New Jersey Double Cold Case Was Just EXPOSED After 32 Years

But first tonight, at 5:00, their families waited decades for this day. The hope, the prayers, and today, the answer. Yuki Washington is off. I’m Siaffa Lewis. >> And I’m Natasha Brown. Detectives crack a decades-old cold case through the help of DNA technology. Now, prosecutors say it brought them straight to a suspect in the murders of two young women dating all the way back to the early ’90s.

>> On Sunday, November 14th, 1993, at 4:24 in the morning, officers from the Camden Police Department found a 24-year-old woman lying face down on a sidewalk on the 300 block of Jackson Street. She was wearing a black and red checkered thermal shirt and checkered pants, no shoes, a sock on her right foot, and nothing on her left.

 Blood was coming from her nose. It had rained until about 3:30 that morning, and the back of her clothing was dry. She had been killed somewhere else and placed on that sidewalk after the rain stopped. The biological material on her body produced DNA from an unknown male, but the technology of 1993 couldn’t pull a clean enough profile to compare against any database.

 [music] The case sat in a Camden evidence room. Five months later, a 16-year-old girl was found stabbed to death on a living room floor 8 miles away. Nobody connected the two for 32 years. Her name was Marabeth Welsh. She was 24 years old, a native of the Philippines, and a mother of two. She lived in Woodlynne, a small borough just across the line from Camden, and she worked at a popular restaurant in the area.

Her youngest daughter, Melody Beth, wasn’t yet a year old. At the time of her death, Marabeth was estranged from her husband, Daniel, and was sharing a residence on the 200 block of Cypress Avenue in Woodlynne with two male roommates. The house was a few blocks from her job. The distance from her bedroom door to the sidewalk where she was found was less than 2 miles.

Camden County detectives went to Cypress Avenue the same morning her body was discovered and did a full forensic search of the house. In a second-floor rear bedroom, the room Marabeth had been living in, they collected a comforter that tested positive for blood. The bed and the area around it showed signs that something violent had happened there.

Dr. Robert Siegel, the medical examiner, did the autopsy that day. He determined Marabeth had been strangled and sexually assaulted and ruled the death a homicide. Camden in 1993 had one of the highest violent crime rates in the country. The streets around the 300 block of Jackson Street were dim, narrow, and lightly patrolled before dawn.

Detectives canvassed the blocks around Jackson Street at that hour and found almost no one who had seen anything. A few people reported a vehicle before sunrise. No one had a plate, a make, or a description that could be developed into a lead. The blocks around Cypress Avenue were quieter, but the picture there was just as thin.

No neighbor had seen a struggle. No neighbor had heard a car pull away. The state lab tested everything that had come off her body. Spermatozoa came back on the shirt, the underwear, and the swabs. The DNA pulled from those samples belonged to an unknown male. Daniel and the two roommates were tested first and none of their profiles matched what had been pulled from the clothing.

In 1993, that result was the end of the road. With no national database to search against and the FBI’s combined DNA index system still 5 years from launching, the profile from the clothing went into a freezer. Marabeth’s family was contacted in the Philippines and locally. Melody and her older sibling went to live with relatives.

Melody was 11 months old and she grew up with no memory of her mother at all. Detectives in Camden County worked the Welsh file hard through the winter and into the spring. The work produced reports, eliminated names, and led nowhere. The trail between her front door and the sidewalk where she was found stayed dark.

Then, 8 miles south in a borough that had nothing to do with Camden, the second body turned up. On Monday, April 4th, 1994, at around [music] 8:45 in the evening, the Magnolia Police Department received a call reporting an unconscious person at a home on the 100 block of Jefferson Avenue. Officers arrived and pushed through the front door.

They found 16-year-old Jennifer Perzia lying on the living room floor at the foot of the staircase with a cloth ligature around her neck. She had been stabbed more than 20 times. The blood in that house was everywhere, across the living room walls, on the kitchen floor, on the stairs. She had fought in three rooms before she went down.

