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/
“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/
“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
” 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
