On the morning of March 18, 1964, a nine-year-old girl left her home in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, carrying a small offering for her teacher. She wanted to reach St. Joseph’s Parochial School early that morning, ahead of the usual routine, so she could drop off the canned goods she had brought before going to mass. She never made it to the classroom.

By that afternoon, her body had been found in an abandoned strip pit near the town airport, and the mystery of what happened to Marise Ann Chiverella would shadow the town for nearly six decades. Marise lived with her family on North Alter Street, a modest address in a coal mining city about eighty miles north of Philadelphia. The region’s mining past was still written across the landscape in the early 1960s, with deep strip pits cut into the earth where coal had been dug from near the surface. Some of those pits had become places for dumping refuse.

It was the kind of place where nobody thought twice about a child walking a few blocks to school. A local historian would later note that anyone who lived in Hazleton in 1964 knew about this case precisely because something like it was so unusual for the city. Marise was a shy, happy girl, the kind of child who was learning to play the organ and who told people she wanted to become a nun. She had brothers and a sister, and on a normal school day, her brother and sister walked her to school.

That morning was different. She set out alone, determined to arrive early with her gift. Police say she was last seen at around 8:10 a. m.

, roughly four blocks north and four blocks east of her home. She was already well along her usual route. After that, the trail goes blank. At school, Marise was marked absent.

Alone, that might not have alarmed anyone right away. But when the morning passed and she failed to come home for lunch, something she normally did, it became clear that something was wrong. A search began, and at around one o’clock that afternoon, it ended in the worst possible way. Her body was found about two miles from the place where she was last seen, inside a strip pit near the Hazleton Airport.

A man was giving his sixteen-year-old nephew a driving lesson in the area when the two of them noticed something in the pit. At first, they thought it was a large doll. When they realized what they were really looking at, they called police. Her clothes and belongings were found there as well.

State police said Marise had been raped and strangled. The Pennsylvania State Police took charge of the investigation, and the response was immediate and relentless. One trooper, identified in local reporting as Trooper Good, later said he was among the first to arrive at the strip pit. According to him, the investigators who worked the case put in as many as twenty hours a day, seven days a week, with no day off, and they kept that pace until the middle of July 1964, nearly four months of non-stop effort on a single case.

But there was a serious problem. Despite all that work, the investigators could not find a lead that pointed to the killer. They had a child who had vanished during a walk of a few blocks. They had a body in an abandoned pit.

And they had very little else. The kind of DNA testing that investigators rely on today was still decades away. In 1964, there was no scientific way to link a stranger to biological evidence left at a scene. Whatever was on that evidence would have to wait for technology that did not yet exist.

Over the following weeks and months, the case stayed at the center of life in Hazleton. Someone had taken a little girl off the street on her way to school, and no one had been arrested. The lead investigator on the case in later years, Corporal Mark Baron, would say that the murder changed the way people in the community lived. According to him, the way you lived in Hazleton was different after March 18, 1964, whether you liked it or not.

For Marise’s family, the loss was permanent, and so was the uncertainty. Her parents wanted justice, but they never sought revenge, and they were never given either one. Both of them would eventually pass away without ever learning who had killed their daughter. The investigation did not stop.

It became something that was handed down. New troopers inherited the case from the ones who came before them, then passed it along again. State police later said that more than 230 members of their force were involved in the investigation at one time or another. A lieutenant would point out that the Pennsylvania State Police was founded in 1905, which meant they had spent more than half of their entire existence working on this one homicide.

Files were passed from one investigator to the next, along with the knowledge that the person who had taken a nine-year-old off the street was still out there, or had at least never been caught. Over the years, investigators developed several suspects, but none was ever arrested or charged, and no one was ever held responsible. As the decades went by, the case slowly went cold, even though no one in the department ever officially let go of it. From 1964 to 2007, more than four decades passed between the murder and the first usable DNA profile.

Entire careers began and ended inside that gap. Many of the troopers who had stood at the edge of the strip pit in March 1964 would likely have retired long before anyone in a laboratory had a profile to work with. The evidence, meanwhile, was simply waiting. And every year that passed made it less likely that the person responsible could ever be held to account.

