DNA Breakthrough Cracks 1964 Pennsylvania Cold Case, Leaving Community Stunned

DNA Breakthrough Cracks 1964 Pennsylvania Cold Case, Leaving Community Stunned

On a bitterly cold Wednesday morning in March of 1964, a 9-year-old girl in a small Pennsylvania coal town tied her scarf tight, picked up two cans of food for her teacher, and stepped out the front door of her family’s home on Alter Street. She had never made the walk to school alone before.

 It was only two blocks. Her older brother and sister would follow just a few minutes behind her. Nothing about that morning seemed unusual. Nothing about that town seemed dangerous. Doors were left unlocked. Children walked everywhere by themselves. And yet, somewhere between her front porch and the school gates. Maurice Chiverella vanished.

 By 1:00 that afternoon, a man dumping ashes off a remote dirt road would look down a 26- ft embankment and see what he thought was a discarded doll. It wasn’t a doll. And the search for the man who put her there would last 58 years. To understand what was lost that morning, you have to understand the world Marie’s Chivalella came from.

 In 1964, Hazelton, Pennsylvania was an anthraite coal mining town tucked into the hills about 80 mi north of Philadelphia. It was a community shaped by waves of European immigration, a heavily Italian-American population living alongside Slovak families and other Eastern European communities who had come for the mines and stayed for generations.

 The neighborhoods were tightly knit. The crime rate was so low it was almost invisible. People left their front doors unlocked at night without thinking twice. Children rode their bikes from one end of town to the other without anyone ever questioning where they were. Maurice lived in the middle of all of this in a home on Alter Street that sat right next door to her family’s retail store.

 Her parents, Carmen and Mary Chivalella, were familiar faces in the community. They were a traditional family of deep Catholic faith, raising five children. And Maurice was right in the middle of it all. Her older sister, Carmen Marie, was 13 at the time. Her brother, Ronald, was 11. And then there was Maurice herself, 9 years old, exceptionally shy, gentle, and quiet in a way that her relatives still remembered decades later.

 She was the kind of child who didn’t take up much space, who spent her free time learning to play the organ, who told her family sincerely and often that when she grew up, she wanted to become a Catholic nun. She attended St. Joseph’s parochial school just two blocks from her front door. Every morning she would walk to class with her older siblings.

 It was a small predictable ritual in a small predictable town. But on the morning of Wednesday, March 18th, 1964, that ritual broke. It was her teacher’s feast day, a special religious occasion honoring Sister Josephine, and Marie wanted to be the first to deliver her gift. She had packed two cans of food, pears and beets, to bring to school as an offering, and she was so eager to get there early that for the first time in her young life, she decided not to wait for her brother and sister.

 She left ahead of them. She walked out the door alone. Her cousin Helen Slatterie would later remember seeing Maurice that morning, hurrying past her house, head down against the wind. The weather that day was brutal. The morning air was bitterly cold. The wind was sharp and biting, and Helen recalled watching the little girl shiver as she pushed forward towards school.

 It was the last time anyone in her family would ever see her alive. Carmen, Marie, and Ronald left a few minutes later, just as they always did. They assumed they would meet their sister at school. They never did, and by the time the bell rang at St. Joseph’s that morning, a 9-year-old girl carrying two cans of pears and beets had already disappeared from the streets of Hazelton somewhere in the space of just two blocks.

The question that would haunt investigators for the next 58 years was simple and it was devastating. What could have possibly happened in a town this safe on a walk this short, in a window of time this small? The answer began to emerge in the worst possible way just 5 hours later. 3 mi outside the city of Hazelton in the Milliesville section of Hazel Township, the landscape changed dramatically.

 where the town itself was warm and residential, the surrounding township was scarred by decades of coal mining. The land was pockmarked with abandoned strip mines, some of which had been repurposed as dumping grounds for refu and ash. One of these pits sat down a dirt path branching off Hazelton Municipal Airport Road, a remote, desolate stretch of ground that almost no one had any reason to visit, unless they needed to dump something they wanted to be rid of.

 At around 1:00 that afternoon, a man named Arthur Robinson was driving down that dirt path. He was giving his 16-year-old nephew driving lessons, and the two of them had come out to dump a load of ashes. As Robinson looked over the edge of the embankment, 26 ft down into the pit below, something caught his eye through the trash in the gray ash.

 At first, he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. From a distance, it looked like a large realistic child’s doll, the kind someone might have thrown out with the rest of the garbage, but something about it didn’t sit right. He climbed down the path to get a closer look, and what he found at the bottom of that pit would change the town of Hazelton forever. It was Marie’s chivalella.

