Episode Details

In 1964, the small town of Hazelton, Pennsylvania, was devastated by the abduction and murder of nine-year-old Marisa Chvarella. Despite interviewing thousands of people and investigating numerous predators over nearly six decades, local authorities were unable to identify the killer. The mystery was finally unraveled in 2020 by Eric Schubert, an eighteen-year-old college student with an extraordinary talent for forensic genealogy. By building complex family trees from degraded DNA found at the crime scene, Schubert narrowed the suspects down to the family of James Paul Fort. Though Fort died in 1980, investigators exhumed his body to confirm a perfect genetic match to the evidence. This breakthrough provided the Chvarella family with long-awaited answers and solidified the case as one of the oldest cold cases ever solved through genetic technology.

This episode includes AI-generated content.