The oldest evidence in these eight cases was collected in 1965. It sat for half a century. In February 2016 the New Jersey State Police and the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office announced that a DNA profile developed by the State Police Office of Forensic Science from that material matched Robert Zarinsky, a man who had been dead for more than seven years. The girl it concerned, Mary Agnes Klinsky, was 18 and a high school senior when she died in September 1965. Her family had waited 51 years for a name.
That is the shape of every case that follows: something taken from a body, a car, a bedroom or a mouth by detectives who had no way to read it, stored by people who had no certainty it would ever matter, and read at last by a laboratory that had not existed when the box was sealed. The gaps run from months to more than five decades. In several cases the evidence was lucky to survive at all. In one, Washington’s Freeway Phantom case, much of it did not.
Zarinsky, of Linden, New Jersey, described by WABC-TV as a former grocer, was convicted by a Monmouth County jury in 1975 of the first degree murder of Rosemary Calandriello, 17, of Atlantic Highlands. She vanished on August 25, 1969, and her body has never been recovered. The courts accepted that her death could be proved by circumstantial evidence. His appeals produced a ruling that still governs New Jersey law: in 1977 the state Supreme Court held that there is no statute of limitations for murder in the state.
Prosecutors in other counties kept looking at him. In 2001 a jury in Elizabeth acquitted him of the 1958 murder of Charles Bernoskie, a Rahway police officer. Late in his life he was indicted for the 1968 murder of Jane Durrua, a 13-year-old from Keansburg, and pleaded not guilty. Another man, J.B., had been charged in 2004, and those charges were dropped after a laboratory mix-up raised the possibility that DNA evidence had been contaminated, WABC-TV reported. Prosecutors then sought DNA evidence to tie Zarinsky to the killing. He was awaiting trial when he died in the hospice unit of a New Jersey state prison in November 2008, at 68.
The Klinsky material was never tested while he lived. PhillyVoice reported that investigators questioned several suspects and witnesses over the decades and cleared them, and that the case went cold because the technology to match the evidence did not exist. Detectives kept what they had and later retested it with newer methods. On February 17, 2016, the State Police and the prosecutor’s office said the profile matched Zarinsky. The Associated Press reported that prosecutors said the DNA excluded everyone but him, and the State Police said other evidence established a motive and placed him nearby at the time.
"Our detectives never quit," the State Police said. The acting Monmouth County prosecutor, Christopher Gramiccioni, said that had Zarinsky been alive he would have been prosecuted. Because he died first, he was never charged with Klinsky’s death. The link rests on the findings of investigators, and no court has ruled on it.
Roger Kibbe was a furniture maker from Citrus Heights, outside Sacramento. In 1991 a jury in El Dorado County convicted him of the first-degree murder of Darcie Frackenpohl, 17, a runaway from Seattle. By then detectives suspected him in six other deaths of women in Northern California, cases the press had grouped together, which stretched back to 1977 and 1986. They did not have enough to charge him.
What changed was a single act of housekeeping. In 2002, according to a 2011 CBS San Francisco report, an investigator for the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office resubmitted DNA evidence from five of the 1980s deaths for testing. The Associated Press reported that the results linked Kibbe to two of the women, and trace evidence such as fabric from the seats of his car tied him to others. The Ceres Courier reported that DNA linked him to the death of Stephanie Brown in 2003. Kibbe was already in prison. Authorities confronted him with the results in 2003, the Associated Press wrote in 2011.
He did not plead for six more years. In November 2009, in San Joaquin County, with a possible death sentence behind the offer, Kibbe pleaded guilty to six counts of first-degree murder: Lou Ellen Burleigh, killed in 1977, and Lora Heedick, Barbara Ann Scott, Stephanie Brown, Charmaine Sabrah and Katherine Kelly Quinones, all killed in 1986. He received six consecutive terms of life without parole. The sister of Barbara Ann Scott spoke to him at sentencing. "I cannot fathom how a so-called human being could do such things to a woman," she said, as the Ceres Courier quoted her. The mother of Charmaine Sabrah told the court she had forgiven him.
Burleigh’s case ran longest. She was killed in 1977, and it was 2011 before a DNA laboratory confirmed the identification of her body, which a Napa County deputy, Michael Bartlett, had pursued on his own time. Her family was told shortly before police announced it in June 2011, CBS San Francisco reported. That December she was taken to Klamath County, where she was born. Her mother said the family could now go to one place "like people sometimes do, and just talk," the Associated Press reported.
