Patricia Ann Tucker ("Granby Girl")

Case background and investigation

On November 15, 1978, skeletal remains were discovered buried under leaves off a logging road near Amherst Road in Granby, Massachusetts, a small town near Holyoke. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner determined the woman had died of a bullet wound to the temple and ruled the death a homicide, estimating that she had been killed around June 1978, months before her body was found. Investigators could establish only a rough profile — a woman estimated at 19 to 27 years old — and she could not be identified. She was buried in a Granby cemetery under markers reading "Unknown" and "In God's Care," and the case was entered in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System as UP14969. For nearly 45 years she was known locally as "Granby Girl."

The break came through forensic genetic genealogy. According to the Northwestern District Attorney's Office and Othram, the Houston-area forensic laboratory that worked the case, Massachusetts State Police submitted biological evidence to Othram roughly two years before the identification was announced; Boston.com reported the samples were sent in March 2022. Othram scientists developed a comprehensive DNA profile from the remains, and the company's genealogy team traced leads to a woman in Maryland believed to be a relative. That connection pointed investigators to the victim's adult son, Matthew Dale, who had previously uploaded his DNA profile to Ancestry.com and shared it with investigators. On January 23, 2023, the comparison confirmed a 100 percent parent-child match.

On March 6, 2023, the Northwestern District Attorney's Office announced that Granby Girl was Patricia Ann Tucker, born July 28, 1950, and 28 years old at the time of her death. Tucker had also been known by the married names Patricia Heckman, Patricia Dale, and Patricia Coleman. In 1977 she married Gerald Coleman in Middletown, Connecticut, and the couple lived on the eastern shore of Lake Pocotopaug in East Hampton, Connecticut. Around the time she vanished in 1978, authorities said, Coleman dropped her five-year-old son Matthew off at the home of a woman named Laura Holmes in Chicopee, Massachusetts, and neither Tucker nor Coleman returned for him; Holmes eventually contacted authorities and the boy was reunited with his birth father. Matthew Dale, who never saw his mother again, said after the identification, "It's a lot to process, but hopefully, the closure can begin now."

Investigators have named Gerald Coleman a person of interest in Tucker's murder. According to police, Coleman never reported his wife missing and was the last person known to have been seen with her. Investigators noted that he had been arrested in Connecticut in 1968 on charges including attempted kidnapping, aggravated assault, and a firearms violation, and that in 1995 he was convicted in Hampden County Superior Court of rape, indecent assault and battery, and assault with a dangerous weapon. Coleman died in a Massachusetts state prison in 1996 and was never charged in connection with Tucker's death.

The murder of Patricia Ann Tucker remains unsolved. First Assistant District Attorney Steven Gagne said at the identification announcement that "the investigation won't stop until we identify her killer and bring the family an additional measure of closure and justice." Investigators have asked anyone with information about Tucker, Coleman, or the couple's movements in 1978 to contact Massachusetts State Police detectives or the Granby Police Department.