SOLVED AFTER 61 YEARS: The Murder of Mary Theresa Simpson | Cold Case DNA Breakthrough
There are cases that break a community so completely that the fracture lines never fully heal. Cases where a child goes out on a quiet Sunday afternoon and simply does not come back. Cases where decades pass, where the people who loved her grow old and gray, where investigators retire and are replaced by the next generation.
And still the question hangs in the air unanswered. Who did this? Who took her for 61 years? The city of Elmyra, New York carried exactly that question. It was embedded in the memory of the police department, passed from one generation of detectives to the next like an inheritance no one wanted, but no one was willing to surrender.
It lived in the heart of a sister who was 16 when she stood at a casket and had to be pulled back from climbing inside. It lived in the sleepless nights of a family who watched the decades roll by without resolution, without justice, without a name to give to the darkness that had entered their lives on a cold March evening in 1964. And then on February 10th, 2026, 61 years and 11 months after a 12-year-old girl named Mary Terresa Simpson walked away from her grandfather’s house and never arrived home, a police chief named Kristen Thorne stood at a podium in the
Keon County District Attorney’s Office and said the words the family had been waiting a lifetime to hear. This is a historic day for the Elmyra Police Department. justice after almost 62 years. What followed that announcement was the extraordinary culmination of a story that stretched across more than six decades, involved hundreds of investigators, thousands of leads, and ultimately came down to a fragment of biological material so small it was invisible to the naked eye.
A speck of DNA preserved unknowingly on a piece of clothing stored in a freezer that would survive the Cold War, the moon landing, the rise of the internet, the birth of an entire science, and finally speak the name of a killer who had carried his secret to the grave 22 years before justice caught up to him.
This is the story of Mary Terresa Simpson, a shy, dancing, deeply loved little girl from Elmyra, New York, and a 61-year journey to find the man who killed her. The city of Elmyra sits in the southern tier of New York State, tucked close to the Pennsylvania border in the Fingerlakes region.
In 1964, it was a working city of roughly 50,000 people, the kind of American community where neighbors knew each other by name, where children played kick the can in the streets until nightfall and where a family could reasonably believe that the world outside their door was safe enough. It was the kind of place where people were proud to be from.
Mark Twain had made his summer home there. Tommy Hilfiger would grow up walking those same streets. Brian Williams would be born there. Elmyra was not a city that expected to be touched by the kind of evil that visited it on March 15th, 1964. Mary Terresa Simpson was born in 1951 or 1952 to Ellsworth and Rose Simpson.
She was not the kind of child who drew attention to herself. Her family and friends would describe her repeatedly and consistently over the years with the same words: shy, sweet, quiet. She was the kind of girl who loved to dance, who took dancing lessons with her older sister, Linda, who enjoyed roller skating on the streets with the metal wheeled skates that clamped to the soles of your shoes and needed a key to tighten.
She went to Girl Scouts and Cub Scouts. She went to camp. She spent time at the neighborhood house, the local community center that drew children from across the area. She was, in every meaningful sense, exactly what she appeared to be. A good-natured, gentle, deeply ordinary 12-year-old girl navigating the quiet rhythms of life in a small American city.
Completely unaware that she had been placed in the crosshairs of someone profoundly dangerous. Life at home had not been entirely without difficulty. Mary’s parents, Ellsworth and Rose Simpson, had separated in May of 1963, and the separation had introduced the kind of fractures that only grow harder to navigate the younger you are when they appear.
Mary had gone to live with her father. In late 1963, Ellsworth found work elsewhere and moved Mary with him to nearby Hammondsport, a small village that placed real distance between the 12-year-old and her mother, reducing their contact to occasional monthly visits. It was a quiet kind of heartache, the sort that 12-year-old girls carry around without ever quite articulating it.
She loved both her parents. She missed her mother. She made do with the circumstances she had been given because that was the kind of child she was. Then, in the early weeks of March 1964, Ellsworth found new work back in Almyra, and the two of them returned to the city. They settled into an apartment on North Main Street.
For Mary, this was something close to a gift. She was back in the city she knew. Her mother was nearby again. Her grandfather lived on Sier Street. Her cousins were within reach. The tight geography of family that had been stretched thin during the months and Hammondsport was drawing back together. And that Sunday afternoon, March 15th, 1964, felt like an ordinary expression of exactly that.
