under duress, and Zucero was released without charge.
The second was Wayne Roach. Sources list his age as either 18 or 19, a teenager from nearby Morrisville.
Roach bore a physical resemblance to another man who would later become central to this case.
A detail that at the time made him a plausible suspect on site alone. His name had turned up written in Carolyn’s notebook and a neighbor separately reported seeing scratches on his face in the days after the murder.
Police searched for him and eventually located him. Roach provided a verified alibi. He had been working in Virginia on the day of the murder.
He was cleared. The third was Father Joseph Sabadish, a priest assigned to St. Marks.
When investigators asked him to account for his whereabouts that afternoon, he lied. His actual location placed him in the nearby town of Holville, where he had been purchasing lingerie for a married woman he was pursuing.
It was an affair he had no interest in disclosing to police, and the lie itself is what drew investigators attention.
Chief Faragali wanted to pursue the priest further. Monscior Paul Baird his superior objected and church leadership blocked continued access.
Undeterred, Faragali and another officer intercepted Sabadish during one of his regular parish visits and brought him in anyway for a polygraph examination.
He passed and was released. Three men, three different reasons to suspect them. Three separate paths that one by one led investigators nowhere.
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But in January 1963, a neighbor gave police a fourth name. He reported unusual behavior from a man living close to the church, a man investigators had not yet spoken to.
That man was 24-year-old William Shrader. Shrader’s background, once investigators started looking, was not clean.
He had grown up in Luzernne County, Pennsylvania, and had spent much of his youth cycling in and out of reform school, a pattern of violence that surfaced early and never fully stopped.
He enlisted in the army at 17 and was dishonorably discharged within a year. Not long after, he shot at another man, was convicted of attempted murder, and served time at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.
Following his release, he settled in Bristol, where he had family ties, living less than two blocks from St.
Marks, close enough to walk past the church without anyone thinking twice about it. When police brought him in, Shrader claimed he had been at work at the time of the murder.
Investigators checked. The story didn’t survive scrutiny. His employer’s own records placed him elsewhere. Confronted with the discrepancy, Shrader offered no clear explanation.
He voluntarily provided a sample of his hair for testing. Investigators had no way in 1963 to compare it meaningfully against what had been recovered from the crime scene months earlier.
The forensic science required simply did not exist yet. Investigators administered a polygraph test. He cleared it.
With no further evidence to hold him, police released him. His hair sample was filed away in an evidence room.
It would sit there for the next 30 years, waiting on a form of testing that hadn’t been invented.
By the time three decades had passed, Carolyn’s case had not been forgotten. Chief Vincent Faragali, who had led the original investigation, never let it go.
He kept her photograph on his desk for years afterward. A quiet, constant reminder of the one case he couldn’t close, and a reminder, too, to every detective who passed through his office that the file was still open.
In 1992, a local newspaper, the Bucks County Courier Times, ran a multi-part investigative series revisiting the murder for its 30th anniversary.
The renewed public attention it generated pushed the case back into active consideration, and in 1993, technology finally caught up to the evidence collected back in 1962.
Over the course of the investigation, police had gathered pubic hair samples from 176 men connected to the case in some way.
141 of those samples were tested. One by one, every man was eliminated except William Shreder.
His sample was the only one that could not be excluded as a match to the hair recovered from the scene.
The method was microscopic hair comparison. Examiners studying color, texture, and structural detail under magnification.
It was reliable enough to rule a person out with real confidence. It couldn’t offer the certainty of a genetic match.
At best, it could say a sample was consistent with the evidence, not that it belonged to one man beyond any other possibility.
That limitation would define the rest of this case. Other pieces began falling into place around the same time.
A friend of Shraders came forward, telling police he had seen him near St. Marks on the day of the murder.
Investigators also noted that Lucky Strike cigarettes, the brand Shrader was known to smoke, had been recovered at the scene back in 1962.
