NEW YORK 1964 Cold Case FINALLY Solved | MARY SIMPSON’S KILLER Finally Identified After 62 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.  Well, I only could tell you a little bit because I wasn’t home when my sister got murdered.

 Linda Galpin says she has been waiting for justice for her younger sister Mary for more than 60 years.  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.  It’s a cold Sunday afternoon in March 1964 in a small city called Elmira, tucked into the Southern Tier of New York State.

 A 12-year-old girl is standing outside a neighborhood store saying goodbye to her aunt and her two cousins. She’s shy, the kind of quiet, careful kid who doesn’t cause anyone trouble. And today, she’s got a short walk ahead of her back to her father’s house, the same walk she’s probably made a hundred times before. The air is sharp enough that she probably has her coat pulled tight, her breath visible in short bursts as she says her goodbyes.

 She waves, she turns, she starts walking. And somewhere between that store and her front door, on a walk that should have taken her only a few minutes, she disappears completely. And the last people who will ever see her alive are the aunt and cousins who just watched her turn the corner and walk out of their sight. Subscribe right now because it would take 62 years, a piece of clothing kept frozen in a police evidence room, and a DNA science that didn’t exist yet in 1964 to finally answer the question this small city has been asking since that

Sunday afternoon, who did this to Mary Teresa Simpson? Mary was 12 years old. Newspapers at the time described her the way people in Elmira remembered her, quiet, shy, and by every account a good girl. She lived with her father in Elmira, a working-class city built around its rail yards and manufacturing, the kind of tight community where a missing child wasn’t just a family tragedy.

 It was something the whole town felt happened to it at once. Mary had an older sister, Linda, who would go on to spend the rest of her life trying to find out what happened to her little sister that Sunday. In March of 1964 though, Linda was simply a girl who was about to lose her sibling in a way neither of them could have imagined. Elmira in 1964 was a city of roughly 40,000 people tucked against the Chemung River, the kind of place where families had lived for generations, where kids walked to school and to the corner store without anyone thinking twice about it,

and where a violent crime against a child felt not just tragic, but almost impossible, a rupture in the basic assumption that this was a safe place to raise a family. That assumption would never fully return, not for the generation of Elmira parents who lived through the search for Mary Simpson, and arguably not for the city itself.

On March 15th, 1964, Mary spent part of her Sunday visiting her cousins and her aunt on the east side of Elmira. When it was time to head home, she said her goodbyes outside a local store and started walking back toward her father’s house alone, a walk her family and neighbors considered ordinary and safe enough for a 12-year-old to make on her own.

 It was the kind of errand kids in small American cities made constantly in 1964 without a second thought from the adults around them, the sort of small unsupervised freedom that simply came with growing up in a town where everyone knew everyone. Mary never arrived home. When evening came and she still hadn’t shown up, her family began to worry, and that worry turned quickly into the kind of fear that spreads through a neighborhood overnight.

 She was reported missing that same evening. For 4 days, Elmira searched for her. Police, neighbors, and family combed the areas around her route home, hoping for any sign of where she might have gone or been taken. Volunteers walked fields and wooded lots on the edges of the city. Local papers ran her photograph and description, and the search consumed the small city’s attention in a way that only a missing child can.

4 days is a long time for a community to hold its breath, checking every ditch and tree line, hoping for the best possible outcome, while quietly bracing for the worst one. Parents across Elmira, who had let their own children walk to corner stores and back without a second thought just days earlier, found themselves watching the clock every time a child left the house, a shift in the city’s basic sense of safety that would outlast the search itself by decades.

On March 19th, 4 days after she vanished, Mary’s body was found roughly 5 miles from where she’d last been seen, hidden in a wooded area off Combs Hill Road, buried under a makeshift covering of rocks, sticks, and dirt. She had been sexually assaulted. The cause of death was ruled to be strangulation. She was 12 years old, and whoever did this to her had taken the time, after killing her, to hide her body well enough that it took search parties four full days to find it.

The Elmira Police Department opened a homicide investigation immediately, and in the early weeks, it was treated with the intensity a case like this demanded. Local newspapers ran extensive coverage in the days after Mary’s body was found. One headline quoting her relatives describing her as a quiet, good girl.

Another built around her mother’s own description of her as active, shy, and quiet. The small handful of adjectives that, in an era before victims got much more space than a photograph and a paragraph, became the entire public record of who Mary Simpson had been. Detectives interviewed neighbors, questioned people who had been in the area, and worked whatever leads they could develop.

