51 Years Later, DNA Exposed an Ohio Child Killer

In other news tonight, the Boardman Police Department will hold a news conference at 1 p.m. tomorrow with an update on a murder case that shook the Mahoning Valley 51 years ago. >> It’s the case of 12-year-old Brad Bolino, who went missing in the spring of 1972 and was found dead 4 days later. Brad Bolino’s body was discovered on April 4th, 1972 in a dumpster behind what was then the Eley store in the Boardman Plaza.

 This is WKBN news footage from that time. >> Somewhere along a 3mile stretch of road in Boardman, Ohio, in the spring of 1972, a 12-year-old boy vanished into the dark. For 51 years, the man responsible lived free. Not on the run, not in hiding. 5 miles away in the same township, driving a delivery truck, raising a family, going entirely unnoticed.

 This is the story of Brad Bolino and the science that finally dragged his killer out of the shadows decades after everyone assumed the answer was gone for good. In 1972, Boardman, Ohio was a suburb of Youngstown, a steel town people were proud to call home. It was the kind of place where doors stayed unlocked at night and kids roamed for miles without anyone worrying.

 That sense of safety didn’t survive what happened to Brad. It couldn’t. His name was Bradley Lee Bolino. Everyone called him Brad. He was born on April 7th, 1959 in Youngstown, Mahoning County, Ohio. The youngest of four children with two older brothers and an older sister ahead of him in a house that was by every account warm and a little chaotic.

 His mother, Elisa, worked as a buyer for Lane Bryant. His father, Joseph, worked shifts at Youngstown Sheet and Tube, the steel company that put food on the table for half the neighborhood. Brad was small for his age, four feet tall, about 80 lb. A boy who could still pass for younger than 12, with what a neighbor once called a sunny disposition.

 But the people who actually knew him described someone sharper than that word suggests. His best friend, Don Templeman, put it simply, years later, Brad was outgoing. He was the one who came up with the risk, Don said. And I was the one who went along with it. Hold on to that. Brad was not a passive kid.

 He was the one leading, the one with the ideas, the one who spent three summers as a catcher, crouched behind home plate while Don pitched to him, and Don’s father coached from the sideline. He rode his bike everywhere. Three miles didn’t feel like a distance to him. It felt like a Tuesday. He and Don would hitchhike sometimes, too.

 A detail that reads very differently now than it would have in 1972 when Boardman was still the kind of place where front doors were left unlocked overnight without much worry. There was a lapidary near his house, a little rock and gem shop where Brad and Don used to go just to look at the geodess.

 It was the kind of place two curious boys drift toward on a slow afternoon. It would matter later. It would matter more than anyone could have predicted. On Friday nights, when the arrangement ran the other direction, Don would sleep over at Brad’s house instead, and the two of them would walk across the street to a drive-in to catch whatever was playing.

 Brad’s father owned a vintage sports car, a little open two-seater, and on good days, he’d drive the boys around town with the top down. It was, by every description anyone has ever given of it, an ordinary, happy childhood. Nobody in that family had any reason to believe it wouldn’t stay that way. Now the day had changed.

 It was Easter break, so there was no school. Brad had spent Thursday night at Dawn’s house, as the two of them often did, trading nights back and forth between their homes like it was nothing. Thursday afternoon, his father, Joseph, had given him permission to stay over with the expectation that Brad would be home by 4 in the afternoon on Friday, but plans shifted the way they do with 12-year-olds.

 Brad called his father and asked for more time. His father agreed, but only until 9:00 that night. Friday was spent, the way idol spring days are spent, by two boys with nowhere they have to be, walking around Boardman, no particular destination. At some point, they noticed a van, brown, unremarkable.

 And then they noticed it again and again, three or four times in different parts of town. At first, they joked about it. Then the joke stopped being funny and they headed back toward Dawn’s house. There’s a small human detail in how that evening actually unfolded. Brad called his own house first and told his older brother he’d be staying at Dawn’s again.

 It seemed settled, but about 20 minutes later, his father called the Templeman house directly and told Brad to come home instead. Two calls 20 minutes apart, pulling him in opposite directions. And in the end, it was his father’s voice that won out. Brad did what he was told. By early evening, the plan was for Don’s mother to drive Brad home as she usually did.

