New York Oldest Cold Case Solved — 1964 Evidence. 2023 Science. One Name. 

A case over 60 years old has finally come to a close. The person who murdered Mary Terresa Simpson in 1964 has been identified.  A few of Simpson’s surviving relatives were in attendance at the conference today, including her sister, Linda, who was only 16 years old at the time of her murder.  This is a historic day for the Police Department.

 Justice after almost 62 years,  and it affected me real bad. I wanted to jump in the casket.  Simpson was reported missing on March 15th, 1964. Her body found 4 days later hidden in a wooden area off of Combmes Hill Road.  Alfred Murray Jr. was born in Ommyra, New York in 1931. He lived and worked in this community, raised a family here, and remained in Ommyra for the entirety of his life.

 Officials say Murray had no known connection to Simpson or her family.  If he were alive today, we would prosecute the case because indeed there is no statute of limitations on murder.  Now,  as 61 years later, her case is finally closing. Linda Galpin, who is Simpson’s older sister, never thought she’d see closure to this case.

 It It sounds like it’s justice.  So, later that month, we were informed that the sperm located on the underwear  and skirt, item 7A, worn by Mary Teresa Simpson, matched Alfred Raymond Murray Jr.,  this is a historic day for the Ammyra Police Department. Justice after almost 62 years.

 His record shows repeated criminal involvement over decades involving offenses involving children.  Right now, I do feel very happy that it finally got solved after almost 62 years. It’s going to take me a little while for it to sink in. And I thank everybody for all their help, how they did it. You know, I I I’m just happy.  More than 60 years after  the crime, this case is now closed.

In 2022, a police sergeant in upstate New York sat down in front of a decision most investigators go an entire career without having to make. In front of him was a sample of biological material recovered from the clothing of a 12-year-old girl. It had sat in a freezer at the Elmmyra Police Department for the better part of six decades.

 It had already been tested twice. It had failed twice and there was almost nothing left of it. 4/10enth of 1 nanog. That is the number Sergeant William Goodwin would eventually say out loud at a podium. A nanog is 1 billionth of a gram. 4/10enth of one is a quantity so small that there is no light, no angle, no magnification available to the naked eye that will let you see it.

 If it was sitting on your fingertip right now, you would not know. That was the entire remaining physical link between a girl who went missing on a Sunday evening in 1964 and the man who took her. Here is what made it a decision rather than a procedure. DNA testing does not read a sample and return it. It consumes it.

The material is destroyed in the process of being understood. So the sergeant was not deciding whether to run one more test. He was deciding whether to spend the last of it. If the laboratory succeeded, a family that had waited 58 years would finally hear a name. If it failed, the case would not simply remain unsolved.

 It would become permanently unsolvable with nothing left to test by anyone ever. Using any technology any future century might invent, one sample, one attempt, no second chance, he chose to spend it. This is what happened next. A warning to our viewers. What you are about to watch is a true story. The video contains  content that some viewers may find disturbing.

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Now, let’s go back to where this started. a small city in the southern tier of New York on the last Sunday afternoon of an ordinary childhood. Her name was Mary Theresa Simpson. She was born in 1951 in Elmyra, New York, the youngest of four children. The family had been through a hard couple of years. Her parents, Ellsworth and Rose, had separated in the spring of 1963, and Mary Theresa had been living with her father.

 The two of them had only just moved back to Elmyra. weeks before that march. Back to the streets she’d grown up on. Back to the city where her mother still lived. Back to her sister Linda. She was shy. She hadn’t collected many friends, partly because the family had moved often enough that she’d never finished putting down roots anywhere.

She wore cat eye glasses. She carried a fan club card in her pocket. Hold on to those two objects. They will matter more than anyone could have guessed. Sunday, March 15th, 1964. Mary Teresa left her father’s apartment around 3:00 in the afternoon. She told him she was going to see her cousin.

 She didn’t go there first. She went to her mother’s house instead. Unannounced, not expected, entirely welcome. Rose was pregnant that spring. She was glad to see her daughter. Mary Teresa stayed about an hour, then left to do what she told her father she was doing and went on to her cousin’s house on the east side. It was to this point a completely unremarkable Sunday.

