This is a historic day for the Elmira Police Department. Justice after almost 62 years. On Sunday, March 15th, 1964 at approximately 10:50 p.m. 12-year-old Mary Teresa Simpson was reported missing by her father. On the morning of March 19th, 1964, a man hiking with his two young sons in the woods off Cooms Hill Road in Elmira, New York found a 12-year-old girl buried under rocks, branches, and dirt. Her mouth had been stuffed with soil and twigs, and she had been suffocated and strangled. She had been missing since the previous Sunday evening when she set out to walk between her parents’ two homes.
Nobody had seen her on that walk. Police interviewed more than 300 people in the months that followed, and none of them had any idea who had taken her off the street. In 1964, there was no science that could read the biological material recovered from her clothing. It took 61 years to identify the man who killed her. This is how they found him. Her name was Mary Teresa Simpson. She was 12 years old at the time. Her parents, Ellsworth and Rose Simpson, had separated the year before, and Mary Teresa had been living with her father.
The two of them had just moved back to Elmira 2 weeks earlier. On March 15th, a Sunday, Mary Teresa left her father’s apartment around 3:00 p.m. She told him she was going to visit her cousin. Instead, she went to see her mother. The visit was unannounced, and Rose was happy to see her. Mary Teresa spent the rest of the afternoon with her mother, the two of them catching up after months of limited contact. Around 6:30 that evening, she left. She was heading back toward her father’s apartment on foot, alone. She never arrived.
Ellsworth waited through the evening for her to come home. When it got late and she still wasn’t home, he started making calls. He called Rose, then relatives, then everyone he could think of who might know where she was. Nobody had seen Mary Theresa after she left her mother’s apartment. Nobody remembered seeing her walking on the street that evening. Ellsworth contacted the Elmira police that night, and she was officially reported missing. The walk between her mother’s home and her father’s apartment was a short route through the residential streets on the east side of Elmira.
The city had a population of about 40,000 people in 1964, built along the Chemung River with of wood frame houses spreading outward from the downtown core. Mary Theresa had known these streets and this neighborhood well before the move to Hammondsport. She had grown up in the area before her parents separated. March in upstate New York means short days. By 6:30 in the evening, the light was already fading. The sidewalks on the east side were mostly empty at that hour. Most families were already inside for dinner.
Mary Theresa was 12 years old and walking alone through quiet residential streets in the last hour of daylight on a Sunday evening. Something happened between her mother’s door and her father’s apartment. Somewhere along that walk, she encountered someone or someone encountered her. For 4 days, police and volunteers searched for Mary Theresa. The search covered every block between her mother’s home and her father’s apartment. Officers knocked on doors up and down the blocks, checked basements and garages, and stopped anyone who had been outside that Sunday evening to ask what they had seen.
Volunteers spread out along both banks of the Chemung River and into the parks and empty lots on the outskirts of the city. Search parties walked the wooded areas and logging roads that surrounded Elmira on its southern and western edges. The terrain was hilly and heavily forested with patches of snow and ice still on the ground from the winter. Ellsworth waited at home for the phone to ring. Rose waited. Linda, who was 16 at the time, waited alongside them.
On the fourth day, a man and his two sons found her on a wooded hillside off Combs Hill Road, roughly 5 miles southwest of downtown Elmira. The body had been concealed beneath heavy stones, tree branches, and layers of leaves and earth. The killer had taken time to conceal the body. The amount of material piled on top of her, the weight of the stones alone, indicated that he had spent a significant amount of time at the site before leaving. The county medical examiner’s autopsy confirmed sexual and determined the cause of death to be asphyxiation by strangulation. Someone had taken Mary Teresa off the street, driven her out of the city, assaulted and left her on a hillside above the town where she had grown up.
After the body was found on the hillside, the Elmira Police Department shifted from a missing person’s operation to a full-scale homicide investigation. Detectives interviewed anyone who had been in the area on the evening of March 15th, including men who lived along the roads leading to the hillside. They talked to men who had been seen driving in the area that Sunday, and men who had prior arrests involving children. Detectives checked criminal records at the local, state, and federal level. They pulled files on every known offender in the region.
Tips came in from across Chemung County and the surrounding region. Witness statements and tip sheets were cross-referenced against every name in the growing file. Each one was investigated individually by detectives, checked against the known facts and the timeline, and either pursued further or eliminated. By October of 1964, 7 months after the murder, detectives had questioned more than 300 people in connection with the case. The effort was thorough, exhaustive, and unlike anything the department had undertaken before.
Detectives in Elmira worked the case around the clock for months. None of the interviews produced a viable suspect or a meaningful lead. The local radio station WELM and the Star Gazette newspaper raised a thousand dollar reward for information leading to the killer’s identification. The community contributed what it could to the fund. 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 been increased to five thousand dollars.
