How DNA Solved an Ohio Cold Case After 42 Years

He came home at 5:00 on a Friday afternoon expecting nothing unusual. Maybe dinner on the stove. The sound of his son babbling from the living room. The ordinary rhythm of a young family’s life. Instead, Mark Madger walked through the door of apartment 1001 and found a silence that was wrong before he could even explain why.

 And then, he saw her. Inside, he discovered a devastating scene. His 25-year-old wife, Nadine, had been fatally attacked. It was a crime so tragic and severe that it completely shattered the quiet afternoon. And their 6-month-old baby boy, Daniel, was still sitting in his playpen just feet away, unharmed, waiting for someone to come.

What happened inside that apartment on January 11th, 1980, was an act of staggering severity, completely without any apparent reason, that it would take 42 years to answer even the most basic question, who did this? And in a devastating final twist, by the time the answer finally came, the man responsible had already spent years living a completely ordinary life.

This is her story. Nadine Cohen was born on October 4th, 1954, in Cairo, Egypt. She came to the United States as a child when her family immigrated, and she grew up in the kind of American suburb that promises reinvention and opportunity. She was sharp. She was warm. She spoke four languages, English, French, Arabic, and Hebrew, with the effortless ease of someone who had always understood that the world was bigger than any single version of it.

 By the time she graduated from Cleveland Heights High School in 1973, she was the kind of person people remembered. Not because she demanded attention, but because she gave it so freely. She went to work as a bank teller in Cleveland, and it was there, behind the teller window, that her story took its most significant turn.

 A man named Mark Madger came into the bank regularly to make deposits. He noticed her. He was drawn to her warmth, her intelligence, the way she carried herself. It took him 6 weeks to work up the courage to actually speak to her. 6 weeks of coming in, making small talk, finding reasons to stay a little longer at the window.

When he finally asked her out, she said yes. They dated for 4 years. They fell in love in the careful, unhurried way that people do when they actually intend to stay. Mark proposed. Nadine Cohen became Nadine Majer. And after the wedding, she did something that revealed exactly who she was. She quit her job at the bank and threw herself into helping her husband build his auto body business from the ground up.

She handled the books. She wrote the paychecks. She was the financial backbone of everything they were trying to build together. In 1979, their son Daniel was born. By January of 1980, the Majer family was living in apartment 101 at the Willow Grove Apartments, 37119 Grove Avenue, Willoughby, Ohio. It was supposed to be temporary.

 They had plans for a house. Plans for more children. Plans for the kind of life that people spend their whole lives working toward. Mark described it simply, big dreams. For their family, for their future. None of it would happen. January 11th, 1980 was a Friday. Mark left for work at 7:00 in the morning. He stopped back home around midday because one of his employees needed a paycheck early, and Nadine was the one who handled that.

She wrote the check. He kissed her goodbye. He left just before 1:00 in the afternoon. As he walked out that door, Nadine was alive, Daniel was in his playpen, and nothing in the world seemed wrong. Hours passed. Mark tried calling the apartment. No answer. He tried again. Still nothing.

 He kept trying, every 10 minutes, every 15, and the phone just rang and rang. By 4:00, he was frightened enough to leave work early. He drove home. He walked toward the building. Before he even opened the door, he could hear Daniel crying, and he thought that was strange because Daniel almost never cried. What Mark found inside that apartment is the kind of thing that doesn’t leave a person.

Nadine was found in the dining room, and the scene immediately indicated a fierce struggle. Forensic evidence showed defensive marks on her hands, proving she fought back with everything she had. The overturned furniture and marks on the walls clearly signaled to investigators that a violent confrontation had taken place right there. That was where she fell.

 That was where she died. Mark urgently tried to use the phone to call for help, but it was non-functional. He grabbed his baby son, ran to the neighbors, and screamed for someone to dial 911. And he stood outside that building holding Daniel, knowing in some part of himself that it was already too late.

 The autopsy later confirmed the true scale of the assault, revealing that the attacker had utilized multiple sharp weapons from the apartment itself during the struggle. The medical examiners determined the murder occurred somewhere between 1:15 and 4:45 in the afternoon. Nadine had been alone with her baby for hours before Mark came home.

She had fought fiercely, and she had been completely, overwhelmingly outmatched. There was no evidence of sexual assault. There was no evidence of forced entry. Nothing appeared to have been stolen from the apartment. The only thing missing from the kitchen was a knife, and they had found it in Nadine’s chest.

