DNA Just Cracked New York’s Oldest Cold Case After 61 Years

This wooded area just off Combs’ Hill Road is where 60 years ago  the body of 12-year-old Mary Teresa Simpson was found covered in rocks and debris.  The Elmira Police Department says it’s now using modern DNA testing to finally solve this cold case.  I just know that  she was found up on Combs’ Hill and then she was covered up with boulders and a hand was sticking out.

 She was fully clothed when they found her    and I guess she had twigs in her mouth. That’s That’s what I heard.  It was a Sunday,  March 15th, 1964. The kind of Sunday that feels like nothing is going to happen. Mary Teresa Simpson was 12 years old and she had spent the afternoon  the way any 12-year-old would.

 She visited her mother. She saw her  cousin. She said goodbye and started walking home. The streets were quiet. The light was already fading. Nobody was watching. Nobody remembered seeing her and by the time her father started making phone calls that night, Mary Teresa was already gone. Linda Galpin was 16 years old when her little sister didn’t come home.

 She was out of town that Sunday. By the time she got the news and rushed back to Elmira, four days had already passed. Her father had been making phone calls. Volunteers  had been searching. Her mother had been waiting and her mother was pregnant.    Rose Simpson was carrying another child while the city searched for the one she had just kissed goodbye.

Linda came home to a casket. She looked at her little sister lying still  and she couldn’t make it real. She tried to climb in but someone pulled her back. This was March  1964. Linda is in her late 70s now. She still thinks about that casket. She still thinks about Mary every single day and for 61 years she had no name to put to what happened on that Sunday evening.

 No arrest, no trial, no answer. Just a file that nobody could close. Welcome to Terra True Crime.    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 Mary. Mary Teresa Simpson was born  in 1951, the youngest of four children. She was shy in the way that kids who move a lot tend to be shy, never quite settled, never fully rooted. Her family had relocated enough times that friendships never had the chance to stick.

 She wore cat-eye glasses. She kept a fan club card in her pocket. She loved Elvis Presley. She carried his address in her pocketbook the way a 12-year-old girl in 1964 would, like it was the most important thing she owned. Hold on to those details, they matter. 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 2 weeks before she disappeared, back to the streets she had grown up on, back to the same city where her mother Rose still lived, back to Linda. For the first time in a while, Mary Teresa was somewhere familiar, somewhere that felt like home.

She had 2 weeks to feel that. On Sunday, March 15th, she left her father’s apartment at around 3:00 in the afternoon. She told him she was going to visit her cousin, but she went to see her mother first. Unannounced, unexpected, and completely welcome. Rose was glad to see her.

 She stayed about an hour, then she left for her cousin’s house as she had originally planned. Around 6:30 that evening, she said her goodbyes and started the walk back toward her father’s apartment. At around 7:00, a friend spotted her on East Market  Street. Mary told her she was heading home. That was the last time anyone who loved her saw her alive.

 March in Upstate New York    means short days. By 6:30, the sky was already darkening. Most families were already inside for dinner. Curtains drawn against the cold. The sidewalks were mostly empty. It was a 12-year-old girl in the last thin minutes of daylight on a Sunday evening. She was on familiar streets.

 She was close  to home. She had no reason to be afraid. And somewhere in that same city, a 32-year-old man saw her. I want you to think about that. A city of 40,000 people, a quiet Sunday  evening, a child walking home. And one man who made a decision in those last thin  minutes of daylight that would take 61 years to answer for.

Ellsworth, Mary’s father, waited. When it got late and Mary still wasn’t home, he started calling Rose, relatives,  anyone who might know where she was. Nobody had seen Mary Teresa after she left her cousin’s house. 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 10:50 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 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 winter. Linda waited. Ellsworth waited. Rose waited.

 While they searched,  the man went to work. He drove for Mayflower Van Lines. He knew every back road on Elmira’s southern edge. He knew the logging  trails. He knew the hills. He drove those roads the way working men know their roots    without thinking, without looking because they have driven them so many times that the road is just part of them.

He went home at the end of his shifts. He sat at his table.    He went to bed. Four days passed for him the same way they passed for everyone else in that city. Except he knew something  no one else knew. On 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. An old logging road that locals knew  well. Children played there. Teenagers used it as a lover’s lane.  Her body had been concealed beneath branches, dirt, 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. He had taken his time. He had chosen each stone. He had placed  them deliberately. The weight of those stones told investigators that the man who put her there 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. He had driven her 7 miles out of the city. He had carried those stones.  He had walked away and then he had gone home. At the scene, investigators collected what they found. Her cat-eye glasses,  the fan club card that had been in her pocket, 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. That decision,    made by investigators who had no way of knowing what forensic science would eventually become, is the reason this case was ever solved.

