New York Oldest Cold Case Was Just SOLVED After 61 Years
This wooded area just off Combmes Hill Road is where 60 years ago the body of 12-year-old Mary Terresa Simpson was found covered in rocks and debris. This is a historic day for the Ammyra Police Department. Justice after almost 62 years. On Sunday, March 15th, 1964, at approximately 10:50 p.m., 12-year-old Mary Terresa Simpson was reported missing by her father.
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. She tried to jump into the casket. Linda Galpin was 16 years old. Her little sister was lying still in front of her and Linda couldn’t make it real, so she tried to get in there with her.
Someone pulled her back. That was March 1964. She is 78 years old now. She still thinks about her little sister every single day. For 61 years, the man who put her sister in that casket walked free. He had a name. He had a life. He knew exactly what he had done. The police had nothing. This is how they found him.
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Her name was Mary Teresa Simpson. She was born in 1951 in Elmira, New York. the youngest of four children with an older brother, an older sister, and an older half-brother. She was a shy girl who didn’t have many friends, partly because her family had moved often enough that she had never fully rooted herself anywhere.
She wore cat eye glasses. She kept a fan club card in her pocket. Those two objects, the glasses and the card, would later be recovered by police and stored as evidence. remember them now while she is still just a 12-year-old girl in a small city in upstate New York heading out on a Sunday afternoon with nowhere particular to be.
Her parents, Ellsworth and Rose, had separated in May 1963. Mary Teresa had been living with her father ever since. The two of them had just moved back to Elmira 2 weeks before the murder, back to the streets she had grown up on, back to the same city where her mother Rose still lived, and back to her sister, Linda.
On Sunday, March 15th, 1964, Mary Teresa left her father’s apartment at around 3:00 in the afternoon. She told him she was going to visit her cousin. She went to see her mother first instead, unannounced, unexpected, and completely welcome. Rose was glad to see her. She stayed about an hour. Then she left to see her cousin as she had originally told her father she would.
It was an ordinary Sunday afternoon. Around 6:30 that evening, Mary Teresa left her cousin’s house and started the walk back toward her father’s apartment. She was last seen at around 7:00 in front of a store on the east side of Elmira by a friend she told she was heading home. March in upstate New York means short days.
By 6:30, the sky was already darkening. The streets on the east side were quiet at that hour. Most families already inside for dinner, curtains drawn against the cold. The sidewalks were mostly empty. It was a 12-year-old girl and the last thin minutes of daylight on a Sunday evening. She never arrived. Ellsworth waited.
When it got late and she still wasn’t home, he started making calls. Rose, relatives, anyone who might know where she was. Nobody had seen Mary Teresa after she stepped out of her mother’s door. Nobody remembered seeing a girl walking alone on East Market Street that evening. He contacted the Elmira Police Department. She was officially reported missing at 10:30 that night.
For 4 days, police and volunteers searched every block between her mother’s home and her father’s apartment. Officers knocked on doors, checked basement and garages, stopped anyone who had been outside that Sunday evening. Volunteers spread out along the Shimong River into the parks and empty lots on the city’s outskirts. Search parties walked the wooded logging roads on Elmira’s southern and western edges.
Terrain that was hilly and heavily forested with patches of snow and ice still on the ground from the winter. Linda waited. Ellsworth waited. Rose waited. And Rose was pregnant. She was carrying another child while the city searched for the one she had just kissed goodbye. On the fourth day, the morning of March 19th, 1964, a man hiking with his two young sons off Combmes Hill Road found her !
PART 2 ⚠️
The location was a wooded area roughly 7 mi from the city off an old logging road that locals knew well. Children played there. Teenagers used it as a lover’s lane. Her body had been concealed beneath branches, dirt, and leaves, and stones. Four heavy stones had been placed on top of her. The largest weighed approximately 110 lb.
Whoever put her there had not been in a hurry. The weight of those stones alone told investigators that he had spent a significant amount of time at that site before walking away. Only part of her hand and one sneaker were visible above the ground. Her mouth had been stuffed with dirt and twigs. The Shimong County Medical Examiner performed the autopsy.
Cause of death asphyxiation by strangulation. There was also evidence of sexual assault. Someone had taken Mary Teresa off the street, driven her 7 mi out of the city, and left her on a hillside above the town where she had grown up. At the scene, police collected what they found, her cat eye glasses, the fan club card, several buttons from her blouse.
Everything was 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 it anyway, as if they already understood that someone someday was going to need it. The Elmira Police Department shifted from a missing person’s operation to a full homicide investigation the day the body was found.
Detectives interviewed every person who had been in the area on the evening of March 15th. men who lived along the roads leading to Combs Hill. Men seen driving in the area that Sunday, men with prior arrests involving children. They checked records at local, state, and federal level. Cross-referenced hundreds of tip sheets against every name in the growing file.
Each one investigated individually, checked against the known facts in the timeline, and either pursued further or eliminated. By October 1964, 7 months after the murder, detectives had questioned more than 300 people. Not one interview produced a viable suspect. The k!ller’s name was not in any of it. WM radio and the Star Gazette newspaper jointly offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the k!ller’s identification.
Residents who had never met Mary Teresa donated money. The murder had shaken the city in a way that nothing else had in recent memory. 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, but there was nothing left to pull. 61 years of institutional memory passed from one generation of officers to the next.