 She was still wearing the clothes she had put on that morning, the dark jacket, the skirt, the black leotards. Her suede shoes had been thrown aside. Her school bag and her small pocketbook were scattered nearby, and the two cans of food she had been so eager to give to sister Josephine. The pears and the beets were sitting near her body, still intact. She had never made it to school.

She had never made it to the end of the block. The state police were notified immediately, and as troopers descended into the pit to recover her body, the picture of what had happened to this little girl came into devastating focus. She had been bound, her hands and ankles tied together with her own shoelaces.

 To prevent her from screaming, the perpetrator had taken her own multicolored scarf and forced it deep into her throat. The autopsy conducted the following day confirmed the cause of death as bilateral strangulation. The medical examiner documented extensive physical trauma consistent with a violent sexual assault.

 But on Maurice’s dark jacket, investigators noticed something else. a fluid stain visible to the naked eye. They didn’t know what to do with it in 1964. The science to analyze it didn’t yet exist. But somebody somewhere in that initial wave of state troopers had the foresight to recognize that this stain mattered, and they made a decision that more than half a century later would change everything.

They preserved it. The investigation that followed was by every measurable standard enormous. The Pennsylvania State Police, working out of the Hazelton barracks, known as Troop N, launched one of the largest mobilizations in the department’s history. Local police forces joined in. Community volunteers joined in.

Detectives interviewed thousands of residents, business owners, and school children. They drove tens of thousands of miles chasing leads across state lines. By the time the dust settled, the investigative file had grown to more than 4,700 pages. Nearly a dozen suspects came under serious scrutiny. One was a Catholic priest whose proximity and rumored connection to another child murder in the town of Bristol, Pennsylvania, made him a person of intense interest.

 Another was a local man known to the community as a public exhibitionist. A man so unsettled by the prospect of a polygraph examination that he took his own life shortly after investigators requested he sit for one. The newspapers carried the story constantly. Hazelton’s standard speaker ran headlines for weeks. National Wire Services picked it up.

 And yet, despite the manpower, despite the miles, despite the thousands of interviews, the case began to slip away from them. Because for all the effort, investigators were running into a wall they couldn’t see past. There were no eyewitnesses to the abduction itself. The biological evidence on Maurice’s jacket couldn’t be typed beyond basic blood groups.

 And the man who had committed the crime, whoever he was, had simply melted back into the community. No name, no description, no fingerprint, nothing. And here was the most chilling detail of all. A name that would matter more than any other name in this entire story. The name of the man who actually did it never once appeared in the active investigative files.

 He lived just six or seven blocks from the Chivalella family. He had grown up in the same town. He walked the same streets. And in 1964, the police didn’t have a single reason to ever speak to him. Who was he? And how did he manage to live freely and openly in the same small town as Maurici’s grieving family for the next 16 years? His name was James Paul Forte.

 He was born in Hazelton in 1941, and he had lived in the town his entire life. In the 1959 Hazelton High School yearbook, his senior photograph showed a tall, blue-eyed, conventionally handsome teenager. The caption beneath his picture noted that he loved to sleep, that he played baseball, and that he was enrolled in the school’s vocational curriculum.

 He was, by all surface appearances, an unremarkable young man, the kind of student who blended into a graduating class without standing out. After high school, Forte enlisted in the United States Army on October 16th, 1959, and served until his discharge in September of 1962. He returned home to Hazelton and took a job as a bartender, eventually also working as a salesman of bar supplies. He never married.

 He never had any known children. He simply lived in the same town doing the same work, drinking, and serving in the same local bars for the rest of his life. On the morning of March 18th, 1964, the morning Maurice Charella left her home alone for the first time, James Paul Fort was 22 years old. He had no criminal record.

 He had no history of violence on paper and he was living just six or seven blocks from the Chivalella family’s home on Alter Street. He was in every sense invisible to the investigation. But he was not, it would later turn out, invisible to other women. In April of 1974, exactly 10 years and 1 month after Maurice’s murder, a 23-year-old woman went to the Pennsylvania State Police and made a report.

 She told them that a man named James Paul Forte had abducted her, forced her into his Chevrolet, and sexually assaulted her. The location of the assault was on Stockton Mountain Road in Hazel Township. And here is the detail that should stop you cold. Stockton Mountain Road lay directly adjacent to the Milnessville strip mines.

