HAZLETON, Pa. (AP) — AP is reporting… DNA and a 20-year-old genealogy expert helped state police identify the man who abducted, raped and murdered a young girl in a case that rattled a Pennsylvania coal town nearly six decades ago, officials announced Thursday. State police exhumed the long-dead assailant’s body last month and said his DNA precisely matched DNA left on the jacket of the victim, 9-year-old Marise Ann Chiverella, who was snatched on the morning of March 18, 1964, as she walked to school in Hazleton, about 80 miles (129 milometers) north of Philadelphia. Her body was found that afternoon in a nearby waste coal pit. Authorities say she was raped and strangled. Police identified her killer as James Paul Forte, a bartender with a record of violent sexual assault, who died of natural causes in 1980 at age 38. Police said Forte, who was 22 at the time of the murder, had no known connection to the little girl or her family. Generations of state police investigators pursued Marise’s killer — more than 230 members of the department were involved in the probe at one time or another — but Forte’s name did not come up until 2020.
By that time, new DNA technology had established a distant family connection to Forte, and Eric Schubert, a college student and expert in genetic genealogy who had volunteered to work the case, put together an extensive family tree that helped investigators narrow their suspect list. State police made the announcement at a news conference packed with current and retired investigators — including the trooper who first probed Marise’s murder — and the little girl’s four siblings and extended family. Her siblings called Marise a sweet and shy girl who was learning to play the organ and aspired to be a nun. “We have so many precious memories of Marise. At the same time, our family will always feel the emptiness and sorrow of her absence,” said her sister, Carmen Marie Radtke. “We will continue to ask ourselves, what would have been, what could have been?” She said their deceased parents never sought revenge, but justice. “Thanks to the Pennsylvania State Police, justice has been served today,” she said. Thanks to Schubert, as well.
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — AP is reporting… Gov. Tom Wolf hit the road Wednesday to begin selling his proposal for what would be the largest-ever increase in aid for Pennsylvania’s public schools, several times over, as school officials digested the news and Republicans who control the Legislature warned that it will never happen. The money — just over $1.5 billion in new dollars for instruction and operations — is almost a quarter of what the state sends now under a public school funding system that critics say has left the poorest public schools, including ones with large minority student bodies, underfunded for decades.
Wolf took his case to teachers and district officials in a news conference at Erie’s Pfeiffer-Burleigh Elementary School, while education groups said they hoped that lawmakers would at least approve close to what the Democrat requested in his budget proposal Tuesday. That said, school boards and superintendents know Wolf has made big requests before that the Republican-controlled Legislature has turned down, in favor of a smaller sum. “We understand that this is always a starting point and typically something less is approved than what the governor asks for,” said Mark DiRocco, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators. “The last few years it was significantly less than what he asked for, and this year we’re hoping it will be closer to what he asked for.”
