The Oldest Cold Case Ever SOLVED by DNA — New York Discovery.

She was 12 years old, shy by nature, small for her age, a girl who had moved so many times in her short life that she had never quite settled, never quite built the circle of friends that other children take for granted. On the afternoon of March 15th, 1964, Mary Teresa Simpson left her father’s apartment in Elmira, New York, and told him she was going to visit her cousin.
She did not go straight to her cousin’s house. She made one stop. First, a secret stop, the kind 12-year-olds keep from their parents. She went to see her mother. The parents had separated. Visits weren’t scheduled as often as Mary would have liked, so she went anyway, unannounced, because she missed her.
She waved goodbye at 6:30 that evening and started walking home. She never arrived. Her father reported her missing at 10:30 that night, and for 4 days Elmira And then, in a wooded area off Combs Hill Road, her small body hidden beneath branches, leaves, dirt, and four heavy stones, the largest weighing more than 100 lb, they found her.
Her mouth had been stuffed with dirt and twigs. For 61 years, no one knew who had done it. 61 years, not 50, not 40, 61. The longest gap between a murder and its DNA solution in the history of American law enforcement. A record that nobody wanted to hold in a case that nobody could close, answered at last by a speck of biological material so small it was invisible to the naked eye, a speck that nearly didn’t make it to the laboratory that could read it.
This is Mary Teresa’s story. Elmira, New York, sits in the southern tier of the state near the Pennsylvania border in the Finger Lakes region. In 1964, it was a modest industrial city, a place of working families, church on Sundays, and children who walked to school and to their cousins’ houses without anyone watching the clock too closely.
It was the kind of city where a 12-year-old girl walking home at 6:30 in the evening was not unusual, was not alarming, was simply a child doing what children did in 1964. Mary Teresa Simpson was born in 1951 or 1952 in Elmira, the city she would never leave. Her parents were Ellsworth and Rose Simpson. She had an older brother, an older sister, and an older half-brother.
Her family was working class, close-knit in the way families become close when they move a lot, and the household is all you have. And they had moved a lot. Her parents separated in May 1963. After the separation, Mary went to live with her father, Ellsworth. In late 1963, Ellsworth found work in nearby Hammondsport, and the two of them moved there, which meant Mary saw her mother only monthly.
Then, in the earlier part of March 1964, Ellsworth found a new job back in Elmira, and they returned. Mary had been back in the city for only a matter of weeks when she was taken. She was described by the people who knew her as a shy girl, not unfriendly shy, the kind of quiet that comes from moving often and never quite having enough time to build roots before the next move came.
She didn’t have a wide circle of friends because she hadn’t had the time to build one. She was, in the way of many children who move frequently, her own company much of the time. Her older sister Linda, four years her senior, away from Elmira when it happened, would spend the rest of her life haunted by the image of seeing Mary’s body at the funeral.
Decades later, still attending press conferences, still thanking investigators, still carrying a grief that 61 years had not lightened. On March 15th, 1964, a Sunday, Mary left her father’s apartment around 3:00 in the afternoon. She told him she was going to visit her cousin on the East Side of Elmira.
She did visit, but first she went to see her mother, an unscheduled stop, a secret detour. A 12-year-old girl who simply missed the parent she didn’t get to see enough. She said goodbye to her family at 6:30 that evening. She was last seen at the corner of East Market and Harriet streets, heading home.
The distance between that corner and her father’s apartment was not far. She never covered it. Elsworth Simpson reported his daughter missing at 10:30 that night. By March 18th, 3 days after Mary disappeared, Elmira police had begun to suspect foul play. This was no longer a missing child case. Vacant buildings were searched. Abandoned homes were checked room by room. Junkyards were combed through.
Police departments across both New York and Pennsylvania were notified. 50 officers swept the area around where she was last seen, searching for physical evidence, for anything that might tell them where she had gone. They found her glasses, several buttons torn from her blouse, scattered across the ground like the evidence of a struggle that had moved fast and ended badly.
On March 19th, 1964, 4 days after Mary disappeared, a man who was hiking with his two sons in a wooded area off Combs Hill Road, roughly 5 miles southwest of Elmira, came across something wrong. A disturbed patch of ground, something that didn’t belong. He looked closer. Mary Teresa Simpson’s body was there, fully clothed, almost entirely concealed.
Her killer had covered her with branches, leaves, and dirt, and then placed four large stones on top of her. The largest stone weighed more than 100 lb. Only a part of her hand and one sneaker were visible above the surface. Her mouth had been stuffed with dirt and twigs. The medical examiner confirmed what the scene already suggested.
