National Post (National Edition)
‘I WILL KILL AGAIN’
SUSPECTED MURDERER TAUNTED GIRLS WITH NOTES, POLICE SAY. AFTER 30 YEARS, DNA LEADS TO AN ARREST
The message was slashed onto the weather-beaten planks of a barn in empty farmland not far from where the girl’s body had been found.
Police in northern Indiana stared at the jerky handwritten scrawl in May 1990, realizing this was the most significant clue in the region’s most publicized unsolved crime. In 1988, eight-year-old April Tinsley had been found murdered and sexually assaulted. Two years later, police were now studying the white building on a stretch of lonely rural road. The message appeared to be a confession — as well as a taunt and a threat.
“I kill 8 year old April M Tinsley,” the barn read, according to a recently filed police affidavit. “(D)id you find the other shoe haha I will kill again.”
Although the message initially failed to steer investigators to Tinsley’s killer, it was not the last word from the alleged murderer. As the case stalled, and hundreds of suspects were targeted and cleared, the girl’s assailant would continue to haunt the Fort Wayne area. Grotesque messages — left with used condoms and Polaroids — were sent to other little girls who the child killer claimed were next on his list.
This reign of terror also failed to direct police to a suspect. But the horrific messages did provide investigators with the DNA they would eventually use to zero in on the killer — once the right advanced science and technology came along.
On Sunday, investigators from the Fort Wayne Police Department and the Indiana State Police arrested John D. Miller, 59, for Tinsley’s April 1988 death. He was scheduled to make his first court appearance on Monday. According to a probable cause affidavit filed in Allen County Superior Court, Miller confessed when questioned about Tinsley’s death.
Documents show that the arrest was not the result of intense media attention over the years—the case was featured twice on America’s Most Wanted as well as a 2016 episode of Crime Watch Daily — nor the repeated pleas for information that followed the 30th anniversary of Tinsley’s death last April. Once again, the cold case was cracked thanks to the dramatic scientific breakthrough pairing forensic DNA with genealogical research.
The new science has led to a run of cold case arrests, including the prosecution of alleged Golden State Killer Joseph James Deangelo and an arrest in the 1992 murder of Pennsylvania schoolteacher Christy Mirack. Court records indicate the Tinsley break came thanks to Parabon Nanolabs, the Reston, Va.-based company at the centre of many of the recent cold case arrests.
On April 1,1988, April Tinsley left her home in Fort Wayne for a friend’s house. When Tinsley failed to walk through the door by dinner time, her mother reported the little girl as missing.
Three days later a jogger spotted the body of a child in a water-filled ditch in nearby Amish country. An autopsy showed the victim had been sexually assaulted and asphyxiated.
DNA evidence found in the girl’s underwear did not initially point to a perpetrator. The barn message scrawled two years later in 1990 unnerved the community. But again, the taunting note produced no immediate concrete evidence.
But the alleged killer surfaced again 14 years later.
In 2004, four notes were left at homes scattered around the Fort Wayne area. Three of the messages were placed on young girls’s bicycles. An additional note was put in a mailbox. Three of the messages were inside plastic baggies with used condoms and Polaroid pictures of the sender’s nude lower body. Several of the notes referred to Tinsley.
Again, the letters did not immediately point police toward a suspect. But the DNA material recovered from the condoms did match the evidence recovered from Tinsley’s underwear — concretely linking the deranged 2004 notes with the 1988 killing.
The case flickered in and out of the national spotlight. Then, 30 years after the killing, the case took a turn.
According to recently filed court documents, in May 2018 the Fort Wayne Police Department submitted the suspect’s DNA to Parabon Nanolabs. Using public genealogy databases, the firm’s researcher Cece Moore was able to narrow the possible suspects down to two brothers in the Fort Wayne area.
Police tracked one — John D. Miller — to a trailer park in Grabill, Ind., outside Fort Wayne. Investigators pulled trash from the location, including three used condoms. According to the probable cause affidavit, the DNA from the recently obtained condoms matched the DNA from the 2004 condoms, which matched the genetic profile found on the victim.
On Sunday, two detectives approached Miller outside his trailer and asked him to come to the police station. There, the detectives asked him if he knew why they wanted to speak with him.
“April Tinsley,” the suspect allegedly told police, according to the affidavit.
According to the court document, Miller allegedly confessed after learning police had a DNA match linking him to the murder.
Miller faces felony charges for murder, child molestation, and criminal confinement.