 The medical examiner found defensive wounds across both of her hands. The day had started normally. The school was closed for spring break, but Jennifer had gone to a 9:00 a.m. track practice and was home by noon. Her mother, Georgia, called from work at 3:00 to check in. A girlfriend called at 5:30 to chat. During that phone call, a man came to the front door and knocked.

 Jennifer told her friend the man had asked for her mother and her stepfather by name. She told him Georgia and Mickey McNear weren’t home and he had left. Later in the same call, she told her friend the same man was walking past the house again. By 8:30 that evening, her parents were home. They found her in the living room.

Magnolia was a small borough in the southwestern part of Camden County. Quiet streets, >> [music] >> single-family houses set close together, lawns that touched each other. The McNear house was on an out-of-the-way cul-de-sac just off the White Horse Pike with the nearest neighbor about 25 yd away. The family had moved to New Jersey from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania about 5 years earlier.

Georgia worked as a bartender and Mickey co-owned Sterling Auto Shop. Jennifer was the youngest of their three children. A 16-year-old girl stabbed to death in her own living room in broad daylight on Easter break in a quiet residential borough sent the entire community into shock. Jennifer had been a sophomore at Sterling Regional, ran track and field, played saxophone in the concert band, and had brought home a bronze medal in discus at the state championships her freshman year.

Parents locked their doors at night. Students at Sterling High School walked home in groups. For weeks, the question on every block was the same. How had the killer gotten inside? There was no sign of forced entry anywhere. Either Jennifer had let her killer in or the door had been unlocked when he came through it.

According to the medical examiner, her cause of death was stab wounds to the neck and chest, ligature strangulation, and sharp and blunt force injuries. The blade was small, possibly a knife or an ice pick. The ligature was an arm cover off a couch in the living room. She had been struck in the head, probably with a heavy glass beer mug that investigators found smashed in the room, the pieces smeared with blood.

Some of that blood was hers, some of it was not. She had hit him with that mug before she went down. Camden County Prosecutor Edward F. Borden Jr. handled the file for the state. From the beginning, investigators believed the killer was someone the family knew, someone familiar enough with the house to come at a time he expected the parents to be out.

The crime scene gave investigators a second thing the Welsh file didn’t have, blood evidence from someone other than the victim. Drops on the lower level door near the rear exit, smears on the door to the master bedroom closet, material on Jennifer’s own socks. Whoever killed Jennifer had been cut up enough by the fight to leave his own DNA inside the house.

 The McNears reported that someone had taken containers of coins from a shelf in their first floor bedroom. Most of the missing coins were Susan B. Anthony silver dollars. A few $5 bills had been taken with them. The total value was small, a few hundred dollars at most. Whatever else had happened in that house, the official motive on paper was robbery.

The Welsh and Persia files sat in two different parts of the same prosecutor’s office. Camden County handled Welsh with state police support. Magnolia was led by local officers working with the same prosecutor. Different detectives, different jurisdictions. In the Persia file, the focus was on people with access to the house.

Jennifer’s stepfather ran an auto shop, and workers, [music] customers, delivery drivers, and contractors had been in and out of the family’s orbit for years. Detectives built a list that grew into dozens of names. Ex-boyfriends, classmates, neighbors, family members, every employee of the garage Mickey co-owned, every co-worker of Georgia from the bar where she tended.

 Each was interviewed, alibied, and asked for a DNA sample. By the end of the first year, the file had hundreds of pages of reports, and not one sample had matched the profile from the living room floor. In In Welsh file, the work was harder. Detectives reconstructed Marabeth’s last hours through the restaurant, the Cypress Avenue house, and the people she had been in contact with that week.

They pulled phone records going back weeks for any number that appeared repeatedly. They asked whether neighbors had heard anything that night. A car, a door, a raised voice. The house had people living a few feet from the bedroom wall who heard nothing at all. Both investigations gradually ran out of leads. Marabeth’s family was small and far away, and the public pressure that sometimes keeps a story in the news didn’t build the same way around Welsh.