By 1994, four separate threads pointed to the same man. A false alibi from 1963, a friend’s account, a cigarette brand at the scene, and hair evidence no one else could explain away.
Investigators believed they were finally close. That year, prosecutors convened a grand jury. William Schrader, by then serving a Louisiana prison sentence for an unrelated conviction, was extradited back to Pennsylvania to testify.
When questioned, he invoked his fifth amendment right and answered nothing. Father Joseph Sabadish also testified along with Carol Anne’s father, Frank Doerty, who gave his own account of that day 32 years earlier.
Investigators tested both suspects. Both cleared their polygraphs. Neither man was indicted. Both walked free.
Narrowing 176 men down to one was a meaningful result. It still fell short of what a criminal indictment required.
Evidence specific enough to place Shrader at the scene, not just evidence that failed to rule him out.
For investigators who believe they were finally closing in on an answer, it was a collapse.
The grand jury adjourned without resolution. It raises a real methodological question. Does eliminating every other possible suspect amount to proof or does it only narrow the field?
Investigators had ruled out 140 other men. Hair comparison alone had not placed Shrader’s hands on Carolanne herself.
And that distinction is exactly why even with everything they had, the grand jury couldn’t move forward.
The result exposed a limitation that would follow this case for decades. Investigators had suspicion, conflicting accounts, and physical evidence, but still nothing they believed could establish beyond doubt who had killed Carolanne.
Dorothy Doerty died in 1975, 13 years after her daughter’s murder without ever learning who was responsible.
Frank Doherty lived decades longer, telling reporters as late as 1992, that he still hoped to see the case solved in his lifetime.
He died in 2001. He didn’t get that answer either. What investigators in Pennsylvania hadn’t fully reckoned with was where Shrader had already been and what he’d already done in the years since they first let him go.
After leaving Pennsylvania, William Shrader resettled in Terabon Parish, Louisiana, where he married a woman he’d met through a prison connection.
She had two daughters, one of them a minor, both with special needs. Investigators later determined that Shrader subjected multiple children in the household to serious sustained abuse over the years that followed.
Including a child he fathered himself. The family also took in a 12-year-old neighbor, Katherine Smith, as a foster child.
She too became one of his victims. None of this was known to anyone back in Pennsylvania.
To Bristol, Shrader was simply a man who had once been questioned and cleared. On Halloween night 1970, a domestic dispute ended with Shrader’s adult stepson forcing him out of the house.
Before leaving, he threatened to come back and burn it down. That night, a fire broke out.
Every adult escaped. The 2-year-old child he and his wife had adopted survived as well, but only because Katherine Smith acted to protect her.
Catherine did not survive. It took 15 years and family members finally coming forward before Shrader was convicted of arson and manslaughter in Catherine’s death.
He was sentenced to 21 years and was still serving that sentence when Pennsylvania investigators came for him in 1994.
He died in prison in 2002, having never once answered for Carolyn’s murder. The case resurfaced publicly more than once in the years that followed.
In 2016, Pennsylvania’s Attorney General’s office interviewed an accuser of Father Sabadish as part of a much larger statewide investigation into decades of clergy abuse.
The same investigation that would eventually produce a sweeping grand jury report on the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania.
In 2022, the resolution of another decades old Pennsylvania child murder, the Maurice Chavearella case, brought renewed attention to unsolved cases just like this one, and reminded investigators what advances in forensic genealogy had made possible.
And in 2024, a 14-part podcast called The Coldest Murder, hosted by Philadelphia radio personality Mike Misinelli, walked listeners through the case in detail, episode by episode.
Miss Anelli had a personal connection to it few listeners knew about. Chief Faragali was his uncle.
There was one account that sat unheard for 30 years inside a family that already knew more than investigators did.
Robert LeBlanc, William Shider’s stepson, told Louisiana police in 1994 that Shrader had confessed to him directly, an admission about a girl in Pennsylvania inside a church.
Robert reported it again in 2007. Both times the information stayed in Louisiana. It never reached Bucks County.