Kibbe died in his cell at Mule Creek State Prison on February 28, 2021, at 81. Investigators treated the death as a homicide, CBS San Francisco reported. A detective who had visited him, Bertocchini, told CBS Sacramento that Kibbe had been afraid of the general prison population.
In Orange County, California, a Marine staff sergeant named Gerald Parker was convicted in 1998 of six counts of first degree murder for killings of women and girls in Anaheim, Costa Mesa and Tustin between December 1978 and October 1979. Five of the people he was convicted of killing were women and girls. The sixth was a full-term unborn daughter whose mother survived. Her husband, another Marine, had been in prison for 16 years for the crime against her.
The break was in the laboratory, and in a decision to look at old files. The Orange County Sheriff’s Department wrote in a 2020 history that in the 1990s Tustin and Costa Mesa investigators kept working their unsolved cases and submitted evidence for DNA testing, and that its crime lab was one of only three in the country then able to run short tandem repeat analysis, a newer method that could identify individuals. A retired Tustin lieutenant, Tom Tarpley, recalled to the site Behind the Badge in 2015 that a supervisor suggested he take another look at one file, so he sent the evidence kit from that case to the lab, which was then testing old evidence for the district attorney. Two Costa Mesa murder cases had been submitted as well.
The profiles were run against the state’s database of convicted offenders. In June 1996 the lab reported three hits at once: the Tustin case and the two Costa Mesa cases all matched Parker, who was in state prison on an unrelated parole violation. The profile that named him came from a blood sample taken when he was last released from prison. The kit collected in 1979 in the Tustin case was then pulled and tested. It matched him too, according to Behind the Badge, the National Registry of Exonerations and the Innocence Project.
On June 14, 1996, Costa Mesa and Tustin detectives interviewed Parker at Avenal State Prison. He said he might have killed someone in Tustin, since he sometimes blacked out. On June 20 an Orange County judge set aside the husband’s convictions and dismissed the case, and he was released that day. He had served 16 years. St. Louis Public Radio, which interviewed him in 2003, described him as the 35th person in the United States exonerated by DNA. California paid him $10,000 in February 1997, then the most its compensation law allowed, and the governor signed a bill in October 1999 granting him $620,000, the registry and the Innocence Project report.
Parker was sentenced to death on January 21, 1999. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on June 5, 2017, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied review in February 2018.
Lorenzo Fayne was arrested in East St. Louis, Illinois, on July 24, 1993, in connection with the murder of Faith Davis, 17. Within a short time, the Illinois Appellate Court recorded, he had confessed to four other killings: Aree Hunt, 6, Fallon Flood, 9, Glenda Jones, 17, and Latonda Dean, 14. In 1994 a St. Clair County jury rejected his insanity defense and convicted him of the first-degree murder of Aree Hunt. The same jury could not agree on death, and he was sentenced to natural life. Illinois prison records now list a life sentence in each of the five St. Clair County cases.
The property room mattered later, and in another state. In October 2009 Milwaukee prosecutors charged Fayne with first-degree intentional homicide in the 1989 death of Rita Scott, 32. The Associated Press reported that DNA evidence in the case had recently been retested and linked to him. According to the criminal complaint, two cold case detectives interviewed him at Menard Correctional Center on October 23, 2009, and he confessed to what the complaint called a random killing. Twenty years separated the evidence from the answer.
When the Associated Press reported the charge, online court records listed no defense lawyer and no first court date. No outcome has been reported, and Illinois prison records list only his five St. Clair County sentences. He has not been convicted of the Milwaukee killing. As of October 2026, Illinois records showed him at Menard.
Over 29 days in the spring of 1992, six people who worked in small shops were killed in five cities: Robin Fuldauer in Indianapolis, Patricia Magers and Patricia Smith in Wichita, Michael McCown in Terre Haute, Nancy Kitzmiller in St. Charles, Missouri, and Sarah Blessing in Raytown, Missouri. Ballistic testing linked all six deaths. Nobody has been charged, and the man the press named the I-70 killer has never been identified.
The evidence stayed with five agencies. When Captain Floyd arrived at the St. Charles police department, KMOV reported, he learned that the case had not been looked at for a while, and that the last laboratory submissions had been sent in 2004.
That changed in late 2021. A multi-agency task force led by St. Charles police, working with the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, reopened the case. Police released age-enhanced sketches and kept a $25,000 reward on offer. In early November 2021 investigators from the five cities met in St. Charles for two days to go through the files, which in St. Charles alone filled ten drawers. A detective, Don Stepp, said: "We believe this case is solvable."