At the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office, the Welsh file went into a cabinet drawer. A few drawers over, in the same building, the Persia file sat in its own cabinet. Two unknown male profiles, two strangled victims, two dead women in the same county five months apart, never compared against each other because nothing on paper suggested they should be.

The Persia file held more heat for longer. The community wouldn’t let it disappear. Jennifer’s classmates at Sterling High School held vigils. The McNairs gave interviews. Reward money was raised, and national television covered the killing. Through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, the case rotated through detectives at the prosecutor’s office.

Lieutenant Arthur Folks kept it on his desk longer than most. He gave interviews when reporters called, listed it as an active investigation in every annual update, and watched the file age past anything technology in his time could solve. In a 2009 interview, 15 years after the murder, Georgia McNair was in a wheelchair dying of scleroderma.

A reporter asked her about the case. “I still try to tell myself that today will be the day,” she said. She died later that year. By the early 2010s, reporters used the same word for both, cold. In the years after Jennifer was killed, one name circled the Persia investigation more than any other.

 Scott David Ross had worked for Mickey McNear at Sterling Auto Shop and had been in and out of the family’s life for years. He’d borrow a cigarette, borrow a dollar, sometimes disappear and come back. The McNears knew him by sight, by habit, by name. After the murder, Jennifer’s older sister Carol came to believe Scott Ross was the man who had knocked on her parents’ door that afternoon.

 She thought he had come looking for money and hadn’t expected anyone to be home. She told reporters Ross never came around the family after the killing and that when she saw him later, he had a black eye he couldn’t explain. Both Scott Ross and his brother Michael Forbes were interviewed and both gave DNA samples.

Neither sample matched the profile from the living room floor. Both men took polygraphs and both passed. Investigators kept Ross’s name in the file anyway. The DNA exclusion meant he hadn’t personally left material at the scene, but it didn’t rule out that he might have been involved in some other way. By 2013, the office was openly telling reporters they believed more than one person had been involved in Jennifer’s murder.

For 19 years, Jennifer’s father Mark told reporters Scott Ross had increasingly become the prime suspect in his mind. He never used the word killer. He told one reporter in 2013, when Ross died, “I didn’t dwell on the fact that I’ll never know because over the last 19 years, I’ve kind of gotten comfortable with the fact that I won’t ever know.

” On April 28th, 2013, Scott Ross died of a drug overdose at the age of 46 in his bed in Gloucester County. 12 days later, outside a South Jersey funeral home, a group of people stood silently in the sun. They were wearing purple, Jennifer’s favorite color. When mourners arriving for Ross’s service looked their way, they turned their backs so that anyone who knew the dead man could read the name printed across their shirts, Jennifer L. Perzia.

Carol was among them. The Camden County Prosecutor’s Office issued an unusual public statement after Ross’s death, confirming that he had been a person of interest, and saying that his death didn’t end the probe. The spokesman for the office added that new information about Ross had come in just days before he died.

 That information has never been made public. For the family, his death changed nothing and everything. If Ross had been the man who killed Jennifer, there would never be a trial. If he hadn’t been, then 20 years of public accusation had been pointed at an innocent man, and the killer was still walking around somewhere, or already in the ground.

That question sat unanswered for another 13 years. In January 2024, the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office, under Prosecutor Grace McCauley, created a full-time Homicide Cold Case Unit. The county had more unsolved murders than the Homicide Squad could work alongside current ones. The new unit was an acknowledgement that some of those files deserved one more pass with tools that hadn’t existed in the 1990s.

The cold case detectives, including Sergeant Dennis Convery and Detective Daniel Crawford, pulled the Welsh and Perzia files and started from the beginning. They reread every report written by every detective who touched either case since 1993 and 1994. They went through the physical evidence still in storage and made notes on what had been tested, what had failed, and what had never been tried at all.