It wasn’t until 2024 that investigators in Pennsylvania learned what Robert had been trying to tell police for three decades.
They traveled to Louisiana that November and interviewed him directly. His account held up against everything else already on file, and investigators found him credible.
That same year in October, the physical evidence from 1962, including the decades old hair sample, was sent to Aramink, a forensic lab in Texas, for renewed DNA testing, made possible through secured grant funding.
The material had spent decades stored in a municipal building attic exposed to extreme swings in temperature.
The attempt to develop a usable DNA profile failed. The evidence was simply too degraded.
Two threads had finally converged in the same year. A confession that took 30 years to reach the right investigators and a final honest attempt at the one form of proof this case had never had.
One succeeded, the other didn’t. Together they were about to change everything. So without DNA, prosecutors now had to decide whether everything else, the hair, the alibi lie, the cigarettes, the friend’s account, and now a stepson’s confession three decades old was enough.
On October 29th, 2025, Bucks County District Attorney Jennifer Sha announced the findings of an investigating grand jury convened specifically to review the case.
The grand jury heard testimony from Dr. Veraneique Valier, a forensic and clinical psychologist specializing in sex offender assessment.
Her assessment focused on behavioral consistency, the way patterns of violence, deception, and control tend to repeat across a person’s life rather than surface once and disappear.
Investigators had already documented exactly that pattern in Shrader’s own history. The lie he told in 1963, the abuse uncovered in Louisiana, the fire that killed a 12-year-old girl in 1970.
Dr. Valier’s profile of the person responsible for Caroline’s death was consistent point by point with that record.
The grand jury’s findings were detailed in a 53-page report approved 2 days earlier by President Judge Raymond McHugh.
Based on the hair evidence, the eyewitness accounts, and Robert LeBlanc’s testimony, the grand jury concluded that William Shrader was responsible for the sexual assault and murder of Carolan Dari.
Shrader, who had died in 2002, would never face trial. But after 63 years, Bucks County officially closed the case.
K. Doy was the only member of her immediate family left to hear the announcement.
She had grown up in a house where her sister’s murder was never far from the surface.
A photograph on a police chief’s desk, a newspaper series every decade, a question her father carried until the day he died.
She stood before reporters and spoke about what 63 years of uncertainty had meant for her family.
How the unanswered question had shaped nearly every day of their lives and how both of her parents died without ever knowing what she now knew.
She said the finding finally brought closure to a wound that had never fully healed and that even though nothing could bring her sister back, the family could now let her rest.
Her story told and her memory honored. After so many decades of unknowing, [snorts] this finding finally brings closure and a truth to a wound that never healed.
There’s one more thread worth closing here. Mike Misinelli, the radio host whose podcast helped bring renewed attention to this case in 2024, is Vincent Faragali’s nephew.
Farragali died in 2001, still without an answer. More than 20 years later, his own nephew played a role in finally getting one.
Every solved cold case is a reminder that investigations don’t always end when public attention fades.
Sometimes the answer outlasts the mystery itself. If you appreciate documentaries built on evidence rather than speculation, consider subscribing.
And we’d like to know, which piece of evidence do you think mattered most in finally cracking this case?
Let us know in the comments below. One thing is worth stating plainly before we go.
DNA never confirmed this case. It couldn’t be tested. What closed it instead was a hair sample that could not exclude one man combined with a stepson’s account that took decades to reach the investigators who needed it.
A grand jury’s finding is a formal legal conclusion. It is not the same as a criminal conviction.
And William Schrader was never tried in a court of law. That distinction matters, and it’s worth sitting with rather than glossing over.
It’s the reason this case, even now, carries an asterisk that pure forensic proof would have erased.
What’s certain is this. For 63 years, one question outlived almost everyone who first asked it.
The investigators, the parents, the police chief who kept her photograph on his desk. In the end, it was the investigation itself carried forward by people who refused to let it die that finally spoke.
