Holly Branagan

Case background and investigation

Moira "Holly" Branagan was a 17-year-old senior at Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. According to CNN, she sang in the school choir and planned to attend Penn State. Her mother had died of leukemia two years earlier, and she lived with her father and brother in a house on Pine Top Trail.

On March 28, 1979, she was alone in the house. CNN reported that her father was away on business in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and her brother was spending the night with a friend. Shortly before 5 p.m. she was on the telephone with a friend and ended the call by saying that someone was at the door. Her brother found her body on the kitchen floor the following morning. She had been stabbed repeatedly, and the blade of the knife had broken off in her back. NBC10 Philadelphia has reported that she was stabbed 18 times.

No one has ever been charged. NBC10 reported in 2009 that evidence sent to the FBI for analysis had produced no usable results at the time. In February 2010, Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli presented the case to a special investigative grand jury convened to review about 31 unsolved homicides, CNN reported; Holly Branagan's was the first case it took up. An investigator for the district attorney's office told CNN that evidence collected in 1979 was being examined with newer DNA technology.

In March 2014, Bethlehem Police Chief Mark DiLuzio told WFMZ that, with the help of the grand jury, police had a person of interest, whom he described only as a man who had been an acquaintance of the family in the 1970s. Police did not name him. NBC10 reported at the same time that Morganelli said there was not evidence that would allow an arrest. In 2019 Morganelli told 6abc that retesting with updated DNA methods had still not allowed the case to be concluded, and that much of the crime scene evidence was tainted or no longer existed. According to 6abc, Holly's father, Richard Branagan, died in 2016.

NBC10 re-examined the case in its 2024 documentary series "Somebody Knows Something: Murder on Pine Top Trail." In May 2025, the station reported that Northampton County District Attorney Stephen Baratta and Bethlehem police were working with the Cold Case Foundation, a volunteer nonprofit, and had sent evidence to laboratories for new DNA testing. The effort includes the M-Vac, a wet-vacuum collection device that can recover genetic material from surfaces that swabs cannot reach, such as the handle of the knife. No results or arrests had been announced in the sources reviewed, and the case remains unsolved.