Around 3:00 in the afternoon, Mary left the apartment she shared with her father. She told him she was going to visit her cousin. What she did not tell him was that she first intended to stop and see her mother. Perhaps she thought he might not entirely approve given the circumstances of the separation. Perhaps she simply wanted to protect a pocket of her life that felt private and precious.
Whatever the reason, Mary made her way to Dwit Avenue where her mother Rose was living and spent about an hour there sitting with the woman she had missed during those months in Hammondsport catching up being a daughter. She was happy. Rose would remember that much her daughter was happy.
From her mother’s house, Mary walked to her grandfather’s home on Sier Street and spent time playing with her cousins. It was a Sunday in mid-March, still carrying the cold that arrives at that time of year in upstate New York. The kind of chill that makes you pull your jacket tighter and walk a little faster.
Around 6:30 in the evening, Mary waved goodbye to her cousins and her aunt as they turned to enter a neighborhood store. They watched her go. She was heading home to her father’s apartment on North Main Street. The walk was not far. It was a route through familiar streets in a city she had known her whole life. There was no reason at all to be afraid.
She was last seen at the corner of East Market and Harriet Streets by a friend who recalled her saying she was heading home. That was approximately 7:00 in the evening. After that, Mary Terresa Simpson was never seen alive again. Ellsworth Simpson waited. Parents always wait through those first few hours, caught between the rational knowledge that children sometimes lose track of time and the gathering dread that something is genuinely wrong.
By 10:30 that night, the dread had won. He contacted the Elmmyra Police Department and reported his daughter missing. What followed was the kind of organized desperation that overtakes a community when a child disappears. Police began searching. Officers calmed the streets between the last known sighting and the family apartment.
Scores of local and state police were mobilized around them. Everyone was looking for a 12-year-old girl in a coat on a cold March night, and nobody could find her. For 4 days, Mary Teresa Simpson was simply gone. On March 19th, 1964, a man was hiking with his two young sons through a wooded section of Southport near Combs Hill Road, approximately 5 mi from the spot where Mary had last been seen.
The area was known locally as a lover’s lane of sorts, a stretch of old logging road that teenagers used, surrounded by trees and brush that created a measure of seclusion. The man’s sons were the ones who first noticed something on the ground that did not belong there. Stones, a deliberate arrangement of heavy stones placed over something that had been carefully concealed beneath branches, twigs, leaves, and dirt.
The largest stone weighed more than 100 lb. Beneath it all, fully clothed but frozen by the March cold, lay the body of Mary Terresa Simpson, the Elmyra Police Department descended on Combs Hill Road, and what they found confirmed the worst fears of everyone who had been searching for 4 days.
Mary had not wandered off and gotten lost. She had not run away. She had been taken from that street corner on the east side of Elmmyra by someone, carried or driven to this remote location, and there she had been murdered with a savagery that was deeply personal in its cruelty. The medical examiner determined that she had been sexually assaulted.
She had been strangled, death resulting from esphyxiation and in a detail that investigators found disturbing beyond the obvious horror of the crime itself. Her mouth had been stuffed with twigs and dirt. Her eyeglasses and a fan club card were found at the scene preserved as evidence. The killer had then covered her body with branches, debris, and those heavy stones as if trying to bury her from the world entirely.
The news struck Elmmyro with the force of something no community is ever fully prepared to absorb. A 12-year-old girl, the shy dancer from North Main Street, who had just come home from Hammondsport, had been taken and killed in the most brutal and intimate way imaginable. The city grieved, and then it demanded answers.
Mary’s sister, Linda, was 16 years old at the time of the murder. She had been out of town when it happened, and the news reached her like a wall she could not get around. She rushed home and found herself standing at her little sister’s funeral, looking at Mary lying in that casket, and something inside her broke so completely that she had to be physically restrained from climbing in beside her.
Their father had to pull her back. I wanted to be in there with her,” Linda would recall more than 60 years later. Her voice still carrying the weight of that moment. “I couldn’t believe she was in a casket. Their mother, Rose, was pregnant at the time of Mary’s murder, carrying a younger sibling who would be born into a family already permanently marked by grief.
The investigation that followed was for 1964 an extraordinarily intensive one. Elmyra police worked alongside New York State Police, throwing every resource available at the case. By October of that same year, just 7 months after Mary’s death, police had questioned more than 300 suspects. 300 people. The investigation cast an enormous net across the community and beyond, reaching as far as Arizona in its pursuit of anyone who might have information.