Remember that. The Chemung County Medical Examiner performed the autopsy. Cause of death: asphyxiation by strangulation.    The original 1964 report found no evidence of sexual assault. That conclusion would later be proven wrong. Technology would eventually reveal what 1964 couldn’t see. What was done to Mary Teresa Simpson on that hillside was worse than anyone officially acknowledged for decades.

Someone had taken her 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 and lived there in that same town for the rest of his life. 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. He was not in any of it.

Think about what that  means. These were detectives who worked the case around the clock, who knew every face on the east side of Elmira, who knocked on every door between her mother’s apartment and her father’s. They interviewed 300 people. They cross-referenced every tip. They followed every lead.

 And in all of that, in all those pages, all those names, all those interviews, they never  reached his door, not once. His name never appeared on a single tip sheet. He never walked into a single one of those interviews. While detectives knocked on doors across the city, he answered none of them.

 While investigators built a file that would eventually grow to more than 6,000  pages, his name was in none of them. W 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 Theresa 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. People who knew something, or thought they knew something,  came forward. Tips were called in. Names were offered. Every one of them was investigated. His name was not among them. In 1972, he was still in Elmira, still driving those same roads, still going home at the end of his shifts, still living in the same city where a 12-year-old girl’s murder remained unsolved  and the reward sat uncollected. He knew.

 He had always known. Linda kept calling. She called the Elmira Police Department periodically. Sometimes once a year, sometimes more. The same question every time. The answer was always the same. Nothing new. The file  hadn’t moved. She called anyway, because what else do you do when the police have nothing? When your parents are aging, when the newspapers have stopped covering it, and the city has mostly moved on.

 She called anyway. 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. 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. In the 1980s, the detectives who had worked  the original case retired.

 He was still in Elmira, still on those same roads. His children were growing up. His family was around him. He had built a life in the same city  where he had taken one. The 1990s came. New century, new investigators, same file,  same dead end. And Linda kept calling. Ellsworth died without ever hearing a name.

   Rose died without ever hearing a name. Rose, who had been pregnant when Mary Teresa was killed, who had carried one daughter into the world in the same year she buried another, died without ever knowing who took her child off the street that Sunday evening. Neither of them lived long enough.

 That is not a tragedy you can summarize. That is a weight that sits in your chest and doesn’t move. Linda said later, “It affected me really badly. I lived through  it for years and cried and suffered heartache all this time. I did this for my mom. She did it for her mom. She kept calling for a woman who died before the answer came.

 If that doesn’t make you angry, I don’t know what will. And while Linda grieved and called and waited, and watched her parents die without an answer, he became a grandfather in the same city, on the same streets,  living a life that Mary Theresa Simpson never got to live, never got  close to living. She was 12.

 She had cat-eye glasses and a fan club card and Elvis Presley’s address in her pocketbook. She had 2 weeks back  in a city that felt like home. That is everything she got. He got decades. Now, here is something most cold case  channels barely touched, something that has never been fully told.

 While the police had nothing, Linda was carrying her own investigation inside her own family. For years, for decades, Linda believed it was her own father who killed her sister. Ellsworth, the man who had reported Mary Theresa missing, the man who had waited by the phone that Sunday night. She looked at him and she couldn’t stop the thought.

She told him to his face. She said, “I think you killed my sister.” He didn’t like it too well. He said, “No, I didn’t.”    And she believed him, and she didn’t believe him, and she went back and forth for years because that is what this case  did to people. It didn’t just take Mary Theresa.

 It planted doubt inside the family she left behind.  It made a sister look at her father and wonder. It made her carry an apology every single day. “I’m sorry if  it’s not him.” every single day. She also suspected Dave Lewis, her father’s friend and roommate. Two people, both gone now. She carried both their names for decades without ever knowing the truth.

 That is the real cost of an unsolved murder. It doesn’t just hollow out the family. It turns them against  each other. It makes grief look like guilt. It makes love look like suspicion. It takes the people who should be holding each other up and puts a question mark between them that  never fully goes away.

 Linda carried that question mark for 61 years. In the year 2000, 36 years after the murder, the New York State Police  Forensic Investigation Center received Mary Teresa’s clothing for analysis. The items had been sitting in that freezer at Elmira Police Headquarters since 1964.  The technology to read what was on them had not existed when they were first collected.

 It existed now, and someone had kept the evidence waiting  for it. Analysts examined the blouse first. They found biological material and developed a male DNA profile from it. The profile was clear and usable.  They entered it into CODIS, the FBI’s national database of convicted offenders across the country. If the man who killed Mary Teresa had ever been convicted of a qualifying offense  anywhere in the United States and had his DNA collected, the system would have flagged a match automatically.