 Police had a crime of staggering brutality and almost no obvious explanation for it. The first hours of any homicide investigation are critical. Detectives canvassed the Willow Grove complex and spoke to residents. No one reported hearing a struggle. No one reported seeing anything suspicious. For a crime that violent in the middle of a Friday afternoon in a building full of people, the absence of witnesses was almost inexplicable. Almost.

 One woman came forward. She lived in the same building, building nine. She told investigators that around 1:00 that afternoon, she had looked out her window and noticed a car parked in the rear of the building, an unusual car. She had never seen it before, and she knew her neighbors’ vehicles. It was canary yellow, bright, unmistakable, impossible to miss.

And after that day, she never saw it again. Police believed that car belonged to the killer. They spent weeks, then months, pulling over every canary yellow vehicle they could find, questioning running plates. Nothing came of it. The car, like its driver, simply vanished. Investigators also worked a theory that made forensic sense.

 A fight that brutal, 40-plus stab wounds, two knives, a victim who clearly struggled. There was a real possibility that the killer had cut himself, that he had bled. Police contacted local hospitals and clinics, requesting records of any man who had come in with cut wounds to his hands in the hours and days after the murder.

They found several. They interviewed them all. Every single one had a reasonable explanation. None could be linked to apartment 101. And then there was the husband. It is the nature of homicide investigations that the people closest to a victim become the first focus of scrutiny. It is not personal. It is statistical.

 And so, Mark Madger, grieving, shattered, barely sleeping, found himself sitting across from detectives, answering questions, retelling the same timeline again and again. He cooperated completely. He agreed to a polygraph test. He passed. His employees confirmed his alibi and confirmed that when he returned to work after his midday stop at home, he was wearing the same clothes he had left in.

 No blood, no wounds, no signs of a struggle. He was cleared. But even after he was officially eliminated as a suspect, the shadow never fully lifted. People talk. Suspicion lingers in small communities in ways that official clearance cannot always undo. For years afterward, Mark Magid felt it.

 The looks, the questions that weren’t quite asked, the silence that meant something. He was raising a son alone, grieving a wife he had loved since he was too nervous to talk to her, and carrying a weight of unspoken accusation that had no basis in fact. He described it later as living under a cloud, not suspected, just never quite believed, either.

Two months after the murder, the Willow Grove complex made the news again. On March 27th, 1980, a woman who lived in one of the building’s other apartments came home to find a stranger standing inside her unit. He had broken in. She confronted him. He ran. She called the police. And investigators still working the Magid case paid very close attention.

 The woman described the intruder. A composite sketch was created. When apartment management saw the sketch, they recognized it immediately. The person described looked exactly like a man who lived in the complex, a tenant in building five, right across from the Magid apartment. His name, in the available records, is given only as Thomas.

 And Thomas had a reputation in the building that management frankly should have acted on long before. Women in the complex had complained about him repeatedly. He closely watched the residents, and multiple women in the complex had previously reported his deeply unsettling and inappropriate behavior to management. He had never been asked to leave.

 Thomas admitted to the break-in. And then investigators noticed something else. His apartment was directly across from apartment 101. From his window, he would have been able to see directly into the Magid unit. He would have known when Nadine was home. He would have known she was alone. Police brought him in. He denied any involvement in Nadine’s murder.

 He claimed he had been at work all day on January 11th. His employer told investigators otherwise. It had been raining on and off in Lake County that day. Workers were sent home early. Thomas had been at the apartment complex during the window in which Nadine was killed. His alibi was a lie. He failed a polygraph.

But a failed polygraph is not evidence. Lying to police about your whereabouts on the day of a murder is suspicious, even damning in context, but it is not proof. Investigators searched his apartment and found nothing that connected him to the crime. No blood-stained clothing, no weapon, no physical evidence.

Thomas remained a suspect in the investigative sense of someone who cannot be ruled out, but not in the legal sense of someone who can be charged. And without more, police had to move on. The investigation ground forward, then slowed, then stopped producing new leads. The case began to go cold. For 16 years, Nadine Majer’s murder sat in a file, periodically reopened, never resolved.

Then, in 1996, detectives made a decision that would ultimately save the case. They retrieved the physical evidence from storage and sent it to the Lake County Crime Lab. The focus was on the clothing Nadine had been wearing the day she was killed. Her shirt, saturated with blood, carefully preserved, never tested in 1980 because the science to do so simply did not exist yet.