 But 1964 was a brutally difficult time to solve a crime like this one. There was no DNA testing of any kind. There was no way to compare biological evidence against a suspect unless investigators already had a name in front of them, and simply couldn’t get one. Whatever physical evidence detectives collected in the days after Mary’s body was found, they had almost no scientific means to interpret it beyond what a trained eye could observe directly.

Despite months, then years of effort, the case produced no arrest and no charges. Officially, detectives said they had run out of leads. The file went into storage, and Mary Theresa Simpson’s murder became one of Elmira’s oldest, most painful unsolved cases. What makes this case different from so many others that went cold in that same era is a single, almost accidental decision made by someone in the Elmira Police Department.

 Instead of disposing of Mary’s clothing once the investigation stalled, someone chose to keep it and to keep it frozen, preserved, waiting for a technology nobody in 1964 could have imagined. Meanwhile, above ground, life in Elmira moved forward the way it does after any tragedy a community can’t solve. Mary’s father grieved the loss of his daughter without ever getting an answer.

Her sister Linda grew up, built a life of her own in Elmira, and never stopped thinking about her sister. Linda has spent decades visiting Mary’s grave, keeping her memory present in a town that even 60 years later still talks about what happened to her. She became, in a quiet, unofficial way, the keeper of Mary’s story.

 The person who made sure a 12-year-old girl from 1964 didn’t simply fade into a newspaper clipping and a case number. For a case this old to still be part of a community’s living memory rather than a forgotten file in a basement says something about how deeply Mary’s murder affected the people who grew up around it.

 In 2025, a book titled What Happened to Me was even published exploring the case in depth, drawing on newspaper archives, court records, and interviews with Mary’s own family. Linda worked closely with the author throughout the process, later saying the author had called her constantly to verify details and get her input, and that the finished book captured both the facts of the case and the lasting impact it left on her family.

That kind of ongoing hands-on involvement, well into her own senior years, is exactly the portrait of someone who never once let her sister’s case become a closed chapter, even decades before anyone had a name to attach to it. For a long time, that’s exactly what this case was, a devastating story with no ending.

 But underneath the surface, in evidence lockers and forensic labs, the pieces of an answer were quietly accumulating decades before anyone in Elmira would know it. The science started catching up in 2003. That year, as DNA testing techniques advanced well beyond anything available in 1964, investigators resubmitted the physical evidence from Mary’s case, including her clothing, a purse, and hair samples to the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center.

 It was, in itself, a small act of faith, reopening a nearly 40-year-old file on the hope that technology had finally caught up to what a small city’s detectives couldn’t do in 1964. A cutting taken from Mary’s skirt tested positive for the presence of sperm. Investigators were able to extract a DNA profile from that sample and enter it into CODIS, the National Combined DNA Index System, used to compare crime scene evidence against the profiles of known offenders across the country.

For Linda, who by then had spent nearly 40 years without a single real update on her sister’s case, the news that there was finally usable DNA must have felt like the first real hope she’d had in her adult life. It didn’t produce a match. Whoever left that DNA behind in 1964 had never been arrested for anything serious enough to have their profile logged into the system.

 CODIS can only flag a name that’s already in the database. Alfred Murray’s name wasn’t in it. For Linda, that meant the hope of 2003 quietly deflated into one more disappointment layered on top of decades of them. One more reminder that having evidence and having an answer were two very different things. In 2014, the evidence went back to the lab a second time, allowing investigators to isolate the male DNA profile more precisely. Again, no match.

The technology had advanced, but the fundamental problem remained. Without a suspect already in the system, a DNA profile alone still couldn’t produce a name. By this point, Linda had lived through two separate rounds of hope followed by silence decades apart. Each one asking her to believe again that this might finally be the moment, and each one ending the same way it had in 1964.

That changed in 2022 when the Elmira Police Department, working with the FBI, secured a grant through a non-profit organization called Season of Justice, which funds cold case investigations specifically like this one. Season of Justice exists for exactly this kind of situation. A case with preserved evidence, a family still waiting for answers, and a police department that simply doesn’t have the specialized budget to pursue forensic genetic genealogy on its own.