Local radio station Wellm and the Stargazette newspaper jointly raised a $1,000 reward fund for anyone who could provide information leading to an arrest. Seven suspects agreed voluntarily to submit to polygraph examinations. The case presented investigators with serious challenges from the very beginning. The wooded area where Mary’s body was discovered offered limited forensic evidence.
There were no witnesses to the abduction itself. No one had seen a car, heard a struggle, noticed anything unusual at the corner of East Market and Harriet Streets that evening around 7:00. The crime scene had been exposed to 4 days of March weather before it was found, compromising whatever physical evidence might have been present.
In 1964, the forensic toolkit available to investigators was a fraction of what would eventually be developed over the following decades. There was no DNA testing. There were no databases to cross reference. There was no genetic genealogy. There were fingerprints, witness testimony, polygraph results, and shoe leather. And none of it led anywhere definitive enough to make an arrest.
The case went cold. The 300 interviews produced no prosecution. The polygraph tests yielded no breakthrough. The reward fund eventually increased to $5,000 by 1972. Drew no useful information. Anniversary stories appeared in the Star Gazette each March, reminding the community that a 12-year-old girl had been murdered and her killer had never been found.
The reward money was eventually donated to a charity in Mary’s name. The case files accumulated, thickened, and sat in storage at the Ommyra Police Department while the officers who had worked the original investigation retired and were replaced by the next generation. But the case was never truly abandoned.
This is one of the things that makes the story of Mary Terresa Simpson so remarkable. Across 60 years, across multiple generations of Elmyra police officers, the case maintained a hold on the department that went beyond professional obligation. Officers who joined the department decades after the crime still felt its presence.
They still carried her name. Then, police chief Joseph Kaine told reporters in 2019 that the case was very much part of the department, part of the consciousness of the officers who worked there. Just weeks before he spoke those words, a new tip had come in. People were still calling. People who had known the neighborhood in 1964, who had heard things or seen things or been told things that they had carried quietly for decades, still sometimes picked up the phone.
The problem, Kane acknowledged, was that so many of the people connected to the original investigation had died. Every year that passed, the living witnesses became fewer and the window narrowed. But something else was happening alongside the passage of time. Something that no one working Mary Terresa Simpson’s case in 1964 could possibly have anticipated.
Science was advancing. Forensic technology was evolving in ways that would have seemed like science fiction to the detectives who had combed Hilm Hill Road in March of that year. And the evidence that had been collected from the scene, the clothing, the personal belongings, the biological materials had been preserved. Not because anyone in 1964 knew what DNA was or understood that it would one day be the most powerful identification tool in the history of criminal investigation.
It had been preserved because that is what investigators did. They kept evidence. They filed it away. They locked it in storage. Mary’s clothing had been kept in a freezer at the Almra Police Department since her death. A frozen record of what had been done to her, waiting decades for a science that did not yet exist to come and read its secrets.
In 2003, 39 years after the murder, investigators submitted pieces of Mary’s clothing to the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center. Testing of a cutting from her skirt and underwear produced a significant finding. The presence of semen was confirmed. DNA was extracted from the material and entered into COTUS, the national combined DNA index system that stores genetic profiles of convicted offenders for comparison against evidence from crime scenes. The investigators waited.
No match came. The profile of Mary’s killer sat in the database as an unknown male, a ghost identified only by his genetic signature with no name attached and no face to accompany it. In 2014, the evidence was resubmitted. The forensic science had advanced in the intervening decade.
Analysts were now able to focus more specifically on male DNA within the sample, refining the profile further. The result was submitted again to Cotus and again, silence no match. The killer was not in the system. He had never been arrested for a crime that had required his DNA to be collected and cataloged. He had moved through the world, leaving no criminal record that the databases could reach.
For many investigators, this would have been the end of the road. The limitations of COTUS as a tool are significant. It only contains the DNA of people who have been arrested for qualifying crimes. If the person responsible for a crime has managed to avoid that net, COTUS cannot find them. It is an enormously powerful database with real and documented limitations and Mary Terresa Simpson’s case had reached those limits twice.
