On Jan. 11, 1980, Mark Madger returned to his Willoughby, Ohio, apartment after work to find a scene of sheer horror: his wife Nadine on the floor of the dining room, stabbed more than 40 times with a butcher knife that was still sticking out of her body, and their 6-month-old son unharmed in a playpen nearby.
For four decades, police could not crack the case of who murdered Nadine, who was just 25 when she died. But that changed in recent months thanks to a new forensic process, and some crucial clues: a bloodstained shirt, a yellow sports car, and some old work records.
Willoughby Police Chief Jim Schultz announced Wednesday that with the help of a DNA testing lab in Virginia and painstaking work to trace an unknown suspect’s family tree, investigators have determined that ex-Marine Stephen Joseph Simcak is the killer.
ADVERTISEMENT
Simcak died in 2018, so many of the Madger family’s questions about the crime remain unanswered. Her husband trembled with anger as he spoke at a press conference where details of the investigation were revealed.
“She fought for her life, she never had a chance,” he said of his wife. “She did not deserve this. If there’s a place in hell, I know he’s in it, and I know he rots there.”
After Nadine’s death, Willoughby police worked for two years to find the culprit with no luck. Their main lead was a neighbor’s recollection that around the time of the stabbing there was an unfamiliar canary-yellow car parked outside the Madgers’ building.
In 1996, the county crime lab was able to test the shirt Nadine was wearing and discovered that it contained her blood, but also the blood of an unknown male—apparently the killer. In 2014, they had the lab analyze the bloodstain pattern on the shirt, which suggested that the injured killer stood over Nadine, dripping his blood onto her.
“But the case basically stayed cold,” said Det. Gabriel Sleigh, who was leading the investigation at that time.
In 2018, the police department turned to Parabon NanoLabs in Virginia, which uses advanced DNA testing to help breathe new life into dormant cases.
The first thing the lab did was phenotyping, using the suspect’s DNA to determine some physical characteristics. In this case, the lab said the killer would be white with blue eyes and blond hair and Eastern European ancestry.
“At that point we could eliminate a lot of people off the suspect list,” Sleigh said.
Then they uploaded the suspect’s DNA profile to two huge databases and began looking for familial matches. They found two distant cousins, which was not enough to immediately lead them to a name.
Instead they traced those cousins’ family trees all the way back to a couple in the 1800s, and began reconstructing the family there. It was an arduous process with a few twists but they eventually landed on Simcak. However, because he was dead, they did not have DNA to confirm their hunch.
However, Simcak had a grandson who had died before him, and the coroner’s office still had that DNA, which they were able to test and ultimately conclude that he was the killer.
The investigation still wasn’t over. Sleigh dug into Simcak’s history and discovered that he owned a bright yellow Dodge Dart in 1980. He worked at Lincoln Electric, where old records showed that in the entire year, he had missed only one day: Jan. 11.
Simcak served in the Marines, was married to the same woman from 1963 until his death, and has no criminal record, police said. The fact that he is not alive to face charges rankles Nadine’s son, Daniel, now a grown man.
“After 42 years, I can finally put a face to the monster who took my mother from me, let alone in front of me in the most brutal way imaginable,” he said, adding, “I am angry and upset that [he] passed away as a free and carefree person.”
His father said it was a shock that they did get a face and a name after so many years.
“I thought Nadine’s killer would never be found,” he said.
Editor’s note: This has been updated with the correct date of the crime.
