Hearbtreaking story of Marise Chiverella

For nearly six decades, a small Pennsylvania mining town carried a wound that never quite healed. In 1964, a 9-year-old girl walked out of her house on an ordinary school morning and never came home. Her killer’s identity remained a mystery for so long that most people who remembered the case assumed it would stay that way forever — until a 20-year-old college student and a stubborn team of state troopers proved them wrong.

An Ordinary Walk to School

On the morning of March 18, 1964, Marise Ann Chiverella left her family’s home in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, to walk the roughly half-mile route to St. Joseph’s Parochial School. She was carrying canned goods for a school donation drive, planning to hand them off to a nun before heading to class. Marise was described by those who knew her as a sweet, somewhat shy girl who was learning to play the organ and dreamed of one day becoming a nun herself.

She was last seen alive around 8:10 that morning. She never arrived at school.

When Marise didn’t show up for class and failed to come home for lunch as she always did, her family and the surrounding community immediately understood something was terribly wrong. A search began almost at once.

A Devastating Discovery

That afternoon, a man teaching his teenage nephew how to drive spotted what looked like a doll lying in a strip-mining pit in Hazle Township, roughly two miles from where Marise had last been seen, near the Hazleton Municipal Airport. As they got closer, they realized with horror that it wasn’t a doll at all.

It was Marise.

Investigators determined that she had been abducted somewhere along her walk to school, se*ually assaulted, and strangled to death. Her wrists and ankles had been bound with her own shoelaces, and a scarf had been stuffed in her mouth. The canned goods she’d been carrying for her school’s donation drive were found near her body — a small, heartbreaking detail that underscored just how ordinary her morning had been before it turned into a nightmare.

A Community Forever Changed

The m*rder shook Hazleton to its core. As one investigator later put it, the way people in the community lived their daily lives changed after that day — parents who had never worried about their children walking to school suddenly did.

Detectives worked the case hard in the months that followed, but with 1960s-era forensic technology, there was little to go on. No suspect was ever identified. As the years passed, the case went cold, but it was never closed. Generations of Pennsylvania State Police investigators — more than 230 troopers over the decades, by some estimates — continued to revisit the file, hoping that someday, technology would catch up to the evidence they’d carefully preserved.

The Break That Took Decades

The first real breakthrough came in 2007, when the Pennsylvania State Police DNA lab was able to develop a genetic profile of the suspect from biological evidence preserved on Marise’s jacket. Investigators uploaded the profile and checked it monthly against new entries in criminal DNA databases. Month after month, year after year, there was no match. Whoever had killed Marise had never been arrested for a crime that required submitting DNA — or so it seemed.

The case’s fortunes changed in 2019, when investigators partnered with Parabon NanoLabs and uploaded the suspect’s DNA profile to GEDmatch, a public genealogical database used by amateur genealogists to trace family trees. This approach, known as investigative genetic genealogy, doesn’t look for a direct match to a known criminal. Instead, it searches for genetic relatives — however distant — who can help investigators build out a family tree and eventually narrow in on a single person.

That’s where Eric Schubert came in. A college student and self-taught genetic genealogy expert who had been volunteering his skills on cold cases, Schubert took on what he later called the hardest genealogical puzzle of his life. Piecing together distant family connections revealed by the DNA, he constructed an extensive family tree that eventually helped investigators narrow their suspect list down to just four names.

One of those four had a record that made him stand out immediately.

Identifying James Paul Forte

That man was James Paul Forte, who had been 22 years old at the time of Marise’s m*rder. Forte lived only six or seven blocks from the Chiverella family, though investigators found no evidence that he had any personal connection to Marise or her relatives. He was, as far as anyone could tell, a stranger who crossed her path at exactly the wrong moment.

Forte worked as a bartender and bar supplies salesman in the Hazleton area for most of his adult life. He was born and raised in Hazleton, never married, and had no known children. He did, however, have a documented history of se*ual violence: in 1974, he was arrested on charges that included rape and se*ual assault, in a case investigators later described as an extremely violent attack on another victim. Forte ultimately pleaded to a lesser charge of aggravated assault and received only one year of probation. In 1978, he was arrested again, this time on charges of reckless endangerment and harassment.

James Paul Forte died in May 1980, at 38 or 39 years old, of what is believed to have been a heart attack — decades before anyone connected him to Marise’s m*rder.

Confirming the Match

Investigators weren’t willing to name a dead man as a child’s killer without absolute certainty. In January 2022, with court approval, Forte’s remains were exhumed so a tissue sample could be taken and tested against the DNA evidence preserved from Marise’s jacket since 2007.

On February 3, 2022, the results came back: a match. According to police, the statistical odds of the DNA belonging to anyone other than Forte were almost incomprehensibly small — investigators described it as more certain than finding another genetic match among every person who has ever lived on Earth, many times over.

Answers, Not Closure

On February 10, 2022, nearly 58 years after Marise disappeared on her walk to school, Pennsylvania State Police held a press conference to announce that her m*rder had finally been solved. It was believed to be the oldest cold case ever solved using genetic genealogy in Pennsylvania history, and one of the oldest in the United States.

Marise’s siblings, including her brother Ronald and sister Carmen Marie Radtke, attended the announcement alongside the investigators — some now retired — who had carried the case forward across generations. Ronald told local reporters that knowing Forte’s identity brought a sense of closure, tempered by the certainty that they would never get the closure they truly wanted, which was Marise herself back. Carmen spoke about the family’s enduring grief and the questions about the life Marise never got to live.

Because Forte had died more than four decades earlier, he could never be arrested, tried, or held accountable in a courtroom. There would be no trial, no verdict, no sentencing. For the investigators who had devoted careers to the case, and for a family that had waited nearly six decades, the DNA match had to serve as the only justice this case would ever deliver.

A Legacy in Cold Case Science

Marise Chiverella’s case has since become a landmark example of how investigative genetic genealogy — the same technique that helped identify California’s Golden State Killer in 2018 — can reach back further than almost anyone believed possible, cracking cases that predate DNA testing itself by decades. For the Pennsylvania State Police, it was proof that evidence carefully preserved in the 1960s, long before anyone could have imagined the technology that would eventually make sense of it, was never wasted.

For Hazleton, it closed a chapter that had shadowed the town since 1964. And for Marise’s family, it finally answered a question they had carried for a lifetime — even if the answer came far too late to deliver the justice they’d once hoped for.