The Heinous Murder of 9-Year-Old Marise Chiverella | Bloodline Detectives with Nancy Grace | Forensic Files

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: 1964, a spring morning in Hazleton, Pennsylvania.
Nine-year-old Marise Chiverella ready to walk by herself to school. She says goodbye to her family, but they
will never see her alive again. ANTHONY PETROSKI: She had left early. She walked by herself to school.
And at that time, this was a very safe neighborhood. You were allowed to walk by yourself.
And she did. And unfortunately, she never came home that day. NANCY GRACE: By lunchtime on that very same day, little
Marise Chiverella body discovered. Marise has been murdered in a savage attack. Marise is found about 25 feet down this slope into this pit.
KRYSTEN QUINN: Marise was found fully clothed. It was her hands and her feet were bound with her shoelaces.
And a colorful scarf that she was wearing that day was pushed so far back in her throat
that it actually knocked out a tooth. And how could someone do this to a little child?
NANCY GRACE: Little Marise Chiverella's family and the tight-knit community of Hazleton
are devastated by her murder. Police work every lead they've got, but still the case goes cold for over half a century.
Then, a new forensic science, investigative genetic genealogy and an unusual twist gives detectives another chance.
RON CHIVERELLA: It seems to be expanding across the country. And that's a wonderful gateway for so many individuals
like-- like my family to get more answers to what really happened to their loved ones.
This is a story about the cruelest of crimes, the brutal murder of a beautiful child
and how a family yearns for answers for nearly 60 years. I'm Nancy Grace. This is "Bloodline Detectives."
[THEME MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Hazleton, Pennsylvania, 1964, a beautiful town just three
hours west of New York City. ANTHONY PETROSKI: It was a wonderful time. The city was beautiful.
A lot of good local businesses. A great community. You were able to leave your door unlocked.
It was a good place to raise children. Marise was a quiet, shy little girl. She was nine years old and she was very petite.
She had dark hair, blue eyes. I think she was an incredible little girl. RON CHIVERELLA: There were five of us children in the family.
Looking and thinking of the personalities of my siblings, they all have a great sense of humor.
And that originated from my father. But my mother had a unique personality, when it came to humor.
She was a trickster. And that rubbed off on all of us, including Marise. She had an excellent personality,
was loved by her classmates at school and really had a strong taking to prayer. Because my mother prayed in the morning and then
in the evening before she went to bed. Marise then also, when she was in second grade,
told us that she was aspiring to become a Catholic nun, a teacher, a sister. And that's what she had in grade school
were Catholic nuns teaching. NANCY GRACE: Little Marise Chiverella leaves for school
that morning with a mission in mind, to give her teacher, the nun, a gift. RON CHIVERELLA: Once a year, it was a tradition
at Saint Joseph's school to recognize and celebrate your teacher, your nun. Marise had asked my mother and father,
you know, what can I bring as a gift? Because the children would bring gifts. And having a grocery store, my father
suggested, why don't we give you some canned goods to take? Marise needed, as the other students in her class,
needed to get whatever their gifts were into their classroom and then scoot over to church in time
so they're not late for 8 o'clock mass. Marise said, I'm gonna get going because I've gotta get
these gifts into the school. Carmen Marie, and Barry said, you know, OK, we'll be-- we'll be right behind you.
She was last seen in front of 212 West 4th Street by a cousin of the family through a window.
And that was around maybe like 8:10 in the morning. And that was the last time that anybody that we know of
can definitively say that they saw Marise Chiverella alive. It wasn't until lunchtime her sister asked her father like,
hey, has Marise been in yet? And they realized then that something was wrong. They returned back to school.
They spoke with the nun that was Marise's teacher. And she said that Marise had been marked absent that day.
They then went to the priest, talked to the priest. And they started organizing a search party
with other children and teachers and, you know, janitorial staff and everything, looking for Marise.
DEVON BRUTOSKY: The priest called the Hazleton City Police Department. And they initiated a missing persons report.
NANCY GRACE: The search for little Marise Chiverella, just nine years old, ends just hours after it begins.
It's a terrible discovery that casts a shadow over the quiet Pennsylvania town. MARK BARON: At around 1 o'clock in the afternoon,
there was a individual and his nephew that were driving around in the area of a abandoned strip hole that was used for refuse,
so a garbage dump. They had gotten out of their vehicle. They looked down into this garbage pit.