 The exact same desolate landscape where Maurice’s body had been thrown a decade earlier. The state police arrested Forte. They executed a search warrant on his vehicle. They recovered hair samples and mud consistent with the scene of the assault. He was formally charged with involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, indecent assault, and aggravated assault.

 A stack of charges that in a different system or a different decade might have ended his freedom for good. It didn’t. On September 18th, 1974, the Luzernne County District Attorney’s Office agreed to a plea deal. The sexual assault charges were dropped entirely. Forte pleaded guilty to a single count of aggravated assault.

 And on October 2nd, 1974, a judge sentenced him to one year of probation and ordered him to cover the victim’s hospital expenses. That was it. No prison time, no conviction that would have placed his fingerprints or biological information into any state or federal database that could ever be cross-referenced against the unsolved murder of a 9-year-old child six blocks from where he grew up.

 He went back to tending bar in 1978. He had one more brush with the law. Minor charges of reckless endangerment and harassment. And then on May 16th, 1980, while working at a ballroom bar in Hazel Township, James Paul Forte collapsed of a sudden heart attack. He was 38 years old. He died in the same town he had been born in.

 He had killed a child, walked free for 16 years, assaulted another woman, faced almost no consequence for it, and slipped quietly into the ground, believing almost certainly that his secret had died with him. In a sense, it had because by 1980, the Chiverella case was already two decades old. The original detectives were aging out of the force.

 The leads had run dry and the technology that could have finally exposed James Paul Forte. The technology of DNA wasn’t yet available to law enforcement in any meaningful form. The case sat and sat and sat. It became known somberly as Pennsylvania’s oldest active cold case. Over the years, somewhere between 230 and 250 individual members of the state police would touch the file.

 None of them could crack it, but somebody decades earlier had preserved a jacket. And on that jacket, dried into the fabric, was the one thing the killer had left behind. The one thing that, given enough time and the right kind of science, could finally tell investigators his name. The question was whether that science would ever come.

The Pennsylvania State Police never let the Chiverella file gather dust. Successive generations of cold case detectives reviewed it. Local newspapers, particularly the standard speaker, kept the story alive in the public consciousness, running anniversary features that ensured Maurice’s name and face were never entirely forgotten.

 The community itself never forgot either. Hazelton had changed permanently after March 18th, 1964. The doors that had once been left unlocked were locked now. Parents who had once let their children walk to school stopped doing so. As one investigator would later put it, that day was the exact historical moment the town lost its innocence.

 But losing innocence is not the same as finding justice. And for decades, justice for Maurice Chivalella seemed almost impossible. The first real glimmer of hope came in 2007. By then, the field of forensic DNA had matured to the point where the Pennsylvania State Police Crime Laboratory could finally do something with the seaman stain that had been carefully preserved on Maurice’s jacket.

 All those years using modern extraction techniques, scientists were able to isolate a clean male DNA profile from the fabric. They developed what’s known as a short tandem repeat profile, the standard forensic DNA signature used in criminal databases like Kotus, the national DNA index system. They uploaded it immediately, fully expecting that they would finally have an answer.

 They didn’t. The killer’s DNA wasn’t in the system. For the next 11 years, the state police ran automated monthly checks against Cotis. Every single one came back negative. The killer, whoever he was, had never been entered into the database, likely because he had never been convicted of a serious felony that would have required a DNA sample.

 The match they needed simply did not exist in the system that was designed to find it. And yet, the breakthrough was closer than anyone realized because in 2018, a new branch of forensic science had begun to revolutionize cold case work across the United States. It was called investigative genetic genealogy.

 Instead of relying on standard DNA profiling, which examines about 20 specific markers to confirm an identity, this new method used something called single nucleotide polymorphism genotyping, a technique that looks at hundreds of thousands of genomic markers and can predict ancestry, physical traits, and most importantly, distant familial relationships.

 In other words, even if your killer’s DNA wasn’t in any law enforcement database, his cousin’s DNA might be. his second cousin, his third cousins, his sixth cousins, anyone who had ever spit into a tube and uploaded their genetic data to a public genealogy site could without ever knowing it be a thread leading directly back to a murderer.

 The Pennsylvania State Police partnered with a company called Parabon Nanolabs to run this advanced analysis on the preserved sample from Maurice’s jacket. By 2019, the killer’s genetic profile had been uploaded to public genealogy databases. specifically ged match and family tree DNA, both of which permit law enforcement searches. The search produced results, but the results were thin.

