New York’s Oldest Cold Case SOLVED- A DNA Match Led Investigators to a Grave After 62 Years.

A case over 60 years old has finally come to a close. The person who murdered Mary Teresa Simpson in 1964 has been identified in a news  conference today with the Elmira Police Department. 18 News reporter Imraan Mahed shares more on the killer and how forensic science was used  to identify him.

 On a Sunday evening in March 1964, a 12-year-old girl was kidnapped while walking home from a family visit  in Elmira, New York. The man responsible for what happened to her next wasn’t a suspect investigators somehow overlooked, wasn’t a lead that went cold, and wasn’t a name detectives once considered and let slip away.

 For the next 62 years, he was never inside the case file at all. How do you solve a murder when the person you’re looking for has never even appeared on your list of suspects? For days. That’s how long it took before the search ended in the woods off Combs Hill Road, where a missing child investigation became something far more devastating.

For nearly 62 years after that, the man responsible had a name somewhere in that same city. He went about an ordinary life, working, raising a family of his own, greeted by neighbors who probably waved to him in the morning and never imagined what he was hiding.    Meanwhile, investigators searched for him inside thousands of pages of reports,  witness statements, and interviews, and they never found him because the one name they needed was never there to begin with.

Stick around because by the end of this story, you’ll understand why this investigation took nearly  62 years to solve, and why detectives were searching for a man whose name had never appeared in the case file  once. It would take a piece of evidence smaller than a grain of rice, A laboratory built specifically for cases everyone else thought were impossible.

 A family tree assembled one branch at a time from people who had no idea they were related to a murderer. And  finally, the opening of a grave. That’s what it took to identify the man who had been hiding in plain sight for  more than six decades. This case involves the murder of a child. Please take that into account before  continuing and take care of yourself while watching.

 Welcome back to Missing Hour. Let me know in the comments what city or country you’re watching from. And to everyone who’s already subscribed,  shared an episode, or left a comment on a previous case. Thank you, genuinely. This channel only reaches more people because you keep passing these stories along. Her name was Mary Teresa Simpson.

 She was 12 years old and she lived in Elmira, New York, a working-class city in the state’s Southern Tier. Her parents, Ellsworth and Rose Simpson,    had separated the year before in May of 1963. And by March of 1964, Mary was living with her father while staying close with relatives across the city.

 She had an older sister, Linda, an older brother, and an older half-brother. Linda would later describe her as shy around strangers but full of energy around the people she loved. Nothing about Mary’s life suggested it would become one of New York’s longest-running unsolved child murder cases. How could anyone have known that an ordinary walk home would leave investigators searching for answers for the next 62 years? Here’s something that seemed completely ordinary in 1964.

 In the days after Mary’s death, investigators collected her clothing along with several personal belongings, including her cat-eye glasses and a fan club card. Her clothing was placed inside a freezer at the Elmira Police Department, and it stayed there for decades. Nobody in 1964 knew what DNA testing would eventually become, since as a forensic tool it simply didn’t exist yet.

 Even so, investigators preserved the evidence anyway, hoping that one day science would be able to do what they couldn’t. Think about that for a second. How many detectives spend years  protecting evidence they know they can’t use, simply because they believe someone in the future might be able to? No one collecting that evidence could have imagined it would still matter more than half a century later.

 On March 15th, 1964, a Sunday, Mary spent the afternoon visiting relatives. She was last seen near the intersection of East Market and Harriet Streets, walking toward the apartment she shared with her father. Most local reporting places  that sighting at around 6:30 that evening, while the FBI’s own case file lists  it slightly later, closer to 7:00 p.m.

 6 decades later, nobody has been able to settle that difference with certainty. But either way, that was the last confirmed sighting of Mary alive. When she still hadn’t come home by 10:30 that  night, Ellsworth Simpson called the police. What do you do when a 12-year-old girl simply doesn’t come home? You start looking everywhere.

 The response was immediate. Officers checked the streets  between Mary’s last known location and her home. Family members contacted relatives, and neighbors joined the search, hoping someone  had seen her, spoken to her, or noticed something that suddenly seemed important. Nothing turned up that first  night.

 By the fourth day, hope was beginning to give way to something much harder to accept. Then, on March 19th,  everything changed. Mary was found in a wooded area off Coomes Hill Road in Southport. Here’s a detail worth mentioning, because even after all these years, different sources describe her discovery slightly differently.

 Contemporary local reporting, along with several later accounts, says she was found by a man hiking with his two sons. The FBI’s own case file tells it another way, stating that children playing in the area discovered her on an old logging road known locally as a secluded spot. Different accounts, but the same heartbreaking ending.

 On March 19th, off Coomes Hill Road, for days after she disappeared, her body was found, partially concealed beneath branches, dirt, and several large stones, the heaviest weighing well over 100 lb. The autopsy determined she had been strangled, and it also confirmed she had been sexually assaulted. In an instant, what had begun as a desperate search for a missing child became a homicide investigation.