The question they were asking was simple. The technology had moved. Could it move enough to read what the 1990s couldn’t? Three years earlier, in February of 2021, the prosecutor’s office had taken a shot at the Persia file alone. Detectives had sent the blood profile from the living room to Parabon NanoLabs in Virginia for investigative genetic genealogy analysis.

Within 2 months, Parabon came back with a name. The closest genetic match the lab had been able to find in the public databases was a second cousin once removed, or a third cousin, of the unknown male. From there, the analysts worked through public records and family trees and developed a possible source. That person, the lab determined, was already deceased.

Detectives drove out to interview that man’s siblings and one of his children. They explained why they had come and asked for DNA samples for kinship comparison. The family consented, and the samples went to the FBI laboratory for analysis. The FBI’s kinship work showed that the man Parabon had named couldn’t have contributed to the unknown DNA profile.

He was not the source. The genealogy had pointed in his direction and had been wrong. The 2021 effort had cost the prosecutor’s office months of work and several family members time. It ended with the wrong name and nothing else to show for it. In August of 2025, the cold [music] case unit sent Marabeth Welsh’s shirt and underwear to the New Jersey State Police Office of Forensic Sciences for new DNA analysis.

>> [music] >> The clothing had been tested in the early 1990s and at other points since. Those tests had found spermatozoa but hadn’t produced a profile clean enough to upload to any database. The 2025 analysis was different. Sperm fraction testing, a technique that separates male contributor material from the rest of the sample, pulled a full unknown male DNA profile off the clothing.

The state lab entered that profile into CODIS, >> [music] >> the FBI’s national database. CODIS automatically compares any new profile against every other crime scene sample in the system. The investigators expected one of three results. The new sample would either match a known offender already in CODIS, return a hit on an unknown crime scene profile somewhere else in the country, or come back blank.

It didn’t come back blank, and it didn’t match a known offender. It matched a different unknown crime scene profile already in the system. That profile had been entered years earlier from blood found at the murder of Jennifer Persia in Magnolia, New Jersey in April of 1994. Two separate investigations, run for 31 years by different teams in different jurisdictions, were now one.

One man had killed both women. The same DNA profile that had been sitting in a Camden evidence box was sitting in a Magnolia evidence box 8 miles away. The unit went back through everyone they had ever looked at, asking a question nobody had been able to ask before. Who connected to one file also connected to the other? One name surfaced from interviews and old reports as a common figure.

The name belonged to a dead man. In late 2025 and early January of 2026, the cold case unit ran the male profile through the same investigative genetic genealogy process the prosecutor’s office had used in 2021. Analysts compared the profile against public genealogical databases, identified partial matches that suggested distant relatives, and built family trees outward.

 The trees narrowed to a single family in southern New Jersey, and from that family to a single likely source. On Tuesday, January 27th, 2026, cold case detectives met with one of his parents. They explained the situation, asked for a buckle swab, and were given multiple samples. 3 days later, on Friday, January 30th, they met with one of his siblings and collected swabs there as well.

They sent all the samples to three separate labs for independent kinship analysis. Parabon NanoLabs in Virginia, the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, and the New Jersey State Police Office of Forensic Sciences in Hamilton. The week of March 9th, 2026, reports came back from all three labs. Parabon determined that the parent shared more than 3,500 centimorgans of autosomal DNA with the unknown profile from the crime scenes.

A parent-child relationship typically falls between 3,300 and 3,700 centimorgans. The math fit. New Jersey State Police calculated that the odds favored a child of that parent over an unrelated person by 4.8 million to one. The same report put the odds of a full sibling to the man’s brother at 150,000 to one. Three labs, working independently, arrived at the same conclusion.

The man whose semen had been found on Marabeth Welsh’s clothing in 1993, and whose blood had been left on Jennifer Perzia’s living room floor in 1994 was the same man, and he had been dead for 26 years. On Thursday, April 9th, 2026, Camden County Prosecutor Grace McCauley held a press conference at the prosecutor’s office.

