April Tinsley was killed by John D. Miller, a man from Grabill, Indiana who lived roughly six miles from where her body was found and evaded identification for 30 years. Miller abducted the eight-year-old on Good Friday, April 1, 1988, sexually assaulted her, and strangled her. Investigators finally identified him in 2018 through forensic genetic genealogy, which matched crime-scene DNA to his family tree on a public genealogy database. He pleaded guilty that December and was sentenced to 80 years in prison. He died in custody in September 2025 at age 66.121Alive News. John D. Miller, April Tinsley’s Killer, Dead at 66
What Happened to April Tinsley in 1988
April was walking home from a friend’s house in her Fort Wayne, Indiana neighborhood on the afternoon of April 1, 1988. A witness later told police they saw a white man in his thirties or forties with light brown hair force a young girl matching April’s description into a blue pickup truck. When she did not come home for dinner, her mother reported her missing. Family members and police searched through the weekend.
Three days later, a jogger found her body in a ditch along a rural road near Spencerville, Indiana, about 20 miles from Fort Wayne. An autopsy showed she had been sexually assaulted and strangled, and that she had likely been killed within a day of the abduction. DNA was recovered from the scene, but in 1988 forensic DNA work was new and no database match existed. Leads on the blue pickup went nowhere, and the case went cold.
The Taunting Notes That Kept the Case Alive
The killer did not stay quiet. In May 1990, someone scrawled a message on a barn door not far from where April’s body had been found, claiming responsibility for killing “8 year old April M Tinsley,” asking whether investigators had located her missing shoe, and threatening to kill again.2Federal Bureau of Investigation. April Tinsley Murder, Pt. 1
Then, in the spring of 2004, four more notes surfaced at homes around the Fort Wayne area, several placed on bicycles that young girls had left in their yards. Each was written on lined yellow paper and sealed in a plastic bag along with used condoms or Polaroid photographs of the writer’s body. One read, “Hi, honey, I been watching you.” The writer identified himself as April’s killer, threatened the girls whose bikes he had chosen, and warned he would blow up their homes if police were contacted.2Federal Bureau of Investigation. April Tinsley Murder, Pt. 1
Those notes were both a cruelty and a mistake. The used condoms contained DNA that matched the profile from the 1988 crime scene, giving investigators multiple confirmed samples from the same person. After 2004, the communications stopped.
How DNA Finally Identified the Killer
For decades the killer’s DNA profile was run against criminal databases with no hit, meaning he had never been arrested for anything requiring a sample. The breakthrough came in May 2018, when a Fort Wayne detective sent the profile to Parabon NanoLabs for forensic genetic genealogy.3WRAL News. DNA Site Helps Indiana Police Make Arrest in 1988 Killing of Girl, 8
The technique does not require the suspect’s own DNA to be in a law enforcement database. Instead, the crime-scene profile is uploaded to a public genealogy platform where people have voluntarily shared their genetic data to research their families. The system flags partial matches, distant relatives who share enough DNA to point back toward a common ancestor. Genealogists then build family trees from those matches using public records, census data, and other genealogical sources, working forward through generations until they reach living people who fit the suspect’s approximate age, sex, geography, and physical description.
In April’s case, that work narrowed the suspect pool to two brothers in the Fort Wayne area. To determine which one was the killer, investigators collected items from John Miller’s household trash, including three used condoms. The DNA from that discarded material matched the DNA from the 1988 crime scene and the 2004 notes.4WRAL News. Child Killer Taunted Investigators for 30 Years With Disturbing Notes. DNA Ends the Mystery of Who Did It, Police Say
Arrest, Guilty Plea, and Sentence
On July 15, 2018, Indiana State Police detectives approached Miller, then 59, at his home in a trailer park in Grabill, a small town northeast of Fort Wayne. He had lived in the area for decades, within a few miles of where April’s body was found. He confessed to abducting, sexually assaulting, and strangling her, and was booked into the Allen County Jail on charges of murder, child molesting, and criminal confinement of a person under 14.5TIME. DNA Match Leads to Arrest in 1988 Rape and Murder of Indiana Girl After Decades of Taunts From Killer
On December 7, 2018, at what had been scheduled as a change-of-venue hearing, Miller changed his plea to guilty. He read a prepared statement admitting he had abducted April, sexually assaulted her, and strangled her with his bare hands. Under the plea agreement, he was sentenced to 80 years: 50 for murder and 30 for child molesting. Indiana Department of Correction records listed his earliest possible release as July 15, 2058, when he would have been 99.6wthr.com. Guilty Plea in the 1988 Murder of 8-Year-Old Girl
Miller’s Death in Prison
John D. Miller died in September 2025 at age 66. The Indiana Department of Correction confirmed his death, though the cause was not widely reported.121Alive News. John D. Miller, April Tinsley’s Killer, Dead at 66
Why the Case Mattered Beyond Fort Wayne
The Tinsley identification came during a wave of 2018 cold-case breakthroughs driven by forensic genetic genealogy, the same technique used months earlier to arrest the suspected Golden State Killer in California. By mid-2019, law enforcement had used it to apprehend at least 59 people in cold cases going back to 1967. Public debate over genetic privacy followed. In 2019, GEDmatch, the platform used in April’s case, changed its terms of service so that users were opted out of law enforcement searches by default, and anyone wanting their profile available for criminal investigations had to actively consent.7DNA Doe Project. Message About the Recent Changes at GEDmatch