Pennsylvania 1964 Cold Case Solved — Arrest Shocks Community

According to state police, this is the fourth oldest cold case in the country to be solved using genetic genealogy. Troopers believe it is the oldest one in the state.  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.  Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Wednesday morning, March 18th, 1964. A 9-year-old girl is getting ready for school earlier than usual. She is in a hurry. It’s her teacher’s feast day. Her teacher is a nun, and Marie wants to bring her a gift before morning mass. She’s gathered some canned goods to take.

 She packs them up, says goodbye, and heads out the door into the cold Pennsylvania morning. Six blocks. That’s all it was. Six blocks from her house on Alter Street to St. Joseph’s [music] Parochial School on Laurel Street. She walked it every day. She was last [music] seen alive at 8:10 in the morning at the corner of Sherman Court and West 4th Street by a neighbor who watched her go.

Just a little girl walking fast carrying canned goods for a nun she admired trying to make [music] it in time for mass. She never made it. That afternoon, a man giving his 16-year-old nephew [music] a driving lesson turned onto a road near the Hazleton Municipal Airport. They saw something in an abandoned strip [music] mining pit.

A coal waste hole locals used as a dump. The man thought at first it was a large doll. He looked closer. It wasn’t. Welcome to Cold Case Unlocked. This case took 58 years to close and it closed because a kid [music] who taught himself genealogy when he was homesick from school decided one night in his college dorm to send a cold email to a police department in Pennsylvania.

 Drop a comment and tell us where you’re watching from.  [music]  We reply to everyone. Now, let’s go back to Hazleton. Her name was Marise Ann Shiverella, 9 years old, third grade at St. Joseph’s Parochial School in Hazleton, a former coal mining city 80 miles north of Philadelphia. A city where the ground itself still remembered the industry that had built it and slowly hollowed it out.

Marise lived at 533 North Alter Street with her parents and four siblings. Oldest brother Ronald was 16. Sister Carmen was 13. Brothers Barry and David were 11 and 7. Marise was the middle child, quiet, shy. Her sister Carmen would later describe her as sweet [music] and gentle. She was learning to play the organ.

 She wanted to be a nun when she grew up, which is why the feast day of her teacher, the nun at St. [music] Joseph’s, mattered enough to make her pack canned goods and head out early on a cold March morning. Those cans were still at the crime [music] scene when police arrived. The morning of March 18th was unusual only in that Marise left earlier than normal.

Other than that, it was ordinary. A school day, a six-block walk, a gift for a teacher she admired. She left home around 8:00. A neighbor saw her at the corner of Sherman Court and West Fourth [music] Street at 8:10. When she didn’t come home for lunch, she regularly did, her family knew something was wrong. By early afternoon, police were called.

At roughly 1:00 p.m., the man giving his nephew a driving lesson spotted her body in the mining pit 2 miles from the school. She was fully clothed and bound. Her own shoelaces had been used to tie her wrists and ankles. A scarf had been stuffed into her mouth. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.

 She was 2 miles from home. She had been taken off the street in the time it should have taken her to walk six blocks. Hazleton had never had a homicide like this. The city’s police and the Pennsylvania State Police both responded. Months of work followed immediately. Every person in the surrounding area interviewed.

 Every possible lead pursued. Nothing came back. No suspect. No name. No evidence pointing anywhere. The case against everything investigators could do to stop it went cold. Years of Pennsylvania State Police history were about to be tied to one 9-year-old girl. More than 230 members of the Pennsylvania State Police worked the Civerella investigation at one point or another across those decades.

 The case file grew to over 4,700 pages. Detectives who started on the case retired and passed it to the next generation who passed it to the next. Every generation read the same pages and reached the same wall. In 2007, 43 years after her life was ended, investigators finally had a tool that hadn’t existed before.

 [music] DNA technology had advanced enough to build a usable suspect profile [music] from the biological evidence preserved from the crime scene. A DNA profile [music] was developed from bodily fluids found on Marise’s jacket. Then it went into the national criminal database. But there was no match.