 It’s worth pausing on how easily this step alone might never have happened. Forensic genetic genealogy isn’t cheap, and small city departments don’t have unlimited budgets to keep funding advanced testing on a 58-year-old file with two prior failed attempts already behind it. If that grant application had been denied or never submitted at all, Mary’s case could very plausibly still be sitting in a filing cabinet today, waiting on evidence that was already sitting in a freezer fully capable of identifying her killer with no funding

path left to actually use it. With that funding, the case was submitted for investigative genetic genealogy, the same broad technique responsible for cracking some of the country’s most notorious cold cases in recent years. The DNA profile, refined by the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center, was uploaded to public genealogy databases by Othram, a forensic laboratory that partners with law enforcement agencies across the country specifically to solve cases exactly like Mary’s.

This is where the real detective work happens, and it looks nothing like a crime lab on television. Investigators don’t get a name from a machine, they get a distant genetic match, sometimes a third or fourth cousin the suspect never even knew existed, and from there, genealogists build entire family trees by hand using marriage records, obituaries, and census documents, narrowing an enormous web of relatives branch by branch until one person fits every detail.

 The right age, the right location, the right window of time. In 2023, the Russell Sage College Criminal Investigation Resource Center joined the effort, helping digitize the case’s massive volume of files. Boxes of interview notes, tips, and dead ends accumulated across six decades that had never been fully cross-referenced against each other.

If you’re watching this from Upstate New York, or if you grew up in a small town where an old case like this one still gets talked about at family dinners decades later, drop a comment and let us know where you’re watching from and what the weather’s like where you are right now, because Mary’s case is exactly that kind of story for Elmira.

 One that never really left, and cases like it live on in towns just like yours. Piece by piece, the genealogy work led investigators to a name, Alfred Raymond Murray, Jr. Murray was born in 1931 in Elmira, making him 32 years old at the time of Mary’s murder. He was a lifelong local, born and raised in the same small city where Mary lived.

According to his obituary, he served in the United States Army and later had a wife and three children of his own. On paper, he looked like an ordinary Elmira man who had lived out an ordinary American life. A veteran, a husband, a father, the kind of biography that gives no outward hint of what investigators now believe he was capable of.

According to Elmira police, Murray had repeated criminal involvement over the following decades involving offenses against children. No single incident proved he was responsible for what happened to Mary, investigators said, but the pattern was consistent with both the forensic findings and the circumstances of her murder.

That pattern, playing out for decades in the same community where Mary was killed, never once connected back to her file. Despite his history, despite living his entire life in the same small city, Murray had never been a suspect. His name did not appear anywhere in the thousands of pages that made up her case.

 He had no known connection to Mary Teresa Simpson or her family whatsoever. By the time the genetic genealogy work pointed to him, Alfred Raymond Murray Jr. was already dead. In November of 2025, investigators exhumed his body to obtain a direct DNA sample and compare it against the profile recovered from Mary’s skirt. A grave opened not to bury someone new, but to finally settle a question the man inside it had carried unspoken to his death.

The odds that the DNA belonged to anyone else, less than 1 in 320 billion. On February 10th, 2026, the Elmira Police Department, alongside the Chemung County District Attorney’s Office, the FBI, and other investigators held a press conference to formally announce what the DNA had confirmed. It became the 18th cold case in New York State to be solved using Authurm’s forensic genealogy work, part of a growing wave of decades-old cases across the state finally being closed by the same combination of preserved evidence

and modern genetic science. Elmira Police Chief Kristen Thorne stood in front of the room and called it a historic day for her department. Justice, in her words, after almost 62 years. Sergeant William Goodwin walked the room through Murray’s disturbing criminal history, noting the pattern lined up with both the forensic evidence and the circumstances of Mary’s murder.

Chief Thorne made one thing unmistakably clear. If Murray were still alive, the District Attorney’s Office would be pursuing murder charges right now. He wasn’t alive. He had died having lived a full life. A wife, three children, a military record, decades of freedom, none of it interrupted by the crime investigators now say he committed against a 12-year-old girl in 1964.

In the room that day was Linda Galpin, Mary’s older sister, standing in front of a packed room of press and community members to finally hear the name of the man responsible for taking her sister from her, 62 years after that Sunday afternoon in March. For a sister who had spent six decades keeping her story alive, visiting her grave, working with an author to make sure Mary was remembered as more than a case file, this was the moment she had been waiting her entire adult life for, and it arrived in a room full of cameras

with a name that meant nothing to her, attached to a man she’d likely walked past on the streets of Elmira at some point without either of them ever knowing what connected them. The room itself, packed with reporters, investigators, and residents who had grown up hearing about Mary’s case, the way you hear about any story that never leaves a small town, sat in a kind of stunned quiet as officials laid out the timeline.

