Known to be the oldest homicide cold case in Lancaster County, Pa., is now one step closer to being solved thanks to a coffee cup.
On Sunday, July 17, Pennsylvania resident David Sinopoli was detained and arrested in the long-standing cold case of Lindy Sue Biechler, after investigators obtained his DNA from a cup of coffee at an airport earlier this year. He was allegedly accused of fatally killing Biechler in a 1975 homicide.
The story is the latest example of DNA testing and genealogy websites busting open crime cases that had previously been left unsolved due to a lack of evidence.
“This case was solved with the use of DNA and specifically DNA genealogy and quite honestly without that, I don’t know that we would have ever solved it,” Heather Adams, Lancaster County District Attorney, said at a news conference earlier this week.
On December 5, 1975, 19-year-old Biechler was found dead in her apartment by her aunt and uncle with 19 stab wounds and a knife sticking out of her neck. Evidence was taken from the scene that contained genetic traces of the killer, but it would be over a decade until DNA evidence was reliable enough to be used in criminal cases.
CeCe Moore, the chief genetic genealogist at Parabon NanoLabs, began working on the case in 2018, according to Lancaster Online.
Here’s what Moore said, according to ABC:
“Usually I’m able to identify common ancestors. But because the common ancestors between the matches and the suspect in this case were probably back in the 1700s [or] 1600s, I wasn’t able to approach it the way that I do most cases.”
“It was really tugging at me, so I decided to develop a new approach. There was a very clear migration pattern from a town in southern Italy called Gasperina, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania,” she said, adding that she found names through old membership documents in a social club.
“Those membership cards listed when people were born. Because I knew that this suspect had roots in this small town Gasperina, I went through all of those cards and found the people who had immigrated from Gasperina to Lancaster,” Moore said.
She came up with a list of 2,300 names.
“About half are gonna be female. A certain percentage are gonna be too old or too young. I knew this person had to be fully Italian from Gasperina or close by,” Moore said. “I worked through each and every one of those families that had migrated from that very specific town. It was really only possible because of this very unique [membership card] record collection that Lancaster had.”
Then came more digging, using Ellis Island records and draft cards.
“I just quietly worked on it on my own time. I didn’t know if it would work,” Moore said.
Even after all that, Moore said she was unsure, according to Lancaster Online.
“Every time I had provided a lead to investigators, I was able to connect that person’s family tree to one or more matches, and the fact that I couldn’t connect this tree made me very concerned,” Moore said. “But there were circumstances about him (such as having lived in Biechler’s apartment complex) that made it seem unlikely that this was a coincidence.”
After telling police Sinopoli could be Biechler’s killer, police put in the legwork. Moore suggested the name to police in December, according to Lancaster Online.
However, they still needed hard evidence.
While under surveillance, investigators managed to get their hands on a coffee cup Sinopoli had sipped at Philadelphia International Airport before he boarded a flight. DNA was obtained from the cup and, just as they hoped, it matched with the evidence left at the crime scene in 1975.
David Sinopoli was arrested this week in Lindy Sue Biechler’s 1975 murder after a genealogist matched the suspect’s DNA on a discarded coffee cup. https://t.co/4UD3zpDjQr
— ABC 7 Chicago (@ABC7Chicago) July 19, 2022
“The finding of the extra coffee cup on the bottom of the bag and the totality of the circumstances is evidence that demonstrated to Det. Martin that the coffee cup on the bottom of the brown paper bag was Sinopoli’s cup or used by him,” the affidavit said.
The DNA on the cup matched DNA from semen found on Biechler’s underwear.
Sinopoli “was not on our radar,” Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams said, adding that “none of the tips over the years have suggested him as a possible suspect.”
Here’s what Adams said, according to ABC:
“There has been a never-ending pursuit of justice in this case that has led us to identifying and arresting Sinopoli. Certainly, law enforcement never forgot about Lindy Sue, and this arrest marks the first step to obtaining justice for her and holding her killer responsible.”
A significant number of cold cases have been solved using genealogy techniques in recent years, the most infamous of which was the arrest of the “Golden State Killer” in 2018.
These kinds of stories raise all kinds of concerns about privacy and ethics, but it’s undeniable the technique provides results.
Sources: WesternJournal, Lancaster Online, ABC
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