And about 25 feet from the very top of the pit, they noticed what appeared to them to be
like a doll, a large doll. And that intrigued them. They go down closer, realize that it is not a doll.
It is actually a juvenile female. They have no idea who this juvenile female is,
but they believe that she to be dead. They leave the area. They go back to their residence and they tell another family
member of what they find. And that family member telephones the Pennsylvania State police at about 1:15 in the afternoon.
DEVON BRUTOSKY: At that time, what they would do is just quarter off the area and wait for a forensic member to come out.
Even though we're advanced in forensic science now, we still had forensic people then
that did what was normal and typical for forensics at that time. They would process the scene, take
photographs, and try and identify exactly who this person was. At that time, what would happen in situations like that,
they would have priests come out to issue last rites and view people that were deceased.
The priest from the school, knowing that Marise was missing and also knowing that it was a young child found,
he and another priest came out. He was the first one that identified her at the scene.
NANCY GRACE: Both the priests and first responders are overwhelmed by the sheer brutality of the crime scene
before them. KRYSTEN QUINN: Marise was found fully clothed. And she just didn't have her shoes on.
They were right next to her body. It was her hands and her feet were bound with her shoe laces.
And a colorful scarf that she was wearing that day was pushed so far back in her throat
that it actually knocked out a tooth. And her book bag filled with the canned goods and her pocket
book and her school books were placed right next to her, as well. It's very disturbing, it is.
We're talking about a nine-year-old girl, a nine-year-old girl that was bound together with her own shoelaces, deceased.
Very hard, very hard. You know, try to explain that to the family. I can't imagine how the troopers did.
It's never easy to tell a loved one that their family members are coming home, especially when this is so new to the community
back in 1964. When I first heard about a concern for Marise, I was on my way home from high school.
I see this black car pull across the intersection, stop, and then started backing up.
Getting out of the vehicle was Father Rabell, one of our priests. He put his hands on my shoulders, very solemn looking.
And he sort of leaned into me. And he said, Ronald, go home. Your mother needs you.
Your sister Marise is dead. I think I was also in a sense of denial. I couldn't believe.
I was living a dream, a nightmare. But I wasn't. NANCY GRACE: Parents in Hazleton all afraid of brutal child
killer could strike again. ANTHONY PETROSKI: But fortunately because of this horrific crime, it really changed the narrative
for the Hazleton community in the fact that we can't leave our doors unlocked anymore.
We can't just let our children walk by themselves to school or to the park afterwards.
We have to keep an eye on them more. One of the worst fears for any parent or any female,
it's been one of my fears my entire life of something like that happening. So I can't imagine being nine years old
and having to endure what she did. Pennsylvania State troopers struggled to make headway in the case.
They have very few leads, no witnesses, and a predatory child killer on the loose.
That's next on "Bloodline Detectives." [SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC] [SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: 1964, Hazleton, Pennsylvania,
nine-year-old Marise Chiverella disappears while walking the short distance to school.
Just hours later, her little body discovered. State troopers are shocked by the crime scene.
They search for any clues left behind by the killer. Investigators believe that she was placed there.
And we say that she was placed there because on her clothing, there's no, like, foreign material, no dirt, no nothing,
nothing that would indicate that she was rolled down this hill or thrown from a vehicle or something like that
or thrown by somebody down there. Rather, she was placed. Being a state trooper investigating a crime,
you have to look at everything as a whole, the totality of the crime scene. You can't just look at one part of it.
And troopers back in 1964 did a phenomenal job collecting physical evidence, collecting DNA,
collecting clothing. KRYSTEN QUINN: She was wearing a sweater, a black skirt and stockings, and a jacket with a colorful scarf.
The day before Marise's murder, it snowed. So down in the stripping pit, they gathered everything that they could
that was on top of the snow. It kind of helped them a little bit because it was actually a dumping ground
for a lot of garbage. That helped them collect that type of evidence. They also found a frozen tire track
and they made a mold of that. MARK BARON: As far as, like, evidence that they're
collecting, obviously all the clothing that she wears, they're taking possession of that.
You know, her book bag, that's in the general area, the shoes. They collected a piece of Rockwool insulation
that supposedly had a footprint on it. Items that looked like they were recently placed
there were taken, even though they may seem very strange in nature that you're picking up.
