For nearly 5 a long time, the killing of 19-year-old Lindy Sue Biechler — a newlywed discovered stabbed to demise on the ground of her Lancaster County, Pa., residence — had stumped authorities. They’d chased scores of suggestions, interviewed as many as 300 folks, launched a job power, introduced the case to crime consultants and, because the years dragged on with out solutions, even tried consulting psychics.
What lastly led to an arrest within the county’s oldest chilly case was the discarded espresso cup — and genetic family tree. Investigators zeroed in on Sinopoli after a researcher at Reston, Va.-based Parabon NanoLabs decided via DNA proof that whoever killed Biechler most likely had ancestors from a small Italian city referred to as Gasperina. The researcher, CeCe Moore, flagged Sinopoli as an individual of curiosity after poring over newspaper archives and historic information.
After the detectives’ stealth mission on the airport, DNA from the espresso cup was in contrast towards DNA discovered on Biechler’s underwear. It was a match, Lancaster County District Legal professional Heather Adams mentioned. Authorities made their long-awaited arrest Sunday morning; Sinopoli, a onetime resident of Biechler’s residence advanced, was taken into custody and was being held with out bail.
“This case was solved with the usage of DNA and, particularly, DNA family tree,” Adams mentioned throughout a Monday information convention. “And fairly actually, with out that, I don’t know that we might have ever solved it.”
She added: “The truth is that David Sinopoli was not on our radar.”
The grotesque killing occurred the night of Dec. 5, 1975, a Friday. Biechler’s aunt and uncle had stopped by her Manor Township residence to alternate recipes. However after they arrived on the constructing, they discovered what Adams mentioned “can solely be described as a horrific scene.” Biechler lay on the lounge flooring, her denims unbuttoned and her physique coated with 19 stab wounds.
Baggage of groceries sat on the eating room desk. The younger spouse had been unloading them when her attacker arrived police mentioned.
She fought fiercely for her life. However Biechler, a flower store employee described by her husband Phil as “extraordinarily compassionate” and “unbelievably charming,” was pronounced lifeless on the scene.
From the beginning, police mentioned, there have been few clues.
“We truly don’t have a factor right now,” Manor Township Police Chief Donald W. Sheeler mentioned on the day Biechler was buried, in response to the Intelligencer Journal.
Authorities cleared suspects, reviewed a chilling letter from somebody claiming to be the killer, pleaded with the general public for assist and investigated leads earlier than the case went chilly. They revisited the case within the years that adopted, submitting proof for DNA evaluation in 1997 and coming into it right into a nationwide database in 2000.
That yr, a job power that included the FBI’s Behavioral Evaluation Unit dug into the case, the Lancaster New Period reported. The group mentioned the killer was most likely a person who knew Biechler and dedicated the crime in a match of rage. 5 years later, a gaggle of legal consultants referred to as the Vidocq Society determined to overview the case.
“I’ve prayed each single evening for 30 years that there shall be justice for her demise,” Biechler’s mom, Eleanor Geesey, informed Lancaster On-line. “My God, possibly it should come.”
But it will be years earlier than DNA family tree, a brand new method that went mainstream with the 2018 arrest of the “Golden State Killer,” cracked the case open and led to Sinopoli’s arrest. Moore mentioned Monday that her analysis into the killer’s family tree pointed to Sinopoli as “an particularly compelling candidate to be the suspect.”
“There have been only a few folks residing in Lancaster that have been the best age, gender and had the best household tree,” she mentioned.
Not one of the suggestions that got here into legislation enforcement through the years pointed to Sinopoli, Adams mentioned. She mentioned he lived in the identical four-unit constructing as Biechler at one level in 1974. However she declined to supply different particulars on whether or not they knew one another or focus on a possible motive.
Few particulars have been instantly obtainable about Sinopoli or his life earlier than or after the brutal killing. A former pressman at a industrial printing firm, he was a hunter whose Fb web page confirmed him looking and vacationing in Italy, LNP reported. He married his first spouse the yr earlier than Biechler’s demise; that they had two youngsters earlier than divorcing in 1986, in response to the paper. In 1987, he married his second spouse, with whom he had one other baby.
In 2004, he was sentenced to a yr of probation after pleading responsible to invasion of privateness and disorderly conduct. He had admitted spying on a girl who was bare in a tanning room at a enterprise the place he labored, in response to LNP.
That gave the impression to be his solely legal arrest in Lancaster County earlier than Sunday. He now faces a murder cost.
“Lindy Sue Biechler was 19 when her life was brutally taken away from her 46 years in the past within the sanctity of her own residence,” Adams mentioned. “The arrest of David Sinopoli marks the start of the court docket course of. And we hope that it brings some sense of aid to the sufferer’s family members and to the group, who for the previous 46 years have had no solutions.”