 She left her cousins around 6 near the corner of East Market and Harriet Streets. A friend saw her and spoke to her. Mary Theresa said she was heading home. March in upstate New York does not give you much daylight. By 6, the sky was already going and there was still snow in the shaded places. The east side of Elmmyra at that hour on a Sunday was families indoors, curtains pulled, dinner on.

 The sidewalks belong to almost nobody. It was a 12-year-old girl and the last thin minutes of light on a cold evening, and it was so far as anyone has ever established. The last time a person who knew her saw her alive, she never arrived. Ellsworth waited. When waiting turned into worry, he started making calls. Rose, relatives, anyone who might have her.

Nobody did. Nobody had seen a girl walking alone on the east side that evening. At 10, he called the Elmmyra Police Department. And Mary Teresa Simpson became a missing child. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the city looked for her the way small cities do, which is to say with everything it had, officers walked the blocks between her mother’s door and her father’s knocking.

 They checked basement and garages. They stopped anyone who had been outdoors that Sunday evening and asked the same questions over and over. Volunteers went further out along the Chimong River into parks out to the wooded edges where the city stopped and the hills started. The terrain south of Elmira is steep and heavily timbered and threaded with old logging roads.

 In March, it is mud and ice and bare branches. They walked it anyway. Linda waited. She was 16, out of town when it happened. And she came home to a house where nobody was sleeping. Ellsworth waited. Rose waited and carried another child while the city searched for the one she’d kissed goodbye. On Sunday afternoon, Thursday, March 19th, a man took his two young sons out walking in the woods off Combmes Hill Road in a stretch of Southport a few miles outside the city.

It was a place local people knew. Kids went there. ordinary ground. He found her. If this case has already got hold of you, take one second to hit like. It moves videos like this in front of people who need to see them. She had been concealed. Branches, leaves, and dirt had been pulled over her, and four heavy stones placed on top.

 The largest weighing more than 100 lb. Only part of one hand and a single sneaker were visible. Her mouth had been packed with dirt and twigs. She was fully clothed and after four nights on an exposed hillside in March, frozen. Investigators noticed something at that scene immediately and it shaped everything they believed about the person they were looking for. He had not been in a hurry.

Moving a 100 lb stone once is work. Doing it four times on a slope in the dark in March is not panic. That is a person taking his time. Whoever brought her out there stayed long enough to bury her carefully, then walked back to whatever vehicle he’d arrived in and drove home. The Chimong County Medical Examiner determined that Mary Theresa had died of asphyxiation.

 The examination also found evidence of sexual abuse. Somebody had taken a child off a city street, driven her past the edge of town, and left her on a hill above the place where she’d spent her whole life. Police collected what was at the scene. Her cat eye glasses, the fan club card, buttons from her blouse, her clothing, her purse, samples of her hair, everything bagged, labeled, and put into a freezer at Elmyra police headquarters.

 Understand what that means? In 1964, there was no forensic science on Earth that could read anything off those clothes. DNA would not arrive as an investigative tool for more than 20 years. Nobody in that building had any concept of a genetic profile because the concept did not exist. There was no reason to preserve biological material because nobody knew biological material could speak.

 They kept it anyway. They kept it frozen. And then across six decades and however many changes of command and equipment and policy, somebody kept on keeping it. Every person who could have signed off on clearing out that freezer chose not to. That decision is the only reason this story has an ending. The investigation itself went hard and went nowhere.

 The department worked it around the clock. Detectives interviewed men who lived along the roads leading up toward Combs Hill. Men seen driving that area on Sunday evening. Men with prior arrests involving children. They pulled records at local, state, and federal level. Tips came in by the hundreds, each one written up, cross-cheed against the timeline, and either pursued or set aside.

 By October of 1964, 7 months in, investigators had questioned more than 300 people. Not one of them was the man they were looking for. A local radio station and the Elmira Star Gazette put up a $1,000 reward. Residents who had never met the family sent money to grow it. By 1972, it stood at $5,000, which in 1972 was a serious sum.

 Nobody ever collected it. The file swelled to thousands of pages. Detectives retired and handed it to younger detectives who read the same reports looking for the name an earlier generation had walked past and hit the same wall. It became the department’s oldest open case, the one every incoming investigator learned about and nobody could close.

 and Linda called sometimes once a year, sometimes more. The same question every time to whoever picked up. Is there anything new? There was never anything new. She kept calling anyway. She would later describe what those decades did to her without any decoration. That it affected her badly.

