On January 13, 1976, a passerby in Lisle, Illinois, noticed a purse lying on the side of the road near College Road and Maple Avenue. Inside was identification belonging to sixteen-year-old Pamela Mower. Behind a nearby guardrail, authorities found the girl herself. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.

A rubber hose lay near her body. The night before, Pamela had told friends she was stepping out for a soda at a nearby McDonald’s. It was a short walk on a familiar route, a freezing Tuesday evening errand that should have taken minutes. She never came back.

Pamela was a junior at Downers Grove South High School and lived in Woodridge, a few miles from where she died. DuPage County in 1976 was one of the fastest-growing suburban regions in America, a postwar landscape of quiet streets and good schools where families believed nothing bad could happen. Pamela’s murder shattered that confidence in the most brutal way possible, and for more than four decades, the case produced no arrest, no trial, and no suspect. The investigation began immediately.

Witnesses were interviewed. The neighborhood was canvassed. Physical evidence was collected from Pamela’s body, including biological material that would eventually become the most important piece of the entire case. In 1976, however, DNA profiling did not exist as an investigative tool.

Investigators worked with what they had and came up empty. The trail went cold. The case was formally reopened in 1993 with fresh eyes on old evidence, but it went cold again. By 2001, DNA technology had transformed criminal investigation.

The biological evidence preserved from Pamela’s body was re-examined, and investigators successfully developed a DNA profile of her killer. It was a major breakthrough, except for one problem: the profile did not match anyone in any available database. The case went cold for the second time. What nobody knew then was that the man whose genetic fingerprint was sitting in that profile had been dead for twenty years.

His name was Bruce Lindahl, and he had died in April 1981, never convicted of a single violent crime. Bruce Lindahl was born on January 29, 1953, in St. Charles, Illinois, and grew up in the same suburban corridor west of Chicago where he would eventually kill. By his early twenties, he had accumulated a criminal history, minor offenses that were filed and forgotten.

On the night Pamela Mower walked toward that McDonald’s, Lindahl was twenty-two years old, living in the area and familiar with the same streets. He encountered a sixteen-year-old girl walking alone in the cold, and the physical evidence preserved at the scene would later place him there beyond any scientific doubt. In the years that followed, Lindahl kept living and kept killing. Investigators would eventually link him to cases spanning 1974 to 1981 across DuPage and Kane Counties, at least twelve murders and nine rapes.

Throughout the second half of the 1970s, he moved through communities that had no idea he existed, hunting women and girls going about ordinary lives. Law enforcement, lacking the forensic tools that would eventually expose him, could not connect the dots. Then came the case that should have ended everything. In 1980, four years after Pamela’s murder, a woman named Deborah Colindres was sexually assaulted by Lindahl at his home in Aurora.

Unlike his earlier victims, she escaped and reported what happened. Charges were filed. Lindahl was arrested and released on bail. While awaiting trial, he told an associate that if the woman who had reported him did not survive to testify, the case would collapse.

Two weeks before the trial was scheduled to begin, Deborah Colindres disappeared. She had left her job at a hospital and never came home. Her body was found on April 28, 1982, in a field in Oswego Township. She had been murdered.

Without a complaining witness, the charges against Lindahl were dropped. By the time Deborah’s body was found, Bruce Lindahl was already dead. On April 4, 1981, he attacked an eighteen-year-old man named Charles Huber in an apartment in Naperville, stabbing him twenty-eight times with a kitchen knife. During the attack, Lindahl accidentally severed an artery in his own leg and bled to death at the scene.

He was twenty-eight years old. He had never been convicted of a violent crime, never stood trial for murder, and had never been publicly identified as responsible for the deaths piling up across the counties. By every official measure, he had gotten away with it. After Lindahl’s death became public, a surviving victim contacted authorities and identified him as her attacker.

Investigators began to suspect the man who bled out on that Naperville floor was far more prolific than anyone had yet documented. But without DNA technology and genetic genealogy, there was no way to prove it. The cases stayed cold, and Pamela Mower’s file sat in a cabinet in Lisle for another thirty-eight years. In September 2019, the Lisle Police Department reopened Pamela’s murder a second time.

The investigators had never truly stopped working the case, but this time they had tools that did not exist before. The first was phenotyping, the ability to predict physical traits from a DNA sample. The second was investigative genetic genealogy, the practice of uploading an unknown profile to public genealogy databases and searching for partial matches among relatives who had voluntarily submitted their own DNA. This method had already cracked one of the most famous cold cases in American history, identifying Joseph James DeAngelo as the Golden State Killer in 2018.

The DNA profile from Pamela’s case, untouched for eighteen years, was sent to Parabon NanoLabs, a Virginia-based company that had become a leading provider of forensic genetic genealogy services. Their chief genetic genealogist, CeCe Moore, had helped solve hundreds of cold cases using this methodology. Phenotyping analysis produced a composite showing a male with specific predicted features that looked remarkably like Bruce Lindahl, but visual similarity is not evidence. Moore and her team uploaded the DNA profile to a public genealogy database and received partial matches from relatives.

From there, genealogists built a family tree, cross-referencing public records, birth certificates, census data, and obituaries, converging methodically on a single candidate: Bruce Lindahl. There was one problem. Lindahl had been dead for thirty-eight years, and confirming a DNA match requires a sample from the subject. Investigators obtained a court order.

In late 2019, Lindahl’s body was exhumed, and a DNA sample was extracted from his remains. The comparison against the profile from Pamela’s case was unambiguous. It matched. On January 13, 2020, exactly forty-four years to the day after Pamela Mower’s body was found behind that guardrail, DuPage County State’s Attorney Robert Berlin announced that her murder had finally been solved.

It was the first case in Illinois to use investigative genetic genealogy to solve a murder. Lisle police detective Chris Lawton, who had personally traveled to Texas to tell Pamela’s father and brother the news, called Lindahl exactly what he was. Pamela’s father expressed profound relief, relief that it had been a stranger, relief that his daughter had fought, and relief that no one had forgotten. But the science was not finished.

In October 2024, investigators in North Aurora announced that they had solved the 1979 murder of Kathy Halle. She had left her apartment to pick up her sister from work and never arrived. Her body was found weeks later in the Fox River. For forty-five years, the case remained unsolved.

Then investigators, using a forensic tool capable of extracting genetic material from degraded fabric, reanalyzed the clothing Kathy was wearing the night she disappeared. The DNA recovered from that clothing was sent for analysis, and the result came back with a statistical probability of 9. 4 trillion to one that it originated from anyone other than Bruce Lindahl. Kathy Halle’s family finally had an answer.

Bruce Lindahl, dead since 1981 and buried since 1981, had been confirmed in a second murder from beyond the grave. He is now an official suspect in at least twelve murders and nine rapes across the Chicago suburbs, with three confirmed by DNA and the rest still under investigation. The science is still working.