 The man who ended the life of Marise Civerella had no qualifying criminal conviction on record. He wasn’t in the system. He never would be, not this way. The profile [music] just sat there, real, usable, accurate, pointing at a man whose name [music] didn’t exist in any database anywhere. In 2018, investigators [music] partnered with Parabon Nano Labs, which had developed a method of generating composite [music] sketches from DNA, predicting eye color, skin tone,  [music]  hair, facial structure from genetic material alone.

The sketches were released publicly. A composite image went out showing what the suspect might have looked like at the time of the crime and what he might look like now. Nobody recognized him. In 2019, Parabon helped upload the DNA profile to public genealogy databases. GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, where millions of people had voluntarily shared their genetic data.

The system found a distant match, possibly a sixth cousin of the perpetrator. A thread, a starting point. But building from a sixth cousin outward to a specific suspect is not a straightforward task. It requires building family trees from the ground up, eliminating branches, cross-referencing names against geography and timelines, ruling out the living and tracing the dead.

That’s where the case sat in early 2020. A thread, a database match, and no one with the specific expertise to follow it all the way to a name. Then a college student in a dorm room in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, started reading about Maurice Chiverella. His name was Eric Schubert. He was 18 years old when he solved his first cold case, the youngest person ever to do so, and the first college student ever to be involved in a criminal cold case investigation.

He had been doing genealogy since he was 10, homesick, watching Ancestry commercials with his mother, thinking he’d try it for 2 weeks. He never stopped. By 15, he had turned it into a business, helping neighbors and eventually families across New Jersey trace their roots. In early 2020, as a junior history major at Elizabethtown College, he had come across Marise’s case.

He was just reading how heinous and how terrible of a crime it was. He’ll later say it struck him, and he knew he could help. He sent a cold email to the Pennsylvania State Police, not to detectives directly, but to their public information office. He laid out his credentials and offered to help. He expected nothing.

 They called him almost immediately. Within weeks, he was sitting in a coffee shop in Elizabethtown across from investigators, making his case for why they should give him a chance. They gave him a partial case file, a DNA profile, a list of roughly 2,000 people who shared some genetic material with whoever had committed this crime.

That was all he needed. For 2 years, he built family trees, started with 2,000 possible distant relatives, eliminated, cross-referenced, built over 50 separate family trees, branch by branch, testing which lines led toward Hazleton and which led away. Which timelines aligned with March 1964 and which didn’t.  [clears throat]  2,000 became hundreds.

Hundreds became 30. Police investigated those 30. 30 became four. One of the four was a man named James Paul Fort. At a certain point, Schubert said later, he knew they were going to find the assailant. He didn’t know yet which one of the four it was, but he knew the answer was in the tree. Fort had never been on a single investigative list in 58 years.

 He never appeared anywhere in the 4,700 pages of case files. He had lived six or seven blocks from Marise’s home on Alter Street. Nobody knew of any connection between them. He was 22 years old the morning walked to school. James Paul Ford was born in 1941 in Hazleton. He lived there his entire life and never left.

 He worked as a bartender and a bar supply salesman. He was never married. He had no children. Most of what investigators knew about him came from two criminal records. In 1974, 10 years after Maurice’s life was ended, he was charged with sexual assault after attacking a woman in a car on Stockton Mountain Road in an area used for coal mining. The charges were reduced through a plea deal.

Sexual assault dropped. Guilty plea entered on felony aggravated assault. One year of probation. He paid the victim’s hospital bill. The woman he attacked told investigators in 2022 that she believed he would have ended her life that day if someone hadn’t come along and interrupted it. In 1978, he was charged again.

This time with reckless endangerment and harassment. He had been living in Hazleton through all of it, unremarkably, tending bar and selling supplies, going home at the end of his shifts like anyone else. On May 16th, 1980, James Paul Ford had a heart attack at his place of employment, the Hazle Township Ballroom, and died. He was 38 years old.

He went into the ground in Hazleton without anyone connecting his name to Maurice Chevalier. Ford was the only one of the four suspects who had never married and had no children, meaning there was no direct descendant available to provide a voluntary DNA comparison. The only way to confirm the match was to go to the source.

