On March 15, 1964, 12-year-old Mary Teresa Simpson left her father’s apartment in Elmira, New York, around 3 p. m. She told him she was visiting her cousin.
Instead, she first stopped by her mother’s home, unannounced but welcome. She stayed about an hour, then went to her cousin’s house as planned. Around 6:30 that evening, she started walking back toward her father’s apartment.
The sun was setting. The streets were quiet. A friend saw her around 7 p.
m. in front of a store on the east side of Elmira. She said she was heading home.
She never arrived.
Her father, Ellsworth, waited. When it grew late, he began calling relatives. No one had seen her after she left her mother’s door.
He contacted the Elmira Police Department, and she was officially reported missing at 10:30 that night.
For four days, police and volunteers searched the city. They combed blocks, knocked on doors, checked basements and garages. They spread out along the Chemung River and into parks and empty lots.
Search parties walked the wooded logging roads on the city’s southern and western edges, where patches of snow and ice still covered the ground.
Linda, Mary Teresa’s 16-year-old sister, waited. Rose, her mother, waited. Rose was pregnant at the time, carrying another child while the city searched for the one she had just kissed goodbye.
On the morning of March 19, 1964, a man hiking with his two young sons off Combs Hill Road found her. The location was a wooded area roughly seven miles from the city, off an old logging road. Her body had been concealed beneath branches, dirt, leaves, and stones.
Four heavy stones had been placed on top of her; the largest weighed about 110 pounds. Only part of her hand and one sneaker were visible above the ground. Her mouth had been stuffed with dirt and twigs.
The autopsy determined the cause of death: asphyxiation by strangulation. There was also evidence of sexual assault. Someone had taken Mary Teresa off the street, driven her seven miles out of the city, and left her on a hillside above the town where she had grown up.
At the scene, police collected her cat-eye glasses, a fan club card, and several buttons from her blouse. The items were carefully bagged and stored in a freezer at Elmira Police Headquarters. In 1964, there was no science that could read what was on her clothing.
The detectives stored the evidence anyway.
The investigation shifted from a missing person case to a homicide. Detectives interviewed everyone who had been in the area on the evening of March 15. They checked local, state, and federal records.
They cross-referenced hundreds of tip sheets against every name in the growing file. By October 1964, seven months after the murder, detectives had questioned more than 300 people. Not one interview produced a viable suspect.
A local radio station and newspaper jointly offered a $1,000 reward. By 1972, the reward had grown to $5,000. In the six decades that followed, nobody collected it.
The case generated thousands of pages of documentation. As detectives retired or transferred, new officers inherited the file. Each generation read through the same stacks of reports, searching for a name a previous investigator had missed.
Each generation reached the same conclusion: every actionable lead had dried up decades ago.
The file stayed open. It became the department’s oldest open homicide, the one that nobody could close, the one that followed every incoming detective like a shadow until they retired and passed it on.
The man who killed Mary Teresa Simpson had never walked into a single interview. His name had never appeared on a single tip sheet. While detectives worked the file and Linda waited and the reward sat uncollected, somewhere in the same city, a man was living his life.
He had a job. He had a truck. He drove the roads in and around Elmira for work, the back roads, the wooded edges of town, the hills south of the city.
He knew that terrain the way working men know the routes they drive every day. He went home at the end of his shifts. He had a family.
He was in Elmira in 1964. He was in Elmira in 1972 when the reward reached $5,000 and nobody came forward. He was in Elmira in the 1980s when the detectives who had worked the original case retired and passed the file to someone new.
He was still there in 2003 when analysts in a state police laboratory were extracting DNA from a 12-year-old girl’s clothing and entering it into a national database.
The file never found him. His name never appeared in it. Nobody knocked on his door.
Linda Simpson, later Linda Galpin, was 16 years old in March 1964. She was out of town when her sister disappeared. She rushed home.
She found Mary Teresa lying still in a casket and couldn’t make it real. She tried to climb in. Someone pulled her back.
She watched the investigation unfold and then stall. The detectives who had worked the case retired or moved on. The local newspaper stopped covering it.
Her parents aged without ever hearing a name. Ellsworth died first. Rose died later.
Rose had been pregnant when Mary Teresa was killed. She had carried one daughter into the world in the same year she buried another. Neither of them lived long enough to hear the name of the man who took Mary Teresa off the street that Sunday evening.
But Linda kept asking. She called the Elmira Police Department periodically, sometimes once a year, sometimes more often. The same question every time.
The answer was always the same: nothing new. She called anyway.
In the year 2000, 36 years after the murder, the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center received Mary Teresa’s clothing for analysis. The items had been stored in a freezer at Elmira Police Headquarters since 1964. The technology to read what was on them had not existed when they were first collected.
It existed now.
Analysts examined the blouse first. They found semen on it and developed a male DNA profile from the biological material. The profile was clear and usable.
They entered it into CODIS, the FBI’s national database of convicted offenders. If the man who killed Mary Teresa had ever been convicted of a qualifying offense anywhere in the United States, the system would have flagged a match automatically. No match.
In 2003, additional clothing was submitted to the state police lab. Analysts examined the skirt and underwear. More biological material was recovered.
The samples confirmed and strengthened the original profile. Still nothing. The man who had left that semen on her clothing in 1964 had never been convicted of a qualifying offense in any law enforcement database anywhere in the country.
The profile was resubmitted again in 2014. The system searched. It came back empty.
Three attempts, three dead ends.
The case needed something no law enforcement database could provide.