In the six decades that followed, nobody ever collected it. The case generated thousands of pages of documentation. Interviews, tips, and leads were all logged and filed. The material filled entire filing cabinets in the department’s records room. As years passed and detectives retired or transferred, new officers inherited the file. They read through the stacks of reports searching for a name or a connection that previous investigators had missed. But in this case, every review reached the same conclusion. The file stayed open, but every actionable lead had dried up decades ago.
The case was one of the most well-known unsolved crimes in the history of the Elmira Police Department. Every detective who came through the department knew about it. 61 years of institutional memory passed from one generation of officers to the next. The file had outlasted them all, and still no name attached to the crime. Her killer was never questioned. His name did not appear anywhere in the file. He had no known connection to Mary Teresa Simpson, to her parents, or to anyone in her family.
Investigators who reviewed the case decades later determined that the crime was most likely an act of opportunity, but the person who carried the weight of the case the longest was not a detective. It was a sister. Linda Simpson was four years older than Mary Teresa. She was 16 in March of 1964. Linda and her younger sister had been apart for nearly a year while Mary Teresa lived with their father in another town. The move back to Elmira had brought them closer. Mary Teresa had only been back for two weeks when she was killed.
Linda watched the investigation unfold and then stall. The years passed without a break. The detectives who had originally worked the case moved on. Local newspapers stopped covering it. The reward money sat uncollected in the fund, but the case did not fade from Linda. She carried it with her through every year that followed. She watched her parents age and die without ever learning who had killed their youngest daughter. Ellsworth died first. Rose died later. Neither of them lived long enough to hear the name of the man who took Mary Teresa off the street that evening.
“It affected me really badly,” Linda 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.”
Mary Teresa had been the youngest of four children. She had an older brother, an older sister, and an older half-brother. Her father had worked in Elmira his whole life, and her mother had stayed in the city after the separation. She was a kid in a small city in Upstate New York who had been through a lot in the past year. The people who knew her remembered her as someone who was easy to be around. Linda kept her sister’s memory alive through the decades that followed.
When the calls stopped coming and the case faded from public view, Linda was the one who kept asking. She called the Elmira Police Department periodically, sometimes once a year, sometimes more often, to ask whether there was anything new. The answer was always the same. The file sat untouched in the records room, gathering dust year after year, but Linda kept calling them anyway. In the year 2000, 36 years after the murder, the New York State Police Forensic Investigations Center received Mary Teresa’s clothing for analysis.
The items had been collected at autopsy in 1964 and stored in evidence for more than three decades. The technology to analyze biological material at this level had not existed when the crime was committed. Analysts examined the blouse first. They found biological material and were able to develop a male DNA profile from it. The profile was clear enough to be used for comparison if a suspect could ever be identified. They entered the profile into CODIS, the FBI’s national database that stores genetic profiles from convicted offenders and compares them against evidence from unsolved cases.
If the man who killed Mary Teresa had ever been convicted of a qualifying offense anywhere in the country and had his DNA collected, the system would have flagged a match automatically. It came back empty. The unknown male was not in the system. Three years later, in 2003, additional pieces of clothing were submitted to the state police lab for further analysis. Analysts examined her skirt and underwear and recovered more biological material.
The additional samples confirmed the original profile from the blouse and strengthened it with more genetic data from the other items. But without a hit in CODIS or any other law enforcement database in the country, the identity of the man who left it remained unknown. The man who left that DNA on her clothing in 1964 died 1 year after the 2003 testing. He was buried in an Elmira cemetery less than 5 miles from the wooded hillside where he had left her body four decades earlier.
His DNA was never collected at any point during his lifetime. He had never been a suspect in the case. Nobody had any reason to ask for it. The case needed a different approach. In 2022, the Elmira Police Department applied for and received funding through Season of Justice, a nonprofit organization that provides grants to law enforcement agencies for 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 decades old.
The DNA was submitted to Astrea, a private forensic genetics lab in The Woodlands, Texas, that specializes in building profiles from degraded biological material. The samples from the Simpson case were nearly 60 years old at that point and had been stored under varying conditions since 1964. They were among the oldest material Astrea had ever worked with. The lab scientists applied a process called forensic grade genome sequencing to extract what genetic information remained in the degraded material.
From that degraded material collected more than half a century earlier, Autrum’s team built a full and usable genetic profile of the unknown male. They then uploaded the profile to public genealogy databases where millions of Americans have voluntarily submitted their genetic information. The FBI’s forensic genetic genealogy team took the profile and began searching for relatives of the unknown person through public ancestry databases. In 2023, investigators also partnered with the Criminal Investigation Resource Center at Russell Sage College where Dr. Christina Lane, a criminologist and associate professor, and her students assisted with the genealogical research.