 That she lived through it and cried through it for years. Her father died without hearing a name. Her mother died without hearing a name. If cases like this matter to you, this is the part where I ask for 10 seconds. Like the video, subscribe to the Crime Bureau, and stay with me because  everything up to here is the part the world already knew.

 What comes next is the part almost nobody has heard. 2003, 39 years after that Thursday on the hillside, Mary Theresa’s clothing, her purse, and her hair samples were sent to the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center. Analysts took cutings from her skirt and her underwear. Both tested positive for the presence of semen, and a male genetic profile was successfully developed from material that had been sitting in a freezer since the Kennedy administration.

 That profile went into Kodis, the FBI’s National Index of Offender DNA. If the man who left it had ever been convicted of a qualifying offense anywhere in the country, and had a sample taken, the system would have raised its hand automatically. The system said nothing. November 2014, the items went back to the state laboratory. Newer methods, better sensitivity, a database that had grown enormously in 11 years.

 Submitted again, compared again, nothing again. Whoever he was, he had never been convicted of anything in the modern era that would have put him in that database. As far as Kodis was concerned, he had never existed. The profile was real. It was usable. It was sitting in a national system and the national system simply did not contain him.

 You cannot match a fingerprint against a file that has no fingerprints in it. Which is where a completely different approach comes in. 2022, Sergeant William Goodwin secured grant funding for advanced forensic DNA testing on the case. The technique on the table was investigative genetic genealogy. Instead of asking a database of offenders whether it recognizes a profile, you build a far more detailed genetic map of the unknown person.

Hundreds of thousands of markers rather than a handful and upload it to the public genealogy databases ordinary people use to find cousins. You are no longer looking for him. You are looking for his relatives. And from a scattering of distant matches, investigators build family trees until the branches close in on one person.

 It has solved cases considered permanently dead. It is also demanding because it needs far more genetic material, far better preserved, than a standard profile does. Elmira had 4/10 of a nanog. Goodwin later explained the arithmetic in public, and it’s worth hearing how carefully he framed it. An extremely small quantity of biological material, invisible to the naked eye, and a testing process that consumes what it examines. There are no doovers.

 If a usable profile could not be developed from what remained, every piece of DNA evidence in the case would be gone permanently. That is the decision from our cold open. They took the shot. The sample was sent to Oram, a laboratory in Texas that specializes in doing the apparently impossible with degraded and vanishingly small samples.

 FBI special agent Kenneth Jensen, assisting the Almyra department, packed it in dry ice in a cooler and shipped it. And then the story nearly ended in the stupidest way imaginable. The package routed through the FedEx hub in Memphis, the largest facility of its kind in the world. An ice storm hit. The hub shut down.

 Six decades of preserved evidence. The last of it sat stranded somewhere inside a shut building in the middle of a historic weather event. Dry ice does not last forever. It sublimates. When it’s gone, the sample warms. And a sample that warms is a sample that degrades. And a sample that degrades is a case that dies in a cardboard box in a Tennessee sorting facility.

 They couldn’t reach anyone at FedEx. The hub was closed. Jensen later described being terrified that the act of shipping it was the thing that would destroy it. Goodwin put it plainly, “It had been nerve-wracking enough getting the last of the DNA tested. Now they were going to lose it before it even arrived.” Jensen called the FBI’s field office in Memphis.

 As it happened, the bureau had a liazison to the hub. That agent walked into a shutdown facility that processes millions of packages and looked for one cooler. He found it in time, moved it into an FBI freezer until the storm cleared, then sent it on to Texas. The science could finally begin. Built a full genome scale profile from that spec.

 It went up into public genealogy databases, and FBI genealogologists began constructing extended family trees, narrowing candidates by age, by geography, by whatever the historical record could say about who had been where. A single figure emerged from the branches. Unnamed for the moment, an unknown contributor the investigation called John Doe.

 Through 2024 and into 2025, investigators worked outward from that tree and identified a living man they believed to be the biological son of the unknown contributor. They approached him. He agreed to give a sample voluntarily, a swab from the inside of his cheek. The state laboratory compared it to the profile from a 12-year-old girl’s clothing.

