New York Coldest Case: Justice Served After 62 Years | True Crime Documentary

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.  This wooded area just off Combsfield Road is where 60 years ago the body of 12-year-old Mary Teresa Simpson was found covered in rocks and debris.

 For 60 years one question haunted a small city in Upstate New York. Who took 12-year-old Mary Teresa Simpson and why did he get to walk free for the rest of his life? On a quiet Sunday evening in March of 1964, Mary Teresa left to walk home. She never made it. Four days later she was found in the woods outside town hidden beneath dirt, branches, and heavy stones on a hillside overlooking [music] the streets where she grew up.

And the man responsible simply disappeared back into ordinary life. He had a name. He had a job. He had a family. He drove the same roads, shopped in the same stores, and grew old in the very same city where detectives spent decades hunting for him. They questioned more than 300 people. [music] They chased hundreds of leads.

 They passed the case from one generation of investigators to the next. And every single year the family heard the same three words. Nothing new. No name. No suspect. Not one solid lead pointing to the person who took a little girl off the street, drove her miles out of town, and left her where he thought no one would ever look.

 For a long time it seemed this case would stay unsolved forever. But six decades later a single trace of evidence so small it was nearly invisible to the human eye forced investigators to open the file one more time. And what they uncovered would leave an entire community stunned. Because the man they’d been searching for all those years had been hiding in plain sight closer than anyone ever imagined.

This is that true crime documentary.  [music]  And before we go any further, I want to know where you’re watching from. Drop your city and state in the comments right now. And if you love a real true crime story you told the right way, subscribe so you don’t miss what comes next.

 Because trust me, this one you’ll want to see all the way through. Her name was Mary Teresa Simpson. She was born in 1951 in Elmira, New York. The youngest of four kids with two older sisters and an older half brother. Mary Teresa was shy. The kind of quiet girl who kept to herself and had only a handful of friends. Part of that came from a childhood spent always on the move.

 Her family relocated so often she never really got the chance to plant roots anywhere or hold on to the friends she made. She wore cat eye glasses and she carried a fan club membership card tucked in her pocket everywhere she went. Hold on to those two small details because years down the road those glasses and that little card would end up sitting in a police evidence file.

But for now, she was just a 12-year-old girl from a small town in Upstate New York stepping out of the house on a Sunday afternoon with nowhere in particular to be. Her parents Ellsworth and Rose had split up in May of 1963 and after the divorce Mary Teresa moved in with her father. Just 2 weeks before that Sunday the two of them had come back to Elmira.

 Back to the same street where she’d grown up. Back to the same town where her mother still lived and back within reach of her older sister Linda. On March 15th, 1964 around 3:00 in the afternoon Mary Teresa left her father’s apartment. She told him she was heading to her cousin’s place. But first out of the blue she made a stop she hadn’t planned.

 She swung by her mother’s house. Rose was thrilled to see her. Mary Teresa hung around for about an hour then headed off to her cousin’s exactly like she told her dad. It was a completely ordinary Sunday. Around 6:30 that evening she left her cousin’s house and started the walk home to her father’s apartment. She was last seen close to 7:00 near a store on the east side of Elmira where she told someone she recognized that she was on her way home.

March in Upstate New York means the daylight runs out fast. By 6:30 it was already going dark. The East Side streets were nearly deserted. Most families were tucked inside for dinner, curtains drawn against the cold. The sidewalks had all but emptied out. And somewhere in those last thin minutes of daylight, her 12-year-old girl walking home simply vanished.

 She never made it through the door. Ellsworth waited. As the night dragged on and his daughter still hadn’t shown up, he started working the phone. He called Rose. He called relatives. He called anyone who might have laid eyes on her, but no one had seen Mary Teresa after she left her mother’s house. No one remembered a young girl walking alone along East Market Street that evening.

 That’s when he picked up the phone and called the Elmira Police Department. Her disappearance went on the books officially at 10:30 that night. Over the next four days, officers and volunteers combed every block between her mother’s house and her father’s apartment. They knocked on doors, checked basements and garages, and questioned everyone who’d been outside that Sunday night.

Volunteers walked the banks of the Chemung River, searched the city parks, and picked through the vacant lots on the edge of town.  [music]  Search teams pushed out along the wooded roads south and west of Elmira, where the ground turned hilly and thick with trees, and where patches of winter snow and ice still clung to the ground.