 And that’s where this story truly begins. Investigating a murder in 1964 meant no DNA, no national databases, no computers, and no cell phone records. Detectives canvassed Mary’s neighborhood door to door, interviewed relatives, neighbors, and known offenders whose backgrounds made them worth examining, and cross-referenced handwritten statements manually, looking for anything that pointed toward a suspect.

 But nothing did. There was no evidence connecting Mary to anyone she knew, which pointed to a stranger. And a stranger leaves no relationship, no dispute, no motive for detectives to trace. Just physical evidence, and at the time, no way to unlock it. So investigators preserved everything, and the case kept growing around it.

 Hundreds of interviews over the years that followed. A case file that eventually reached roughly 6,000 pages. And still, no arrest, no charges,    no name. Years later, Elmira police partnered with Russell Sage College’s Criminal Investigation Resource Center to organize the case file, mapping every suspect, lead, and piece of  tested evidence.

The review confirmed something unexpected. The man responsible wasn’t a forgotten suspect or someone ruled out. His name simply wasn’t there, not once    in 6,000 pages. DNA testing didn’t exist in 1964  and wouldn’t become usable until the mid-1980s. But the evidence was preserved and waiting.

 In 2003, Mary’s clothing was resubmitted  to the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center, and a cutting from her underwear and skirt, item 7A,    produced a DNA profile entered into CODIS, the national offender database. No match. In 2014, investigators tried again with YSTR analysis,  which isolates male-specific DNA more precisely. Still no match.

But a database can only identify someone whose profile is already inside it. And the missing piece here was never the evidence. It was a name to test it against. Stick around,  because what happened next changed everything and without it Mary’s killer almost certainly would have remained unknown forever.

 The real turning point came in 2022 when Elmira police and the FBI received grant funding from season of justice to advance cold cases through modern testing. That mattered because almost nothing remained to test. Roughly 0.4 nanograms, invisible without magnification, and testing consumes the sample it analyzes.

 This was a single opportunity. The evidence went to Off-Ramp, a Texas lab specializing in samples too small, old, or degraded for traditional testing, and Mary’s case would become the 18th  in New York state solved using their technology. FBI special agent Kenneth Jensen  shipped it in dry ice in early 2023, and an ice storm shut down the FedEx hub in Memphis, stranding the package.

 Jensen had FBI personnel located inside the closed facility and place it in a freezer until deliveries resumed, and it reached Texas intact. Analysts built a broader DNA profile and compared it against public genealogy databases, starting with distant relatives and working outward to build a family tree from birth, marriage, and census records.

 It took roughly 2 years, narrowing the field by age, geography, and who could plausibly have been in Elmira in March of 1964. Eventually, the search led them to a living man. He wasn’t their suspect. His importance was much more specific than that.    The DNA suggested he could be the biological son of the unknown man they had been searching for all these years.

Investigators asked whether he would voluntarily provide a cheek swab, and he agreed. The comparison confirmed exactly what they had hoped, a paternal relationship. Meaning they were one generation away from identifying  the person whose DNA had remained anonymous for nearly 60 years. That trail led investigators to Alfred Raymond Murray Jr.

 He was born in Elmira in 1931 and had lived there for essentially his entire life. He served in the United States Army from 1951  to 1959 before returning home, where he worked as a truck driver for Mayflower Van Lines. He married, raised three children, and later  became a grandfather. By every outward appearance, he had lived  an ordinary life. He died in March of 2004.

Here’s what’s genuinely remarkable about that discovery. There had never been a documented connection between Alfred Murray and Mary Teresa Simpson. He wasn’t someone detectives had questioned, and he wasn’t a suspect they overlooked.  His name had never appeared anywhere in the investigation, not once.

 Remember the 6,000 pages investigators spent  decades compiling? He wasn’t inside them. How does a man live an entire life in the same city where a child was murdered and never once cross paths with the investigation looking for him? The stranger detectives believe they were looking for in 1964 really was a stranger.

 Once Murray’s name surfaced through the genealogy work, investigators began reviewing his background. According to records later cited by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Murray had a documented history involving offenses against children dating back to his teenage years, and Sergeant William Goodwin would later describe it publicly as repeated criminal involvement over the course of decades.

 That history didn’t prove he killed Mary, since the DNA would have to do that, but it did give investigators confidence they were finally moving in the right direction. There was just one problem. Alfred Raymond Murray Jr. had been dead for more than 20 years, so the only way to obtain his  DNA was to open his grave.

