April Tinsley

Case background and investigation

April Marie Tinsley was an eight-year-old girl from Fort Wayne, Indiana. On April 1, 1988, Good Friday, she was walking home from a friend's house in her south Fort Wayne neighborhood when she was abducted. Three days later, on April 4, her body was found in a ditch in rural DeKalb County, near Spencerville. She had been raped and strangled. Her murder devastated the community and launched an investigation that, despite intensive local, state, and federal effort, would remain unsolved for more than thirty years, becoming one of Indiana's most infamous cold cases.

What made the case especially haunting was that the killer did not simply vanish. In May 1990, a message was found scrawled on a barn door reading, in effect, that the writer had killed April Tinsley and threatened to kill again. Then, around Memorial Day weekend in 2004, the killer struck a taunting note again, leaving several handwritten messages in the Fort Wayne area, some accompanied by condoms and Polaroid photographs, addressed to young girls and referencing April. These items horrified investigators and the public, but for years the biological evidence they yielded could not be matched to any known suspect.

The breakthrough came through forensic genetic genealogy. Investigators had preserved DNA from the crime and from the taunting notes. In 2018, working with the technique that uploads a crime-scene DNA profile to genealogy databases to find relatives, genealogist CeCe Moore helped narrow the suspect pool to two brothers. Fort Wayne police then focused on John D. Miller, a 59-year-old man, and collected DNA from used condoms in the trash outside his home. The DNA matched the evidence from April's murder. When detectives confronted Miller in July 2018, he reportedly acknowledged the crime almost immediately, saying April Tinsley's name.

Miller was charged with murder and child molestation. On December 7, 2018, he pleaded guilty, and on December 21, 2018, he was sentenced to 80 years in prison, 50 years for the murder and 30 for child molestation, a term prosecutors and the family understood would effectively keep him behind bars for the rest of his life. Under the sentencing law in effect at the time of the 1988 crime, he could not be given life without parole, and his earliest theoretical release date was decades away, when he would have been about 99 years old. At his sentencing Miller offered an apology to the Tinsley family and the community.

The guilty plea and conviction finally closed a case that had tormented Fort Wayne for a generation, and it stood as an early, high-profile demonstration of how forensic genetic genealogy could crack decades-old crimes that conventional DNA database searches could not. For April's mother and the wider community, the identification of a suspect after thirty years, and his admission of guilt, brought long-delayed answers about who had taken and killed the little girl and taunted the city for years afterward. Miller served roughly seven years of his sentence before he died in an Indianapolis hospital on September 4, 2025, at the age of 66, closing the final chapter of one of Indiana's most notorious murders.