Cold cases from Indiana discussed, mapped, and brought back into public eye. In this book, every chapter is a new case with new victims. From Burger Chef to Lauren Spierer, I cover all types of unsolved cases. Theories and serial killer studies incl...
When I first found out I was pregnant with my oldest child, I immediately wanted a girl. I knew her name from the moment those two lines appeared to me. Her middle name was going to be Marie. Maybe that was part of the reason this case hit me so hard, or maybe it was because this case is every parent's worst nightmare.
Like most Good Fridays in Indiana, the Good Friday of 1988, was chilly only in the mid to low forties. The chilly weather never stops the children from going out to play. It is the time of year when the kids have become restless and want to run around outside unhindered by their bulky winter coats.
That year Good Friday fell on April 1. A small eight-year-old girl asked permission from her mother to walk to a friend's home. This little girl was April Marie Tinsley. April lived on the 300 block of West Williams Street in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She was going to walk to a friend's house in the 2300 block of Hoagland Avenue. According to sources, she was going to retrieve her umbrella, which had been left there previously.
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An hour after April departed from her home; dinner was ready and April's mother, Janet, had begun to worry because April had not returned home. Within the hour, a missing person's report was filed. That evening, more than one hundred people, including police and civilians, mounted a search for April in the area surrounding her home.
While searching the area, police found a witness. The witness stated that April had been pulled into a truck by a man in his 30's. Some accounts say that the truck was light colored while others say that the witness claimed it was dark. The witness helped the police create a composite sketch of the perpetrator.
Those searching would make no progress. Three days later on April 4, in neighboring DeKalb County, a jogger came across the body of April Tinsley. No attempt at hiding the body was made. Instead, the girl's clothed body was in the open.
An autopsy would reveal that the small girl had died two days before the jogger discovered her body. The cause of death was suffocation and she had been raped. DNA was found with the body and was ran against all existing databases the police had access to at the time. It is theorized that since the body had not been discovered earlier, it had to have been placed on the side of the road sometime in the late hours of April 3 or in the early morning hours of April 4.
The case would grow cold. People began to slip back into daily life, but the case was still alive and well in the minds of the Fort Wayne Detectives. For two years, no progress was made in the case. When they received a call from someone about a graffiti on a barn, they never expected the two would be linked. That was until they saw the message.
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