00:00For 58 years, police could not name the killer of a 9-year-old girl found in a Pennsylvania
00:06coal pit.
00:07Then, a 19-year-old with a laptop did it, in a single summer.
00:11March 18, 1964.
00:15Hazleton, Pennsylvania.
00:189-year-old Maurice Ann Chivarella walked to school carrying her books.
00:23A walk she had taken a hundred times.
00:26She never reached the classroom.
00:29Hours later, searchers found her in a nearby strip mining pit.
00:33The deep scars the coal industry had carved into the hills.
00:37She had been strangled.
00:39The town was shattered.
00:40And the investigation hit a wall almost immediately.
00:44Detectives interviewed hundreds of people and collected physical evidence far ahead of its time.
00:50But in 1964, DNA science did not exist yet.
00:54The sample sat in storage, waiting for a future the investigators could only dream of.
01:01The case went cold.
01:02Years became decades.
01:04Maurice's family never got answers.
01:07Her mother died still not knowing.
01:09Pennsylvania's oldest cold case became its most haunting.
01:13A file that refused to stay closed, but refused to open.
01:17Then came investigative genetic genealogy.
01:20The same science that caught the Golden State Killer.
01:24Upload crime scene DNA to a public ancestry database.
01:28Find distant relatives.
01:29And build a family tree that narrows to one name.
01:33Police needed someone to do the grinding work.
01:36That someone was Eric Schubert.
01:38A college student from Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.
01:42Just 19 years old.
01:44He had taught himself genetic genealogy from online videos and forums.
01:49When Hazleton police handed him Maurice's DNA.
01:52He said yes.
01:53Schubert spent months building family trees.
01:56Hundreds of them.
01:58One branch at a time.
01:59Late nights.
02:00Spreadsheets.
02:01Public records.
02:03The DNA pointed to one family line.
02:06One generation.
02:07One man.
02:09James Paul Forte.
02:1043 in 1964.
02:13Forte had died of a heart attack in 1980.
02:16He could never stand trial.
02:18But investigators exhumed his body and ran the DNA test.
02:23It matched.
02:2358 years later.
02:26Maurice's killer had a name.
02:28A teenager had done what police could not.
02:31In February 2022.
02:33Police closed the case.
02:35Maurice's family finally had an answer.
02:38Not from a veteran detective.
02:40But from a 19 year old with a laptop and an obsession.
02:43Some cases are solved by time.
02:46This one was solved by a kid who refused to let it go.
02:49He didn't know.
02:49Come here.