That required a judge’s approval, backed by the confirmed paternal DNA match, and specialized help, since remains buried that long need a forensic anthropologist rather than a standard medical examiner. One final detail makes this next chapter even more remarkable. By 2025, FBI Special Agent Kenneth Jensen, the same investigator who had personally shipped Mary’s evidence to Texas two years earlier, had retired from the Bureau and accepted a position with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as a forensic case manager. It

was Jensen who told investigators that NCMEC could help make the next step possible, and that’s exactly what happened. The organization agreed to provide both financial assistance and access to a board certified forensic anthropologist, someone trained specifically to recover usable biological material from long-buried remains.

 With court authorization secured, Elmira police carried out the first exhumation in the department’s history in November 2025, nearly 62 years after Mary disappeared. Detectives had retired. Family members had grown old. Some had died without ever knowing who was responsible. Now the investigation had arrived at a cemetery.

  The forensic anthropologist carefully recovered a usable sample from Alfred Raymond Murray Jr.’s remains, which was sent to the New York State Police for one final comparison  against the DNA preserved from Mary’s clothing all those decades earlier. Everything came down to this. If the profiles matched, the mystery that had haunted Elmira since 1964 would finally have an answer.

 The results came back. It was a match. Investigators later stated that the probability of an unrelated person matching that DNA profile was less than 1  in 320 billion. After nearly 62 years, they finally had their man. The result also answered a question that had frustrated investigators for decades.

 Why had the DNA searches in 2003 and 2014  failed? The answer was surprisingly simple. Alfred Raymond Murray Jr.’s DNA had never been entered into any law enforcement database because he had never been arrested for an offense that required it. The evidence had been accurate all along. The technology simply hadn’t reached the point where it could identify someone whose DNA wasn’t already on file.

 On February 10th, 2026, investigators gathered at the Chemung County District  Attorney’s Office to publicly announce what generations of detectives had spent their careers trying to discover. Police Chief Kristen Thorne, Sergeant William Goodwin, representatives from the FBI, Chemung County District Attorney Weeden Wetmore, and members of Mary’s family were all present.

  Together, they announced that Alfred Raymond Murray, Jr. was the man responsible for Mary Teresa Simpson’s murder.    There would never be a criminal trial, and there would never be a guilty verdict in a courtroom, since Murray had died more than 20 years earlier. But, for Mary’s family, finally knowing who had taken her from them was something they had waited almost an entire lifetime to hear.

 Some moments don’t erase the pain. They simply replace one unbearable question with an answer. During the announcement, Sgt. William Goodwin addressed the decades of work that had gone into the investigation. The family finally got an answer. The case was never forgotten. District Attorney Weeden Wetmore added, “The wheels of justice move slowly.

 The Elmira Police Department did a tremendous job.” Police Chief Kristen Thorne then turned toward Mary’s family and said, “I hope the family members here know this case  was never forgotten. Mary Teresa was never forgotten.” She also acknowledged the heartbreaking reality that some questions would never be answered.

 Had Murray still been alive,    investigators would have wanted to sit across from him to ask why, to understand how a 12-year-old girl became his victim. Those answers died with him. But, one question no longer remained: Who? Mary’s sister, Linda Galpin, was 78 years old when she attended that announcement.

 She thanked everyone who had worked the case  over the decades and said she was grateful her family finally had an answer.  And yes, I’m Mary Teresa’s sister. And I want to thank the police department and everybody who was involved in it. I am very happy it’s finally I could just my Bible with you. Well, thank you very and I’m glad it’s all finally settled after almost 62 years.

Um that’s all I have to say, but thank everybody that was involved. Touched my heart. Thank you.  Brenda, thank you.  You’re welcome.  Okay.  Then she shared the thought that stayed with so many people who heard her speak. She wished their mother had lived long  enough to hear it, too. As of the most recent reporting, the case remains exactly where that February 2026 announcement  left it.

No additional suspects, no further charges, which were never possible after Murray’s death, and no publicly identified  additional victims. Just an answer that arrived almost 62 years after the question was first asked. One final detail feels strangely fitting. In September 2025, just 2 months before Murray’s grave was  exhumed, and roughly 5 months before investigators publicly identified  him, a book titled What Happened to Me? Exploring the Mary Teresa Simpson cold case was published. At the time it was

written, the biggest question in the entire case still had no answer. Within months, it finally did. Mary Teresa Simpson was 12 years old. She liked roller skating, took dance lessons,    and wore cat-eye glasses she probably picked out herself. Her mother died without ever knowing who took her daughter away.

 And her sister spent nearly 62 years waiting for an answer many families  never get. When that answer finally came, it wasn’t in a courtroom or after a confession. It came because generations of investigators refused to let a little girl become just another forgotten file on a shelf. Alfred Raymond Murray Jr.

 never had to answer for what he did or explain why. Those answers were buried with him, but one question no longer is. Who took Mary Teresa Simpson? After nearly 62 years, her family finally knows. If there’s one thing this case proves, it’s that time doesn’t erase  the truth. Sometimes it simply waits for the right people and the right science to uncover it. Stay safe.

 I’ll see you in the next one.