DNA Bombshell Revives 1975 Horror

Three teenage girls were stabbed and left for dead in a ditch outside Indianapolis in 1975, and it took nearly fifty years, a federal DNA grant, and a genealogy technique that didn’t exist when the crime happened to finally put a name to the man who did it.

Story Snapshot

In August 1975, three girls hitchhiking in Indianapolis were abducted, stabbed, and dumped — all three survived, but the case collapsed when police botched the original lineup.
A 2018 federal grant funded DNA testing on preserved clothing, and by 2023 genetic genealogy identified Thomas Edward Williams as the attacker.
Williams had already died in prison in 1983, meaning the identification was never tested in open court against a living defense.
The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officially closed the case on January 18, 2024, nearly five decades after the attack.

The Night Three Girls Nearly Didn’t Come Home

On a summer night in August 1975, three teenage girls hitchhiking toward a popular Indianapolis hangout accepted a ride from a stranger. What followed was a calculated, savage attack. The man drove them outside the city, produced a knife, and stabbed all three before leaving them in a roadside ditch. That all three survived was not by his design. The evidence collected at the scene — rope, a handkerchief, cigarette butts, and the victims’ clothing — would sit in storage for decades before technology caught up to the crime. ^[1]

Police moved quickly after the attack. A man named Williams was arrested after his wife reported suspicious behavior: he had burned a striped shirt and a kitchen knife matching the description of the weapon had gone missing from their home. The victims identified him in a lineup. Then the case fell apart. Investigators had shown the girls Williams’s mugshot before the lineup was conducted, a procedural error that made the identification legally compromised and led to the charges being dropped. ^[1] The attacker walked. The girls carried the weight of that failure for the next half century.

How a Federal Grant Cracked a 50-Year-Old Case

The case sat cold until 2018, when a federal grant enabled DNA testing on clothing preserved from the original crime scene. Analysts isolated a biological profile from Sherry’s clothing that had not degraded beyond use. The profile didn’t match anyone in the Combined DNA Index System, the national database used by law enforcement, which meant conventional matching hit a wall. That’s where investigative genetic genealogy entered the picture — the same technique that had identified the Golden State Killer just months earlier. ^[1]

Genetic genealogy works by comparing a crime-scene DNA profile against consumer ancestry databases, then building family trees outward from partial matches to identify a common ancestor and work back down to a suspect. By 2023, that process led investigators to Thomas Edward Williams. ^[3] The recap of the investigation notes Williams had been in Indianapolis in August 1975, lived nearby, and worked as a mechanic — details consistent with the original suspect description. He was, in a grim irony, already dead. Williams had died in prison in 1983, serving time on an unrelated conviction. ^[1]

A Solid Case With One Significant Caveat

The identification carries real weight. The original 1975 investigation had independently pointed to a man named Williams before the lineup was tainted. His wife’s report of him burning a shirt and the missing knife were not manufactured details — they were contemporaneous observations that fit the crime. The DNA profile isolated from preserved clothing, combined with genetic genealogy pointing to the same man, creates a convergence of independent evidence streams that is difficult to dismiss. ^[1]

The honest caveat is that the public has not seen the underlying forensic record. No laboratory report, loci count, likelihood ratio, or genealogy case file has been released. The genetic genealogy vendor, the reference relatives used to build the family tree, and the chain-of-custody documentation for the clothing samples remain out of public view. Because Williams died before the identification was made, no defense attorney ever cross-examined a DNA analyst under oath or challenged the genealogy methodology in open court. ^[1] That is not evidence of error — it is simply the structural reality of a posthumous cold-case closure, and it matters when evaluating how certain “certain” actually is.

What Closure Looks Like Without a Courtroom

On January 18, 2024, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officially closed the case. Deputy Chief Kendale Adams addressed the three surviving women directly. ^[1] ^[3] For them, the institutional acknowledgment that they were right all along — that the man they identified in 1975 was the man who attacked them — carried meaning that no laboratory report could fully quantify. The procedural failure that let Williams walk in 1975 was a system failure, not a factual one. The DNA work, even without public documentation, gave the victims something the justice system had denied them for nearly fifty years: a name attached to a closed file.

Genetic genealogy is now a standard cold-case tool in law enforcement, and cases like this one illustrate both its power and its accountability gap. The technology can reach back across decades and identify people who were never in any law enforcement database. What it cannot do, at least in cases like this one, is subject its conclusions to the adversarial scrutiny of a trial. For the public, that means accepting that some of the most compelling cold-case resolutions will arrive without the full evidentiary paper trail that a courtroom would demand. In Indianapolis, the three women who survived the slasher got the closest thing available to justice. Whether the rest of us can independently verify it is a different question entirely.