I mean, assorted papers that may have a person's name on it. They collected an empty milk carton.
They collected an empty ice cream container. When you have nothing to work with initially,
anything could go ahead and be that little bit of a breakthrough. Because once you collect that evidence, you send it off for,
you know, trace evidence testing or maybe there's blood on it. Or maybe you could get a hair fiber off of something.
Things can just snowball for the-- for the good when you get that-- that-- that first piece of evidence.
And then you're just rolling. NANCY GRACE: The next day Marise Chiverella's grieving father
makes a heartbreaking request. RON CHIVERELLA: My father had asked to go and see the location where Marise's body was found.
Police agreed. And I went with my father because my mother had told me the day before, stay with your father.
Take care of your father. So I went with my dad and the Pennsylvania State police.
And we went to the trash dump where they found Marise's body. And that was a very heart rattling, shaking experience
for both me and my father. I have never been back there since-- since that point
in time. NANCY GRACE: Autopsy confirms the worst fears of the family, of police, and of the tight-knit community.
The results of the autopsy were that she was sexually assaulted and that she was killed by blunt force trauma and strangulation.
Some police actually attended the funeral and some police actually documented the people that attended the funeral.
Believing that it's possible that the killer could have attended the funeral, being such a small community,
we wanted to document everybody that was attending the funeral. So they did both.
Some went to mourn with the family and some went to investigate and make sure we could collect information
that we may need later. RON CHIVERELLA: Seeing her in her coffin, she had in her hands her prayer book along with a pair
of white rosaries. And she looked beautiful. NANCY GRACE: Months pass. Possible suspects come, then go.
Pennsylvania State troopers continue to work the case, following up on leads and keeping
the Chiverella family informed. The Pennsylvania State police were there every day
for the first several weeks, giving my mother and father updates on what was transpiring.
And they were working 18 hour days, staying and sleeping at the barracks, getting maybe four or five hours of sleep, and then back out.
And they did that for several months without any pay. They weren't getting paid overtime.
There was no such thing as paid overtime. They were doing it from the goodness of their hearts
and their own minds of how horrible the crime was. MARK BARON: They were obtaining lists of sex offenders
that were from the area. They checked each and every one of them out. Sex offenders that were out of the area
that were known to police, they checked everyone out. Absentees from school who were males and that
were of age that could have committed this type of crime, they were checked out.
All of the guests at local motels and hotels within a 25-mile radius that stayed
here on the night of March 17, all of them were contacted. All of them were checked out, be it
by our department or our department contacting a local department in another state
perhaps and saying, can you go ahead and reach out to these people and see what they were doing in Hazleton
and-- and try to-- try to verify something. DEVON BRUTOSKY: Back in 1964 and all the way into the '80s,
we used basically teletype systems. So you would send out teletype messages to different departments asking if they could provide
any details on similar cases. We had cases all throughout the Northeast United States
that they sent teletypes out to and information came back. They reached out to many different agencies.
They followed up every lead they could. And eventually, it just came to a standstill.
After a year of investigating, they actually had 9,000 contacts which lead to over 22,000
man hours, 116,000 miles traveled, and over 3,000 files of police paperwork. But all of this led to no leads.
And that's when the case went cold. ANTHONY PETROSKI: I don't know of one investigator
who gave up hope on this case. They always said that this is a solvable case. It is.
We need a little bit more technology. And we need somebody fresh to take a look at it.
As we see next on "Bloodline Detectives," the fresh look comes from a very clever teen
with a passion for genealogy. [SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC] [SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Hazleton, Pennsylvania, 1964,
nine-year-old little Marise Chiverella disappears walking to school. Hours later, her brutalized body discovered.
Police pursue every available lead. But in the end, the case goes cold. Now, over 40 years later, a new investigator takes
another look at the evidence. In 2007, with advancements in technology, they found a semen stain on one article of clothing
that she was wearing the day of the homicide. From that, a DNA profile for a suspect was able to be created.
And that was entered into CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System that the FBI maintains.
That profile was then immediately checked against known and unknown samples, both on the state level and the national level.
Every week or bi-weekly that that profile was checked with no matches. NANCY GRACE: Investigators are making progress.