 But that Friday, she was at the grocery store. Don’s father was in bed sick with the flu. There was no ride available. So at 7:30 in the evening, with the sun going down, Brad decided to walk. He said goodbye to Dawn. He stepped outside. Don went to bed not long after. Around 10:00 that night, Brad’s older brother called the Templeman house, asking if Brad had made it back yet.

 Don’s mother told him Brad had left hours earlier. Now genuinely alarmed, she woke Dawn, and the two of them got in the car and retraced the route Brad would have walked. They found nothing. Brad’s father got home late that night, assumed his son had simply stayed over again, and went to bed around 2:00 in the morning without checking.

 He woke up around noon on Saturday, realized Brad wasn’t home, called the Templeman’s, and learned his son had left their house the night before and never arrived. He went out searching immediately. By 3:20 that afternoon, Brad was officially reported missing to Boardman police. For the rest of the weekend, family, neighbors, and officers searched the streets of Boardman.

 Brad had a bit of a reputation as a wanderer, and that reputation gave people hope for a while. But when Sunday came and went, Easter Sunday, a day this close-knit family would never have missed together. The hope started to curdle into something else. There were scattered, unconfirmed sightings that Saturday at a mall on a basketball court at a Dairy Queen.

 All, as it would later turn out, almost certainly wrong. Most likely simple confusion between a Friday with no school and the Saturday that followed it. The search continued anyway because a search needs somewhere to look and rumor was the only map anyone had. Then came Tuesday. At around 8:00 in the morning on April 4th, 1972, a sanitation worker named Paul Smith was collecting trash from a dumpster behind’s dairy store at the Boardman Plaza.

 Underneath layers of garbage and cardboard, he made a tragic discovery. He had found 12-year-old Brad. The plaza is barely a mile from where Brad was last seen. The whole town had been searching outward, imagining some faraway location. The answer the entire time may have been sitting almost within walking distance of where the search began.

 Police called for Brad’s cousin, a youngsttown vice squad officer named Tony Deolto, who had spent the weekend helping in the search himself. It fell to him to make the identification. It fell to him afterward to walk into his aunt and uncle’s house and tell them their youngest child was dead. Decades later, he would say only this.

 You are never prepared to do something like that. You just do it. Brad’s body was taken to Southside Hospital in Youngstown where the Mahoning County Coroner, Dr. David Bolinki, performed the examination. He would later tell reporters in words that made the local papers that this was the act of a degenerate.

 It was as close to an explanation as anyone in 1972 was ever going to get. Here is what the autopsy showed delivered plainly. Brad had suffered fatal injury caused by asphixxiation. A belt found around his neck. There were clear indications he had been subjected to severe physical trauma before losing his life.

 There were no signs he had fought back. No defensive marks, no bruising consistent with a struggle, a detail that troubled investigators for decades. One expert would later suggest an explanation. Certain conditions can bring on unconsciousness within seconds before a struggle even has the chance to begin.

 The original coroner’s report placed the time of death at 9:00 on Saturday night, more than 24 hours after Brad was last seen. For 50 years, that gap sat at the center of the case, unexplained. Where was he? Who had him? But there was a detail in that same autopsy that quietly argued against the timeline everyone had accepted. In Brad’s stomach, still only partially digested, was the dinner he had eaten at the Templeman House Friday night.

Chicken and pineapple. Digestion doesn’t wait 24 hours. And so decades later, when investigators looked at this case with fresh eyes, they would reach a very different conclusion. Brad was almost certainly taken within hours of walking out that door on Friday night, not held somewhere for a day.

 The timeline that haunted this case for half a century appears to have simply been wrong. Now, the investigation and its failures. Boardman in 1972 was a small department handling a case that would have tested a much larger one. Evidence was collected without much consistency. Leads piled up in boxes without a clear system for following through.

 The belt itself became its own small mystery. It was sized for a much younger child, fit for a 5 or 6year-old, and small enough that some in the Bolino family couldn’t even confirm it belonged to Brad at all. Some reports say it was his. Others say his own belt was still on him, which would mean the one around his neck belonged to someone else entirely.

 Investigators believed it came from a department store chain with a local branch, but could never trace a purchase to anyone. It was later sent to a forensic dentist who confirmed bite marks on the tag end, but not enough of a pattern to ever match a suspect. There’s another detail here, and it deserves to be told honestly because the record itself is divided on it.

 Don Templeman has said that when police brought him to the station to identify Brad’s clothing, they also showed him an object they said had been used against Brad during the assault. It’s a memory that has stayed with him for over 50 years. But the two retired officers most closely tied to this case remember it differently. One denies it happened at all.

