Mary Theresa Simpson was 12 years old when she was returning home from her grandmother’s house in the city of Elmira in 1964. Simpson did not make it home. Instead, she was found dead four days later on a nearby road in the Southern Tier city.
Over the decades, as forensic technology advanced, the Elmira Police Department kept track of the case in hopes of catching Simpson’s killer. More than six decades later, the law enforcement agency was able to solve the case, in part by enlisting the help of Criminal Investigation Resource Center and its interns.
Gabrielle Casper, a graduate student at Sage, was one of 20 students who interned at the Capital Region college’s center and worked on the case.
"It was actually very humbling to see all of the different people throughout the decades that have worked on this case that still thought about Mary Theresa Simpson and were concerned about her case," said Casper. "...and to kind of just see all the work that was put into it throughout the years."
According to the National Policing Institute, there are currently about 250,000 unresolved murder cases in the United States. As leads grow cold and newer cases stack up, older unresolved cases get pushed to a police department’s cold case unit. However, oftentimes smaller police departments do not have the manpower or resources for a designated cold case unit. This is where institutes like the Criminal Investigation Resource Center can step in.
Christina Lane is the co-founder and director. She says enlisting the help of students studying criminal justice and other related majors in helping solve cases has helped alleviate the heavy caseload for law enforcement.
"We actually give the investigators a resource. We are a tool. So they can actually see what has been done thus far on the case, and they can see it clearly, and it actually helps them with the energy and where they're going to put that energy in the investigation.," said Lane. "So we need the interns. The interns are what makes this happen."
For Simpson's case, the students helped create a searchable database of over 6,000 pages of documents collected by different law enforcement agencies since the death. The interns also revisited the site where Simpson was found, tracing her steps and locating where rocks used to bury her body came from. Lane says students were standing around the birch tree Simpson was found beneath.
"When we stood there, we looked over and we saw an old rock wall. And the one thing that was somewhat, you might call it disturbing, but also interesting, that when you looked over, you can actually see the spaces where the perpetrator pulled the large rocks of slate and covered her body ." said Lane. " [He] tried to hide it from people that would pass."
Additionally, the Federal Bureau of Investigation created a DNA family tree with DNA samples collected from the semen on Simpson’s clothes. Agents tracked down a person on the family tree who voluntarily gave DNA samples for this case. The agency was then able to exhume the body of their late suspect, Alfred Murray Jr., who police say was Simpson’s killer.
Elmira Detective Sgt. William Goodwin says enlisting the help of CIRC throughout the whole investigation was a huge help in making sure everything was organized between the different law enforcement agencies.
“We have a full-time detective bureau, but we do have quite the caseload and we don't have a dedicated cold case unit." said Goodwin. "So, it's tough to work on a case that requires a lot of man hours from 1964 when there's a lot of pressing current cases to be focused on.”
Goodwin says Elmira has about 74 sworn officers.
Beyond helping smaller police departments with caseloads, Lane says enlisting a fresh set of eyes to cold cases is important because it is important to provide some amount closure to families.
“I always say it's it's great that this has happened. Justice has been found. But then there's the other part," said Lane. "You see the families, they're still grieving. Their loved ones are still gone, their loved ones were victims of violence.”