The DNA recovered from the crime scene provides a unique marker connected to the man they believe is Marise Chiverella's killer.
They don't, however, have a name. They then turn to the FBI'S profiling division
in Quantico, Virginia for a possible match. DEVON BRUTOSKY: Our criminal investigation assessment
officers went down to Quantico. And they presented our case. And they were given a profile source
of who to look for, who might have committed the crime, and some areas to maybe further
the investigation, look into these types of people from back then as to who could be the suspect.
With that, they-- they move forward with the old fashioned police work and talking to people.
However, again, it became fruitless. 2018, advances in DNA technology offer a glimmer of hope for a breakthrough in little
Marise Chiverella's murder. Parabon NanoLabs in Virginia, a pioneer in the DNA process called phenotyping,
joins the investigation. MARK BARON: They concluded that he was probably a Southern European, Middle
Eastern heritage. And I know that they said with about 90% confidence that the suspect was going to have either hazel
or green colored eyes. Lieutenant Brutosky, who was the troop and criminal investigation unit section commander,
he approached me and said that they were working with Parabon about developing some phenotype sketches
of the potential killer. And he said we were gonna have a press conference to update
the community members on this. I said that sounds like a great idea. We wanted to show the community that, number one, this case,
we're not giving up on it and we're never going to. And number two, if you recognize, maybe you
see these sketches and you recognize a person, give us a call. It was all about getting potential leads.
You know, we're only as good as the community that we serve. So if the community can provide us information,
we will gladly take it. NANCY GRACE: The press conference yields not a single lead.
But it does introduce a new twist in the investigation, Eric Schubert, a teenage genetic genealogy prodigy,
offers his assistance. I was homesick a lot when I was a kid. So I would be, you know, home, bored, annoying my mother,
the typical things a 10-year-old would do. I would always see commercials for genealogy, stuff like that.
And then on one of these occasions when I was home, my mother I suppose saw one of those commercials
again for a big genealogy site. And I guess the idea sort of popped into her head,
you know, you're home, you say you like this. Here's my computer. Here's my account.
How about you have some fun with this for two weeks. I sort of just quickly took a liking to it
and I never put that laptop down. ANTHONY PETROSKI: It was February 5, 2020. And I received an email from ES Genealogy.
It was from a Mr. Eric Schubert. I had never heard of him before. And he had sent me an email saying that he had seen
our press conference in regards to the Marise Ann Chiverella case. And he was looking into the case himself and the history
of the case, that it's one of the oldest cold cases in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania
and that he saw the pictures that Parabon gave us, the phenotype sketches and that he
thinks he could help. And so further in the email, it says that he's a genealogist
and he has 10 years of experience, which at the time, he was only 18 years old. Now, he offered his services pro bono.
And he said he would love to help and be part of this team. At the bottom of the email, there
was a link for his website. And I clicked on that. And it brought up his website, very professional.
The email was very well written. And there was a picture of him. And, I mean, no disrespect by this,
but he looked like a child. And I thought to myself, is this real? I get a lot of emails every single day.
Can this be real? NANCY GRACE: It's an extraordinary offer. State troopers decide to meet the
fresh faced teen genealogist. He came prepared like it was a job interview. He provided us contact information
for two other police departments so that we could go ahead and talk to them regarding the work that he did for them.
ANTHONY PETROSKI: Myself and Corporal Barron had a coffee. Eric had an apple juice and we sat there
and he treated this like it was the job interview of his life. But one thing that really stuck out to myself
and Corporal Barron was he said, I can help solve this case. And he wasn't being cocky when he said that.
He was being confident. And there was something about that confidence in an 18-year-old who shows up at a coffee shop
drinking apple juice giving us his resume, showing us his work. It was impressive.
I'm confident enough that, like, when you're talking with law enforcement on this,
you're the expert in the room. And if you get that relationship, you recognize that they are on the investigative side
when you have leads. And they know better than you on that. But you might know better than them on the genealogy side.
If you get that balance, it works. And we had the best team working with PSP on the Chiverella case.
So I think that plays a lot into it. We walked away from that meeting thinking that Eric was the real deal.
NANCY GRACE: After decades, the investigation is now in the hands of a young genealogist,
a teenager born more than 30 years after Marise Chiverella's murder. Eric Schubert brings more than youthful expertise.