Stored evidence went to the laboratory. WTHI-TV reported in 2022 that DNA results had come back in the investigation. KSHB reported in February 2024 that a St. Charles detective was assigned to the case full time. As of March 2024, nobody had been arrested or charged.
The same investigation shows the other side of the new tests, which is that they can close a door as quickly as they open one. After a 2001 Terre Haute killing was raised as a possible link, tips pointed to a man living in Missouri. Police obtained a DNA sample from him, and it did not match, KMOV reported. He has not been publicly named by police and has not been charged. Whether the 2001 case belongs to the series is unknown.
Derrick Todd Lee shows a different problem. His case did not turn on decades of storage. It turned on a profile that existed for months while the man it described was left out of the net.
Between September 2001 and March 2003, five women were killed in and around Baton Rouge and Lafayette, Louisiana, and the State Police Crime Lab matched the same man’s DNA in each case. On July 29, 2002, investigators announced that DNA linked the deaths of Gina Wilson Green, Charlotte Murray Pace and Pam Kinamore to one man. A multi-agency task force asked men named in tips for cheek swabs, and most agreed. The search reportedly took swabs from more than a thousand men. The man it wanted was not among them.
He was Lee, 34, of St. Francisville, a laborer with a record of burglary, stalking and peeping. Detectives in the small town of Zachary had suspected him for years in the 1998 vanishing of Randi Mebruer and in the 1992 death of Connie Warner. He was never charged with Warner’s death, and no DNA tied him to it. On July 24, 2002, Zachary officers met the Baton Rouge police chief and other investigators, and a lieutenant, McDavid, later told WAFB that his department had said Lee was its prime suspect in two murders. Zachary detectives were never asked to join the task force. Baton Rouge’s chief answered in November 2003 that Lee had not been DNA tested because of the task force’s priorities.
Lee’s cheek swab was taken on May 5, 2003, under a court order obtained by investigators working the two Zachary cases, not the serial cases. It took three weeks. The result matched the task force’s profile, and on May 27 he was arrested in Atlanta. In 2004 he was convicted of the second degree murder of Geralyn Barr DeSoto in West Baton Rouge Parish and the first degree murder of Pace in East Baton Rouge Parish, where a jury recommended death. He was sentenced to death on December 10, 2004. DNA tied him as well to Pam Kinamore, Trineisha Dené Colomb, Carrie Lynn Yoder, Green and a nonfatal assault in Breaux Bridge. He was never tried for those cases. The West Feliciana Parish coroner’s office gave heart disease as the cause when he died at a hospital on January 21, 2016, still sentenced to death at Angola.
For almost 20 years the Green River case was the largest unsolved serial murder investigation in the United States. Ridgway, a truck painter, was not unknown to it. Police noticed him in 1983, questioned him more than once and gave him a polygraph in 1984 that he passed, and in 1987 detectives obtained a saliva sample from him.
In 1987 the task force had also tried DNA testing on a tiny evidence sample. The technology of the time gave no result and used up much of the material. That experience shaped the next attempt. In March 2001, with Dave Reichert now sheriff, officials decided that testing had improved enough to try again, with what material was left. Samples went to the Washington State Patrol crime laboratory. The scientists there linked Ridgway to several of the killings matching his 1987 saliva to profiles from evidence in the cases of Opal Mills, Marcia Chapman and Cynthia Hinds, who died in 1982. The sample had sat for 14 years.
On November 30, 2001, he was arrested as he left work at the Kenworth plant in Renton, at about 3 p.m. He was 52. Prosecutors charged him with four counts of aggravated first-degree murder on December 5, 2001, and three more in March 2003. On November 5, 2003, in Seattle, he pleaded guilty to 48 counts, answering "yes" as the lead prosecutor read each name. On December 18, 2003, Judge Richard Jones sentenced him to 48 consecutive life terms without release. In 2011 he pleaded guilty to a 49th count.
Four of the counts concerned women who then had no names, four unidentified victims designated B-10, B-16, B-17 and B-20, and the storage of evidence did its slow work on these too. Sandra Majors was identified as B-16 in 2012. In January 2021 the King County Sheriff’s Office announced that genetic genealogy had identified Wendy Stephens, a 14-year-old runaway from Denver, as another. Lori Anne Razpotnik was named in December 2023, and Tammie Liles in January 2024. Each identification came decades after the original investigation.