 The other doesn’t recall it. The coroner’s report doesn’t mention any such object, though it does confirm in clinical terms the tragic nature of the harm inflicted. This is one of the places this story cannot hand you a clean answer. A frightened boy’s memory of the worst day of his life sits on one side.

 Two officers recollection sits on the other. Both are trying to tell the truth. They don’t agree. Brad was laid to rest at Green Haven Memorial Gardens in a funeral so crowded it was standing room only. classmates, teachers, neighbors, nearly the entire school Brad and Don had attended together. For a town that had believed only days earlier that nothing like this could happen here, the funeral was the moment that belief finally permanently broke. And then came the leads.

 Dozens of them, all dead ends, one after another. A security guard with a strange fixation on police work, eliminated by DNA. A local man known only as old Bob investigated and never charged. Whispered rumors about a theater projectionist, a man at a pizza shop, hundreds of vehicles, including an orange sports car that led nowhere.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about this stretch of the case. None of it went anywhere. Every name, every tip, every search warrant. Dead end. Dead end. Dead end. For the officers who inherited this file decades later, that was the hardest part. Not the horror of the crime itself, but the sheer volume of nothing they had to wade through just to get back to where the case had started.

 In 2001, 29 years after Brad died, the case was reopened. Brad’s body was exumed. Clothing evidence was sent to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation. And there finally was a real breakthrough. Forensic scientists found DNA on Brad’s clothing that did not belong to him. It belonged almost certainly to whoever had killed him. A profile was built.

 It was uploaded to CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database. It came back with nothing. No match anywhere in the system. Retired police chief Jack Nichols, who would go on to spend years on this case, put it in blunt terms. People who commit crimes like this against children don’t typically do it once and stop.

 So, why wasn’t this man anywhere in the system? There were explanations, none satisfying. Some states still hadn’t required DNA collection from every prisoner already behind bars before newer laws took effect. Some offenders refused to provide samples. Some collections simply never happened. Lost in the same kind of bureaucratic gap that swallows evidence in cases like this one across the country.

 It was entirely possible Brad’s killer had already been arrested for something else somewhere and had simply slipped through one of those gaps. A scenario that, as it would eventually turn out, wasn’t far from what actually happened. Around 2007 or 2008, the case was formally reassigned to Nicholls and Detective Robert Rup along with two other unsolved Boardman deaths from the same era.

 15-year-old Thomas Baird beaten in 1970 and 13-year-old David Evans found dead in 1975. We’ll come back to David. Here is what Nichols and Rup did not know yet. Two of these three cases were in fact connected and proving it would take years of quiet, unglamorous work. Going through decades of paperwork, Nicholls and Rup narrowed the list of persistent names down to seven men who kept surfacing in old police reports.

 None of them had enough against them to be called suspects outright. But the courts, Nichols would later explain, are more willing to grant a warrant when police are trying to clear a name rather than build a case against one. Using that opening, the two detectives secured search warrants and collected DNA from every one of the seven.

 Every single sample came back negative. Seven men eliminated, a belt with no pattern. A national DNA database with no match. two detectives, one of them nearing retirement, staring at a case that had already outlived most of the people who first worked it. The break, when it finally came, didn’t come from a witness or a confession.

 It came from a technology that didn’t exist when Brad Bolino died. In 2018, Boardman Police under Captain Albert Kakashik began working with Parabon Nanolabs, a forensic genetic genealogy company, the same kind of technique that had just helped identify the Golden State Killer in California. Take an unknown DNA profile uploaded into public genealogy databases where ordinary people have voluntarily shared their own genetic information to research family history.

Look for partial matches, distant cousins. Build outward, branch by branch, generation by generation, narrowing an entire family tree down to one living person. It sounds almost simple when you say it that fast. It wasn’t. This was still a relatively new tool for law enforcement in 2018, and Boardman’s case would end up being one of the more difficult trees anyone at Parabon had worked through, precisely because the profile they were chasing belonged to a man who had done everything right to stay invisible. No

criminal record worth mentioning, no prior arrests to flag him, nothing but a distant thread of shared DNA connecting him to people who had never heard his name attached to anything. Parabon’s phenotyping gave investigators a physical profile. A man of European descent. Fair or very fair skin, possibly with freckles, brown or hazel eyes, black or brown hair.