Then, in 2007, something changed. The State Police DNA lab developed a DNA profile of the killer from biological evidence left on the jacket Marise had been wearing that day. Someone had kept that evidence safe for more than forty years, and now science had finally caught up to it. For the first time, investigators had something that could point to one specific person.

Soon after, the lab developed DNA profiles for all the original suspects and compared them to the one from the jacket. Police were hoping for a match, but none of them matched. That eliminated every name investigators had been carrying for years and left them with a profile that belonged to a man they could not identify. From that point on, the State Police checked the killer’s DNA profile against new entries in their DNA databases every month.

It was a simple routine, and for years it produced nothing. The case had run into a fundamental limit of DNA evidence. A profile is only useful if you have someone to compare it to. If the killer had never been arrested for a serious crime, or had died before his DNA could be collected, then his profile would never show up in a database of known offenders.

The police had the answer, in a sense. They just had no way to read it. That situation lasted for more than a decade. It did not change until investigators tried something that would have sounded like science fiction in 1964.

In 2018, the state police teamed up with Parabon Nano Labs, a company that specializes in DNA technology and genetic genealogy. Genetic genealogy works differently from traditional forensic databases. Instead of comparing a crime scene profile only to people who have been arrested, it compares that profile to DNA that ordinary people have voluntarily uploaded to public genealogy databases while researching their own family history. Even if the killer himself had never taken a DNA test, one of his relatives might have.

And that relative could serve as a starting point for tracing the family tree backward and then forward again toward the person who left the evidence behind. The following year, in 2019, Parabon shared the profile with a public genealogy database called GEDmatch. According to police, it soon produced a match with a distant relative of the killer. That was a major breakthrough.

For the first time in fifty-five years, investigators had a genetic link to the family of the man they were looking for. Around the same time, state police also released images of what the suspect might look like at ages twenty-five, forty, and sixty, according to local news reports. Those images were based on DNA technology and were meant to jog the memory of anyone who might have known him. But they did not lead to an identification.

And the genealogy result had a problem of its own. A distant relative is not a suspect. The person who matched was not a brother, father, or even a first cousin. It was someone connected to the killer by a shared ancestor several generations back, which meant that the family tree behind that match could include hundreds or even thousands of people.

Somewhere in that tree was the man who murdered Marise, but no one knew which branch to follow. A DNA match tells you only that two people share an ancestor. It does not tell you who that ancestor was. Genealogists have to work that out using birth, marriage, and death records, obituaries, and other documents, then build the tree back down again through every child, grandchild, and great-grandchild, looking for someone who fits.

Someone of the right sex, the right age, and the right place at the right time. Every branch has to be checked, and every mistake can send an investigation in the wrong direction. Solving that puzzle would take someone with a rare skill, a great deal of patience, and, as it turned out, an unusual amount of initiative. In 2020, a college student named Eric Schubert was looking for his next case.

He was eighteen years old, a history major at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, and he ran his own small research business called ES Genealogy. Schubert had become fascinated by genealogy as a young boy, and by then, he had already helped other law enforcement agencies work on cold cases using genetic genealogy, a method that blends DNA testing with traditional family tree research. He said later that he went looking for a case where he could actually be useful, and Marise’s case was the first one he came across. He remembered it vividly.

He believed that if he could get involved, he might be able to bring the case at least a little closer to being solved. So he did something that most people would never dare to do. He sent an email to the Pennsylvania State Police and offered to help. Lieutenant Devin Brattonski, who commands the criminal investigation section for the State Police troop in that area, would later describe that email as outside the box for State Police, and that was an understatement.

The State Police were described as normally insular, and an outside volunteer offering to work on an old, high-profile homicide was not something they were used to. Schubert himself was pleasantly surprised when they said yes. From there, Schubert spent about two years working alongside the investigators. Once he began, Brattonski said, he started building a family tree around the DNA match, focusing on the relatives of that distant cousin.

