She was murdered 45 years ago. Online family tree helped cops find her siblings; search begins for grave
Fleeing a tumultuous family life, Miriam Chapman left Indiana and was found murdered in Miami in 1976. Serial killer Samuel Little confessed to her slaying.
For decades, the family only knew the basics of Miriam Chapman’s disappearance and violent death.
Distraught by the suicide of her alcoholic father and a crumbling marriage, Miriam Chapman left Indiana and made her way to Florida. Years later, in the summer of 1976, the word spread among her siblings. Chapman, a mother of two who had turned to sex work in Miami, was found strangled in a field on the edge of the Everglades.
“It was like three days before my high-school graduation and my brother came down into the
basement to tell me,” said her younger sister, Jane Gadbury. “I bawled and bawled.”
It wasn’t until about a year and a half ago that Gadbury and her relatives saw TV news reports that detailed the awful truth about Chapman: She was the victim of Samuel Little, the notorious serial killer who preyed on vulnerable women for decades across the U.S. Official confirmation came late last week, when Miami-Dade Police Detective David Denmark, of the cold-case homicide unit, tracked down Gadbury, called her and told her of the details.
For Gadbury, it was a bittersweet moment. “You don’t know what to say, except thank you,” said Gadbury, of Hartford City, Indiana. “You’re numb to it. You have to reprocess it all over again.”
Now, Denmark says, police will work with the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office to pinpoint the exact location of Chapman’s grave at a county cemetery for the poor and unidentified. Chapman was buried at the Southwest Miami-Dade cemetery in 1976 after no relatives claimed her body.
“The family will know where she is resting,” Denmark said. “She was considered a ‘lost soul.’ Now, that soul is at rest and is no longer lost.”
For years, the cold-case squad had been trying to track down relatives of Chapman. In doing so, they were eventually helped by media reports in two states, a researcher for a truecrime podcast and genealogy data uploaded to Ancestry.com.
SAMUEL LITTLE
Little died in prison at age 80 in December, considered by the FBI the most prolific serial killer in modern U.S. history. He confessed to 93 murders, mostly of women on the fringes of society whose deaths received scant public attention. He operated in Florida during the 1970s and
1980s. Police say Little confessed to at least 12 murders in Florida, often drawing detailed sketches of the victims.
Officially, police and prosecutors have identified Little as the culprit in four murders in Miami-Dade County, including the 1977 slaying of Dorothy Gibson, who was found strangled in bushes near a downtown Greyhound bus station. Another man, Jerry Frank Townsend, was wrongfully convicted and served 22 years in prison for Gibson’s murder, along with several others.
A husband and wife collecting rocks and plants found Chapman’s decomposing corpse in a brush thicket on May 16, 1976.
The body was along a canal off Tamiami Trail near Krome Avenue. Little murdered her in the shadow of 70-foot-tall concrete arches that have become a local, if mysterious, icon — a rural spot where people used to picnic, hunt snakes and shoot guns (The arches were actually constructed as an entrance for a planned industrial park that was never built).
Chapman was a prostitute who worked at the
Turf Motel and the Saxon Motel near Liberty City. With no witnesses and no suspects, the case went cold.
Little recalled how he had held Chapman under water “until she almost passed out” and then dragged her to a canal and strangled her, according to a prosecutor’s memo. That matched the physical evidence — her brightly colored shorts had slipped off and were embedded in the canal bank.
In a jailhouse interview, detectives showed Little mug shots of Chapman and other women from the time period. He immediately picked out Chapman.
The Miami News, the now-shuttered afternoon newspaper, chronicled Chapman’s tortured life in terms that today would be shockingly callous. An article from June 1, 1976, recalled her as a “lost soul” with an awkward laugh, who was vulnerable to predators during her time on the Miami streets. One motel manager recalled that Chapman talked frequently about returning to
Indiana, where her children were in foster care.
The story described her intellectual disability in crude terms. The headline blared: “She couldn’t read or write, but walked on the wild side.”
“There were a lot of derogatory words and misinformation about her,” said Bryan Worters, a forensic genealogist for The Fall Line Podcast and Redgrave Research Forensic Services. He helped locate her family tree. “It was very dehumanizing.”
Chapman grew up in Marion, Indiana, one of five siblings. Gadbury remembers a hard-scrabble but loving childhood with her older sister: swimming in a creek, family trips to buy 77-cent hamburger meals on Friday nights.
But her mother, Ruth Chapman, struggled with bipolar disorder. Her father, Wayne Chapman, though he held a steady job at a wire factory, suffered from alcoholism. To escape the tumult, Miriam Chapman married young and eventually had two children.
“She was 16. I think she was just trying to get out of the family life,” Gadbury said. “He was good for her for a little while, but it didn’t work out.”
Wayne Chapman killed himself in 1967. Miriam Chapman and her husband soon divorced. “After that, she left and I never saw her again,” Gadbury said.
Over the years, as the murder probe remained cold, Chapman’s brothers and sisters lost contact with her children.
The Miami Herald first reported on Little’s confession in the Chapman case in February 2019.
At the time, detectives had been unable to find immediate relatives for Chapman, who also went by the name “Angela” and used two different Social Security numbers in arrest records from the time. Her story eventually appeared on news programs in Indiana. A cousin saw the story and told Gadbury, who called a number that had flashed on the screen.
She’s not sure about the number she called, whether it was a police department or some sort of tip line. “They took my number and said someone would call, but no one did,” said Gadbury, 63, a grandmother and nurse.
The dots were eventually connected, albeit in a circuitous way.
Chapman’s story appeared as part of a fourpart series on The Fall
Line, the podcast hosted by Laurah Norton, a writing professor at Georgia State University. The true-crime podcast focuses primarily on cases from the Southeastern United States. “Our goal for the project is for the killers to be in the background, and for the victims to be in the foreground,” Norton said.
Worters, the genealogist for the podcast, had been compiling detailed dossiers on Little’s victims. Worters also works with Redgrave, a company that is based in Orange, Massachusetts, and assists police in using forensic genealogy to help track down killers and identify victims.
On Ancestry.com, the genealogy website where members of the public can link their DNA profiles and trace their lineage, Worters found that one of Chapman’s relatives had uploaded info on her and an old photo of her.
Meanwhile in Indiana, reporter Jon Webb, of the Evansville Courier & Press, was also researching Chapman. He heard the podcast and reached out to Norton, who supplied names from the family tree.
Webb called MiamiDade Police with the names of Chapman’s parents and her hometown: Marion, Indiana. Detectives soon located a Chapman cousin who lives in New Mexico but had never heard of her. Eventually, Det. Denmark reached out to Worters and soon tracked down Gadbury in Indiana.
“This is the very least I can do for Miriam, her loved ones, and investigating agencies,” Worters said. “Little saying that people didn’t care about these victims is disheartening. Focusing on the victims and their stories while minimizing him is just the appropriate antithesis to what he believed.”