 The closest match wasn’t a brother or a cousin. It wasn’t even a second or third cousin. The strongest genetic link the database could find was a sixth cousin. A sixth cousin across generations of family trees, branches reaching back more than a century, millions of potential descendants scattered across an entire country. It was on paper almost impossibly distant and the state police for all the resources they had thrown at this case for 55 years didn’t have the specialized genealogical expertise to climb a tree that big. What they needed was someone

with the patience, the skill, and the time to build family trees the size of forests, one ancestor at a time. They needed someone who could take a sixth cousin match and slowly, painstakingly narrow it down to a single human being. What they did not expect was that the person who would do it would not be a veteran detective.

 He would not be a senior forensic scientist. He would in fact be an 18-year-old college freshman who would order an apple juice at the meeting where he convinced the Pennsylvania State Police to let him work the oldest cold case in the state. His name was Eric Schubert. In early 2020, he was 18 years old, a history major at Elizabeth Town College in Pennsylvania, and already an accomplished genetic genealogologist with a track record of helping resolve identification cases.

 When he learned about the Chiverella case, he reached out to the Pennsylvania State Police himself and offered his services for free. The detective who took the meeting was Corporal Mark Baron, the lead investigator on the case. The two of them met in a college coffee shop, and Baron, a seasoned trooper sitting across the table from a teenager, was initially skeptical.

 The skepticism didn’t ease when instead of ordering a coffee, Schubert ordered an apple juice. But as the meeting went on, and as Schubert walked Baron through his professional portfolio and his understanding of low centmorgan DNA match strategies, the dynamic shifted entirely. By the end of that meeting, Corporal Baron was convinced.

 This 18-year-old college student had a deeper grasp of investigative genealogy than almost anyone he had ever worked with. Schubert was brought on to the case officially. What followed was an 18-month research marathon. Schubert dedicated up to 20 hours a week to the Chivalella case on top of his college coursework. He built family tree after family tree, more than 50 interconnected trees in total, tracing branches across continents and centuries.

 He had to because when your only genetic anchor is a sixth cousin match, you don’t get to skip steps. You have to map every descendant, every marriage, every immigration record, every birth and death, all the way back until you can find the common ancestor that ties everyone together. Eventually, after countless hours of work, Schubert found that anchor.

 The entire genealogical tree he was building converged on a single point in history. an Italian immigrant who had arrived in Hazelton, Pennsylvania in 1904. This was the ancestor who connected every match in the database back to the unknown killer. From that anchor, Schubert worked outward, systematically tracing every male descendant of this lineage who would have been alive and of reproductive age in March of 1964 and then eliminating branch by branch every man who had moved away from the Hazelton area before the crime took place. It was

painstaking. It was exhausting, but it worked. By the end of his 18-month investigation, Schubert had narrowed the suspect pool from a continent of potential descendants down to four closely related men. And of those four, the investigative focus quickly tightened around two deceased brothers, both of whom had lived in the right place at the right time.

 Now, investigators faced a delicate problem. They needed to figure out which of these two brothers had killed Maurice Chivalella. Assuming both of them was complicated legally and ethically. So instead, Corporal Baron tracked down the surviving widow of one of the brothers, she agreed to help. She voluntarily handed over an old hairbrush that had belonged to her late husband, a brush still rich with rootbearing hair samples that could be tested for DNA.

 The laboratory analyzed it. The result came back. Her husband’s DNA did not match the profile on Maurice’s jacket. He was ruled out, which left exactly one man, James Paul Forte. In January of 2022, a Luzernne County judge approved the exumation of his remains. He had been buried in Hazelton for 42 years. Investigators carefully extracted a direct bone and tissue sample, and the Pennsylvania State Police Crime Laboratory ran the comparison.

 On February 3rd, 2022, 57 years, 10 months, and 16 days after a 9-year-old girl left her front porch with two cans of peers and beets, the laboratory delivered its result. The DNA profile from James Paul Forte’s exumed remains a perfect match to the seaman stain on Maurice’s jacket. Eric Schubert would later describe the statistical certainty of the match in language that almost defies comprehension.

 The probability that the DNA could have belonged to anyone other than James Paul Forte, he said, was one in something Septilian, a number written as a one followed by 24 zeros. There was no longer any doubt. The man who had killed Maurice Chivalella in 1964 had a name, and now finally the world would know it.

 But the question that remained, the one that would echo through the press conference that followed, was a heavier one. What does justice look like when the killer has been dead for 42 years? And what does it mean for the family who waited 58 years to find out? On February 10th, 2022, exactly one week after the laboratory confirmed the match, the Pennsylvania State Police held a formal press conference at the Troop N barracks in Hazelton.

