On July 6, 1973, 11-year-old Linda Ann O'Keefe left summer school at Lincoln Intermediate School in Corona del Mar, California, and began her walk home. It was a route she had taken many times. She never arrived.
A witness saw Linda standing next to a turquoise van, talking to the driver, a white man in his mid-20s to early 30s. There was no license plate recorded. No one saw her get into the van. That was the last time she was seen alive.
Less than 24 hours later, her body was found in a ditch near a nature trail in the Back Bay area of Newport Beach. An autopsy determined she had been abducted, sexually assaulted, and strangled. The sexual assault was kept secret for years to protect the investigation.
Forensic scientist Jim White collected and preserved biological evidence from Linda’s body. In 1973, DNA technology did not exist in criminal investigations. There was no database to search, and no way to know that the evidence would one day hold the key to the case.
Investigators pursued every lead. They checked vehicle registrations for a turquoise van. They questioned men matching the witness description. Nothing led to a specific suspect.
What they did not know was that the killer had left California shortly after the crime. He changed his name and built a new life in another state.
For 46 years, the Newport Beach Police Department kept Linda’s photo on the wall of the police station. Generations of investigators came and went, but the photo remained. It was a silent commitment that the case was not over.
In the late 1990s, the biological evidence preserved since 1973 was sent to a lab. A suspect DNA profile was created. In 2001, that profile was uploaded to CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database. There was no match.
The man who killed Linda was living under a different name. In 1973, he was James Albert George Layton, living in Orange County, about a half hour from where Linda was abducted. After the murder, he moved to Florida and changed his name to James Allen Neil.
He eventually settled in Colorado. Between 1995 and 2004, he was accused of sexually assaulting two other young girls in Riverside County, California. Linda’s case remained cold, and her photo still hung on the wall.
On July 7, 2018, exactly 45 years after Linda’s body was found, the Newport Beach Police Department did something unprecedented. They paused all regular Twitter content and retold the case in Linda’s own voice, one tweet at a time, from the morning she left for school to the morning her body was found.
The campaign ended with a video of detectives who had worked the case over the years. The department also released a suspect sketch created from DNA using phenotype prediction technology. The face of the man in the turquoise van was reconstructed from the evidence Jim White had preserved in 1973.
The campaign brought the case before millions of people. It also created the pressure needed to move the investigation forward with new technology.
Newport Beach PD partnered with Parabon NanoLabs, a private forensic DNA analysis company. The suspect DNA was uploaded to FamilyTreeDNA, a public genealogy database. Investigators looked for partial matches that suggested blood relations, then built family trees from those matches.
In January 2019, the family tree pointed to James Allen Neal, a 72-year-old man living in Monument, Colorado. He had lived in Orange County in the 1970s under the name James Layton.
Investigators did not approach him immediately. They placed him under surveillance and collected a DNA sample he left behind in his daily activities. The sample was compared with the suspect DNA from Linda’s body. It was a complete match.
In February 2019, James Allen Neal was arrested in Monument, Colorado and extradited to California. He faced charges of murder with special circumstances of kidnapping and committing a lewd act on a child under 14, plus charges related to the sexual assault of two young girls in Riverside County.
At a press conference on February 20, 2019, Orange County DA Todd Spitzer announced the arrest. Spitzer was 12 years old when Linda was killed. Newport Beach Police Chief John Lewis said, “Linda never made it home that afternoon. For 45 years, generations of our investigators never gave up. We never forgot Linda.”
On May 27, 2020, James Alan Neal died at the age of 73 while awaiting trial. He died in custody before the case could go to court. There was no conviction, no sentence, no trial.
DA Todd Spitzer said Neal’s death robbed the O’Keefe family of the justice they deserved. Chief Lewis said the department intended to bring Neal to trial and hoped to bring a measure of closure to Linda’s family.
The case leaves lasting lessons. Jim White preserved evidence in 1973 without knowing what DNA would become. That decision, made out of professional instinct, became the foundation that solved the case decades later.
The 2018 Twitter campaign showed that presenting an old question in a new way can reach a new audience and create a breakthrough. And the case is a painful reminder that a cold case is not just delayed justice. It is an opportunity for a perpetrator to continue harming new victims while the system has not yet found him.