There was no match. In 2003, additional clothing was submitted. A cutting from Mary’s skirt and underwear tested positive for the presence of sperm. The samples confirmed and strengthened the original profile. The sexual assault that the 1964 autopsy had missed  was now confirmed.

 What was done to that child on that hillside was now part of the official record. The profile was entered into CODIS again. Still nothing. The profile was resubmitted in 2014.  The system searched. It came back empty. Three submissions, three dead  ends. Three times the science did everything it could and came back with silence.

 Because the man who left that biological material on a 12-year-old girl’s clothing in 1964 had never been convicted of a qualifying offense in any law enforcement database in the country. He had slipped through every net, every single one. He was still in Elmira when the first submission came back  empty in 2000.

 He was still there in 2003 when the second one confirmed the profile and still found nothing. He was still there in 2004  when he died. He went to his grave while investigators were still searching for his name in databases that didn’t have it. He died in 2004. The file was still open. The reward was still uncollected. Linda was still calling.

 And he was buried in an Elmira cemetery less than 5 miles from the hillside where he had left her. In 2022,  Elmira Police Sergeant William Goodwin applied for and received a grant from Season of Justice, a nonprofit that funds advanced forensic testing in cold cases. The grant covered the full cost of submitting  the DNA evidence to a private laboratory in Texas that specializes in building usable genetic profiles from degraded  biological What remained of the DNA was 0.

4 nanograms. 1 nanogram is 1 billionth of a gram. The sample was invisible to the naked eye. It was smaller than anything you have ever  tried to see. It was the last viable piece of biological evidence connecting a killer to a 12-year-old girl murdered six decades earlier.    There were no do-overs.

 When DNA testing is performed, the DNA is consumed in the process. If a usable profile could not be developed from what remained, the evidence was gone  forever. That is the decision Sergeant Goodwin made. That is the weight he carried when he authorized that submission. One shot, six decades of preservation, one invisible sample, no second chance.

 FBI Special Agent Kenneth  Jensen packed the evidence carefully in dry ice and shipped it to Texas. Then the ice storm hit. A historic winter storm shut down the FedEx hub in Memphis, the largest FedEx hub in the world, the one through which the package had been routed. The shipment sat  stranded somewhere inside a frozen facility.

 Jensen couldn’t reach anyone at FedEx. The dry ice had a finite life. If it ran out before the package moved, the evidence was gone.  60 years of careful preservation, a freezer that had held those clothes since 1964. Detectives who had stored evidence for science that didn’t exist yet, a grant, a decision, a submission, all of it ended by a weather forecast.

 Jensen contacted the FBI’s liaison at the Memphis hub. Agents physically searched the frozen facility for one small package among millions. One package among millions in a facility shut down by a historic storm. Jensen said later, “I was petrified that my act of shipping it through FedEx was going to lose the only chance of solving it.

” They found it just in time, moved it into a bureau freezer until the storm cleared, then shipped it on to Texas. That moment, that search through a frozen facility for one small package, is the moment this case almost ended. 60 years of work, 60 years of Linda calling, 60 years of a file that outlasted every detective who ever read it.

 Almost ended by an ice storm in Memphis. Almost ended by weather. They found it. The lab applied forensic-grade genome sequencing to what remained of the degraded material and built a complete genetic profile of the unknown male. The profile was uploaded to public genealogy databases, where millions of Americans have voluntarily submitted their own genetic data.

 The FBI’s forensic genetic genealogy team began building family trees outward from every match they found. In 2023, investigators partnered with the Criminal Investigation Resource Center at Russell Sage College where Dr.  Christina Lane and her students assisted with the genealogical work. They received a case file totaling over 6,000 pages.

 They organized it, mapped it, charted every suspect, every lead, every forensic test conducted since 1964. They traced family lines, cross-referenced public documents with genetic data, worked through birth records, marriage certificates, and paper trails that stretched back generations into Upstate New York. Branch by branch, generation by generation.

 The work took more than 2 years. By 2025, the tree had narrowed to a single individual. Investigators contacted his surviving son. He cooperated completely. He provided a voluntary DNA sample. The comparison confirmed a familial relationship between his DNA and the unknown male profile recovered from Mary Teresa’s clothing.

 A familial match identifies family line, not the man himself. And the man the tree pointed to was already dead.    He had died in 2004. He was buried in an Elmira cemetery less than 5 miles from the hillside on Combs Hill Road where he had left her 40 years earlier. Authorization was obtained to exhume  the remains.