The results changed everything. The shirt contained two distinct sources of blood. Most of it was Nadine’s own, but not all of it. Some of the blood on that shirt belonged to an unidentified male. During the physical struggle, the attacker had inadvertently injured himself, leaving his own biological trace on her clothing.

 The crime lab developed a full male DNA profile from that blood. For the first time, investigators had something real, something biological, something that could not be fabricated or explained away. They immediately compared it to every suspect they had ever looked at, Mark Majer, Thomas, every man who’d ever been seriously considered in connection with this case. Not one of them matched.

 The DNA profile was entered into CODIS, the national DNA database. It sat there, searched, researched, and returned nothing. Year after year, the profile waited for a match that never came. In the late 1990s, the database was growing. In the early 2000s, it was growing faster. By the time the technology and the database had both reached their modern scale, investigators had run the profile dozens of times. Zero hits.

 The person who killed Nadine Maggio had apparently never been arrested for any crime in any jurisdiction that contributed to that database. He had no criminal record in the most literal sense. His DNA did not exist anywhere in the system. In 2014, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation took another look at the shirt.

This time, they were not just testing for DNA, they were analyzing the blood stain patterns. Forensic science had advanced enough to tell investigators something remarkably specific. The blood drops on Nadine’s shirt were circular in shape, perpendicular drops. That meant the source was directly above her, not at an angle.

Whoever bled on her was standing over her or kneeling over her at the moment the blood fell. The killer was right there, close, and bleeding. Still no name, still no match in any database. The case went cold again. And then, in 2018, Detective Gabe Slay, the Willoughby officer who had become the lead investigator on the Maggio case, made the decision that would eventually end 42 years of silence.

He reached out to Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA technology company based in Virginia. They specialized in two things that had never been available before in this case, DNA phenotyping and genetic genealogy. Phenotyping first. Parabon took the killer’s DNA profile and used it to predict physical characteristics based on genetic markers.

 Their assessment, the suspect was a white male with blond hair and blue eyes of Eastern European descent. It was not a photograph. It was not a definitive identification, but it was something. It allowed investigators to eliminate large categories of previous persons of interest. It narrowed the focus, and it confirmed that whoever killed Nadine Madger in January of 1980 was still genetically an unknown.

Then came the genealogy work. Parabon’s genetic genealogy process involves uploading an unknown DNA profile to public ancestry databases. In this case, both GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA. These platforms allow users to voluntarily upload their own genetic information and consent to law enforcement comparisons.

 The databases search for shared genetic segments between the unknown profile and registered users. Matches don’t mean the users themselves are suspects. They mean those users share ancestry with the suspect somewhere in the family tree. When Parabon ran the search, they found matches, distant ones, third cousins, fourth cousins, fifth cousins.

 The genetic overlap was real, but the relationships were so remote that there was no direct path to a name, not yet. This is where the work becomes genuinely extraordinary. A genealogist began constructing family trees backward from those distant cousins, mapping generations, tracing lines of descent, finding where these separate family branches all converged.

They went back to the mid-1800s. They found a couple, John Morasco and Anna Bonduranis, whose descendants, across multiple lines, all shared the same genetic markers as the suspect. The search continued forward from that couple, mapping their children, their grandchildren, their great-grandchildren. It was slow.

It was painstaking. There were dead ends and wrong turns, but eventually, investigators stumbled across a death record. A man named Steve Simcak, born in 1883 in Bohemia, died in Cleveland in 1934. His mother was listed as Mary Morasco. The surname spelling was different from the records they had been tracing, but Detective Slay knew that Eastern European family names frequently changed spelling when families immigrated to America.

The geographic connection was right. The family connection traced back to the same region of Slovakia as John and Anna Morasco. It was close enough to follow. Building the Simcak family tree forward from that 1934 death record eventually brought investigators to a living person, a man named Steven Joseph Simcak, East Lake, Ohio, a suburb northeast of Cleveland.

Less than 15 miles from the Willow Grove apartments where Nadine Mager had died. Steven Joseph Simcak had been born in 1939. He had graduated from Benedictine High School in 1957. He had served in the United States Marine Corps in the late 1950s, stationed at bases in California and Florida. He had married in 1963, the same woman until the day he died.

 He had five children, three biological, two stepchildren. He had worked at Lincoln Electric Company in Euclid, Ohio for 37 years before retiring in 2002. He had then moved with his wife to Bemus Point, New York, a small town about 60 miles southwest of Buffalo. He had no criminal record of any kind, not an arrest, not a charge, nothing.

