DNA site helps make arrest in 1988 slaying

The last time 8-year-old April Tinsley was seen alive, a man was dragging her into a beat-up blue pickup truck in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Police and her family fanned out that Friday afternoon in April 1988, searching through the weekend, but there was no sign of her.

On the following Monday, a jogger on a rural country road about 20 miles outside of the city made a gruesome discovery: April's body at the bottom of a ditch. She had been raped, strangled and then dumped, police said.

In the 1980s, Fort Wayne was not immune to violence, but no case tormented the city like her abduction and murder. It struck fear in parents and frustrated police, who struggled to identify a suspect or make an arrest — a fact a person who claimed to be the killer reveled in reminding them, leaving a cryptic message on a barn door and attaching handwritten notes and used condoms on girls' bicycles.

But this month, police in Northern Indiana got a break in the case. A DNA profile that detectives had recently uploaded to a genealogy website led them to a man who lived in a trailer park in Grabill, a tiny town just northeast of Fort Wayne and about 6 miles from where April's body was found.

When police knocked on his door Sunday morning and asked if he knew why they there, he replied: "April Tinsley."

Police took the man, John D. Miller, 59, into custody, and he was expected to be charged with murder, child molestation and criminal confinement. At a court hearing Monday, a judge ordered Miller to be held without bond and gave prosecutors three days to file charges.

Police released few details about Miller, but said that it appeared he lived by himself. Court records in Indiana show that he was charged with several minor driving infractions over the last 20 years.

April's disappearance gained national attention and gripped local residents, even when the case had appeared to have gone cold. April's case was featured twice on the television program America's Most Wanted and was the subject of a previously scheduled show on "Investigation Discovery" on Sunday night, hours after Miller was arrested.

The biggest breakthrough came only recently.

In May, a detective in the Fort Wayne Police Department sent the suspect's DNA to Parabon NanoLabs, which works with law enforcement agencies to help identify possible suspects. A genealogist using the lab's findings narrowed the possible suspects to two brothers, including Miller, police said.

A similar technique was used by police in California to arrest a man in the case of the East Area Rapist, also known as the Golden State killer, and another man in the 1987 killing of two people in Washington state.

In Indiana, police staked out Miller's house on July 6 and took trash he had discarded. It contained three used condoms, which were tested and matched DNA recovered in 2004 and on April's body, police said.