 On November 5th, 2025, the body was disinterred from the cemetery. A board-certified forensic anthropologist  recovered biological samples which were submitted to the New York State Police for  comparison testing. DNA extracted directly from the exhumed remains  was compared to the profile recovered in 2000 and confirmed in 2003.

  The match was definitive. The probability of selecting an unrelated individual who would produce the same genetic result was less than 1 in 320 billion. His name was Alfred Raymond Murray Jr. born in Elmira in 1931, never left.  A Korean War veteran, a truck driver for Mayflower Van Lines who knew every back road and logging trail on the city’s southern edge.

 A man  with a documented criminal history involving children, known to the Elmira Police Department for decades.  But being known to police is not the same as being convicted. And CODIS only holds DNA from people convicted of qualifying  offenses. Whatever was on his record was not enough to put him in that database.

 Not enough to flag his name.  Not enough to connect him to a 12-year-old girl’s clothing sitting in a freezer since 1964.    And still, in a file that ran to more than 6,000 pages, across 61 years, across hundreds  of investigators, his name never appeared in a single interview. Never appeared on a single tip sheet.

 Nobody knocked on his door. He was 32 years old in March of 1964.  He saw a 12-year-old girl walking alone through quiet streets as the last light faded on a Sunday evening. He took her. He drove her 7 miles out of the city on roads he knew like the back of his hand. He carried those stones. He placed them on top of  her one by one.

 The largest weighed 110 lb. He was not in a hurry. He walked away. He went home. He went to work the next day. He drove those same roads. He lived in that same city for  40 more years. He became a grandfather. He died in 2004. His obituary ran in the Star-Gazette on March 19th, 2004.

 March 19th, exactly 40 years to the day after Mary Teresa’s body had been found on Combs Hill Road. His obituary listed his wife, his children, his grandchildren, and his military service. It described a man who lived his whole life in one  city, served his country, and raised a family. It did not mention Mary Teresa Simpson.

 At the time of his death, the two names had never been connected. He died with her name unspoken. He died with the answer. He took it with him into the ground, and investigators had to go in after it. He had a name. He had a life. He had a family and a funeral and an obituary in the local paper, and Mary Teresa Simpson had a casket at 12 years old and a sister who spent 61 years making phone calls that went nowhere, and parents who died without ever hearing the truth.

That is who he was. That is what  he did. And now everyone knows it. On February 10th, 2026, Police Chief  Kristen Thorn stood at a podium in Elmira. Beside her, representatives from the FBI, the District Attorney’s  Office, Sergeant William Goodwin, and retired officers who had worked the case across the decades.

 Men and women who had read that same file    and reached the same dead end, now standing in the same room for this. In the audience  sat Linda Galpin, 78 years old, three surviving members of Mary Teresa’s family,  waiting for a name they had never heard spoken out loud. The Chief named him.

Linda stood up. She had spent 61 years making phone calls that were answered with nothing new. She had watched her parents die without  ever learning the name. She had suspected her own father. She had told him to his face and watched his reaction and carried that guilt every single  day.

 She had roller skated with Mary, gone to Girl Scouts with her, gone to the neighborhood  house with her. She had watched her little sister grow up just enough to be shy and quiet    and 12 years old with cat-eye glasses and a fan club card in her pocket. And then she had watched all of that get taken. Covered in stone on a hillside 7 miles from home, she had one thing to  say.

“I am very happy it’s finally ended. I just wish my mom was here. That’s it.” After 61 years, that was all she had. That was enough. Mary Teresa Simpson was 12 years old. She spent her last Sunday the way any child would, visiting her mother, seeing her cousin, starting the walk home. She had 2 weeks  back in a city that felt like home.

 She had cat-eye glasses and a fan club card and Elvis Presley’s address in her pocketbook. She She had a sister who loved her. She had a mother who was glad to see her when she showed up unannounced. She had a whole life still in front  of her. She never made it home. It took 61 years, an invisible DNA sample, an ice storm in Memphis, a woman who never  stopped calling, a son who cooperated when investigators came to his door, a forensic anthropologist who flew in from Detroit  to recover what remained, a lab in Texas that worked

with material no one else could sequence, a team of college students who organized 6,000 pages of case files so investigators could finally see the whole  picture. Every single one of those things had to happen. Every single one. And they did. His name was Alfred Raymond Murray,    Jr. He knew what he did.

 He carried it his entire life. He went to his grave with it. And they dug it back up. Now everyone knows it. If this case  stayed with you, leave a comment below. Tell me what you make of 61 years and one name and a woman who never quit asking. If you’re new here, hit like and subscribe.

 This is Tira True Crime and we’ll see you in the next one.