Stranded on the Tarmac

0:00 Speaker 1: The package that left the Elmira Police Department in New

0:02 Speaker 1: York on February fifteenth, twenty twenty one looked like an

0:06 Speaker 1: ordinary cooler packed for a weekend trip. But inside, packed

0:10 Speaker 1: carefully in blocks of dry ice, was a microscopic speck

0:14 Speaker 1: of biological evidence, a piece of fabric DNA recovered from

0:18 Speaker 1: the skirt of a twelve year old girl named Mary

0:20 Speaker 1: Teresa Simpson. Mary Teresa had been murdered fifty seven years earlier,

0:25 Speaker 1: in March of nineteen sixty four. For nearly six decades,

0:29 Speaker 1: her case had been the oldest active cold case in

0:32 Speaker 1: the department's history. Generations of detectives had inherited her file,

0:36 Speaker 1: stared at her black and white school portrait, and retired

0:40 Speaker 1: with no answers. This microscopic speck of DNA was their

0:44 Speaker 1: absolute last shot. But the universe, it seemed, wasn't done

0:48 Speaker 1: testing Mary Teresa's memory. As the courier plane carrying the

0:51 Speaker 1: cooler flew south, a historic, unprecedented ice storm slammed into

0:56 Speaker 1: the United States. It completely paralyzed the FedEx Superhub in Memphis, Tennessee,

1:02 Speaker 1: the largest logistical bottleneck in the world. The airport froze

1:05 Speaker 1: over power grids failed. Back in New York, FBI Special

1:10 Speaker 1: agent Kenneth Jensen got the notification on his screen shipment

1:14 Speaker 1: delayed location Memphis Hub asterisk asterisk. Jensen felt his stomach drop.

1:21 Speaker 1: Dry ice has a strict shelf life. If the cooler

1:24 Speaker 1: sat stranded on a tarmac or in a freezing, unheated

1:28 Speaker 1: warehouse for more than forty eight hours, the dry ice

1:31 Speaker 1: would sublimate, the temperature inside the container would rise, moisture

1:34 Speaker 1: would form, and the fifty seven year old DNA, the

1:38 Speaker 1: only evidence left on Earth, would degrade into completely useless mush.

1:42 Speaker 1: Decades of waiting would end in irreversible loss. The clock

1:46 Speaker 1: was ticking and the largest shipping network in the world

1:49 Speaker 1: was completely ghosting. The police hashtag hashtag hashtag the mid

1:54 Speaker 1: Storm scavenger hunt. We couldn't get a hold of anyone

1:57 Speaker 1: at the hub, agent Jensen would later recall. The entire

2:01 Speaker 1: city of Memphis was shut down. I was petrified that

2:04 Speaker 1: my act of shipping it was going to destroy the

2:07 Speaker 1: only chance we had left to solve it. Desperate, Jensen

2:11 Speaker 1: began calling the FBI's field office in Memphis. Because the

2:14 Speaker 1: Memphis Hub handles millions of packages a day and is

2:17 Speaker 1: critical to national infrastructure. The Bureau kept a permanent liaison

2:21 Speaker 1: agent assigned to the facility. Jensen tracked him down through

2:25 Speaker 1: emergency lines. I need you to go into the hub,

2:28 Speaker 1: Jensen told the agent. There is a cooler. It contains

2:32 Speaker 1: the evidence of a nineteen sixty four child murder. If

2:36 Speaker 1: you don't find it tonight, the DNA dies. What followed

2:40 Speaker 1: was a blind, chaotic scavenger hunt through millions of square

2:44 Speaker 1: feet of stranded cargo. The Memphis agent, working with a

2:47 Speaker 1: skeleton crew of airport workers by flashlight, navigated massive mountains

2:52 Speaker 1: of backlogged steel containers. It was a needle in a

2:55 Speaker 1: frozen haystack. Hours passed, the dry ice inside Mary's cooler

3:00 Speaker 1: was rapidly venting away. Just as the temperature boundary was

3:04 Speaker 1: about to breach, the agent spotted the specific tracking label

3:07 Speaker 1: on a pallet buried deep within a cargo hold. He

3:10 Speaker 1: dragged the cooler out, threw it into the back of

3:13 Speaker 1: his government vehicle, and rushed it to the only place

3:16 Speaker 1: with guaranteed power and a functioning subzero unit, the evidence

3:19 Speaker 1: freezer at the local FBI field office. The DNA was

3:23 Speaker 1: saved just in the nick of time. A week later,

3:26 Speaker 1: when the runways finally cleared, the package was flown to

3:30 Speaker 1: a specialized private laboratory in Texas known for doing the

3:33 Speaker 1: impossible with heavily degraded ancient biological samples. Hashtag hashtag hashtag

3:39 Speaker 1: the Girl on the Bicycle. To understand why a room

3:42 Speaker 1: full of hardened retired detectives wept when that package was saved,

3:46 Speaker 1: you have to go back to March fifteenth, nineteen sixty four,

3:49 Speaker 1: in Elmira, New York. Mary Teresa Simpson was a quiet,

3:53 Speaker 1: painfully shy twelve year old girl on a crisp Sunday afternoon.

