Comment David Sinopoli sat in an airport cafeteria with his wife and another couple before sunrise on a February morning, while they waited for their early morning flight. Unbeknownst to the 68-year-old Pennsylvania man, detectives were watching. And after he tossed a coffee cup into a trash can at Philadelphia International Airport’s Terminal A, they rushed to retrieve it. For nearly five decades, the slaying of 19-year-old Lindy Sue Biechler — a newlywed who was found stabbed to death on the floor of her Lancaster County, Pa., apartment. – had misled the authorities. They had chased dozens of tips, interviewed 300 people, formed a task force, presented the case to crime experts and, as the years passed without answers, even tried to consult psychics. What ultimately led to an arrest in the county’s oldest cold case was the discarded coffee cup — and the lineage. The researchers came up with Sinopolis after a researcher at Reston, Va.-based Parabon NanoLabs. determined through DNA evidence that whoever killed Biechler likely had ancestors from a small Italian town called Gasperina. The researcher, CeCe Moore, flagged Sinopolis as a person of interest after studying newspaper archives and historical records. A decades-old murder may have been solved with new forensic technology and conch shell DNA After the detectives’ stealth mission to the airport, DNA from the coffee cup was compared to DNA found on Biechler’s underwear. It was a struggle, Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams said. Authorities made their long-awaited arrest Sunday morning. Sinopoli, a one-time resident of Biechler’s apartment complex, was taken into custody and held without bond. “This case was solved using DNA and, specifically, DNA genealogy,” Adams said during a news conference Monday. “And honestly, without it, I don’t know that we would have ever solved it.” He added: “The reality is that David Sinopoli was not on our radar.” The gruesome murder happened on the evening of December 5, 1975, a Friday. Biechler’s aunt and uncle had stopped by her Manor Township apartment to exchange recipes. But when they arrived at the building, they found what Adams said “can only be described as a horrific scene.” Biechler lay on the living room floor, her jeans unbuttoned and her body covered in 19 stab wounds. Bags of groceries sat on the dining room table. The young wife was unloading when her attacker arrived, police said. She fought hard for her life. But Biechler, a flower shop worker described by her husband Phil as “extremely compassionate” and “incredibly charming”, was pronounced dead at the scene. From the beginning, police said, there were few clues. “We really don’t have anything right now,” Manor Township Police Chief Donald W. Sheeler said the day of Biechler’s burial, according to the Intelligencer Journal. Authorities cleared suspects, examined a chilling letter from someone claiming to be the killer, pleaded with the public for help and combed through evidence before the case went cold. They revisited the case over the next few years, submitting evidence for DNA analysis in 1997 and entering it into a national database in 2000. A murder went unsolved for 25 years until a man called in a tip: He was the killer That year, a task force that included the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit dug into the case, the Lancaster New Era reported. The group said the killer was likely a man who knew Biechler and committed the crime in a fit of rage. Five years later, a group of crime experts called the Vidocq Society decided to re-examine the case. “I prayed every night for 30 years that there would be justice for her death,” Biechler’s mother, Eleanor Geesey, told Lancaster Online. “God, maybe he’ll come.” However, it would be years before DNA genealogy, a new technique that became mainstream with the arrest of the “Golden State Killer” in 2018, cracked the case and led to Sinopoli’s arrest. Moore said Monday that her investigation into the killer’s genealogy pointed to Sinopolis as “a particularly compelling candidate to be the suspect.” “There were very few people living in Lancaster who were the right age, gender and family tree,” he said. None of the tips that came to law enforcement over the years pointed to Sinopoli, Adams said. He said he lived in the same four-unit building as Biechler sometime in 1974. But he declined to provide other details about whether they knew each other or discussed a possible motive. Few details were immediately available about Sinopolis or his life before or after the brutal murder. A former printer at a commercial printing firm, he was a hunter whose Facebook page showed him hunting and holidaying in Italy, the LNP said. He married his first wife a year before Biechler’s death. they had two children before divorcing in 1986, according to the paper. In 1987 he married his second wife, with whom he had another child. The murder of a young woman remained unsolved for almost 58 years. A 20-year-old student helped clear up the case. In 2004, he was sentenced to one year of probation after pleading guilty to invasion of privacy and disorderly conduct. He had admitted to spying on a woman who was naked in a tannery at a business where he worked, according to the LNP. That appeared to be his only criminal arrest in Lancaster County before Sunday. He now faces a charge of murder. “Lindy Sue Biechler was 19 years old when her life was brutally taken 46 years ago in the sanctity of her home,” Adams said. “David Sinopoli’s arrest marks the beginning of the legal process. And we hope it will bring some sense of relief to the victim’s loved ones and to the community, which for the past 46 years has had no answers.”