But the world was changing again. In 2018, an investigation in California captured the attention of law enforcement agencies across the country and in many ways across the world. The arrest of Joseph James D’Angelo, the Golden State Killer, introduced the wider public to a technique called forensic genetic genealogy.
Instead of searching a database of criminals, investigators had used a publicly accessible ancestry database to identify distant relatives of the unknown suspect, then built a family tree backwards until they arrived at a single man. It was, as many described it at the time, a new kind of science, a way of reaching into the vast web of human biological connection and finding a specific person through the threads that bound them to everyone else.
In Elmmyra, a police sergeant named William Goodwin was paying close attention. Goodwin had been working on Mary Terresa Simpson’s case with the quiet determination that characterized the department’s relationship with this particular file. He had not given up. He had never given up. And when he saw what forensic genetic genealogy had accomplished in California, he understood immediately what it might mean for a 12-year-old girl in upstate New York whose killer had evaded Cotus twice. The challenge was funding.
Forensic genetic genealogy is an expensive specialized process. It requires submission of evidence to advanced private laboratories capable of extracting and analyzing DNA profiles from degraded or minute samples and then using those profiles to conduct genetic genealological searches through ancestry databases.
The Ommyra Police Department, a municipal force in a city of modest means, did not have the resources to pursue this technology independently. Goodwin began looking for a way forward. In 2022, working in partnership with the FBI, Goodwin secured a grant from an organization called Season of Justice, a nonprofit specifically dedicated to providing funding to investigative agencies and families seeking to solve cold cases.
The grant opened the door to what would become the final chapter of a 60-year investigation. In February 2023, forensic evidence from Mary’s case was packed carefully and sent to Aram Incorporated, a private forensic laboratory headquartered in the Woodlands, Texas, that had established itself as a world leader in the recovery and analysis of DNA from degraded, contaminated, or extremely small biological samples.
What author received was approximately 0.4 nanogs of DNA. Sergeant Goodwin would later describe this quantity in terms designed to help people grasp just how extraordinarily small it was, less than half a nanog invisible to the naked eye, an amount of biological material so minute that it defied ordinary intuition. And yet it contained within it if scientists could coax it out the complete genetic identity of the man who had murdered Mary Terresa Simpson.
There was an additional pressure that made the work even more fraught with tension. DNA evidence is consumed in the testing process. it is used up. When Oram received that 0.4 nanogs, they were receiving not just a sample, but the entirety of the remaining evidence. If the testing failed, there would be nothing left to try again.
60 years of preservation, 60 years of careful storage in a freezer at the Ommyra Police Department would be exhausted in a single attempt. If the science could not deliver a result from this sample, there would never be another opportunity. The case would end there, not with an answer, but with a door closing permanently.
Then came an entirely unexpected obstacle that could have ended everything before it began. FBI special agent Kenneth Jensen had been assigned to assist the Ommyra Police Department with the case. He understood what was at stake with the DNA sample. He packed the fragile evidence carefully in dry ice, placed it inside a cooler, and shipped it to Aram’s laboratory in Texas via FedEx.
It was the safest and most expedient method available. There was nothing extraordinary about the logistics until everything became extraordinary at once. An ice storm of historic proportions descended on Memphis, Tennessee, where the largest FedEx hub in the world is located. The hub shut down. Shipments were stranded.
The package containing the last remaining DNA evidence from Mary Terresa Simpson’s 1964 murder was sitting somewhere inside that frozen, paralyzed hub with the dry ice that kept it stable slowly depleting. If the dry ice ran out entirely before the storm cleared and the package could be located and shipped, the DNA could be compromised beyond recovery.
Jensen could not get anyone at FedEx on the phone. The storm had disrupted everything. In a moment of desperation, he reached out to fellow FBI agents in Memphis. The bureau, it turned out, had a liaison stationed at the FedEx hub. That agent was dispatched into the chaos of the storm to find a single package among the thousands of stranded shipments.
What Goodwwind would later call a massive scavenger hunt unfolded in the frozen Memphis hub while investigators in Elmmyra watched and waited and tried not to think about the dry ice running out. The FBI agent found the package just in time, just barely in time. Jensen then made the decision to hold the DNA in the FBI’s freezer in Memphis until the storm had cleared and it could be safely transported to Texas.
The sample was preserved. The science could proceed. Author’s scientists applied what the company calls forensic grade genome sequencing to the 0.4 nanog sample. Working with degraded and trace quantities of biological material is Aram’s particular expertise and the scientists succeeded in building a comprehensive DNA profile from the microscopic evidence.