 Linda waited. Ellsworth waited. And Rose waited, too, carrying a child inside her while the whole town searched for the daughter she’d hugged goodbye only days before. On the fourth day, the morning of March 19th, a man out walking with his two young sons near Combs Hill Road found her.  [music]  It was a wooded stretch about 7 mi outside the city, off an old dirt road the locals all knew.

 Kids used to play out there. It was that kind of quiet, out-of-the-way place. She’d been hidden beneath branches, dirt, leaves, and rocks. Four large stones had been set on top of her, the biggest weighing somewhere around 110 lb. Whoever left her there hadn’t been rushing. The sheer weight he’d stacked on that spot told investigators he’d taken his time before walking away.

Only part of one arm and a single sneaker were left showing above the ground. The Chemung County Medical Examiner confirmed what everyone already feared. This was no accident. Mary Therese had been taken and killed. [music] Someone had grabbed her right off the street, driven her 7 miles out of town, and left her on a hillside looking down over the very place she’d grown up.

 At the scene, police collected everything they could find. Her cat-eye glasses, the fan club card, a few buttons from her blouse. Every item was carefully bagged and locked away in a freezer at the Elmira Police Department. Back in 1964, the science didn’t exist yet to read what a killer might leave behind on a victim’s clothing.

But those detectives preserved every piece anyway, almost like they already sensed that one day it would matter. The moment her body was found, the case flipped from a missing child search to a homicide investigation. Detectives questioned everyone who’d been near that area on the night of March 15th.

 [music] Men who lived along the roads leading up to Comfort Hill, men who’d been spotted driving out that way that Sunday, men with prior arrests for crimes against children. They pulled records at the local, state, and federal level. They lined up hundreds of tips against every name that surfaced anywhere in the file, running each lead down one by one, matching it against the timeline, then either chasing it further or crossing it off.

By October of 1964, just 7 months in, detectives had interviewed more than 300 people. Not one of those conversations produced a real suspect. The name they needed was nowhere to be found. Radio station WELM and the Star-Gazette newspaper teamed up to put a $1,000 reward on the table for anything that led to the killer.

People who’d never even met Mary Therese chipped in money. This crime shook that town harder than just about anything folks could remember. By 1972, the reward had a climbed to $5,000 with police praying the bigger number might finally shake someone loose. Over the next six decades, nobody ever claimed a dime of it.

As the years piled up, the case swelled into thousands of pages. Every interview, every report, every follow-up became part of a growing archive. When detectives retired or moved on, the boxes got handed to the next investigator, and along with them came the story of a case that had never given up an answer.

Each new generation read the same stacks of paper, hunting for the one name somebody before them might have missed. And every time, they hit the same wall. The trail had gone cold years earlier. The case was never officially closed. It just sat there, open, with almost nowhere left to go.

 It became the oldest unsolved murder in the department’s history. The case that trailed every new detective like a shadow, until the day they retired, only to be passed down to the next one. The files outlasted them all. One investigator replaced another, but those folders never moved.  [music]  And still, there was no name.

 While detectives poured their lives into this case, while Linda held onto hope, and while that reward sat there year after year with no takers, the man responsible was doing something almost impossible to wrap your head [music] around. He was just living. Out in that same city, going about his days like nothing had ever happened.

 To everyone around him, he was another familiar face, a regular. He had a job. He had a truck. He drove the back roads around Elmira, the wooded outskirts, the hills south of town, and he knew that landscape the way you know the route to your own front door. Every turn, every dirt lane. After his shift, he went home to his family, and life rolled on like the world owed him nothing.

 He was there in 1964. He was still there in 1972 when the reward hit $5,000 and nobody picked up the phone. He was there through the 1980s when the original detectives finally retired and handed the case to a new crew, [music] who read the same files and slammed into the same dead end. He was still there when the ’90s closed out and a brand new century began.

And through all of it, nobody had the faintest idea that the man an entire department had been chasing for decades was living right down the road. He was even there in the early 2000s when forensic scientists first started pulling DNA from a 12-year-old girl’s clothing and feeding it into the national database, searching for a name that simply wasn’t in the system yet.

In all that time, he kept living his ordinary life, completely unaware that science was finally starting to close the distance. Think about what that really means. More than 300 people interviewed. Hundreds of tips run against every name in the file. Detectives who gave up months of their lives, who knew nearly every face on the East Side of Elmira, who walked door-to-door between that mother’s home and that father’s apartment, step-by-step, refusing to overlook a thing.