He applies techniques he uses to reveal a normal family tree. Except in this case, his goal is to reveal the name of a killer.
Forensic genetic genealogy is the same process that I would do to find a parent,
find someone's grandparent, that sort of thing. Except you're finding a killer or a rapist.
You don't know who the DNA is from. You're working backwards. And it's a very effective application of the technique.
He would talk to me daily, at the bare minimum weekly. ANTHONY PETROSKI: I would describe it as a big brother,
little brother. That's how I would describe Corporal Baron and Eric. They were professional with each other.
But they also felt comfortable with each other. So they can have those talks where they could say,
I don't think so. Look somewhere else. I don't think you're right on that. And it was a good, professional relationship.
They had a very good rapport. NANCY GRACE: The friendship between teenager Eric Schubert
and a Pennsylvania State trooper gives a comfort zone for the amateur genealogist so he can focus on Marise
Chiverella's murderer. Eric Schubert looks for connections between the suspect's DNA and local records.
He studies archives, old newspapers, and online sources. It's tedious work. But step by step, Eric Schubert gets
closer and closer to the heart of the killer's family tree. He then comes back to me and says,
I think I have a pretty good idea of what line of this family tree our suspect is going to be on.
Now, he prefaced everything by telling me that, like, Italian genealogy is very difficult because of records.
Like, they may or they may not exist. ERIC SCHUBERT: I was giving him names of people that I thought
were connected in some way. And he was basically just telling me hair color, eye
color, do they have a record? Because it was a violent crime. We knew, you know, who did this probably had a record.
So we figured that was at least a way to quell it down. Piece by piece, Eric Schubert assembles the genetic jigsaw
puzzle, until remarkably he uncovers what has been hidden over half a century. The identity of Marise Chiverella's killer.
That's next on "Bloodline Detectives." [SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC] [SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Hazleton, Pennsylvania, 2020,
18-year-old Eric Schubert, a prodigy in investigative genetic genealogy, is close to solving the 1964 murder of nine-year-old Marise
Chiverella. Marise disappears walking to school. Just hours later, she is found dead,
the victim of a vicious sex attack and murder. I'll never forget when we really got the match, which
was leading into all this big family tree and these family members. We were able to determine that there was a network.
All these DNA matches who are related to the subject are also related to this family.
Our person who did this also must be descended from that family. It wasn't a super strong match.
But it just allowed us to say, OK, we're doing something right. We know we're in the right direction.
Let's dive into this family. Schubert was giving Mark names as to whom may be associated
or related to the specimen that had been found on Marise's blouse. Mark and I would go out and obtain
buccal swabs from whom we believed would be family members. MARK BARON: We had gotten a DNA sample from an individual.
And it was like 1,100 centimorgans. And we're like, [EXHALES],, that's like a first
or a second cousin. Quite honestly, like, when we went and we talked to this individual, I was 100%, and I'm being honest when
I tell you this, I thought that whomever I was looking for was still a distant relation that was probably
from New York or New Jersey. I didn't think that it would be somebody that was from the area.
When we had narrowed in on this big family tree and we were really getting into Hazleton
and going through some of these names, we basically whittled down our list to four people.
DEVON BRUTOSKY: Of the four men, one was still alive at the time. We initially went down and sat on his house
with some undercover people. And we were gonna pull some trash and get a DNA profile from the trash.
We waited a few days, and they didn't put their trash out. So we decided that Corporal Baron and Trooper
Quiroz were just gonna do what they had been doing all along. And they were gonna approach him and explain what we were doing.
And we're working on this case. And it would significantly help if we could get your DNA profile.
So the gentlemen agreed. We took his profile. Corporal Baron went to the airport.
We got our airplane. And he flew it to the DNA lab out near Pittsburgh. And we had that processed overnight.
And so we were very eager to get that because if this was our suspect, we were gonna make an arrest.
NANCY GRACE: The swab taken from the potential suspect does not deliver the 100% match investigators want.
It does, however, point them in the right direction. The Y-DNA from that gentleman did not match.
So now we were on to two brothers. So there was two brothers on one side and two brothers on the other.
So once we knew this brother's DNA didn't match, the Y-DNA, we knew it had to be one of the other two brothers.
JAMES QUIROZ: We looked at criminal histories. We did our due diligence. We did our research.