Detectives who came through the department knew the Simpson case by name. It was 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 file outlasted them all, and still no name attached to the crime.
The man who k!lled Mary Teresa Simpson had never walked into a single one of those interviews. His name had never appeared on a single tip sheet. 300 people questioned. Not one of them was him. 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 the8s when the detectives who had worked the original case retired and passed the file to someone new. And those new detectives read through the same stacks and reached the same dead end. He was there when the ‘9s ended and a new century began. 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, looking for a name the database did not have.
The file never found him. His name never appeared in it. Nobody knocked on his door. Think about what that means. 300 people interviewed, tip sheets cross-referenced against every name in the growing file. Detectives who worked the case around the clock for months, who knew every face on the east side of Elmira, who knocked on every door between her mother’s apartment and her father’s.
They never reached his. In a city of 40,000 people with a file that had swelled to thousands of pages, the one man who knew what had happened on that hillside was never in any of it. He grew older in the same city where a 12-year-old girl’s murder remained unsolved. He became a grandfather. The same streets, the same town, the same years passing for two families at once.
one waiting for a name, one man who had carried it the whole time. Linda Simpson, later Linda Galpin, was 16 years old in March of 1964. She was out of town when her sister disappeared. She rushed home. She found Mary Teresa lying still in a casket and she 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 newspapers 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 k!lled. 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 than that. The same question every time. The answer was always the same. Nothing new. The file hadn’t moved.
She called anyway. It affected me really badly, she said later. I lived through it for years and cried and suffered heartache all this time. Like I told everybody, I did this for my mom. 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, and someone had kept the evidence waiting for it. Every case on this channel is weeks of digging through real records, real documents, real lives.
If this one is landing with you, take 10 seconds right now. Hit like and subscribe. It’s what keeps Crime Watch Central going. And now back to the freezer that held the answer for 60 years. 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 COTUS, the FBI’s national database of convicted offenders across the country. If the man who k!lled Mary Teresa had ever been convicted of a qualifying offense anywhere in the United States and had his DNA collected, the system would have flagged a match automatically. No match.
The unknown mail was not in the system. In 2003, additional clothing was submitted to the state police lab. Analysts examined the skirt and underwear. More biological material recovered. The samples confirmed and strengthened the original profile from the blouse. Still nothing. The man who had left that seaman on her clothing in 1964 had never been convicted of a qualifying offense in any law enforcement database anywhere in the country.
Cotus had no record of him. The profile was resubmitted again in 2014. The system searched, it came back empty. Three attempts, three dead ends, decades of waiting. The case needed something no law enforcement database could provide. In 2022, Elmmyra police surgeon William Goodwin applied for and received a grant from Season of Justice, a nonprofit 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 Oram 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 Oram had ever worked with. They had been stored under varying conditions since 1964, and what remained was barely enough to see, let alone sequence. What remained of the DNA was 0.4 nanog. 1 nanog is 1 billionth of a gram. The sample was invisible to the naked eye.
It was the last viable piece of biological evidence connecting a k!ller to a 12-year-old girl murdered six decades earlier. FBI special agent Kenneth Jensen, who was assisting the Ommyra 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. 60 years of careful preservation ended by weather. 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. Oram 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, branch by branch, generation by generation.
The work took more than 2 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 familiar match identifies a family line, but investigators needed the man himself, not his descendants.
The man the tree pointed to died in 2004. He was buried in an Elmmyra cemetery less than 5 mi from the hillside on Combmes 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 exume the remains.
On November 5th, 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 exumed 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 Elmmyra in 1931, never left. A Korean War veteran, a truck driver for Mayflower Van Lines who knew every back road and logging trail on the city’s southern edge.
A man with a documented criminal history involving children that stretched back to age 17, arrested for molesting two 7-year-old sisters. A man the Elmmyra Police Department had files on for decades. a man who in March of 1964 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 19th, 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. February 10th, 2026, the Chimong County District Attorney’s Office in Elmyra. Police Chief Kristen Thorne stood at the podium. Beside her, representatives from the FBI and the District Attorney’s Office, Sergeant William Goodwin, and retired officers who had worked the case across the decades.
Men and women who had read that same file and reached the same dead end, now present in the same room for this. In the audience, Linda Galpin, 78 years old. her uncle Dwayne Bowman, 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 Almyra Police Department, Thorne said. Justice after 61 years, she named him. This is a historic day for the Almra Police Department. Justice after almost 62 years. District Attorney Weeden Wetmore said, “The wheels of justice move slowly.” Goodwin. 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. This was the 18th case in the state of New York solved through Aram’s forensic genetic genealogy process. One name at a time, one family at a time, reaching back through decades of cold files that everyone had stopped believing could ever be answered. 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. I just wish my mom was here. Well, thank you very much. And I’m glad it’s all finally settled after almost 62 years. Oh, that’s all I have to say. But thank everybody that was involved. Cuz from my heart, thank you. A 12year-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. Mary Teresa was 12, walking alone as the light failed. Talk to the children in your life about safe roots, trusted adults, and the right to say no.
If something feels wrong, report it. A tip that seems small can be the one that closes a file. Predators depend on silence. Communities that stay aware, stay connected, and speak up are harder to prey on. If this case stayed with you, leave a comment below. Tell me what you make of it. 61 years, one name, one woman who never quit asking.
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