A complete genetic portrait of an unknown male. Assembled from this smallest possible fragment of biological reality was now ready to be matched against the world. The FBI’s forensic genetic genealogy team then took over. Using the profile had developed, they began searching publicly accessible genealogy databases. The same ancestry websites where millions of ordinary people upload their DNA to find long-lost relatives and trace their family histories.
The principle of forensic genetic genealogy is elegant in its logic. Everyone shares DNA with their relatives. The closer the relative, the more DNA is shared. Even distant cousins share measurable quantities. By finding people in the databases who share portions of their DNA with the unknown profile, investigators can begin to map a family tree, building outward from the unknown person’s genetic connections to identify the web of relatives from whom a suspect might be drawn.
The process is painstaking and requires genuine genealogical expertise alongside scientific skill. It is not a database search in the simple sense. It is detective work conducted at the molecular level. It requires researchers to trace family branches across generations, to cross reference historical records, to eliminate possibilities and pursue promising threads with the same patient determination that any investigation demands. It took years.
The work continued through 2023, 2024, and into 2025 with Ommyra Police, the FBI, and students from the Criminal Investigation Resource Center at Russell Sage College working together to organize and digitize the thousands of pages of case files accumulated over 60 years and to cross reference the genetic leads with the historical record.
In 2023, Elmira Police had also partnered with the Criminal Investigation Resource Center at Russell Sage College, bringing fresh academic eyes to bear on the mountains of documentation that had accumulated across the decades. Students worked alongside investigators to organize, digitize, and conduct detailed reviews of case files, forensic records, and suspect leads from the original investigation.
It was a collaboration that reflected the reality of modern cold case investigation. The science was advancing fast enough that institutional memory needed to be preserved and organized to make use of it, and that required help. Gradually, through the layered work of the FBI’s genealogy team, the pool of possible suspects narrowed.
Family connections were identified. Branches of the family tree were explored and eliminated, and in 2024, investigators began conducting interviews with potential relatives who fell within the narrowing genetic circle. The pursuit was closing in on someone. A person whom investigators were coming to refer to as John Doe, the unknown male whose DNA had been sitting in evidence storage since 1964, still without a name.
Then came the moment that broke the case open. Investigators made contact with a living individual who the genealogical analysis suggested was likely a biological son of the unknown contributor to the DNA evidence recovered from Mary’s clothing. That individual agreed voluntarily to submit a buckle swab, a simple cheek swab for DNA comparison.
The New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center analyzed the sample and compared it to the profile extracted from Mary’s skirt. The result confirmed what the genetic genealogy had been pointing toward. The buckle swab donor was biologically related in a paternal relationship to the unknown DNA on Mary Teresa Simpson’s clothing.
The father of this individual was now identified as John Doe. He had a name and that name led investigators directly to a man who had lived in Elmmyra his entire life, had served in the United States Army from 1951 to 1959, had worked as a truck driver for Mayflower Vanlines, and had died of natural causes on March 16th, 2004 at the age of 73.
His name was Alfred Raymond Murray Jr. Murray had been born in 1931 in Ommyra. He had grown up in the same city where Mary Terresa Simpson grew up. He was 32 years old on the night she was killed. A grown man with a family of his own children. A life by every surface appearance unremarkable. He had served his country in the Korean War era.
He had come home and built an ordinary working life in his hometown. And according to the Ommyra Police Department, his name had never once appeared in the thousands of pages of documents generated by the investigation into Mary’s murder. He was not among the 300 people questioned. He was not among the seven who agreed to take a polygraph.
He was not among the suspects who had been pursued, eliminated, and forgotten over the decades. He was completely invisible to the investigation, a ghost hiding in plain sight in the city where he had committed an unspeakable crime against a child. Investigators would later state that there was no indication Alfred Murray had any relationship to Mary Theresa Simpson or her family.
He had not known her. This was in the assessment of the Almyra Police Department a crime of opportunity. A man with what law enforcement sources described as a known and disturbing history of interest in children had encountered a 12-year-old girl walking alone on an eastside street corner in the early evening of a March Sunday and he had taken her.
