James Paul Forte: DNA, Genealogy, and a 1964 Cold Case

James Paul Forte was a Hazleton, Pennsylvania bartender identified in February 2022 as the man who kidnapped, raped, and strangled nine-year-old Marise Ann Chiverella in March 1964. He was 22 at the time of the killing, died of heart failure in 1980 at age 38, and was never a suspect during his lifetime. Pennsylvania State Police named him only after forensic genetic genealogy pointed to him and DNA taken from his exhumed remains matched evidence preserved from the crime scene.¹

Who James Paul Forte Was

Forte was born in 1941 and grew up in the Hazleton area. He graduated from Hazleton High School in 1959 with a vocational designation; his yearbook described him as “tall, blue-eyed and handsome” with an undecided future. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in October 1959 and was discharged in September 1962. He worked as a bartender at a Hazle Township ballroom, where investigators later said he “kept to himself” and lived a “muted life.”²

His record was not as quiet as his life appeared. In April 1974, a 23-year-old woman reported that Forte had sexually assaulted her in his vehicle. He was charged with involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, indecent assault, and aggravated assault. Police recovered hair samples and mud from his car that matched the crime scene. Prosecutors withdrew the sexual assault charges, and Forte pleaded guilty to aggravated assault. Judge Bernard C. Brominski sentenced him to one year of special probation and ordered him to pay the victim’s hospital bills. In 1978, he was arrested again on charges of reckless endangerment and harassment; records detailing the outcome could not be located.²

Forte died of heart failure on May 16, 1980, at his place of employment. No one had ever questioned him about the Chiverella murder.²

The 1964 Crime

On the morning of March 18, 1964, Marise Ann Chiverella left home carrying canned goods for St. Joseph’s School before morning mass. She was last seen walking along West Fourth Street in Hazleton at about 8:10 a.m. Neighbors offered to let her come inside to warm up on the cold morning, but she said she needed to get to school.³

Her body was found around 1:00 p.m. in a coal stripping pit in Hazle Township, more than two miles from where she had last been seen. The canned goods were nearby. She had been raped and strangled.⁴ No arrests followed. Over the next several decades, more than 230 members of the Pennsylvania State Police worked the case and compiled over 4,000 pages of investigative material. Forte’s name never surfaced. Investigators later concluded that the attack was random, with no known connection between Forte and the Chiverella family.⁵

How Forte Was Identified 58 Years Later

The first scientific step came in 2007, when the Pennsylvania State Police DNA laboratory developed a suspect profile from bodily fluids recovered from Marise Chiverella’s jacket. That profile was checked periodically against law enforcement databases and produced no matches for years.⁵

In 2019, with the help of Parabon Nano-Labs, investigators uploaded the profile to GEDmatch, a public genealogy database. The upload turned up a very distant relative of the unknown suspect, possibly a sixth cousin. It was thin, but it was a thread.⁶

Eric Schubert’s Genealogy Work

In early 2020, Eric Schubert, a college student and genealogy researcher from Medford Lakes, New Jersey, contacted the Pennsylvania State Police to volunteer. Schubert had researched genealogy since childhood, founded his own business, ES Genealogy, as a teenager, and had already assisted a police department with a cold case in 2019 when he was 18. He was a history major at Elizabethtown College.⁷

Working from the suspect’s DNA data and a list of possible genetic matches, Schubert built family trees using census records, newspapers, and traditional genealogy. He started with a pool of roughly 2,000 people who might share ancestors with the perpetrator and narrowed it to hundreds, then to about 30, and finally to four primary suspects.⁷ Investigators contacted many identified relatives, most of whom cooperated by giving DNA samples to help narrow the search.⁶ Of the four finalists, Forte emerged as the person most closely related to the crime-scene profile. Schubert worked alongside investigators for about two years before Forte was definitively identified.⁸

Exhumation and DNA Match

In January 2022, Pennsylvania State Police obtained a court order to exhume Forte’s remains. A DNA sample was taken from the body and compared against the profile from Marise Chiverella’s jacket. On February 3, 2022, results confirmed a match.¹ One week later, on February 10, 2022, state police named Forte publicly at a news conference in Hazleton. Lead investigator Cpl. Mark Baron told reporters the exhumed DNA “precisely matched” the 1964 evidence.⁹

Authorities described the case as the oldest in Pennsylvania solved through forensic genetic genealogy, and among the oldest solved that way in the country.⁴

Why Forte Was Never Prosecuted

Because Forte died in 1980, no criminal charges were possible. Luzerne County District Attorney Sam Sanguedolce said at the news conference, “Our great regret is we do not get to prosecute the individual responsible.”⁹ The identification formally closed the investigation and gave the Chiverella family answers after 58 years, but it produced no courtroom accounting for the crime itself.

1
NBC News. Cold Case Murder of Girl, 9, in 1964 Finally Solved, Police Said
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Times Leader. Who Was James Paul Forte? Suspected Killer Left Few Clues
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ABC27. PSP Solve Cold Case Homicide of Marise Chiverella After 57 Years
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NPR. Police Solve 1964 Rape and Murder of Girl With Help of DNA and a Student
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CNN. Hazleton Pennsylvania Cold Case Solved
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KCRA. 58 Years Later, Police Solve Cold Case Murder of 9-Year-Old
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NJ Spotlight News. Eric Schubert Helped Police Solve Marise Chiverella 57-Year Cold Case Murder
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WGAL. Elizabethtown College Student Helps Solve 1964 Murder of 9-Year-Old Pennsylvania Girl
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WJAC-TV. Family, Detectives React to Solved Hazleton Murder Case From 1964