 And not one of them ever reached his door. In a city of roughly 40,000 people in a case that grew into thousands of pages, the one man who knew exactly what happened on that hillside never showed up anywhere in the investigation. It was like he lived outside of suspicion entirely. He grew old in the same town where a little girl’s murder stayed unsolved.

 He became a grandfather. Generations came and went.  [music]  Same streets, same town, same passing years playing out for two very different families. One waiting to hear a name, the other carrying that name in silence the whole time. Linda Simpson, who later became Linda Galpin, was 16 years old in March of 1964.

When her little sister went missing, Linda was out of town and she rushed home the moment she heard without a second thought. Seeing Mary Teresa lying there so still broke something in her that never fully healed. The shock was beyond anything words can hold. In that moment, overcome with grief, she tried to climb in beside her sister and someone had to gently pull her away.

That memory stayed burned into her for the rest of her life. She watched the investigation kick off and then she watched it grind to a halt. In the beginning, everyone was sure the answer would come quick, but the years just kept rolling by. The detectives moved on. One generation replaced another.

 The local paper eventually stopped running in the story. It slipped out of the headlines, but it never once slipped out of the family’s memory. Her parents grew old without ever hearing the killer’s name. Ellsworth passed first. Rose followed later. And here’s the part that sits heavy. When Mary Teresa was taken, Rose was pregnant.

 That same year, she gave birth to one daughter and buried another. Two of the most opposite moments a mother can live through, landing almost on top of each other. Neither parent lived long enough to learn who pulled their little girl off that street. But Linda never stopped asking. [music] She refused to let this case fade away. Every so often, she’d call the Elmira Police Department, sometimes once a year, sometimes more, and her question never changed.

 And every single time, the answer came back the same. Nothing new. The case hasn’t moved. She kept calling anyway, over and over, making sure nobody ever got the chance to forget her little sister. She carried that weight for decades. She’d say later that she lived with it every day, that she cried and hurt through all those years, and that she kept fighting for one simple reason.

 She did it for her mom. Then science finally caught up. Mary Teresa’s clothing was sent to the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center for testing.  [music]  Those items have been sitting in a freezer at the Elmira Police Department since 1964, untouched, waiting for a day when technology could finally read what they’d been holding all along.

Back when investigators first collected them, there was no way to pull anything usable off that fabric. The evidence had always been there. Humanity just hadn’t figured out how to read it yet. Now, at last, it could. And because someone decades earlier had preserved every scrap, that patience [music] finally handed the case a real shot.

Experts started with her blouse, and they recovered genetic material left behind by the man responsible. From that, they built a male DNA profile. Even after all those years, it had held up well enough to work with. It was clean. It was usable. And for the first time ever, it had the power to point straight at a specific person.

They uploaded it into CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database, packed with profiles from convicted offenders all across the country. The system automatically checks any new profile against everything already on file. If the man who took Mary Teresa had ever been convicted of a crime that required a DNA sample, his profile would already be in there.

 And CODIS would have flagged an instant match. But there was nothing. His DNA simply wasn’t in the system. The first real chance to name him led nowhere. Investigators didn’t stop. They sent more of her clothing in for testing, wanting to squeeze out every bit of genetic information they possibly could. [music] The additional items produced more biological material, and it confirmed and strengthened the exact same profile they’d built from the blouse.

Every new result told them they were on the right track. But the outcome never budged. The man they were hunting had never been convicted of anything that would have landed his DNA in a law enforcement database. There was still no record of him in CODIS. In 2014, they ran the profile through the system one more time.

 Another 11 years had gone by. The technology had improved. The database had swelled with countless new records. The search ran again, and once again, it came back with nothing. Three attempts, three dead ends, three separate searches that all ended the exact same way. Decades of waiting and still not a single answer. This case needed something no criminal database could ever give it.

 It needed a completely different way in. In 2022, Elmira Police Sergeant William Goodwin applied for a grant from Season of Justice, a nonprofit that funds advanced forensic testing for unsolved cases. For this investigation, it was another shot at moving forward and maybe the very last one. The grant came through and it covered the full cost of sending the DNA getting the DNA to a private lab equipped to work with biological samples nearly 60 years old.

