Police have solved a 58-year-old rape and murder of a young girl that rocked a Pennsylvania coal mining town with the help of DNA and a 20-year-old college student and genealogy expert.
Last month, state police dug up the killer’s dead body and found his DNA matched with DNA left of the coat of 9-year-old Marise Ann Chiverella who was abducted on March 18, 1964 while she was walking to school in Hazleton.
Her body was found later that afternoon in a waste coal pit, after she had been raped and strangled to death, cops said.
The killer was finally identified as James Paul Forte — a bartender with a history of violent sexual assault — who died of natural causes in 1980 when he was 38.
Forte, who was 22 when he killed Marise, had no known connections to the girl or her family.
In the nearly six decades since Marise was murdered, over 230 members of the department took a shot at the case at one time or another. Forte’s name, however, did not come up until 2020, when DNA technology had shown a distant family connection.
20-year-old Eric Schubert, a college student and expert in genetic genealogy, volunteered to work on the case. He put together an extensive family tree and helped police narrow their list of suspects.
Schubert, a history major at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and owner of ES Genealogy, had helped other police departments using genetic genealogy – a combination of DNA testing with traditional genealogical research.
He offered to work on the case after reading about Marise’s story, and the Pennsylvania State Police surprisingly accepted. He worked on the case for the next two years.
“The investigation that went into all of this work was probably the hardest genealogy task that I’ve ever faced. This was probably the hardest thing that I’ve ever done in my entire life,” Schubert said at a press conference. “And it means so much to me that I was able to be on the team that could provide answers to the Chiverella family.”
At a certain point, he said he “knew we were going to find the assailant.”
The press conference was packed with active and retired police officers who had worked on Marise’s case, including the state trooper who first investigated the killing. Marise’s four siblings were also present.
“We have so many precious memories of Marise. At the same time, our family will always feel the emptiness and sorrow of her absence,” her sister, Carmen Marie Radtke, said. “We will continue to ask ourselves, what would have been, what could have been?”
“Thanks to the Pennsylvania State Police, justice has been served today,” she said.
State police Cpl. Mark Baron, the lead investigator, said it’s the oldest cold case to be solved using genetic genealogy in Pennsylvania, and the fourth oldest in the nation.
Baron got emotional as he spoke about the decades-long case that took a significant toll on the local community.
“It’s a vivid memory for everybody who lived through this, and it’s a vivid memory for everybody who grew up in this area,” he said. “What happened to her ushered in a change in this community. Whether you like it or not, the way you lived changed after March 18 of 1964 in Hazleton.”
With Post Wires