According to reporting, the match was a sixth cousin, a relative who shares an ancestor roughly seven generations back. That made the search enormous. Schubert had to trace many family lines and then study more distant matches as investigators collected additional DNA samples along the way. At one point, investigators also connected the case to a surname.

Brattonski said that DNA evidence recovered from a separate homicide case near Weatherly in 1972 had led them to the name Palmino. Investigators then linked that name to a retired New Jersey State Police captain, and he referred them to another relative who was considered the family historian. That turned out to be an important turn. The family cooperated.

Investigators interviewed numerous relatives from the family tree, and Brattonski said that most of them agreed to provide DNA samples. Each sample helped Schubert and the police remove people from the tree and narrow down the branches that mattered. Step by step, the number of possible suspects came down. Eventually, the list was narrowed to four men, and one of them stood out.

Schubert would later describe the work as a gigantic puzzle. He said it was probably the hardest genealogy task he had ever faced and probably the hardest thing he had ever done in his life. But he also said that at a certain point, he knew that they were going to find the person they were looking for. Police have not publicly detailed every step of how they weighed those four men against each other.

What they have said is that one of them drew attention because of his criminal history. By then, the timeline of the case stretched across almost six decades. The murder in 1964, the DNA profile in 2007, the partnership with Parabon in 2018, the genealogy match in 2019, Schubert’s email in 2020, and now, in the early weeks of 2022, a single name. The man who stood out was named James Paul Forte.

He was born in 1941 in Hazleton, and he spent his entire life in the town. He was a bartender and a bar supply salesman, and according to reporting, he was never married and had no known children. In 1964, he was twenty-two years old and lived roughly six blocks from the Chiverella family home. Investigators did not find any known connection between Forte and Marise or her family.

Police said the attack appeared to be random, and they did not believe that he knew her. He was also never part of the original murder investigation. In all the years that troopers had spent looking for a suspect, his name had never come up. But there was something else in his history that caught the attention of the investigators.

In 1974, about ten years after Marise was killed, Forte was arrested in an unrelated case on charges connected to the sexual assault of a young woman. The case ended with a plea deal. He pleaded guilty to the less serious charge of aggravated assault and was sentenced to one year of probation. Then, in 1978, Forte was arrested again, this time on charges of reckless endangerment and harassment.

Police said they did not have any more information about how that case ended. And in 1980, James Paul Forte died. He was thirty-eight years old. According to police, he died of natural causes, possibly a heart attack.

So by the time his name finally surfaced in connection with Marise’s murder, he had been dead for more than forty years. The state police had developed the killer’s DNA profile in 2007. By the time that happened, Forte had already been dead for twenty-seven years. Police have not said why the monthly database checks never produced a hit, but the timeline offers a likely clue.

Forte died in 1980, long before DNA collection from offenders became routine, and a man who is no longer alive cannot be swabbed after an arrest. In other words, the answer had been sitting in the state’s own evidence room for decades, and every ordinary tool that police had was pointed at people who were still alive. Consider what the timeline means. Forte lived for another sixteen years after March 1964, and according to reporting, he spent his entire life in Hazleton.

For all those years, the man police now name as Marise’s killer worked in the same town where the search for him was underway. And when he died in 1980, the file on Marise’s murder was still open, with no suspect and no explanation. That created a new problem. The DNA work had led investigators to a family, and then to four men in that family, and then to one man with a history of violence against women.

But genealogy does not prove anything about a single individual by himself. It shows relationships. To prove that Forte was the man who left the evidence on Marise’s jacket, police would need to compare his own DNA directly to the profile from the crime scene, and there was no easy alternative. According to reporting, Forte was never married and had no known children, so there were no direct descendants whose DNA could stand in for his.

A cousin sample could suggest the link, but it could never confirm who had left the evidence. The only way to get a definitive answer was to exhume his body. That was not an easy step. It required legal approval and the assistance of the Luzerne County District Attorney’s Office.