In 2022, Elmira Police Sergeant William Goodwin applied for and received a grant from Season of Justice, a non-profit organization that funds advanced forensic testing in cold cases. The grant covered the full cost of submitting the DNA evidence to a private laboratory capable of working with samples that were nearly 60 years old.
The DNA was sent to Othram Technologies in The Woodlands, Texas, a lab that specializes in building usable genetic profiles from degraded biological material. The Simpson samples were among the oldest material Othram had ever worked with. What remained of the DNA was 0.
4 nanograms. One nanogram is one billionth of a gram. The sample was invisible to the naked eye.
It was the last viable piece of biological evidence connecting a killer to a 12-year-old girl murdered six decades earlier.
FBI Special Agent Kenneth Jensen, who was assisting the Elmira Police Department on the case, packed the evidence carefully in dry ice and shipped it to Texas. Then the ice storm hit.
A historic winter storm shut down the FedEx hub in Memphis, the largest FedEx hub in the world, the one through which the package had been routed. The shipment sat stranded somewhere inside a frozen facility. Jensen couldn’t reach anyone at FedEx.
The dry ice had a finite life. If it ran out before the package moved, the evidence was gone.
Jensen contacted the FBI’s liaison at the Memphis hub. Agents physically searched the frozen facility for one small package among millions. “I was petrified that my act of shipping it through FedEx was going to lose the only chance of solving it,” Jensen said later.
It was, in the words of Sergeant Goodwin, a massive scavenger hunt.
They found it just in time, moved it into a bureau freezer until the storm cleared, then shipped it on to Texas.
Othram applied forensic grade genome sequencing to what remained of the degraded material and built a complete genetic profile of the unknown male. The profile was uploaded to public genealogy databases, where millions of Americans have voluntarily submitted their own genetic data. The FBI’s forensic genetic genealogy team began building family trees outward from every match they found.
In 2023, investigators partnered with the Criminal Investigation Resource Center at Russell Sage College, where Dr. Christina Lane, criminologist and associate professor, and her students assisted with the records-level genealogical work. They traced family lines, cross-referenced public documents with genetic data, worked through birth records, marriage certificates, and paper trails that stretched back generations into upstate New York.
The work took more than two years.
By 2025, the tree had narrowed to a single individual. Investigators contacted the suspect’s surviving son. He provided a voluntary DNA sample.
The comparison confirmed a familial relationship between his DNA and the unknown male profile recovered from Mary Teresa’s clothing.
A familial match identifies a family line, but investigators needed the man himself. The man the tree pointed to died in 2004. He was buried in an Elmira cemetery less than five miles from the hillside on Combs Hill Road where he had left her 40 years earlier.
He had lived the rest of his life in the same city, and nobody had ever asked him about it.
Authorization was obtained to exhume the remains. On November 5, 2025, the body of Alfred Raymond Murray Jr. was disinterred from the cemetery where he had lain for more than 20 years.
His remains were transported to the state forensic laboratory. DNA extracted directly from the exhumed remains was compared to the profile recovered in 2000 and confirmed in 2003. The match was definitive.
The odds of selecting an unrelated individual who would produce the same genetic result: less than 320 billion.
His name was Alfred Raymond Murray Jr. Born in Elmira in 1931, he never left. He was a Korean War veteran, a truck driver from Mayflower Van Lines who knew every back road and logging trail on the city’s southern edge.
He had a documented criminal history involving children that stretched back to age 17, when he was arrested for molesting two 7-year-old sisters. He was a man the Elmira Police Department had files on for decades.
In March 1964, he was 32 years old and saw a 12-year-old girl walking alone through quiet streets as the last light faded on a Sunday evening. He took her.
His obituary ran in the Star-Gazette on March 19, 2004. March 19th, exactly 40 years to the day after Mary Teresa’s body had been found on Combs Hill Road. His obituary listed his wife Rosemary, his children, his grandchildren, and his military service.
It described a man who lived his whole life in one city, served his country, and raised a family. It did not mention Mary Teresa Simpson. At the time of his death, the two names had never been connected.
On February 10, 2026, the Chemung County District Attorney’s Office in Elmira held a press conference. Police Chief Kristen Thorne stood at the podium. Beside her were representatives from the FBI and the District Attorney’s Office, Sergeant William Goodwin, and retired officers who had worked the case across the decades.
In the audience sat Linda Galpin, 78 years old, her uncle Dwayne Bowman, and her cousin Ronnie Bowman, three surviving members of Mary Teresa’s family, waiting for a name they had never heard spoken out loud.
“This is a historic day for the Elmira Police Department,” Thorne said. “Justice after 61 years.”
She named him.
District Attorney Weeden Wetmore said, “The wheels of justice move slowly.” Goodwin said, “The family finally got an answer. The case was never forgotten.”
It was, forensic scientists confirmed, the oldest cold case ever solved with DNA evidence. It was the 18th case in the state of New York solved through Othram’s forensic genetic genealogy process.
Linda Galpin stood up. She had spent 61 years making phone calls that were answered with nothing new. She had watched her parents die without ever learning the name.
She had carried her shy little sister, the cat-eye glasses, the fan club card, the casket she had tried to climb into, through every single year of her adult life.
“I am very happy it’s finally ended,” she said. “I just wish my mom was here.”
A 12-year-old girl, a walk home, a man who knew the road. He had a name. He had a life.
He knew exactly what he had done. It took 61 years, an invisible DNA sample, an ice storm in Memphis, and a woman who never stopped calling to find it.
His name was Alfred Raymond Murray Jr. Now, everyone knows it.