 Without that money, testing like this would have been almost impossible to pull off. The DNA was shipped to Autrum Technologies down in The Woodlands, Texas. A lab about to attempt something no one had managed before. Autrum specialized in building usable genetic profiles out of badly degraded material. The kind of cases that just a few years earlier would have been written off as hopeless.

The Simpson samples were among the oldest they’d ever handled and their work would decide whether after nearly six decades anyone could finally put a name to this man. Since 1964, that evidence had been stored, moved and restored under all kinds of conditions. Decade after decade and yet those microscopic traces somehow survived.

What was left was barely enough to even detect let alone sequence. And a single misstep could wipe out the last chance to identify the killer for good. The [music] total amount of usable DNA came to just 4/10 of a nanogram. One nanogram is a billionth of a gram and investigators had less than half of even that.

The sample was completely invisible to the naked eye. In other words, this entire case now rested on something you couldn’t see without specialized equipment. It was the last piece of biological evidence still tying the killer to a 12-year-old girl six decades after she was taken. The final chance after 60 years of silence.

 FBI special agent Kenneth Jensen, who was helping the Elmira department, carefully packed the evidence into a container loaded with dry ice and sent it toward Texas. Every precaution was taken to make sure that priceless material made the trip without a scratch. And then the weather did something no one saw coming. A brutal ice storm slammed into Memphis, shutting down FedEx’s main logistics hub, the largest shipping hub in the world, and the exact point the package had to pass through.

Within hours, the movement of thousands of shipments ground nearly to a halt. The container carrying Mary Teresa’s evidence was stranded somewhere inside that massive frozen complex, lost among endless warehouses and shipping containers, and no one knew exactly where. Jensen couldn’t reach a single person at FedEx. Every attempt hit a wall.

Here’s the problem. Dry ice only holds its temperature for so long. The hours kept slipping away. If it thawed before the package started moving again, the evidence would be gone forever, and no one could ever get it back. 60 years of careful preservation nearly undone not by a mistake, not by lost paperwork, but by a winter storm.

Jensen got in touch with an FBI contact who worked with the Memphis hub, and the search kicked off immediately. Agents literally combed through that frozen facility hunting for one small package among millions. They understood that container held far more than biological evidence. It held the last chance to name a man who’d stayed hidden for more than 60 years.

Jensen would admit later that he was terrified his decision to ship through FedEx might cost them the whole case. Goodwin described it as a full-scale search for a single missing package where every passing hour could have cost them everything. They found it at the very last moment. A little longer and that evidence could have been stranded for good.

It was moved into a freezer at an FBI facility and held there until the storm blew through. The only way to guarantee it stayed safe. Then finally it made it to Texas. And that’s where the phase that changed everything began. Arthur ran forensic grade whole genome sequencing on what little remained of that degraded material.

Even after all those decades, modern technology managed to recover information that once seemed lost for good. The result was a complete genetic profile of the unknown man, the first real lead pointing straight at a single individual. Investigators uploaded that profile into public genealogy databases, the kind where millions of Americans have voluntarily shared their own DNA.

Those voluntary matches were the key that finally cracked things open. An FBI team that specialized in forensic genetic genealogy started building family trees from every match they found,  [music]  examining each connection one at a time, and slowly ruling out dozens of family lines that led nowhere. In 2023, the Criminal Investigation Resource Center at Russell Sage College joined the effort.

Dr. Christina Lane, a criminologist and associate professor there, worked alongside her students to grind through an enormous amount of genealogical research buried in historical records. It was painstaking patient work that demanded checking and rechecking every tiny detail. They traced family lines. They matched public records against genetic data.

 They dug through birth records, marriage certificates, and countless old documents spanning generations of families across Upstate New York. Archive after archive, document after document, branch after branch. The work stretched on for more than 2 years, and slowly, steadily, the pool of possible suspects kept shrinking.

 By 2025, that family tree had narrowed all the way down to one man. Investigators reached out to the suspect’s surviving son, who voluntarily gave a DNA sample. Testing confirmed a biological link between his DNA and the unknown male profile pulled from Mary Teresa’s clothing. It was a massive breakthrough, but it still wasn’t the final word.

 A family match can only point you to a bloodline. Investigators needed the man himself, not one of his descendants. And the man that research pointed to had died back in 2004. [music] He was buried in a cemetery in Elmira, less than 5 miles from the hillside on Combs Hill Road, where 40 years earlier he’d left her.

