Monday, October 23, 2017

April Marie Tinsley





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. 


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.




A teenager had claimed he had seen a man writing on the barn, which prompted the call to Police. The message was allegedly written in three media: pencil, crayon, and permanent marker. This message appeared shortly after a local paper had run a story on the two-year anniversary of April’s disappearance. The message claimed the writer was responsible for the murder and rape of April. Along with message, the perpetrator left behind his DNA.

The case then went cold again, with no new action for fourteen years. In 2004, notes began to appear in the Fort Wayne area. In total, four notes were found. Two of the notes were found on little girls’ bicycles. Another one was found in the basket of a little girl’s bike. The final note was placed in a mailbox.

The notes that were placed with the bicycles were all discovered by little girls; meanwhile, the note in the mailbox was discovered by a letter carrier before the girl could get the mail. Every note was inside a Ziploc bag and written on yellow legal pad paper. Every note began with the phrase “Hi Honey” and had some version of I have been watching you. One note in particular, stated that if it was not on the local news the writer would blow up the child’s house.




Along with these letters some other things were found. With one of the notes a used condom was found. The DNA taken from the condom matched that found at the barn where the message was written and on April’s body. Polaroid photographs were also found with some of the notes. The photographs depicted a naked white male masturbating. The photos were disturbing.
 
The photo above shows a bedspread from one of the polaroid photographs. Authorities released it in hopes that someone might be able to identify the bedspread. Police went to local hotels and bedding stores in search of the blanket in the photograph. The pattern is similar to those often seen in cheap hotels.

In 2009, five years after the notes were left Fort Wayne police began to work more closely with the FBI. The FBI brought in experts from the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Unit (CARD). This unit is divided into teams that are made up of behavioral analysists, crime against children specialists, coordinators from the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes and persons from the violent criminal apprehension program.

The same year April Tinsley’s case would be featured on America’s Most Wanted, hosted by John Walsh, for the first time. During this time, the FBI released their full profile of the suspect to the public. Authorities set up a hotline that the public could call in order to hear the full description. It was believed the man was probably not a parent. He more than likely befriended people with children and was seen as being good with children. Sometimes, he might be perceived as overly friendly.

Again, the case would grow cold after it received more than 50 tips thanks to America’s Most Wanted. The suspect list for the case was made up of over 600 people. America’s most wanted revisited Fort Wayne and the April Tinsley case in 2012.The FBI also released this map relating to April's case while working with America's Most Wanted. 


When covering the case this time, America’s Most Wanted were told of a piece of information the police had never released to the public. When April’s body was found a crude sex toy was found near the body. The object had been wrapped in a sears bag and had DNA on it. This information led to new outrage among the community over the case, but sadly leading nowhere.

New hope would spring up in 2015. A company called Parabon offered its services to the Fort Wayne Police Department. The department jumped at the offer. Parabon has a tool that they call Snapshot.
Snapshot uses the genetic traits that are found in DNA to produce the physical characteristics of an individual. From just nanograms of DNA, they are able to tell eye, hair, and skin color. The limitation is that they are unable to tell the height, weight, or age of the individual whose DNA has been tested. 


 In 2016, Parabon partnered with the Fort Wayne Police released this DNA composite sketch. From the DNA, they knew the suspect had brown or black hair, hazel or green eyes, and a bone structure similar to the one in the sketch above. A forensic artist took the information from the computer program and produced this sketch. The sketch on the left would have been the suspect at the time of April’s abduction going off the age the witness gave to police. The face on the right is supposed to show the age progression of the suspect on the left.

This technology led to the arrest and conviction in a double-murder out of North Carolina in 2017. The suspect had previously been cleared and taken off the list of suspects until the parabon sketch was produced in that case.

The Snapshot sketch provided by Parabon allowed the Fort Wayne authorities to narrow the suspect list. It went from having 600 suspects to having between 120 and 150 persons of interest.

Anyone with information regarding this case is asked to contact the authorities. You can contact the Fort Wayne Police Department with information regarding the April Tinsley case at (260) 427-1222.

As a way to honor April’s memory, in 2012, her neighborhood constructed a memorial garden for her. Her mother receives comfort knowing that April’s little brother shares many of the same mannerisms that her daughter possessed. Even almost 30 years later, a community and family deserves answers.

____________________Sources________________________________________

WANE TV NEWS Sources:

Podcast:
True Crime Garage. Episode 7. “April Tinsley.” Available for purchase on iTunes and Amazon.
True Crime Guy. “A Monster in Fort Wayne; The Murder of April Marie Tinsley.” http://truecrimeguy.com/april-marie-tinsley/

Articles:

“April Tinsley Kidnapping and Murder Still Baffles Police.” Traciy Reyes. The Inquistr. July 5, 2015. https://www.inquisitr.com/2227504/april-tinsley-disappearance-and-murder-still-baffles-police/

“Cold Case Heats Up: Help Solve 1988 Murder, Part 1.” The FBI. April 3, 2009. https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2009/april/tinsley_040309

“Help Us Solve These Crimes: April Tinsley.” The Fort Wayne Police Department. July 5, 2016. http://www.fwpd.org/help_us_solve/april-tinsley-investigation/

“Hitting the Airwaves, Help Solve Cold Case, Part 2.” The FBI. April 14, 2009. https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2009/april/amw_041409-part-2

“In Search of a Killer. Help Solve Cold Case, Part 3.” The FBI. May 19, 2009. https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2009/may/april-tinsley-murder-pt.-3

“New Forensic DNA Analysis Produces Image of Cold-Case Killer at Large.” Andrea Isom. Crime Watch Daily. June 2, 2016. October 16, 2017. https://crimewatchdaily.com/2016/05/02/young-girl-murdered-police-receive-series-of-disturbing-taunts/

“Parabon’s DNA Phenotyping had Crucial Role in North Carolina Double-Murder Arrest, Conviction.” Seth Augenstein. Forensic Magazine. January 5, 2017. October 20, 2017. https://www.forensicmag.com/news/2017/01/parabons-dna-phenotyping-had-crucial-role-north-carolina-double-murder-arrest-conviction

“Police Release Updated Rendering of Suspected Tinsley Killer.” WANE Staff Reporters. May 3, 2016. http://wane.com/2016/05/03/police-release-updated-rendering-of-suspected-tinsley-killer/

” Putting a Face to DNA: How New Tech Gives Hope in Cold Cases.” Kate Snow. NBC NEWS. June 30, 2015. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dna-mugshot-how-new-tech-gives-hope-cold-cases-n384771






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