An Amazing Outcome

Her body was found in the river. It had been weeks since she had gone missing. Finding the body was a step forward, but not a lot of help in identifying her killer. It would be another 45 years before that happened.

Her name was Kathy Halle and she was a 19-year-old young lady living in North Aurora, Illinois. She left home on March 29, 1979, to pick up her sister at a nearby shopping center, but her family never saw her again. Her body was found in the Fox River on April 24, just weeks later. The case soon went cold. It wasn't until 2019 that some real progress was made. That year another murder case from a nearby town, Lisle, was solved using familial DNA. A young woman named Pam Maurer had been killed in 1976. Lisle PD exhumed the body of Bruce Lindahl, compared DNA, and linked him to Pam's murder.  

The North Aurora Police were interested because there were several similar links between the cases, so they looked again at Halle's case. They took out their old evidence and sent it to a local lab to be reevaluated. However, the results told them there was a mixture of two individuals, but the DNA was "too degraded to yield a working profile." (1)

A couple of years later, Detective Ryan Peat learned about the M-Vac in a seminar he attended. In June 2023 he and a colleague personally drove Kathy's clothing to DNA Labs International in Florida to have it tested with the M-Vac. And finally in August of 2024 they learned the results, that "DNA found on Halle's clothing was 9.4 trillion times more likely to have originated from Lindahl." (1) Detective Peat said, "It was an amazing outcome...There's no reason that we should have gotten this strong of a profile on a victim that's 45 years old and sitting in the Fox River being washed for three weeks." (2)

On October 23, 2024, it was announced at a news conference that Kathy Halle's murder had been solved and that Bruce Lindahl was the perpetrator. Unfortunately, Bruce could not be brought to trial because he died in 1981 as a result of a self-inflicted knife wound sustained while he was stabbing and killing another man. Bruce is a suspect in several other unsolved cases in the area.

Jamie Mosser, Kane County State's Attorney, said that "back in 1979 nobody knew about DNA or how to even properly package it to preserve the DNA....It's almost a miracle, [the original investigators] packaged [Halle's clothing] in the right way that we would eventually able to extract the DNA." (2) The M-Vac brought truth, if not full justice, to the Halle family and their community. At the news conference, her family said in their statement, "Thanks to advancements in DNA technology and groundbreaking investigative tools, we are hopeful that other families won't have to endure the same pain and uncertainty we faced for so many years." (3) That is the hope we all share.

Quoted Sources
1. Forensic Mag
2. True Crime Blog: Stories & News
3. USA Today 

Other Sources
nbcnews.com
Chicago Tribune