 He looked, by every external measure, like exactly the kind of person you would never suspect of anything. But investigators kept digging. And what they found was a chain of specific, verifiable facts that, taken together, pointed in one direction. Steven Simcak, in January of 1980, lived in East Lake, just a few miles from the Willow Grove apartment complex in Willoughby.

He had worked at Lincoln Electric since 1965. Investigators requested his employment records from 1980. In the entire year, across all 12 months, Steven Simcak had called in sick exactly one time, one day, January 11th, 1980. He was scheduled for the third shift that day. He called in with the flu and did not go to work.

 It was the only day he missed the entire year. And then, there was the car. Interviews with people who knew Simcak in the 1980s confirmed that he had owned, at that time, a canary yellow Dodge Dart with a white vinyl top. Exactly like the car a neighbor had seen parked behind building nine at 1:00 on the afternoon of January 11th. The car no one had ever seen before.

The car that was never seen again. Steven Joseph Simcak had never been a suspect. His name had never appeared anywhere in the original investigation. There was no prior connection between him and the Majer family. Mark Majer would later confirm that his wife had never known this man, had never had any dealings with him, had never spoken about him.

 He was, as far as anyone could determine, a complete stranger. There was only one problem. Steven Simcak had died on June 18th, 2018, just months before Parabon completed their genealogical work. He was 79 years old. He had died of natural causes, and his remains had been cremated, which meant there was no body to exhume, no sample to collect, no way to directly match his DNA to the profile on Nadine’s shirt.

The case had its most likely answer, and no way to confirm it. This is where the investigation took one final, crucial turn. Searching through records and obituaries, Detective Slay discovered that Steven Simcak had a grandson who shared his name, also called Steven, known within the family as Stosh. And Stosh had died in 2015, 3 years before his grandfather in Euclid, Ohio.

The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office still had Stosh’s DNA on file. That sample was requested and released. It went straight to the Lake County Crime Lab, and then to Parabon. The results came back, and they were significant. Stosh and the unknown suspect shared enough DNA to confirm they were related, not closely, but unmistakably.

 The kind of overlap you see between a grandparent and a grandchild, not a stranger, not a coincidence, family. Stash was Steven Simcak’s grandson. That meant the suspect’s DNA ran through the Simcak bloodline. But a grandchild connection, while powerful, was not enough to close the case. Investigators needed to get one step closer.

They needed a direct comparison, someone from Simcak’s own generation, his own children. In April of 2022, investigators made contact with one of Steven Simcak’s surviving biological children. They explained the investigation. They asked for a DNA sample. The child agreed. According to family members present, they believed the test would clear their father.

 They were confident it would come back with nothing. They gave the sample willingly on April 28th, 2022. The Lake County Crime Lab and Parabon NanoLabs both analyzed the sample independently. The results came back. Simcak’s child and the unknown suspect shared roughly half their entire DNA, the exact amount a parent and child share with each other, not a cousin, not a distant relative, a parent.

Parabon was unequivocal. The probability was 100%. There was no other explanation that fit. The blood on Nadine Madjer’s shirt belonged to the father of the person sitting in that lab. Steven Joseph Simcak had killed Nadine Madjer. On July 13th, 2022, Willoughby Police Chief James Schultz stood before the cameras and made the announcement that Mark Madjer had spent 42 years believing would never come.

 It is our department’s conclusion that Steven Joseph Simcak fatally wounded Nadine Madjer in her residence on January 11th, 1980. Sitting in that room as Schultz spoke were Mark Madjer and his son Daniel, the baby from the playpen, now a grown man in his early 40s. They had waited their entire lives for this moment.

 And the moment, when it came was not the one they had imagined because Simcak was dead, because there would be no arrest, no trial, no courtroom where Mark could look at the man who killed his wife and hear him answer for it, no moment of legal reckoning. The man responsible for taking Nadine Magers life right in front of her infant son had lived his full life, retired comfortably, moved to a small town in New York, and died peacefully at 79.

He had never been questioned, never been suspected, had apparently never given any outward indication that he carried something like this inside him. Mark Magers stood at that press conference and trembled with an anger that 42 years of grief had not diluted. “He was a thief, a coward, a liar, and a murderer,” Mark said.

 “He concealed the truth so that no one would know what he did to Nadine. He stole Nadine from her family and friends. Most of all, he stole Nadine from me and my son, Daniel. How could he get up every day, look himself in the mirror, and know what he did? Only a coward could do that.” He addressed Simcak’s family directly. He told them he held nothing against them, that they had nothing to do with the father they had.