Ridgway has claimed many more victims than the 49 for which he was convicted, with figures between 65 and 80 reported, and authorities have treated those claims with caution. In December 2025 he was reported to be in declining health at Walla Walla.
The Washington, D.C., Freeway Phantom case shows what happens when the property room fails. Between April 1971 and September 1972, six Black girls and young women, from 10 to 18, were taken from the District’s neighborhoods and killed. The Metropolitan Police Department lists the case on its appeal for information, and a police poster offers a reward of up to $150,000. Nobody has been arrested or charged.
The evidence collected in the 1970s did not survive well. Washingtonian reported in July 2009 that D.C. police had lost the entire case file and that none of the case’s evidence could be located in the police evidence warehouse. James Trainum, then the director of the cold case unit, and a group of interns rebuilt the files from information supplied by retired D.C. detectives, the FBI and the Prince George’s County police. "Maybe it’s over there in some box and we haven’t stumbled across it," he said.
Something did turn up. In a WUSA9 cold case report, Trainum said that a box of evidence located the previous year contained clothing from Diane Williams, the last victim, which might carry the killer’s DNA. In 2009 Washingtonian reported that testing was on hold. Like most of the District’s cold case DNA work, it depended on the FBI’s overloaded laboratory at Quantico, where cold cases went to the back of the queue. Trainum admitted that the unit had been "sitting on a lot of stuff." A new D.C. police laboratory was expected to ease the backlog.
In the later WUSA9 report on a book about the case, the two police departments described it differently. A Prince George’s County police spokeswoman said the department was still actively investigating. A Metropolitan Police spokeswoman said the District’s cases had been purged years earlier and were no longer active investigations. Retired investigators told the station that so much evidence had been lost or misfiled that it was unclear whether enough survived to recover the killer’s DNA. Boundary Stones, the WETA history site, reported that the D.C. Council later required evidence in unsolved homicide cases to be kept for at least 65 years.
No single rule ran through these cases. In New Jersey, detectives kept 1965 material long enough for a state laboratory to read it in 2016. In California, one investigator’s decision to resubmit old evidence moved Kibbe’s case from one conviction to seven, and a lab’s ability to run a new method moved Parker’s from a dead end to a database hit. In Washington State, a saliva sample taken in one decade became evidence in the next. In the I-70 case, the evidence was kept but went unsubmitted for years, and a task force had to reopen it. In Washington, D.C., storage failed: Washingtonian reported that none of the evidence could be located in the evidence warehouse, and the clothing that turned up later was a matter of luck.
• 1958: Rahway police officer Charles Bernoskie killed; Zarinsky acquitted of the murder in 2001.
• September 1965: Mary Agnes Klinsky, 18, dies in New Jersey; DNA attribution to Zarinsky announced February 17, 2016.
• 1969: Rosemary Calandriello, 17, vanishes in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey; Zarinsky convicted in 1975.
• April 1971 to September 1972: The six Freeway Phantom killings in Washington, D.C.
• 1977 and 1986: The Northern California killings later tied to Roger Kibbe.
• December 1978 to October 1979: The Orange County killings later tied to Gerald Parker.
• 1982: Green River killings begin; 1987, a saliva sample is taken from Gary Ridgway.
• 1989: Rita Scott killed in Milwaukee.
• 1991: Kibbe convicted of the murder of Darcie Frackenpohl.
• April 8 to May 7, 1992: Six killings in five cities attributed to the I-70 killer.
• June 1996: DNA hits name Parker; on June 20 the husband’s convictions are set aside.
• 1998: Parker convicted of six counts of first degree murder.
• March 2001: Washington State Patrol retests Green River evidence; November 30, Ridgway arrested.
• 2002: Kibbe evidence resubmitted in San Joaquin County; July 29, DNA links three Baton Rouge killings.
• May 5, 2003: Lee swabbed; May 27, arrested in Atlanta. November 5, Ridgway pleads guilty to 48 counts.
• July 2009: Washingtonian reports the Freeway Phantom case file and evidence lost.
• October 2009: Fayne charged in Milwaukee after a DNA retest; November, Kibbe pleads guilty to six counts.
• 2012 to 2024: Four unidentified Ridgway victims are named, from Majors (2012) to Liles (2024).
• January 21, 2016: Lee dies.
• February 28, 2021: Kibbe dies in prison.
• November 2021: I-70 task force meets in St. Charles; 2022, DNA testing of stored evidence.
• February 2024: A St. Charles detective is assigned to the I-70 case full time.