Mary had been sexually assaulted. She had been strangled. The cause of death was asphyxiation. The evidence indicated she had been killed at or very near the spot where her body was found, meaning whoever did this had carried her or led her deep enough into those woods to be invisible from any road, and then spent time there making sure she was hidden.
This was not impulsive. This was deliberate. The news hit Elmira like a physical blow. Child murders did not happen in this city. In a place of this size, in 1964, the murder of a 12-year-old girl was not something the community had language for. It sent shockwaves through every household, every school, every church.
Parents who had never thought twice about their children walking home began watching from windows and setting rules. Mary Teresa Simpson became a name that Elmira would carry for the next 61 years. Within days of Mary’s body being found, Elmira police launched one of the most intensive investigations the city had ever mounted.
The task force was relentless, door-to-door, interview after interview, lead after lead, chased down until it went nowhere, and the next one began. By October 1964, 7 months after the murder, police had questioned more than 300 suspects. 300. In a city of this size, that number represents almost everyone with any possible connection to the crime and hundreds beyond.
The local radio station WELM and the Star-Gazette newspaper pooled resources and offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest. Seven suspects agreed to take lie detector tests. None of them broke the case open. The reward money sat unclaimed. Years passed. The task force dissolved back into regular duty. The file grew thicker with dead ends.
Investigators came and went, each picking up the case and putting it down without an answer. By 1972, the reward had been raised to $5,000. Still nothing. Eventually, the unclaimed reward was donated to a charity in Mary’s name. Occasional anniversary stories ran in the Star-Gazette. The community remembered. The family waited.
For 39 years, the case had no DNA component at all. The technology simply did not exist when Mary was murdered. Investigators in 1964 had collected her clothing, her personal effects, and various items from the scene as standard evidence practice, not because they imagined what future science might extract from them, but because that was what good investigators did. They collected everything.
They preserved everything. Mary’s clothing was placed in a freezer at Elmira Police Department headquarters, where it would remain untouched, perfectly cold, sealed against time for decade after decade. Then, in 2003, 39 years after the murder, investigators submitted Mary’s clothing to the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center for DNA testing.
Testing confirmed that fluid present on her skirt and a cutting from her underwear was semen. For the first time in the case’s history, a male DNA profile was extracted and entered into CODIS, the National Combined DNA Index System. Zero matches. In November 2014, the evidence was submitted again. Improved technology, updated databases, fresh comparison. Zero matches.
The man who killed Mary Teresa Simpson had never been arrested for anything that required sample. He had lived entirely outside the reach of every database law enforcement had ever built. The file went back into storage. Elmira’s oldest open homicide stayed open. In 2022, Elmira Police Sergeant William Goodwin received a grant funded by the nonprofit organization Season of Justice for advanced DNA testing in Mary’s case.
The decision that followed was the most consequential one made in 60 years of investigation. Because here was the problem. 39 years of testing and retesting had consumed most of what little biological material remained. What was left of the DNA sample measured out to 0.4 nanograms. An amount invisible to the naked eye.
An amount that the vast majority of forensic laboratories in the country could not work with. And this was critical. This was the last of it. If the next test failed, there would be nothing left to test. The case would die with the sample. Sergeant Goodwin and FBI Special Agent Kenneth Jensen made their decision carefully. They chose Autrum Inc.
, the private forensic laboratory in The Woodlands, Texas, that had become the national standard for impossible DNA cases. The same laboratory that had solved Stephanie Isaacson’s murder in Las Vegas. The same laboratory that was becoming the last stop for cold cases that every other lab had turned away. Jensen packed the evidence himself, fragile biological material preserved in dry ice, sealed in a cooler.
He handed it to FedEx for shipment to Texas. And then an ice storm, one of the worst in years, shut down the FedEx hub in Memphis, Tennessee, the largest FedEx hub in the world, the one the package was routed through. The shipment sat stranded. Somewhere in that frozen hub, in a building nobody could reach, Mary’s last remaining evidence was sitting in a cooler with dry ice that would not last forever.
If the dry ice gave out, if the temperature climbed, if the biological material degraded past the point of recovery, 60 years of waiting would end in irreversible loss. Jensen said it plainly later. They could not get anyone at FedEx on the phone during the historic storm. Nobody picked up. Nobody could tell them where the package was, whether the dry ice was holding, whether the cooler had been kept in a temperature-controlled area or left on a loading dock somewhere. They could only wait.