And we found that James Forte had a criminal history. His brother Frank did not.
His brother had passed about a year prior to us getting there. Corporal Barron and I went and visited Frank Ford's widow.
And we asked her if he had any belongings that may have DNA on them. She provided us a couple of combs,
hairbrushes, and razor blades that had hair samplings on it. We then submitted those to the lab.
And they excluded Frank. NANCY GRACE: The power of investigative genetic genealogy
and the determination of investigators combined to deliver to a breakthrough-- a list of four suspects.
It's reduced to a single name-- James Forte. James Forte was from the Hazleton area.
He had died in 1980 at the age of 38 of apparent natural causes. He was a bartender.
From the limited information we have on James Forte, because his name did not appear in our report
from the original investigators, in 1974 he was arrested and charged for involuntary deviate sexual intercourse,
indecent assault, and aggravated assault. That was in 1974. And then I believe in 1978, he was arrested, according
to the newspaper, for recklessly endangering another person and harassment by communication.
NANCY GRACE: The evidence against James Forte is strong. But it does not prove with an absolute 100%
certainty he is the man that cruelly murdered Marise Chiverella. To be sure Forte's the killer, investigators
need a warrant to exhume his body and extract a DNA sample from his bones. Corporal Barron and the Luzerne County
District attorney's office, they went before a judge, had a hearing. And all my work was approved by the judge
to approve the exhumation order of James Paul Forte to be exhumed to prove if he was the one who did this.
We exhumed his remains. Started at like 7:00 AM. And we wanted to do it with the least amount of fanfare
and the least amount of knowledge by anybody that we were doing it to avoid any type of media frenzy.
The pathologist was there. He collected some samples that were sent off to the DNA lab for testing.
And ultimately, we got our result. This is a result that, even by today's standards of forensic science, it's extraordinary.
We find out why next on "Bloodline Detectives." [SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC] [SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
NANCY GRACE: Hazleton, Pennsylvania, 2022, after 58 years and thousands of hours of detective work,
Pennsylvania State police know with certainty who murdered nine-year-old Marise Chiverella.
I got a call from Jeff Sacchetti, who's our lead DNA guy out there. And he said you got him.
And I said, sorry. He said you got him. And I said, what have we got? And he said 1 in 25 or 1 in 27 septillion,
that only one person in that many people could have that DNA profile match. And it was a good day.
I called everybody to my office. And we celebrated. Lieutenant Brutosky came down to my office and he walked in.
And I think all he said to me was, hey, I just got a phone call. We got him. I would say relief that it was finally over.
Because working that case for, like, four years. And being a supervisor, I didn't have a caseload.
So, like, the only case that I ever worked was Chiverella for four years. ERIC SCHUBERT: Of course, you know,
my heart dropped when they-- they called me. I picked up the phone and I just said, please tell me it's done.
And they said, yeah, it's done. And that was it. And, like, I still get emotional now talking about it.
So it's just like, two years of work boils down to, you know, it's done. I was like in shock for a minute.
Like, from 1964 to 2022, and it's being solved now. It was an awesome feeling. It really was a great feeling to know
that we were able to do this for the family and the community members. That everybody that went through this together
NANCY GRACE: The team holds a press conference and goes public with the incredible news.
They ask Eric Schubert, who joined the investigation as an 18-year-old amateur genealogist,
to share his experience. ANTHONY PETROSKI: He delivered a wonderful speech, addressing how proud he was to be a part of this team,
addressing the Chiverella family, the fact that they will always mean something to him.
He's an impressive kid. And he won over a lot of people during that press conference, community members who have never
met this young man before. They-- they were-- they were blown away. ERIC SCHUBERT: When I first started this case,
I printed out a picture of Marise. I kept it with me. And I always had it. So that's what I think back on and I look at.
She is why we were doing the work and her family. DEVON BRUTOSKY: I think Eric is a young man well
beyond his years, a brilliant person in the research that he's doing. And I'm very thankful that he called us that day.
KRYSTEN QUINN: Marise's case was the fourth oldest case in the entire nation. And I think for it to be solved in Hazleton,
they felt a major sigh of relief to finally know who did that to Marise and that he only
lived until 38 years old and he could no longer hurt anybody else. MARK BARON: I don't know if there's really
gonna be closure for the family or for maybe even, like, the people who knew Marise.