They traced family lines and cross-referenced public records with genetic data. The work was slow and painstaking. The crime was from 1964 and the suspect’s family tree stretched back generations into upstate New York and beyond. Many of the relatives had been born in the early 20th century or before. Birth records from that era were incomplete. Marriage records had gaps. Some branches of the tree were difficult to follow because individuals had moved, changed names, or left no paper trail.
The genealogists worked through every branch of the family tree methodically, building outward from the DNA matches in the public databases. They identified living descendants and narrowed the list of candidates generation by generation. The FBI team and the Russell Sage researchers coordinated their efforts with the students handling much of the records level research while the FBI team managed the genetic comparisons. By 2025, after more than 2 years of genealogical work, the tree had narrowed to a single individual.
The man had lived in Elmira in 1964 and was 32 years old at the time of the murder. A truck driver and Korean War veteran, he was married with children and had spent his entire life in the same city where the crime took place and he had been dead since March of 2004. Investigators contacted the suspect’s surviving son and collected a DNA sample voluntarily. The comparison confirmed a parent-child genetic relationship between the son and the unknown male whose DNA had been found on Mary Theresa’s clothing decades earlier.
A son inherits roughly half his genetic material from each parent and the match was clear. But investigators wanted more than a familial connection. A familial match identifies a family line, not a specific individual within that line. They obtained authorization to exhume the suspect’s body from the cemetery where he had been buried for more than 20 years. The remains were carefully recovered, documented, and transported to the state forensic laboratory for analysis.
DNA extracted directly from the exhumed remains was compared to the male profile that had been recovered from Mary Theresa’s clothing in 2000 and confirmed in 2003. The match was definitive. There was no room left for ambiguity. The odds of selecting an unrelated individual who would produce the same profile were less than one in 320 billion. After 61 years of searching and waiting, the unknown male finally had a name. His name was Alfred Raymond Murray Jr.
Born in 1931, Murray grew up in Elmira and never left. He served in the United States Army during the Korean War and came home to Elmira to marry a woman named Rosemary. Together they had four children, a daughter named Charlotte, a son named Lewis, a daughter named Becky, and a son named Alfred III, who died in 1979. Murray spent much of his adult life working as a truck driver. The roads in and around the city were part of his daily routine. He knew the back roads, the wooded areas, the logging trails, and the stretches of hillside outside of town.
He was known to local police for past behavior involving children. The department had records on him going back years. Despite that history, the investigators who spent months working the case in 1964 never came across his name. He was never interviewed or fingerprinted in connection with the case. He lived the next 40 years in Elmira without ever being identified. He drove the same roads he had always driven, shopped at the same stores, and attended family gatherings and community events.
From the outside, nothing at all about his life raised suspicion. Nobody in Elmira ever connected him to the death of Mary Teresa Simpson or to what had happened on the hillside that March evening. Murray died on March 16th, 2004 at the age of 73. His obituary was published in the Star-Gazette on March 19th, 2004. That date, March 19th, was the same day Mary Teresa’s body had been found on Combs Hill Road, exactly 40 years earlier.
The obituary listed his wife, Rosemary, his surviving children, his grandchildren, and his military service. It described a man who had 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. The crime was entirely opportunistic. Murray had no personal connection to the Simpson family. There was no shared workplace and no mutual acquaintance linking the two. A 32-year-old truck driver with a vehicle and a history of predatory behavior saw her walking alone on a March evening and took her.
On February 10th, 2026, the Elmira Police Department, the Chemung County District Attorney’s Office, and the FBI held a joint press conference. Elmira Police Chief Kristen Thorn stood at the podium. Beside her were representatives from the FBI and the District Attorney’s Office. Thorne addressed the room and the assembled media.
“This is a historic day for the Elmira Police Department,” Thorne said. “If Mr. Murray were still alive, the District Attorney’s Office would seek criminal charges against him for murder.”
Several of Mary Teresa’s surviving family members were in the room for the press conference. Linda was there. She was in her 70s now, retired, a grandmother herself. She had spent the past six decades carrying the weight of it.
“I am very happy it’s finally ended,” Linda said. “I just wish my mom was here.”
She had waited more than 61 years for someone to stand at a podium and say a name out loud.
“I hope the family members here know this case was never forgotten,” Thorne said. “Mary Teresa was never forgotten.”
From the crime to the identification, the case had spanned 61 years and the entire history of forensic DNA science. A 12-year-old girl under a pile of rocks and branches on a wooded hillside off Combs Hill Road, found by a man and his two sons on a Thursday morning in March of 1964. The man who put her there lived in the same city for another 40 years and died without anyone ever asking him about it. It took 61 years to find his name.