The details of exactly what happened between that corner and Combmes Road belong only to Alfred Murray Jr. and he took them to his grave. But the knowledge that he was the man responsible did not end with the son’s DNA. Investigators still needed the most definitive possible confirmation. With the financial assistance of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and with the legal authorization of the Kimong County Court, the decision was made to exume Alfred Murray Jr.’s grave.
On November 5th, 2025, Murray’s remains were exumed. Several retired officers who had worked on Mary Theresa Simpson’s case over the years were present for the exumation. Drawn back by the weight of what this moment represented, a forensic anthropologist from Detroit was brought in to assist with the recovery of biological samples.
Those samples were submitted to the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center for comparison against the DNA recovered from Mary’s clothing more than 60 years earlier. The results were unambiguous. The probability that the DNA recovered from Mary Terresa Simpson’s clothing belonged to anyone other than Alfred Raymond Murray Jr.
was less than 1 in 320 billion. Not one in a million. Not one in a billion. 1 in 320 billion. The science had delivered its verdict as definitively as science can deliver anything. Alfred Murray Jr. had killed Mary Theresa Simpson on February 10th, 2026. A room packed with reporters, investigators, community members, retired officers, and the surviving family of Mary Theresa Simpson gathered at the Kimone County District Attorney’s Office on Lake Street in Elmyra.
Police Chief Kristen Thorne took the podium and opened with words that landed in that room like something long held underwater finally breaking the surface. This is a historic day for the Elmyra Police Department. justice. After almost 62 years, Sergeant William Goodwin, the lead investigator who had carried this case through its modern chapter, unveiled the photograph, and the name that had been hidden for more than six decades, Alfred Raymond Murray Jr.
for decades, Goodwin said the individual connected to the forensic evidence had been known only as John Doe. through investigative genetic genealogy and the combined efforts of the Almra Police Department, the FBI, the New York State Police, Author Incorporated, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the students of Russell Sage College, that John Doe had finally been given his name.
Murray was not present to face those words. He had died 22 years earlier, buried in Ommyra, no more than a few miles from the city where he had taken the life of a child. He would never stand in a courtroom. He would never hear a verdict read. He would never be required to explain himself to the family whose lives he had fractured beyond repair with a single act of violence on a March evening in 1964.
Kimoon County District Attorney Weeden Wetmore was clear on the matter. If Alfred Murray Jr. were still alive, the district attorney’s office would seek criminal charges against him for murder. But he was not alive. And so the justice that arrived on February 10th, 2026 was the only kind available. Imperfect. incomplete in the ways that all postumous resolutions are incomplete, but real.
A name where there had been no name for 61 years. An answer where there had been only an open wound. In that packed room, three of Mary Teresa Simpson’s surviving relatives sat and received the news that had been more than six decades in coming. her uncle Dwayne Bowman, her cousin Ronnie Bowman, and her sister Linda Galpin, 78 years old, who had been 16 the last time she saw Mary lying still in a casket, and had wanted to climb in beside her.
Linda stood up and addressed the room. She had lived with this for most of her life. She had gone to Girl Scouts with Mary, had taken dancing lessons with her, had roller skated with her on those metal wheeled skates on the streets of their Elmyra neighborhood. She had grown up, grown old, lost her parents, watched the decades pass without resolution.
Her mother, Rose, had been pregnant when Mary was killed, had given birth to another daughter into a family already forever changed, and had never lived to see this day. Linda spoke for her mother as much as for herself. “It affected me real bad,” she said. Her voice carrying everything 61 years of unresolved grief sounds like, “I wanted to jump in the casket. My dad had to pull me back.
I live through years of crying and heartache. I did this for my mom. When she was asked whether the resolution felt like justice, Linda Galpin paused. 61 years is a long time to carry a question. The answer, when it finally comes, does not undo a single day of that carrying. It does not bring the 12-year-old girl back.
It does not restore the mother who waited and never knew, or the father who reported his daughter missing at 10:30 on a March evening and never fully recovered from what followed. But it is something. It is the acknowledgement that she existed, that what was done to her mattered, that the world did not simply move on and forget.
It sounds like justice, Linda said finally. It’s going to take me a little while for it to sink in. And I thank everybody for all their help. The Elmyra Police Department announced that the case was now officially closed. It was, investigators noted, the oldest cold case in the department’s history. It was believed to be the oldest homicide ever solved using DNA technology anywhere in the United States.
