Justice After 61 Years: New York’s Longest-Running Cold Case Solved

Justice After 61 Years: New York’s Longest-Running Cold Case Solved

This wooded area just off Kolb’s Hill Road is where 60 years ago the body of 12-year-old Mary Teresa Simpson was found covered in rocks and debris. This is a historic day for the Elmira Police Department. Justice after almost 62 years. On Sunday, March 15th, 1964 at approximately 10:50 p.m., 12-year-old Mary Teresa Simpson was reported missing by her father.

A warning to our viewers. What you are about to watch is a true story. The following program contains content that some viewers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is strongly advised. She tried to jump into the casket. Linda Galpin was 16 years old. Her little sister was lying still in front of her, and Linda couldn’t make it real.

 So, she tried to get in there with her. Someone pulled her back. That was March 1964. She is 78 years old now. She still thinks about her little sister every single day. For 61 years, the man who put her sister in that casket walked free. He had a name. He had a life. He knew exactly what he had done. The police had nothing.

 This is how they found him. Welcome to Crime Watch Central. This is exactly the kind of case we exist for. Before we go any further, drop a comment right now and tell us where in the world you’re watching from. We read every single one. If you’re new here, hit like and subscribe. That’s what keeps us digging into cases like this one.

 Now, back to Elmira. Her name was Mary Teresa Simpson. She was born in 1951 in Elmira, New York, the youngest of four children with an older a an older sister, and an older half-brother. She was a shy girl who didn’t have many friends, partly because her family had moved often enough that she had never fully rooted herself anywhere.

She wore cat-eye glasses. She kept a fan club card in her pocket. Those two objects, the glasses and the card, would later be recovered by police and stored as evidence. Remember them now while she is still just a 12-year-old girl in a small city in upstate New York heading out on a Sunday afternoon with nowhere particular to be.

Her parents, Ellsworth and Rose, had separated in May 1963. Mary Teresa had been living with her father ever since. The two of them had just moved back to Elmira two weeks before the murder, back to the street she had grown up on, back to the same city where her mother, Rose, still lived, and back to her sister, Linda.

On Sunday, March 15th, 1964, Mary Teresa left her father’s apartment at around 3:00 in the afternoon. She told him she was going to visit her cousin. She went to see her mother first instead, unannounced, unexpected, and completely welcome. Rose was glad to see her. She stayed about an hour. Then she left to see her cousin as she had originally told her father she would.

 It was an ordinary Sunday afternoon. Around 6:30 that evening, Mary Teresa left her cousin’s house and started the walk back toward her father’s apartment. She was last seen at around 7:00 in front of a store on the east side of Elmira by a friend she told she was heading home. March in upstate New York means short days.

 By 6:30, the sky was already darkening. The streets on the east side were quiet at that hour. Most families already inside for dinner, curtains drawn against the cold. The sidewalks were mostly empty. It was a 12-year-old girl and the last thin minutes of daylight on a Sunday evening. She never arrived. Ellsworth waited.

 When it got late and she still wasn’t home, he started making calls. Rose, relatives, anyone who might know where she was. Nobody had seen Mary Theresa after she stepped out of her mother’s door. Nobody remembered seeing a girl walking alone on East Market Street that evening. He contacted the Elmira Police Department.

 She was officially reported missing at 10:30 that night. For 4 days, police and volunteers searched every block between her mother’s home and her father’s apartment. Officers knocked on doors, checked basements and garages, stopped anyone who had been outside that Sunday evening. Volunteers spread out along the Chemung River, into the parks and empty lots on the city’s outskirts.

Search parties walked the wooded logging roads on Elmira’s southern and western edges, terrain that was hilly and heavily forested with patches of snow and ice still on the ground from the winter. Linda waited. Ellsworth waited. Rose waited. And Rose was pregnant. She was carrying another child while the city searched for the one she had just kissed goodbye.

On the fourth day, the morning of March 19th, 1964, a man hiking with his two young sons off Combs Hill Road found her. The location was a wooded area, roughly 7 miles from the city, off an old logging road that locals knew well. Children played there. Teenagers used it as a lovers’ lane. Her body had been concealed beneath branches, dirt, and leaves, and stones.

Four heavy stones had been placed on top of her. The largest weighed approximately 110 lb. Whoever put her there had not been in a hurry. The weight of those stones alone told investigators that he had spent a significant amount of time at that site before walking away. Only part of her hand and one sneaker were visible above the ground.

 Her mouth had been stuffed with dirt and twigs. The Chemung County Medical Examiner performed the autopsy. Cause of death, asphyxiation by strangulation. There was also evidence of sexual assault. Someone had taken Mary Teresa off the street, driven her 7 miles out of the city, and left her on a hillside above the town where she had grown up.

At the scene, police collected what they found. Her cat’s eye glasses, the fan club card, several buttons from her blouse. Everything was carefully bagged and stored in a freezer at Elmira Police Headquarters. In 1964, there was no science that could read what was on her clothing. The detectives stored it anyway, as if they already understood that someone someday was going to need it.

 The Elmira Police Department shifted from a missing person’s operation to a full homicide investigation the day the body was found. Detectives interviewed every person who had been in the area on the evening of March 15th. Men who lived along the roads leading to Combs Hill, men seen driving in the area that Sunday, men with prior arrests involving children.

 They checked records at local, state, and federal level, cross-referenced hundreds of tip sheets against every name in the growing file, each one investigated individually, checked against the known facts in the timeline, and either pursued further or eliminated. By October 1964, 7 months after the murder, detectives had questioned more than 300 people.

 Not one interview produced a viable suspect. The killer’s name was not in any of it. W E L M radio and the Star Gazette newspaper jointly offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the killer’s identification. Residents who had never met Mary Teresa donated money. The murder had shaken the city in a way that nothing else had in recent memory.

By 1972, the reward had grown to $5,000. In the six decades that followed, nobody collected it. The case generated thousands of pages of documentation. As detectives retired or transferred, new officers inherited the file. Each generation read through the same stacks of reports, searching for a name a previous investigator had missed.

Each generation reached the same conclusion. Every actionable lead had dried up decades ago. The file stayed open, but there was nothing left to pull. 61 years of institutional memory passed from one generation of officers to the next. Detectives who came through the department knew the Simpson case by name.

 It was the department’s oldest open homicide, the one that nobody could close, the one that followed every incoming detective like a shadow until they retired and passed it on. The file outlasted them all, and still no name attached to the crime. The man who killed Mary Teresa Simpson had never walked into a single one of those interviews.