The storm cleared. The hub reopened. The package arrived in Texas intact. The dry ice had held. The last sample Mary’s case would ever have made it to the one lab in the country built to read it. Authum’s scientists went to work on 0.4 nanograms of DNA. Using their proprietary forensic grade genome sequencing method designed specifically for degraded, near depleted, or contaminated samples, they extracted a comprehensive genetic profile from what remained.
In 2023, working alongside students from Russell Sage College’s Criminal Investigation Resource Center, who had been brought in to digitize and review decades of case files, Authum uploaded the profile to public genealogical databases. The FBI took that profile and began building family trees, branch by branch, generation by generation, narrowing geographic location, age ranges, historical records.
The kind of painstaking genealogical reconstruction that requires months of work and an absolute refusal to cut corners. A suspect emerged referred to internally as John Doe while investigators confirmed the identity. Across 2024 and into 2025, law enforcement conducted The trail led them to a man believed to be a family member of their John Doe.
That man submitted a buccal DNA swab voluntarily. When his profile was compared to the DNA recovered from Mary’s skirt, the familial match was confirmed. The family member was a son. And when you have a son’s DNA matching the crime scene sample, the father becomes the suspect. The father’s name was Alfred Raymond Murray Jr.
Alfred Murray Jr. was born in 1931 in Elmira, New York. He was raised in the city. He had served in the United States Army during the Korean War. According to his obituary, he was a married man with three children and two grandchildren. He had worked as a truck driver. He had lived in Elmira his entire life. He was 32 years old on March 15th, 1964, the day Mary Teresa Simpson waved goodbye at the corner of East Market and Harriet Streets and started walking home.
And Sergeant Goodwin confirmed at the press conference what investigators had found when they looked deeper into Murray’s history. Repeated criminal involvement over the decades involving offenses involving children. The specific offenses were not fully disclosed, protected under applicable law, but the pattern was clear.
Murray was known to Elmira police, not in connection with Mary’s case. In connection with other investigations, other children, a history that in hindsight was a map of exactly who he was. His name appeared nowhere in the thousands of pages of the original case file, not as a suspect, not as a witness, not as a person of interest. In 300 interviews across 61 years of investigation, nobody had ever looked at Alfred Murray Jr.
in connection with Mary Teresa Simpson. He had been invisible. By the time investigators found him, he had been dead for 22 years. Alfred Murray Jr. died in March 2004 at the age of 73, almost exactly 40 years to the day after Mary Teresa Simpson was taken from the corner of East Market and Harriet Streets. He was buried in Elmira.
In November 2025, investigators exhumed his remains from that Elmira Cemetery. DNA taken directly from Murray’s exhumed body was compared to the profile extracted from Mary’s skirt. The probability that the DNA belonged to anyone other than Alfred Murray Jr. less than 1 in 320 billion. On February 10th, 2026, 61 years, 10 months, and 26 days after Mary Teresa Simpson waved goodbye and started walking home, Elmira Police Chief Kristen Thorne stood at a press conference at the Chemung County District Attorney’s Office and spoke the
words that three generations of investigators had worked toward. She said, “This is a historic day for the Elmira Police Department. Justice after 61 years.” She then said the thing that matters most, the thing that every cold case family needs to hear. “If Mr. Murray were still alive, the District Attorney’s Office would seek criminal charges against him for murder.
We now know the truth. Sergeant Goodwin stood beside her and described Murray’s pattern of crimes against children carefully within legal limits and said what the evidence had confirmed. While no single prior incident proved responsibility for Mary’s murder, the history was consistent with the forensic findings and the circumstances of the homicide.
Mary’s older sister Linda Galvin, who had been out of town when the murder happened in 1964, who had seen her little sister’s body at the funeral and carried that image for 61 years was in that room. She looked at the investigators, at the cameras, at the room full of people who had worked this case across careers and decades, and she said simply, “I want to thank the Elmira Police Department and everyone involved.
I’m glad it’s all over. I just want to thank everyone who was involved.” It was not a speech. It was not a statement prepared for cameras. It was a woman in her late 70s finally exhaling after 61 years of holding her breath. The case was officially the oldest ever solved with DNA evidence in American history. Alfred Murray Jr.
was known to Elmira police before 1964. Known. Not suspected in Mary’s case, but known. He had criminal involvement involving children before March 15th, 1964. His history was documented. His name was in police files. He was a man the system had already looked at in other contexts. And yet in 300 interviews across an investigation that reached as far as Arizona chasing leads, his name never surfaced in connection with Mary Teresa Simpson. Not once.