 But he wanted them to know, plainly and without softening, what kind of person their father actually was. “If there is a place in hell, I know he’s in it,” Mark said, “and I hope he rots there.” Daniel Magers, who had been 6 months old on the day his mother was taken from him, who had grown up without her, who had spent his entire childhood watching other kids hug their mothers and feeling that absence like something physical.

Daniel stood at that same press conference and spoke. “After 42 years, I can finally put a face to the monster who took my mother from me, let alone in front of me, in the most brutal way imaginable.” He said he was angry that Simcak had passed away as a free man, a carefree citizen he called him, before he could be identified, before he could be caught, before questions could be asked, before any form of justice could be served. But he also said something else.

He said he had no animosity towards Simcak’s family, that they were not responsible for what their father had done, that they should not be made to carry his sins. The motive for the murder has never been established. Police do not know what brought Steven Simcak to the Willow Grove Apartments on the afternoon of January 11th, 1980.

They do not know whether he knew Nadine, whether he had watched her, whether he had followed her, or whether the encounter began and escalated in a matter of minutes with no prior contact at all. Mark Madger was clear that as far as he knew, Nadine had never spoken of this man, had no connection to him, had no awareness of his existence.

Chief Schultz acknowledged openly that the department did not know why Simcak chose that apartment, that day, that woman. Those questions, he said, were still being worked. They may never be answered. Because the only person who could answer them spent decades living a stable, quiet, outwardly unremarkable life.

 He worked his 37 years. He stayed married. He raised his children. He retired. He moved away. He died. And whatever he knew about Nadine Madger, he carried it with him into silence, into cremation, into whatever comes after. Detective Slay stood at that press conference and said the words that summed up everything the case had come to represent.

 Steven Joseph Simcak was never a suspect in this case. His name was never mentioned in the report. He was never involved in any kind of criminal activity that would have made him a suspect. Without this, without genetic genealogy, without the databases, without the science that did not exist in 1980 and barely existed 20 years ago, he would never have been identified.

This case became an episode of On the Case with Paula Zahn in 2023, a program titled A Lifetime of Grief. Both Mark and Daniel appeared on camera. They spoke about what it was like to finally know. And what it was like to know that knowing was all they would ever get. There is a photograph of Nadine Mager taken not long before she was killed.

She is young. She is smiling. She looks like someone with a great deal of life still ahead of her. Four languages, a husband she loved, a baby she was only beginning to know, plans for a house, plans for more children, a business she was helping build from the ground up, a future she was absolutely certain was coming.

 What happened in that apartment on a Friday afternoon in January of 1980 stole all of it. Not just from Nadine, from Mark who the next four decades raising their son alone, carrying the grief and the unresolved anger that never fully lifts when the question of who did this remains unanswered, from Daniel who grew up with a mother-shaped absence at the center of his life.

 From everyone who knew her and understood that the woman they lost was not replaceable. The science that solved this case did not exist the day Nadine died. It barely existed when her shirt was first tested in 1996. The genealogy tools that traced a family tree from the mid-1800s to a suburban street in Eastlake, Ohio were decades away from the day a young woman fought for her life in a dining room while her baby waited in the next room.

But someone at every stage of this investigation made sure the evidence did not get lost, made sure the shirt stayed preserved, made sure the case file stayed active inside the Willoughby Police Department even when the case went cold to the outside world. Chief Schultz said it plainly on that July morning in 2022.

For the last 42 years, this case has never gone cold inside our building. We’ve always had investigators, officers, detectives, people working on the case. Daniel Mager said something similar when it was his turn to speak. He thanked the department. All of them. Every detective and officer across four decades who refused to let the file get dusty, who understood that Nadine Mager was a person, that her death mattered, that the answer existed somewhere even when finding it seemed impossible.

 The answer existed in a shirt, in a family tree that stretched back to Bohemia in the 1800s, in the DNA quietly preserved in a county freezer. In a match so precise, so complete, that no other explanation was possible. The man who raised five children, who worked the same job for 37 years, who drove the same Ohio roads, lived in the same corner of the same county, breathed the same air as Nadine Madger and her young family.

That man was the one who walked into apartment 101 on a January afternoon and took everything. He got away with it. He lived his full life and he got away with it, but he did not disappear. He left something behind. And 42 years later, it was enough.