For nearly 58 years, the rape and murder of a 9-year-old Pennsylvania girl walking to school eluded investigators. But on Thursday, authorities announced they’ve finally caught her killer.
Lieutenant Devon Brutosky revealed Thursday that James Paul Forte, a local bartender who died in May 1980, murdered Marise Anne Chiverella, abducting her as she was on her way to school. Forte would have been 22 when he committed the crime.
“We’re always told not to get attached to a case, but you can’t help it,” a lead investigator on the case, Corporal Mark Baron said through tears during a press conference Thursday. “It’s a vivid memory for everybody who lived through this and it’s a vivid memory for everybody who grew up in this area. You were told by a grandparent, a parent, an aunt, an uncle—this is Marise’s story.”
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Forte’s body was exhumed in January and his DNA was found to be a match to DNA on the little girl’s jacket on Feb. 3—years after her body was discovered beaten and strangled in a strip mine, police said.
“This is the fourth oldest cold case to be solved in the country utilizing genetic genealogy,” Baron said, touting the discovery of the matching DNA. “It’s the oldest in the state.”
Baron said that he had spent “countless hours” poring over Chivarella’s case since he was assigned to it in 2017.
“What happened to her ushered in a change in this community. Whether you like it or not, the way you lived changed, after March 18, 1964 in Hazleton,” he said.
At around 8:10 a.m. that day, Chiverella was carrying canned food to drop at a local church in Luzerne County en route to school, but never made it to class, The Express-Times reported.
Pennsylvania authorities said the little girl’s body was found that afternoon about two miles away with the canned goods she was believed to be carrying strewn nearby. For decades, no arrests were made and for its first 40 years, police relied on “old fashioned police work,” Brutosky said.
But investigators eventually turned to DNA and genealogy as technology evolved, he said.
In 2007, the Pennsylvania State Police’s DNA lab developed a suspect profile from DNA found on Chiverella’s jacket. DNA profiles for all of the original suspects in the case were submitted to the lab, Brutosky said, but none matched.
The DNA profile was then checked monthly against new entries.
For years, investigators failed to turn up a lead—until 2019, when the profile was sent to the DNA database GEDMatch which located a distant match, Brutosky said.
Through family tree research that used Census, military and newspaper records, closer matches were gradually reached.
While exploring family names linked to the match, police said they were led to a New Jersey State Police captain who connected investigators with a family member who kept records of their ancestry.
In 2020 and 2021, investigators interviewed a series of relatives and were able to collect DNA samples from them, before using those findings to narrow the pool of suspects down to four people. One of them was Forte.
Eric Schubert, a 20-year-old volunteer genealogy expert on the case, said that he had been working with police for two years to find a close DNA match.
At the beginning, Schubert said, the highest DNA match to Chivarella’s assailant in public DNA databases was “very, very low,”—equalling about 53 centimorgans—which are units used to measure genetic linkages.
The team eventually scaled up to roughly 1,200 centimorgans, closing in on a DNA match which might be shared with a cousin, he said.
According to Brutosky, through that research Forte became the investigation’s “main suspect” and his body was exhumed to obtain a sample of DNA, which ultimately matched the semen on Chivarella’s jacket.
“We aren’t under the impression that this is the only crime he may have committed,” Brutosky said, adding that police learned Forte had been arrested at least two other times—once in 1974 for various sex-related crimes and again in 1978 for reckless endangerment and harassment.
Luzerne County District Attorney Sam Sanguedolce said he regretted that Forte, who is believed to have died of natural causes at age 38, wouldn’t be prosecuted, but declared that Chiverella’s killer would “face his own vengeance.”