On January 6th, 2022, Ford’s body was exhumed from his grave in Hazleton. A tissue sample was extracted. It went to the lab. On February 3rd, 2022, the result came back. The Pennsylvania State Police released the probability figure in their official press statement. To find another person who would produce the same genetic matches for it, you would need to search over 4 million planet Earths.

The DNA on Marise’s jacket was his. The case was closed. 7 days later on February 10th, the press conference was packed with state police brass, current investigators and retired ones, men and women who had carried some piece of this case across different decades of their careers. And in that room, Marise’s four surviving siblings, Ronald, Barry, David, and Carmen. All of them old now.

All of them still waiting for a name that had been six or seven blocks away from their house in 1964. Lead investigator Corporal Mark Baron, who choked up as he spoke, said, “It’s a vivid memory for everybody who lived through this, and it’s a vivid memory for everybody who grew up in this area. What happened to her ushered in a change in this community.

Whether you like it or not, the way you lived changed after March 18th of 1964 in Hazleton.”  And what happened to her ushered in a change in this community. Whether you like it or not, the way you lived changed after March 18th of 1964 in Hazleton.  Marise’s eldest brother Ronald stood at the microphone and talked about their mother.

Every Sunday, every holiday, when the family gathered for a meal and their mother said grace, she ended it the same way, every time. For years and then decades, she would finish the prayer and add, “Please help the Pennsylvania State Police find the man that hurt my daughter.” At some point years into it, their mother told each of her surviving children that she had forgiven whoever had ended the life of Maurice.

 She said it without knowing the name. She forgave someone she couldn’t identify because that was the only way she knew how to carry it. Then Ronald talked about the organ. Maurice had been learning to play it. The organ is still in the family. Still in good shape. He said all of them remember playing it with her when they were young.

No sheet music, no real notes, just all of them at the keys together making whatever sounds they could manage until they figured out how to play the same part twice in a row. Just kids making noise. Maurice’s sister Carmen quoted two passages from the Bible. The first urged leaving vengeance to God.

 The second from Matthew spoke about what happens to those who harm children. Then she said, “Our family now knows the identity of her attacker. Justice has been served today.” Eric Schubert stood at the podium beside the state police. He was 20 years old. He said it was the hardest genealogy work he had ever done in his life.  I was 18 years old when I started working on this case.

Uh now I’m almost 21, so this is something that um I’ve been working on this for a very long time, to say the least.  He said it meant everything to him to have been on the team that could bring answers to this family. He said, “What he did to her is irreversible. But I think there’s some closure in knowing that he’s no longer alive and out there doing this to other girls.

” A 20-year-old who learned genealogy from a TV commercial when he was homesick. Two years of work in a college dorm. 50 family trees. One email to a public information officer. That’s what finally broke a case that 230 state police officers couldn’t crack in 58 years. Maurice Ann Shiverella. 9 years old, shy, sweet, learning to play the organ.

She wanted to be a nun. She left her house early one Wednesday morning because it was her teacher’s feast day and she wanted to bring her a gift and still make it to mass on time. The canned goods she was carrying were found at the crime scene. She never delivered them. Her mother said that prayer for years, every Sunday, every holiday, every meal where the family gathered and said grace and felt the shape of the person missing from the table.

“Please help them find the man that hurt my daughter.” They found him. It took 58 years and a kid in a dorm room, but they found him. If you want to help cases like Maurice’s get solved faster, and there are thousands of them still open, upload your DNA to a public genealogy database like GEDmatch or FamilyTreeDNA.

You might be a distant relative of someone whose name belongs in a case file. You’d never know it, but a genealogist building a family tree outward from a crime scene sample might. That’s how Eric Schubert found James Ford. That’s how the Golden State Killer was caught. That’s how this works. Your DNA sitting in a public database costs you nothing and could be the thread that closes a case that’s been open since before you were born.

If this case stayed with you, drop a comment. Tell us which moment hit hardest. Hit like, subscribe, and we’ll see you in the next one.