 Corporal Mark Baron stood at the front of the room and in a moment that several reporters described as visibly emotional, announced that the oldest cold case in Pennsylvania history had finally been solved. James Paul Forte was responsible for the abduction, sexual assault, and murder of 9-year-old Maurice Charella because he had died in 1980.

 No criminal prosecution could ever be brought. The case was officially closed. Sitting in the audience were Maurice’s four surviving siblings. Now in their 60s and 70s, they had waited their entire adult lives for this moment. Carmen Marie Radkkey, the older sister who had assumed she would see Maurice at school that morning, spoke on behalf of the family.

 She told the room that while the wound left by her sister’s death could never fully heal, the identification of her killer brought a sense of justice and peace that the family had nearly stopped hoping for. She spoke about her late parents, Carmen and Mary Chiverella, who had lived the rest of their lives in deep grief, never seeking vengeance, only praying that the truth would one day come out.

 They had not lived to see this day, but the prayer they had whispered for decades had finally been answered. Her brother Ronald spoke too, expressing personal gratitude to the Pennsylvania State Police and to Eric Schubert. For the family, the resolution allowed them to finally shift their focus away from the horror of how Marie died and back toward who she had been.

 A gentle, devout little girl who had hoped one day to become a nun. The story was carried by major outlets across the country and around the world. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, CNN, all ran detailed features on the breakthrough. The case was later profiled on programs like A&E’s Cold Case Files and Bloodline Detectives.

 And the public response, while overwhelmingly one of relief, also carried an unmistakable undercurrent of anger. Because once the timeline of James Paul Forte’s life became public, once people learned about the 1974 sexual assault on Stockton Mountain Road, the plea deal, the year of probation, a hard question rose to the surface.

 If the 1974 court system had treated that assault with the seriousness it deserved, would Mur’s killer have been identified decades sooner, would another woman have been spared? It was a question no one in that press conference could answer. But the legacy of the Chivalella case is not only one of grief and missed opportunities.

 It is also one of the most important forensic case studies of the modern era. It stands as the oldest cold case in Pennsylvania history ever to be solved using investigative genetic genealogy and it is believed to be among the top five oldest cases of its kind ever solved anywhere in the world. The collaboration between the Pennsylvania State Police and an 18-year-old college student fundamentally changed how law enforcement agencies think about partnerships with independent genealogologists.

 It directly influenced the creation of a dedicated Pennsylvania State Police genetic genealogy unit and it has accelerated the resolution of other cold cases across the country, including renewed interest in cases like the 1962 rape and murder of 9-year-old Carol Anne Doerty in Bucks County. Another child killed in another small Pennsylvania town in another era when justice seemed permanently out of reach.

Lieutenant Devon Brutoski speaking at the same press conference emphasized something that the case made unmistakably clear. None of this, not the DNA profile, not the genealogical tree, not the exumation, not the answer, would have been possible without the foresight of the troopers in 1964 who took a sting jacket and decided against all reasonable expectation to preserve it.

 They could not have imagined what science would one day be able to do with it. They preserved it anyway. And because they did, 58 years later, a family finally received an answer. Maurice Charella was 9 years old. She wanted to be a nun. She left her house early one bitter March morning because she was excited to bring her teacher a gift of canned pears and beets.

 She walked alone for the first time in her life. She never made it to school. And for 58 years, the man who took her from her family lived freely, died quietly, and was buried under a stone that gave no hint of what he had done. But the people who loved her never gave up. The detectives who inherited her file never gave up.

 A teenager in a college coffee shop, drinking an apple juice across the table from a state trooper, refused to give up. And in the end, the smallest, most patient kind of justice arrived. Not in a courtroom, not in a prison sentence, but in a name finally spoken out loud, in a press conference where her brothers and sisters could hear it.

In a moment where a family that had carried grief for nearly six decades could finally lay one small piece of it down. This is what happens when communities, science, and stubborn human persistence refuse to let a child be forgotten. This is what closure can look like even half a century late. But there is one detail in this story that still lingers.

 One parallel that historians and investigators have not stopped raising. Just two years before Maurice Churella vanished, in another small Pennsylvania town only a couple of hours away, another 9-year-old girl named Carol Anderty was raped and murdered in 1962. Her case remains one of the most haunting unsolved child killings of the same era, same age, same kind of town, same questions.

 And in light of what genetic genealogy has now made possible, could the technology that finally named Maurice’s killer one day name hers? That story is its own dark journey, and it deserves its own telling. We’re covering it next. Click the video on your screen now to