Not in 7 months of intensive investigation in 1964. Not in the decades of periodic review that followed. Not in any of the thousands of pages of the case file that Russell Sage College students digitized and reviewed in 2023. Invisible. Completely invisible. The author who spent a year researching and writing a book about the case published just months before the announcement said she never saw his name.
She had expected the killer to be someone connected to Mary’s family. A neighbor, a relative, someone with a known relationship to the victim. Instead, it was a man from across the city who had selected a 12-year-old girl at random, a crime of opportunity, police concluded who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Mary Teresa Simpson had chosen to make an unscheduled stop that evening. She had chosen to visit her mother, the parent she didn’t get to see often enough. If she had gone straight to her cousin’s house, if she had left her mother’s just a little earlier, if she had taken a different route home, the geometry of that evening was as fragile as the DNA that eventually solved it.
There is the detail about the ice storm. Kenneth Jensen standing at a phone that nobody answered, knowing that somewhere inside a frozen FedEx hub in Memphis, the last biological evidence from a 60-year-old murder was sitting in a cooler that was running out of dry ice. That moment, the storm, the silence on the line, the clock ticking, is the moment the entire case almost ended.
If the dry ice had failed, if the package had been left somewhere warm, if one link in that chain had broken, Alfred Murray Jr.’s name would never have been spoken in that press conference room. The dry ice held. And there is the timing of Murray’s death. He died in March 2004, almost exactly 40 years to the day after the murder.
He lived freely for 40 years, a married man with children and grandchildren, a Korean War veteran, a truck driver who moved through Elmira without anyone connecting his name to the girl found under four heavy stones on Coons Hill Road. He died thinking he had won. He hadn’t. He was just waiting in a cemetery in the same city where Mary Teresa Simpson’s family was still waiting for the science to come for him.
It took 22 more years after his death, but it came. Mary Teresa Simpson was 12 years old. She was shy. She had moved too many times to build the kind of friendships other children had. She lived with her father after her parents separated. She missed her mother enough that she made an unannounced detour on a Sunday evening just to see her, a small act of love that cost her everything.
She deserved to grow up, to stop moving, to put down roots somewhere and finally build the friendships she never got to have, to become whoever she was going to become. Instead, she is frozen at 12. Frozen in a March evening in 1964. Frozen in the memory of a sister who saw her body at a funeral and never fully came back from it.
But here is what else is true. The officers who responded to that wooded area on Coons Hill Road on March 19th, 1964 had no idea what DNA was. Forensic DNA would not exist as a tool for criminal investigation for another 22 years. They collected Mary’s clothing and her personal effects because that is what good investigators do.
They collect everything. They preserve everything. They trust that something they cannot yet understand will one day matter. They were right. That clothing sat in a freezer at Elmira Police Department headquarters for 61 years through administrations that came and went, through officers who worked the case and retired and were replaced by officers who worked it again.
Three generations of investigators who picked up the same file, looked at the same dead ends, and handed it forward with the same unspoken instruction. Don’t let this one go. Sergeant Goodwin didn’t let it go. He chased a grant. He made the decision to send the last remaining evidence, 0.
4 nanograms, invisible to the naked eye, the final shot to the one laboratory built to read the impossible. An ice storm tried to take it. The dry ice held. And on February 10th, 2026, in a room in Elmira, New York, a name that had never appeared in 61 years of investigation was finally spoken aloud. Alfred Raymond Murray, Jr.
Linda Galvin finally exhaled. If Mary’s story moved you, if you believe that a 12-year-old girl who made a detour to see her mother deserves to be remembered, that a sister who waited 61 years deserves to be heard, that the officers who kept a freezer cold for six decades deserve to know their work mattered then right now, before you scroll past this moment, subscribe to this channel and drop a comment below.
Tell us what part of Mary Teresa’s story hit you hardest. Because there are hundreds of families still sitting where Linda Galvin sat for 61 years waiting, hoping, refusing to accept that the answer is gone forever. Every time you subscribe, every time you share, every time you leave a comment, you are telling those families that the world has not forgotten, that these stories matter, that these names matter.
Mary Teresa Simpson mattered. She mattered enough that strangers preserved her clothing in a freezer for six decades. She mattered enough that a nonprofit funded a grant, that a sergeant fought for it, that an FBI agent stood on the phone during an ice storm willing a cooler to stay cold.
She mattered enough that a laboratory in Texas did something that had never been done before in American history. She mattered enough to wait 61 years for an answer and she has one now. 61 years, 10 months, 26 days. The oldest cold case ever solved with DNA. The clock has stopped.