 A start, not an answer. For the next four years, investigators worked the family tree down, one branch at a time. Captain Kauashik described it in stark terms. They’d know from a percentage of shared DNA that the profile came from a particular branch. Try this section. They’d be told, “Compare it. No, not this one. Move down again.

” It wasn’t clean work. Family trees don’t account for adoptions that were never documented or births families quietly never spoke of. Not every distant relative wanted to give a sample voluntarily. The genealogy traced back through generations of a family with roots in Wales, then worked forward again toward the present day.

Each branch eliminated was in its own way a small defeat, and each one narrowed the field a little more. The process took four years and cost the township just over $29,000. And then finally, on the most recent branch of the tree, a living relative agreed to give a sample voluntarily. That relative by every account was appalled to learn what a member of their own family might have done.

 The sample was a match. 98.2% probability according to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Not a perfect confirmation because the man himself could no longer be tested directly. He had died in July of 2019 and been cremated, but a forensic scientist at BC Y reviewed everything and stood behind the match.

 On January 24th, 2023, Boardman Police Chief Todd Worth stood at a podium and said the name Joseph Norman Hill. He wasn’t a drifter. He wasn’t a stranger passing through. In 1972, Joseph Norman Hill was 32 years old, married, and living on Shadyside Drive in Boardman, less than 5 miles from the Bolino family home. He drove a truck for a bottled water company, delivering bottles to homes and businesses around the very township where Brad lived.

 To everyone who remembered him, he was entirely unremarkable. Police found no connection at all between Hill and the Bolino family. As far as anyone can determine, Brad was not a target chosen because of who he was. He may simply have been a boy walking alone in the dark on a night when there was no one available to give him a ride.

 Think about what that actually means. While boardman searched its streets for 4 days, questioned neighbors, chased down a brown van and an orange sports car and hundreds of other vehicles that led nowhere, the man responsible was almost certainly still in town, still going to work, still coming home to his own family every night.

 He wasn’t hiding in the shadows the way these stories usually go. He was in plain sight the whole time, doing something as ordinary as delivering water bottles to houses just streets away from where Brad’s family was searching. Hill moved his family to California in 1978, eventually settling in Ukipa, San Bernardino County.

 Over the following four decades, he lived in 14 different residences. His wife died in 1993. His only recorded brush with the law came in 1986 in Los Angeles. a conviction for disorderly conduct and solicitation. Nothing else, no pattern anyone could point to. He died in an assisted living facility in July of 2019 of natural causes, never questioned, never charged.

He had been dead for 3 and 1/2 years. By the time his name was finally spoken in that room in Boardman, even after his identity was confirmed, investigators found themselves running into a different kind of wall. Hill’s wife had died decades earlier and police chief Todd Worth would later describe his surviving family as very limited, which meant very limited information about who Joseph Norman Hill actually was, what he was like behind closed doors, or what, if anything, anyone around him ever suspected. The man who had eluded a

national DNA database for over 20 years managed in death to remain almost as difficult to fully understand as he’d been to find in the first place. Mahoning County Prosecutor Gina De Geneva told reporters that had Hill still been alive, her office was confident there was enough evidence to bring the case before a grand jury.

Instead, there would be no trial, no conviction. What there was finally after 51 years was a name. Standing at that same podium, retired detective Robert Rup, the man who had spent years of his career on this case before retiring, said something that has stayed with almost everyone who covered the story. Ever since the day he stood at that dumpster and watched them pull Brad’s body out, he said he had thought about this case every single day of his life.

Now, he said he could finally think about it knowing the boy was at peace. Brad’s family attended the press conference. They sat quietly. They did not speak publicly. They came, by every account, simply to be present, to thank the officers who had refused to let this case die. Don Templeman moved away from Boardman with his family that same year.

First to Tennessee, then further still, and for nearly three decades, no one in law enforcement asked him another question about that night. Then around the year 2000, while he was on a trip to Disney World with his own wife and children, Boardman detectives tracked him down by phone. While his family swam at the hotel pool, Don sat alone in the room for an hour, going back through every detail he could remember.

 It was the first time anyone had asked him anything about Brad since 1972. And it did not end there. 5 months later in June of 2023, Boardman police and Ohio’s attorney general Dave Yost held a second press conference. This one was about David Evans, the 13-year-old boy whose 1975 death had been reassigned to Nicholls and Rup alongside Brad’s case all those years earlier.