A case that had opened in 1964 and traveled across 61 years of investigation, technological evolution, institutional memory, and human determination had finally reached its end. What makes the story of Mary Teresa Simpson so remarkable is not simply the passage of time. Those 61 years is a staggering span by any measure. It is the combination of factors that came together improbably and persistently to deliver a resolution that had every reason in the world to never arrive.
It begins with the evidence preservation. In 1964, nobody knew what DNA was. The structure of the double helix had been described only 11 years earlier by Watson and Crick. The idea that biological material on a piece of clothing could decades later be used to identify a specific individual from among the entire human population of the Earth was science fiction in the truest sense.
The officers who collected Mary’s clothing from that crime scene, who submitted it as evidence and stored it as a matter of standard investigative practice, had no idea what they were preserving. They were not thinking about genetic sequencing or forensic genealogy or nanogs of biological material. They were thinking about a 12-year-old girl and the tools they had available to them.
They filed the evidence in a freezer and it sat there for 60 years unaware of its own significance. That unknowing act of procedural care was the foundation upon which everything else was eventually built. It continues with the generations of Elmmyra police officers who refuse to file this case away as hopeless. Every department has cold cases.
Not every department maintains the kind of relationship with a decades old file that the Ommyra Police Department maintained with Mary Teresa Simpson. The case never stopped being worked. It was re-examined with new tools in 2003. It was submitted again in 2014. It was the subject of ongoing attention and follow-up throughout the intervening year.
When Sergeant William Goodwin began the modern phase of the investigation, he was not starting from nothing. He was inheriting a case that had been kept warm by every officer before him who had refused to simply wait for someone else to care. It continues with the FBI’s willingness to partner with a municipal police department in a small New York City to assign an agent like Kenneth Jensen to assist with the case and ultimately to use Jensen’s retirement connections at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to fund
the exumation that delivered the final confirmation. And it continues with the extraordinary drama of that ice storm in Memphis and the FBI agent who conducted what Sergeant Goodwin called a massive scavenger hunt through a frozen paralyzed shipping hub to find a single package carrying an amount of DNA invisible to the naked eye.
Because if that package had been lost, if the dry ice had run out and the sample had been degraded beyond use, the story would have ended there. 60 years of preservation undone by a weather event. It came that close. And it continues with author incorporated and with the science itself. The technology that allowed 0.
4 nanogs of degraded biological material to yield a complete and usable genetic profile is extraordinary. The fact that it existed at all is the product of decades of scientific advancement that unfolded completely independently of Mary Theresa Simpson’s case but converged with it at exactly the right moment. The science arrived in time.
It arrived just barely in time with virtually no DNA remaining after the sample was consumed in testing, but it arrived. Alfred Raymond Murray Jr. was a married man with children when he killed Mary Terresa Simpson. He was 32 years old, old enough to know exactly what he was doing and what it meant. He had served in the army.
He worked an ordinary job. He lived in the same city as a family of the child he murdered and continued to live there for decades afterward. Whether he ever thought about what he had done, whether guilt found him in the night, or whether he carried his secret with the ease of someone who felt nothing is something no one will ever know.
He died in 2004 believing in all likelihood that his secret had died with him. It had not. It had been waiting in a freezer at the Ommyra Police Department for 40 years when he died, and it would wait there for another 21 more before the science came to collect it. Police Chief Thorne stood at that podium and spoke of a historic day.
But the history in this story is not simply the history of a case solved. It is the history of a community that refused to forget a child, of a sister who waited 61 years and made it to the day when she could finally hear a name spoken aloud in a courtroom setting and know that the question was answered. of investigators who passed a file from one generation to the next and said simply, “We are not done with this.
” Of a science that grew up slowly over decades and reached its hand back into 1964 and found what everyone had been looking for. Mary Terresa Simpson was 12 years old. She was shy. She loved to dance. She roller skated on metal wheeled skates on the streets of Elmmyra with her sister Linda. She went to Girl Scouts and to camp and to the neighborhood house.
She navigated the quiet difficulty of her parents’ separation with the grace of a child who simply keeps moving forward because that is what children do. On a Sunday afternoon in March 1964, she visited her mother, played with her cousins, waved goodbye, and turned toward home. She never arrived, and the world took 61 years to say her name the way it needed to be said. Rest in peace, Mary Teresa.
The answer finally came.