 The result confirmed a paternal relationship. The man who left that material in March 1964 was this man’s father, which raised the last problem. His father was already dead. In November 2025, with funding from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the Elmmyra Police Department and the Chimong County District Attorney’s Office did something departments almost never do.

 They opened a grave. A forensic anthropologist traveled in from Detroit. Dozens of officers came out, serving officers and retired ones who had carried this file across their entire careers and had no professional reason to be standing in a cemetery on their own time. They watched a casket come up out of the ground on a crane.

 Biological samples were taken from the remains and compared against the profile from Mary Theresa’s clothing. It matched. The odds that the DNA belonged to any other person on Earth were calculated at less than 1 in 320 billion. February 10th, 2026. The Chimong County District Attorney’s Office, Elmyra, New York. Police Chief Kristen Thorne stood at a podium with the FBI and the District Attorney’s Office beside her.

 In the audience sat Linda Galpin, 78 years old, having called that department for six decades and been told every single time that there was nothing new. This is a historic day for the Elmyra Police Department. Thorne said, “Justice,” she said after almost 62 years. Then she said his name, Alfred Raymond Murray Jr. He was born in Elmmyra in 1931 and he never really left it.

 He drove a truck for a living which meant he knew the roads, the back roads, the logging cuts, the wooded shoulders of the hills south of the city. He served in the US Army. He married, he had three children. He died in 2004 at 72 of natural causes and was buried in Elmmyra a few miles from the hillside off Combmes Hill Road.

 He had no known connection to Mary Theresa or her family, not a neighbor, not a relative, not a familiar face. Investigators believe he encountered a child walking alone in the last light of a Sunday evening, and that was the whole of it. He was 32 or 33 that March, depending on which record you read. And there is a detail here that reframes those 300 interviews.

 Murray was not an unknown quantity to law enforcement. Sergeant Goodwin described repeated criminal involvement across the decades involving offenses against children, a pattern reaching back to an arrest at 17 concerning two 7-year-old sisters. He was on the books. He was in that city and in a file that grew to thousands of pages in a department actively looking for exactly the kind of man he was.

 His name never surfaced in connection with Mary Theresa. Not once in 61 years. Chief Thorne was asked what would happen if he were alive. Her answer was unhesitating. The district attorney’s office would be seeking charges. Investigators would be interviewing him, trying to get at the questions no laboratory can answer.

 What happened on that hillside and why her? Those answers went into the ground with him in 2004. What remains is the one thing the family had asked for since 1964. Not why, who. The case is now formally closed. It stands as the oldest case ever solved with DNA evidence. Linda Galpin had said for most of her adult life that this would never happen while she was alive to see it.

 At that podium, she was brief. She said she was glad justice was finally done and that she wished her mother were there. And of six decades of phone calls that went nowhere, she said, “I did this for my mom.” She’d been 16 when she came home to find her little sister lying in a casket, and she’d tried to climb in, and her father had to pull her back.

 She waited 61 years and 11 months to hear the name. Think about how narrow the path to that moment was. If an officer in 1964 hadn’t frozen the clothing of a child at a time when nobody knew why you would. If one person across six decades of turnover had cleaned out that freezer. If a sergeant in 2022 had looked at 4/10en of a nanog and reasonably concluded it wasn’t worth spending the last of the evidence on a long shot.

 If an FBI agent in Memphis hadn’t found one cooler inside a shutdown building during an ice storm. Any one of those. And Mary Terresa Simpson is still a girl who walked home in the dark and vanished into a question. She wore cat eye glasses. She kept a fan club card in her pocket. And on a Sunday afternoon, she went to see her mother without being asked to, which is a small thing that meant everything afterward because it was the last hour her mother ever got.

 She was 12 years old and she was walking home. It took 61 years, 4/10 of a nanog, and one chance that nobody was guaranteed, but somebody finally said her name and his name in the same room. If this one stayed with you, hit like and subscribe. Tell us in the comments what you make of that decision in 2022.

 Would you have spent the last of the evidence or held it back for a technology that might never have come? Thank you for watching the Crime Bureau and remember, no case stays cold forever.