 David lived about a mile from where Brad had been found, and the two boys had more in common than their neighborhood. David was also a student at the same middle school. He also played baseball, teaching himself to pitch and catch one-handed after being born with a narrow hand and only two fingers and a thumb.

 He was diabetic and careful about it. The kind of kid who kept his parents informed of where he was because he had to be. On a January evening in 1975, David told his father he’d checked the ice on a nearby lake to see if it was safe to skate on, found that it wasn’t, and headed home. He never arrived. His red-nit hat was found later that night at the spot where his father had last seen him.

 Snow trampled in a circle around it. For 6 days, volunteers and law enforcement searched for him. At one point, using a National Guard helicopter to scan the snow. He was found frozen on his back in the bushes of a parking lot less than half a mile from where Brad’s body had been discovered 3 years earlier.

 At the time, his death was ruled a diabetic coma. No evidence of foul play, but Evans had a broken wrist and forearm and a small round puncture wound in his lower back. Both injuries that occurred after he died, which a diabetic coma alone cannot explain. Decades later, the current Mahoning County coroner reviewed the case and reclassified David Evans’s death as a homicide.

 When investigators tested DNA recovered from his clothing against the profile that had identified Brad’s killer, it matched. Joseph Norman Hill. Standing at that podium, Attorney General Dave Yoast used a term that reframed the entire investigation, defining the suspect as a repeat predator. A third Boardman case, 15-year-old Thomas Baird, has been looked at again as well, but investigators do not believe it’s connected.

 Baird was found badly beaten in December of 1970, 2 years before Brad disappeared, and survived for 10 days in the hospital before he died. He was conscious long enough for police to ask him who had done it. He never told them. Whatever answer he was holding on to died with him. And to this day, Thomas Baird’s case remains exactly where it was left in 1970.

Unsolved, unconnected, and unresolved. There is an uncomfortable truth sitting underneath all of it. For 39 years, from the moment Brad died until Ohio began consistently collecting and cataloging DNA from convicted offenders, there was effectively no functioning system that could have caught a man like Joseph Norman Hill through routine police work alone.

 Even after national databases existed, they only work if someone’s DNA is actually in them. And Hills, as it turned out, never was. He was never arrested for anything serious enough in any state he lived in to end up in a system built to catch people exactly like him. What finally worked wasn’t a database at all. It was a family tree built out of strangers curiosity about their own ancestry, cross referenced against a killer’s DNA by people patient enough to spend 4 years and $29,000 chasing a single name.

 That’s the part of this story worth sitting with the longest. This case didn’t get solved because someone finally talked. It got solved because someone somewhere uploaded their own DNA to a genealogy website looking for long-lost cousins. And decades later, that small, ordinary act of curiosity became the thread that unraveled two tragic cold cases.

 Joseph Norman Hill lived in the 14 different homes across California over four decades. Police know he took two boys in Boardman. What they don’t know, what investigators in California are still trying to answer is how many other names are still waiting in the dark. He was 12 years old. He should be 67 today. He should have grandchildren.

 He should have a whole life of eers behind him instead of just the one that ended it. He never got to see if the Boardman Plaza would change or what would eventually replace the drive-in across from the lapidary. He never got a say in whether Dawn’s family should have stayed in Ohio instead of leaving for Tennessee that June.

 He never got to know that his best friend would spend the next five decades still wondering, still turning it over, still carrying him. He was walking home. That’s all he was doing. He was walking home the way he had a hundred times before, down a street with the porch lights just starting to come on. If there is one thing to carry out of Brad Bellino’s story, let it be this.

This case sat unsolved, not because no one cared, but because for decades, the science the world needed simply hadn’t been invented yet. Evidence preserved patiently, even through years of silence, is never wasted. Somewhere in a lab, in a family tree nobody has built yet, there may already be an answer, sitting quietly, waiting for the technology and the people stubborn enough not to give up, to finally catch up to it.

 Cases like Brads are the reason genetic genealogy has since been used to help identify suspects and victims in hundreds of cold cases across the country. Cases that had sat exactly where this one sat. closed on paper, open in every way that mattered to the families still waiting. Every one of those families spent years believing an answer might never come.

 For the Bellinos for 51 years, it didn’t. And then one Tuesday afternoon in January, it finally did. If this case stayed with you, and it should, hit like, subscribe, and tell us which moment landed hardest for you. No case stays cold forever. We’ll see you in the next