I think one thing that you could say is that maybe the community could start to heal
after 57 and a half years. DEVON BRUTOSKY: It was a big deal for our community. And I believe it's a big deal anywhere.
We were the oldest case in Pennsylvania to use forensic genetic genealogy to solve a case in the country.
I think we had one of the oldest cases to be solved. So we knew that pressure was there
during the news conference. However, I felt good because the family had closure.
NANCY GRACE: The news that the mystery of Marise Chiverella's murder is finally solved brings some comfort
to her brother Ron. But it can never lessen the pain of his loss. RON CHIVERELLA: It doesn't give me closure.
It gives me answers. I have answers of who the individual was. I've even had someone say, well, now you have--
you can-- you can heal. OK, well, I'll never have Marise again. I'm limited because I never met the nieces and nephews
I would have had from Marise. I don't know who her husband would have ever been.
So all of those absences over the last 50 some years our family was robbed of, needless to say,
of the main entity that we lost was Marise. NANCY GRACE: After the press conference,
the Chiverella family invites the whole team to an intimate memorial and Marise's final resting place.
ANTHONY PETROSKI: We set the vase of flowers with our Pennsylvania State police patch next to her headstone.
And we had a moment there with the family. And it was-- it was-- a it was a very surreal feeling,
it really was. And my part in this was very minor. I was proud to be there with that family,
knowing that the department that I worked for, the Pennsylvania State police were able to give
this family closure. MARK BARON: We have a close bond and a friendship that's-- that's grown out of this tragedy.
If there's any positive thing that could be gleaned from, you know, this type of an investigation
is that, you know, like I've been able to form friendships with the Chiverella family.
NANCY GRACE: Without the groundbreaking science of investigative genetic genealogy,
a case nearly 60 years old would never have been solved. RON CHIVERELLA: It seems to be expanding across the country.
And that's a wonderful gateway for so many individuals like my family to get more answers to what really
happened to their loved ones. Solving the tragic murder case of Marise Chiverella,
just nine years old, is incredible. It's about the success of the science of investigative genetic genealogy.
And it's about thousands of hours of determined detective work. But still, there's more to the story than that.
It's also about the contribution of a remarkable teenage boy who achieves the extraordinary, providing answers
to a long-grieving family, answers they waited to hear almost 60 years. I'm Nancy Grace.
Thank you for being with us here on "Bloodline Detectives." [SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC] [THEME MUSIC]

Hazleton, Pennsylvania, 1964, the brutalized body of 9-year-old Marise Chiverella is discovered after she disappears walking to school. Half a century later, a teen prodigy in investigative genetic genealogy helps detectives solve this heinous crime.

Now in its fourth season, Bloodline Detectives is the leading true crime series that explores how police departments harness genetic genealogy to solve crimes that were once considered "unsolvable," bringing long-awaited answers to victims' families.

=============== Like, comment and subscribe if you’re ready for more true crime. Your favorite shows like World’s Most Evil Killers, Meet Marry Murder, Forensic Files, Unsolved Mysteries, Murdered At First Sight and Bloodline Detectives are all available to stream 24/7 for free via the FilmRise Streaming Network. You can access The FilmRise Streaming Network through most free App Platforms and Smart TV portals such as Amazon Fire TV, The Roku Channel, Android, iOS and many more.

Brief Summary

The 1964 murder of Marise Chiverella is solved using DNA technology and genealogist Eric Schubert's expertise after nearly 60 years.

Key points

The Disappearance of Marise Chiverella. Nine-year-old Marise Chiverella goes missing on her way to school, leading to a frantic search.
Advancements in Forensic Science. New forensic techniques give detectives another chance to solve the cold case after decades.
Brutal Discovery. Marise's body is found in a garbage pit, shocking the community.
A Community in Mourning. The tight-knit community of Hazleton is devastated by Marise's murder, leading to fears for children's safety.
A Teen's Offer to Help. Eric Schubert, a teenage genealogist, offers his assistance in solving Marise's cold case.
Teen Prodigy Solves Cold Case. 18-year-old Eric Schubert uses genealogy to crack the 1964 murder of Marise Chiverella.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

How could someone do this to a little child?

Krysten Quinn expressing disbelief over the crime.

1:13WatchJun 9, 2024

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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