62 years is longer than most of the people in that room had been alive. For a city the size of Elmira, a case like this one isn’t just a police file, it’s part of the collective memory, passed down through families, the kind of story parents tell their own kids as a reason to be careful without either generation ever expecting an actual answer to arrive.

For Linda and for the rest of Mary’s family, there will never be a trial, never a jury, a verdict, or a sentencing hearing where they get to watch the man responsible face any formal consequence. Murray died without ever once being questioned about Mary Teresa Simpson, without a single detective in 62 years of investigation ever knocking on his door.

What the family got instead was something quieter and in its own way harder to sit with. A name, a set of facts, and the confirmation that the man responsible had lived out his entire life in the very city where he took Mary’s, walking the same streets, shopping in the same stores, raising his own three children, all while an entire community searched for answers he could have given them at any point and never did.

And here’s what this case still cannot answer, even with a name finally attached to it. Investigators have been direct about the fact that Murray had no known connection to Mary or her family. There’s no evidence he knew her, no indication their paths had crossed before that Sunday, nothing in 62 years of investigation that explains why a 12-year-old girl walking a short, familiar route home became his target that particular afternoon.

 Was it random? Did he see her leaving the store and follow her? Had he been in that neighborhood for some other reason entirely and simply encountered a shy 12-year-old walking alone? Nobody knows, and because Murray never lived to be questioned, that answer very likely died with him. Investigators were able to prove, with near absolute scientific certainty, exactly who did this.

 They may never be able to say why he did it or why Mary, specifically, was the one he chose. That gap sits uncomfortably at the center of an otherwise closed case. A one in 320 billion DNA match tells you, beyond any reasonable doubt, who committed a crime. It tells you nothing about what was happening in that person’s mind in the moments leading up to it.

Murray’s own family, his wife, his three children, are left now to reconcile decades of ordinary memories, birthdays, holidays, an entire domestic life with a truth about their husband and father that arrived only after his death, delivered not by him, but by a laboratory. It’s worth sitting for a moment on the strange, almost quietly poetic detail sitting at the center of how this case finally got solved.

 For decades, while Mary’s murder sat cold, unsolved, gathering dust in a filing system, the one piece of physical evidence capable of eventually identifying her killer was sitting inside a freezer at the Elmira Police Department, deliberately kept cold, waiting for a science that hadn’t been invented yet. Somebody, back in 1964 or in the years shortly after, made the quiet decision to preserve that evidence instead of discarding it, without any way of knowing that decision would matter for 62 years.

 In a very literal sense, this cold case stayed solvable because someone kept it cold on purpose, tucked away in an evidence freezer through five different decades, through the entire span of Linda Galpin’s adult life, waiting for the exact right moment in forensic science and the exact right grant application to finally thaw the truth out.

Mary’s case is also part of something bigger than Elmira. It’s one of 18 cold cases across New York state alone that Astrium’s forensic genealogy work has helped close, a number that keeps climbing as departments across the country dig back through their own evidence freezers and storage rooms. Every one of those 18 cases represents a family that spent years, sometimes decades, exactly like Linda Galpin, telling the same unfinished story.

Not every cold case gets that chance. For every file like Mary’s, preserved carefully enough to still yield usable DNA 60 years later. There are others where the evidence was lost or never collected in a way that could survive the decades or simply never made it to the front of a funding queue. Elmira got lucky, if that word can even apply here, in the one place it mattered most.

Mary Theresa Simpson was 12 years old. She was quiet, she was shy. She was, by every single account left behind by the people who knew her, a good girl. The kind of ordinary, unremarkable description that somehow captures a whole childhood in three words. She said goodbye to her aunt and her cousins outside a neighborhood store on an ordinary Sunday afternoon in March, and she started walking the short distance home, the same walk she’d made without incident more times than anyone could count.

She never made it, and for 62 years, an entire city carried that unfinished walk with her until a piece of frozen fabric and a science nobody in 1964 could have dreamed of finally finished it for her. If this story stayed with you, subscribe and hit the notification bell because we cover cold cases just like Mary’s every week.

 Cases where the truth waited decades, sometimes literally frozen in an evidence room for someone determined enough to finally go looking for it. And before you go, tell us in the comments, do you think Alfred Murray targeted Mary specifically or do you believe, like investigators still do, that a 12-year-old girl walking home alone on an ordinary Sunday simply crossed paths with the wrong man at the worst possible moment?