For nearly his whole life, those two places sat just a few miles apart. He spent the rest of his days in that same town, and not once did anyone question him about the crime. No accusation, no suspicion that ever led investigators to his door. Authorities got legal clearance to exhume his remains.

 On November 5th, 2025, the body of Alfred Raymond Murray Jr. was brought up from the cemetery where it had rested for more than 20 years,  [music]  then transported to the state forensic laboratory for the final confirmation. DNA taken directly from those remains was compared against the genetic profile investigators had first developed years earlier. The match was absolute.

The odds that the same result could belong to some other person were less than one in 320 billion. After six decades of unanswered questions, genetics delivered the final answer. His name was Alfred Raymond Murray Jr. He was born in Elmira in 1931 and he never left. He spent his whole life in that one city.

 A Korean War veteran, a truck driver for Mayflower Van Lines, a man who knew every back road and wooded trail on the south side of town so well that a stranger could easily get lost out there while he never would. He also carried a documented history of crimes against children, one that started when he was just 17 with an arrest for offenses against two young sisters.

The Elmira Police Department had kept records on him for decades. [music] They sat in the department’s own archives the entire time, never once connected to what happened to Mary Teresa. In March 1964, he was 32 years old. And that was the evening he spotted a 12-year-old girl walking alone through quiet streets as the last of the daylight faded on a Sunday, and he took her.

His obituary ran in the Star-Gazette on March 19th, 2004. March 19th, exactly 40 years to the day after Mary Teresa was found on Combs Hill Road. The obituary mentioned his wife, his children, his grandchildren, and his military service. It painted a picture of an ordinary man who’d spent his life in one town, served his country, and raised a family.

 It never mentioned Mary Teresa Simpson. At the time he died, no one had connected those two names yet. On February 10th, 2026, inside the Chemung County District Attorney’s Office in Elmira, Police Chief Kristen Thorne stepped up to the podium. Besides her stood representatives from the FBI, the District Attorney’s Office, Sergeant William Goodwin, and retired officers who had worked this case across different decades.

Men and women who’d spent years reading the same file only to run into the same dead end every single time. Now they were all in one room together. Sitting in the audience was Linda Galpin, 78 years old, carrying a lifetime of waiting, heartbreak, and questions that had gone unanswered for decades.

 Beside her sat her uncle Dwayne Bowman and her cousin Ronnie Bowman, waiting quietly for the moment their family had spent generations praying for. Three of them, about to hear a name none of them had ever heard spoken out loud. The name of the man who’d been nothing but a faceless shadow in their family’s story for more than 60 years. Chief Thorne called it a historic day for the Elmira Police Department, saying justice had finally been served nearly 62 years later.

 And then she said his name out loud.  This is a historic day for the Elmira Police Department. Justice after almost 62 years. [music]  District Attorney Weeden Wetmore reminded the room that the wheels of justice turn slowly, that sometimes it takes many long years, but that justice still finds its way in the end. Goodwin put it simply.

The family finally had an answer. This case was never forgotten. For decades it stayed an open wound for everyone who worked it and everyone who remembered the story. Forensic experts confirmed something remarkable. This is the oldest unsolved case ever cracked through DNA evidence. After more than six decades, technology finally brought closure to a case that once looked impossible.

It also became the 18th case in New York State solved through Autosomal Forensic Genetic [music] Genealogy. One name, one family, and a road that ran for decades. Linda Galpin stood up. After 61 years of waiting, she finally heard the words she’d lived for all that time. For 61 years, she’d called the police.

 For 61 years, she’d heard the same reply, “Nothing new.” She watched both of her parents pass without ever learning the killer’s name. They never lived to see the the day the truth came out. She carried that pain through her entire adult life, never letting go of the memory of the day everything changed.

 Her shy little sister, the cat-eye glasses, the fan club card, the coffin she once tried to climb into. And now, at last, she had her answer. She only wished her mother had lived long enough to see it.  Well, thank you very much, and I’m glad it’s all finally settled after almost 62 years. That’s all I have to say, but thank everybody that was involved.

God bless my heart. Thank you.  in silence for every year that followed. It took 61 years, 61 long years of waiting, uncertainty, and unanswered questions. An invisible trace of DNA, a speck too small to see, that went unnoticed for decades, and then changed everything. An ice storm in Memphis, a random twist of weather that nearly ended the whole story, and a woman who never stopped calling, who refused to accept the silence and kept fighting no matter how many years went by.