 Two families were in the room. Marabeth’s daughter, Melody Beth Welsh, sat with her own young child, her mother’s granddaughter. Marabeth’s husband, Daniel, was there. So was Mark Persia, Jennifer’s father, with his daughter Carol and two of his nieces. Georgia McNear had died in 2009 of a long illness.

 Mickey had died before her. McCauley announced that DNA evidence and investigative genetic genealogy had identified the man responsible for the murders of Marabeth Welsh and Jennifer Persia. His name was Francis T. Schooly. He had lived in Mantua Township. He was 32 years old when he killed Marabeth in Woodland in November of 1993 and 33 when he killed Jennifer in Magnolia the following April.

In 2000, at the age of 39, he took his own life. Not one detective on either investigation had ever known his name. His connection to the Persia family had been hiding in plain sight for 30 years. Schooly had done construction work for Mickey McNear at the family’s home, and he co-owned a mini race car that Sterling Auto Shop sponsored.

 He had been in the family’s orbit for years. Someone knocked on the door that April afternoon and asked for Georgia and Mickey by name. Schooly knew those names. His connection to Welsh was thinner, but it was there. A sibling of Schooly’s, shown a photograph of Marabeth during the 2026 interviews, told detectives they had seen the two together at some point in the past.

A relative of hers, contacted separately, confirmed the same thing. How and where they had crossed paths, nobody alive could say with certainty. He had hovered at the edges of the community, done contract work, gone home at the end of the day like anyone else. Nobody had ever thought to ask him for a sample.

McCauley told reporters that if Schooly had been alive, the evidence would have supported charges in both murders. She didn’t address one part of the file directly. The 2013 statement from the prosecutor’s office under a previous administration had said investigators believed more than one person had been involved in Persia’s death.

The DNA had now [music] pointed cleanly to one man. Whether the office still believed in an accomplice and whether the visitor who knocked that afternoon was the same man who came through the door that evening wasn’t part of the announcement. Scott Ross was mentioned only in the negative. Three generations of the Welsh family stood in that room.

 The woman who had been murdered present only as a photograph on a display board. The daughter who had survived her now grown and the little girl too young to understand any of it. “It was very unexpected.” Melody told reporters but grateful for all their hard work. Asked about what the identification meant to her, she said something a longer answer wouldn’t have improved on.

“There’s some closure. I guess it is the best word for it. The details of how her body was found. It’s just kind of feels like she was alone and I don’t think anyone should feel that way.” Daniel had been one of the first people Camden County tested in 1993 when investigators were ruling him out. He had lived for 33 years with the question of who had killed his estranged wife.

“All of a sudden, we have answers to what happened to her.” he told reporters. “We’re relieved to hear that for sure. The Persia family didn’t speak. The years of statements, of pointing at Scott Ross, of waiting for the call that would tell them they could finally close it, had been carried to this moment by relatives who had already buried two of their own.

Magnolia mayor Betty Ann Kauling Carson had been the borough’s mayor since 1991. She had been in office 2 years when Jennifer was killed and was still in office when Skoures’ name was announced 32 years later. She remembered the days after the killing as the only thing the town had talked about. When I found out, I couldn’t sleep, she said of the identification.

In a community park called Albertson Park, a gazebo and a memorial plaque stand in Jennifer’s name. The town dedicated them in 1994 in the weeks after she died and they have been there ever since. McCauley closed for the office. The identification couldn’t restore the two young women to their families, she said, but she hoped it offered a measure of justice and some comfort.

Words almost can’t describe what it means to the families. It settles that feeling deep inside. It gives them a semblance of peace. For Melody, the answer arrived too late to share with anyone who would have remembered Marabeth. For the Persia family, it arrived after both parents were already gone. A 24-year-old woman face down on a Camden sidewalk before dawn.

 One sock on her right foot. The back of her clothing dry after a night of rain. Five months later, a 16-year-old girl on the living room floor of her own home with a couch arm cover around her neck and a smashed beer mug at her feet. Two crime scenes 8 miles apart with the same man’s DNA on each one. It took 32 years to put a name to him.

By then, he had been dead for 26. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.