But investigators had built enough of a case to justify it. On January 6, 2022, state police exhumed Forte’s remains so that a tissue sample could be taken and sent to the lab. About a month later, the results came back. The DNA profile from Forte matched the profile from the biological evidence on Marise’s jacket.

Police described the match as precise. After nearly fifty-eight years, the state police had a name. On Thursday, February 10, 2022, investigators held a news conference in Hazle Township. At the front of the room stood a poster of Marise placed next to a vase of flowers and a trooper’s hat.

The room was packed with current and retired members of the state police, including the trooper who first worked the case in 1964. Marise’s four siblings were there, along with members of her extended family. And so was Eric Schubert, who by then was twenty years old. Lieutenant Brattonski told the room that Forte was not alive to be prosecuted, but he also made it clear that in the view of the state police, Forte was the person who had committed the crime.

Baron said the case was believed to be the fourth oldest cold case in the United States solved through genetic genealogy and the oldest in Pennsylvania. Corporal Baron, who led the investigation, could barely speak as he addressed the room. His voice shook. He said that even investigators are told not to get attached to a case, but that it was impossible not to.

He told the family and the community that the message of the day was hope. That no matter how long it might take, police will never give up. And that in life or in death, the person responsible will be found. Baron also reminded everyone that the case had touched far more than one family.

He said that over fifty-seven years, it had affected Marise’s relatives, the Hazleton community, and hundreds of members of the state police who had worked on it. Marise’s siblings thanked the investigators. Her sister, Carmen Marie Radke, said that the family had so many precious memories of Marise. She said that at the same time, they would always feel the emptiness and sorrow of her absence, and that they would keep asking themselves what could have been.

She also said that their parents had never wanted revenge. What they wanted was justice, and now, thanks to the state police, the family finally knew who had murdered their sister. Her brother, Ronald, said that knowing the person’s identity gave the family a sense of closure, though not full closure, and that they would never have that. He said that it was a relief to know that the person was no longer out there.

According to the siblings, their mother never lived to see this day, but they believed she was watching. If Marise were alive today, she would be in her sixties. Instead, her family had spent most of their own lives without knowing who had taken her. There would be no trial, because Forte had died decades before he could ever be charged.

There was no courtroom, no verdict, and no sentence. Under the law, he was never convicted of anything connected to Marise’s murder. That is an unusual way for a case to end. In most homicide cases, the conclusion rests on a jury’s verdict.

Here, it rests on a DNA comparison, a family tree, and the judgment of the investigators who spent years testing both. State police consider the case solved based on the DNA match to the evidence recovered from her clothing. And for the family, that was enough. Schubert did not pretend the result could undo anything.

He said that what was done to Marise is irreversible and that no family tree could change that. But he said it meant a great deal to have been part of the team that could provide answers to the Chiverella family. A cold case that had defeated generations of professionals had been cracked with the help of someone who was not yet twenty-one. And it started with an email.

Marise’s case also joined a growing list of decades-old investigations solved through genetic genealogy. Police in other states have used the same approach to identify suspects in cases that were thirty and forty years old. What set this one apart was its age and the fact that the breakthrough came from a volunteer who had not yet finished college. For investigators who had spent their careers on files that seemed to have no future, it was proof that an old case is never truly finished as long as the evidence survives.

A few questions remain unanswered. The publicly available accounts do not say exactly where Marise was taken or precisely how she was abducted during that short walk to school. And while Forte’s history of violence against women was part of what drew investigators to him, the sources available do not say whether police have connected him to any other crimes. Unless investigators say more, those questions will probably stay open.

It is also worth noting what the family chose to share that day. They did not talk about the crime. They talked about a girl who played the organ, who was quiet and cheerful, and who hoped to become a nun. They spoke about a sister who was supposed to grow up and about the ordinary life she never got to have.

What is clear is that the case changed something in Hazleton. A little girl who wanted to get to school early so she could hand her teacher a gift became a name that people in that town never forgot. For nearly fifty-eight years, that name was attached to a mystery.

Today, it is attached to an answer, and to a family who waited a lifetime for it.