3:57 Speaker 1: She had borrowed her older sister's bicycle to ride down

4:00 Speaker 1: to the local corner store to buy a carton of

4:03 Speaker 1: milk for her mother. She was wearing a pleated skirt,

4:06 Speaker 1: a light jacket, and a smile that her sister, Gallpin,

4:10 Speaker 1: would later describe as too gentle for this world. She

4:13 Speaker 1: never came home. Her bicycle was found abandoned on the

4:17 Speaker 1: side of a dirt road near the edge of town,

4:20 Speaker 1: its front will still spinning slowly in the gravel. A

4:23 Speaker 1: massive search party of hundreds of volunteers, state troopers, and

4:27 Speaker 1: military personnel scoured the surrounding woods. Two days later, a

4:32 Speaker 1: local hunter found her body hidden beneath a pile of

4:35 Speaker 1: brush in a remote ravine. She had been sexually assaulted

4:38 Speaker 1: and strangled. The murder rocked the tight knit community of

4:42 Speaker 1: Elmira to its core. Doors that had never been locked

4:45 Speaker 1: in generations were suddenly bolted shut. Parents refused to let

4:50 Speaker 1: their children out of their sight. The police department launched

4:53 Speaker 1: the largest investigation in its history. They interviewed thousands of people,

4:58 Speaker 1: tracked down every registered v vehicle matching the tire tracks

5:01 Speaker 1: found near the bicycle, and polygraphed dozens of suspects. But

5:05 Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty four, forensics consisted of blood typing and

5:10 Speaker 1: finger printing. The killer had left no fingerprints, and his

5:13 Speaker 1: blood type matched a third of the male population. The

5:17 Speaker 1: case slowly went cold. Years bled into decades. The original

5:21 Speaker 1: detectives passed away, leaving their handwritten notebooks behind in cardboard

5:26 Speaker 1: boxes in the basement of the station, but the department

5:30 Speaker 1: never destroyed the evidence. Mary Teresa's clothing remained sealed in

5:34 Speaker 1: brown paper bags, waiting for a future that the nineteen

5:37 Speaker 1: sixty four detectives couldn't even imagine. Hashtag hashtag hashtag the

5:42 Speaker 1: Ledger of the Dead. When the Texas Lab received the

5:45 Speaker 1: micro sample in twenty twenty one, they didn't run a

5:48 Speaker 1: standard Cody's database check. The DNA was too old and

5:52 Speaker 1: fractured for the government's automated systems. Instead, they utilized investigative

5:57 Speaker 1: genetic genealogy, the same revolution utionary science used to catch

6:01 Speaker 1: the Golden State killer. They uploaded the profile to public

6:04 Speaker 1: research databases like jed match, mapping out the distant cousins,

6:08 Speaker 1: second cousins, and great uncles of the unknown DNA profile.

6:12 Speaker 1: The genealogists spent nearly three years meticulously building a massive,

6:17 Speaker 1: sprawling family tree, tracing lines of descent backward to the

6:20 Speaker 1: late eighteen hundreds and then forward again into the mid

6:23 Speaker 1: twentieth century. By late twenty twenty four, the branches of

6:27 Speaker 1: the family tree converged onto a single family that lived

6:30 Speaker 1: in Elmira in nineteen sixty four, and specifically onto one man,

6:35 Speaker 1: William Murray. Detectives pulled Murray's historical records in nineteen sixty four.

6:41 Speaker 1: He was a thirty three year old local laborer who

6:43 Speaker 1: lived just three blocks from the corner store where Mary

6:46 Speaker 1: Teresa was last seen. He had a history of minor

6:49 Speaker 1: public disturbances, but had never been a primary suspect in

6:53 Speaker 1: the murder. There was just one major obstacle, William Murray

6:57 Speaker 1: had died in two thousand and two. To close the case,

6:59 Speaker 1: to deface definitively and proved to a legal certainty that Murray

7:02 Speaker 1: was the killer, the police needed a direct, uncorrupted reference

7:06 Speaker 1: sample of his DNA. They needed to exhume his remains

7:10 Speaker 1: hashtag hashtag hashtag the gathering at the graveside in November

7:15 Speaker 1: of twenty twenty five, under a gray, overcast New York sky,

7:19 Speaker 1: A modern police unit arrived at a quiet cemetery in

7:22 Speaker 1: Chemung County, but they weren't alone. Standing along the perimeter

7:27 Speaker 1: of the graveyard were dozens of elderly men, retired Elmira

7:30 Speaker 1: police chiefs, former sheriffs, and detectives who had worked Mary's

7:34 Speaker 1: case in the nineteen seventies, eighties, and nineties. They stood

7:38 Speaker 1: in the cold, watching in absolute silence, as a forensic

7:42 Speaker 1: anthropologist carefully exhumed the coffin of William Murray. A bone

7:46 Speaker 1: fragment was secured and sent back to the lab. Three

7:49 Speaker 1: months later, on February nineteenth, twenty twenty six, Elmira Police

7:54 Speaker 1: Chief Kristen Thorne stepped in front of a room packed

7:57 Speaker 1: with news cameras. Her voice trembled slightly as she made

8:00 Speaker 1: a historic announcement. Today, after sixty one years, we can

8:05 Speaker 1: finally give Mary Teresa Simpson's family the name they have

8:09 Speaker 1: waited a lifetime to hear. DNA has confirmed, without a

8:13 Speaker 1: shadow of a doubt that William Murray was her killer.

8:16 Speaker 1: This is now officially the oldest cold case ever solved

8:19 Speaker 1: by genetic genealogy in human history. For Mary's surviving sister, Galpin,

8:25 Speaker 1: who was sixteen when her sister vanished and had spent

8:28 Speaker 1: her entire life wondering if she would ever know the truth,

8:31 Speaker 1: the news arrived with a heavy, bittersweet finality. I'm just

8:36 Speaker 1: glad justice was finally done, Galpin said quietly from her

8:40 Speaker 1: living room, holding an old photograph of her little sister.

8:43 Speaker 1: I always said it would never happen in my lifetime,

8:47 Speaker 1: but the police never forgot her. They fought through an

8:50 Speaker 1: ice storm just to keep her name alive.