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To enjoy this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, check us out on Patreon. Patreon.com/ForensicTales Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The content of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. After failing to find a ride home from summer school, 11-year-old Linda O'Keeffe decided to walk home. But she never made it back to her parents' house.
The next day, her body was found along a popular running and cycling trail in Newport Beach, California. How can new DNA technology catch her killer? This is Forensic Tales, episode number 239, The Murder of Linda O'Keefe. ♪
Thank you.
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola. Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast with a forensic science twist. Each episode features real stories highlighting how forensic science was used, from fingerprinting to criminal profiling to DNA. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.
As a one-woman show, your support helps me find new compelling cases, conduct in-depth fact-based research, and produce and edit this weekly show. You can support my work in two simple ways. Become a valued patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales and leave a positive review. Before we get to the episode, we've got one new Patreon supporter to thank this week, James W. Now, let's get to this week's episode.
As a kid, you feel invincible. Nothing bad could ever happen to you. Terrible things only happened to other people. This is especially true if you grew up in what you believed to be a safe neighborhood, a place where violent crimes like rape and murder just simply didn't happen. That's probably what 11-year-old Linda O'Keefe thought as she walked home one day from summer school in July of 1973.
On Friday, July 6, 1973, Linda attended summer school at Lincoln Elementary School in Corona Del Mar, California, a seaside neighborhood in the Southern California city of Newport Beach. Normally, she rode her bike to school, but this day was a little different. Instead of taking her bike, she got a ride to school from her piano teacher.
The school day went on as usual, and once Linda finished up her class for the day, she was excited to head home to start the rest of her summer day. She was even talking about the upcoming weekend. But since she didn't ride her bike to school that day, the only two options she had were number one, walk home, and two, call her mom and ask for a ride.
Linda decided to go with option number two. It was a hot summer day and the last thing she wanted to do was walk home all by herself. So she called her mom from the school office and asked her for a ride. But her mom Barbara said that she was too busy with work and couldn't go pick her up. But Linda kept begging her mom just to come get her. But all her mom would say was, just walk home. You've done this before. I'm tied up at work and I'll see you later.
And all of that was true. The family did live pretty close to the school, so it wasn't really that long of a walk. And Linda's mom worked as a seamstress, so she was usually tied up at work. And it wouldn't be uncommon for either her or Linda's dad to be tied up and not able to pick up Linda or her two sisters from either school or daycare. So that's usually why Linda rode her bike to school.
So that was it. Option two was out of the question. Her mom wasn't going to come by and swing and pick her up. So it was back to option number one, walk home. So after sitting on the curb out in front of the school crying for a couple of minutes, that's exactly what she did. The walk from school on Pacific View Drive to her house on Orchid Avenue would have taken her anywhere from 30 minutes to maybe 40 minutes, depending on the exact route that she took.
From door to door, it was about one and a half miles. So it wasn't really all that far, but it wasn't exactly around the corner either. Now, around 1.15 p.m., one of Linda's friends and her mom spotted Linda talking to a white man in a turquoise-colored van near the intersection of Marguerite and Inlet Drive, which was a spot about a half mile from the school in the direction of Linda's house.
The girl, who lived down the street from Linda, thought that this interaction was a little strange since she didn't recognize the man but didn't really think anything was wrong. Maybe it was just a family friend offering her a ride. So after that, the friend and her mom walked away, and that was the last time that anyone saw Linda alive. At first, Linda's mom Barbara wasn't too concerned when her daughter didn't come home that afternoon.
It wasn't unusual for kids in the neighborhood back then to stay out well past when the streetlights came on. We're talking about the early 1970s, so most kids didn't really have a reason to be afraid of a lot of things that we're probably afraid of today. Or maybe we just didn't know any better back then. Either way, just because Linda didn't come home right away, that didn't mean there was any reason for her family to send off alarm bells.
But when she still wasn't back by dinnertime, that's when her mom started to get a little bit worried. So she started calling some of Linda's friends and driving around the neighborhood looking for her. But there wasn't any sign of her. So that's when Barbara decided it was time to call the Newport Beach City Police. Right away, dozens of police officers joined Linda's family and friends in the search for her. She was only 11 years old. And by the time the search started, it was well past dark.
So there wasn't really any reason for her to be out somewhere on her own. And when it comes to child abductions, time is never on your side. They spent the entire night looking for her. They traced every path they thought she would have taken from the school to her parents' house. Marguerite Street, Goldenrod Avenue, and even MacArthur Boulevard. All possible routes she would have taken from Pacific View Drive to Orchid Avenue.
but absolutely nothing turned up. The only thing they had was that 1.15 p.m. sighting by her friend and her mom, but that was hours earlier. The search lasted through the night and into the morning on July 7th, but it abruptly ended that afternoon. A local architect named Ron Yeo was biking with his four-year-old son along a popular nature trail known as Back Bay.
As someone who lives in Orange County myself, I've been running and biking on Back Bay for probably close to 10 years now, so I know exactly where this is at. If you take it all the way around, the route is almost exactly 10 miles, so it's a really good running and cycling path. Plus, it's paved almost the entire way, and you don't really have to worry about too many cars.
But some parts of the route also go through neighborhoods. And these are some of the nicest neighborhoods and houses in all of Orange County, easily worth millions of dollars. So I know exactly what this area and trail look like. And it's definitely not a place that you would expect to find a body, especially given just how popular it is. When Ron Yeo went to show his son a spot to find frogs, he stumbled upon the body of a young girl,
It was missing 11-year-old Linda O'Keefe. Her body had been dumped in the grass right next to the paved road. It was a spot about three miles from her parents' house. She was still wearing the dress that her mom made her and carrying a homemade book bag. Since her mom worked as a seamstress, her and her sisters usually wore homemade dresses. The Orange County Coroner's Office found that Linda had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death.
But detectives were left with one big question. They couldn't figure out who killed her. For those of you unfamiliar with Orange County, California, Corona Del Mar is just a sleepy beach town. So when people learned about the news about Linda's murder, they were completely shocked. Nothing like this had ever happened there before. Even today, in 2024, Corona Del Mar is still thought to be an extremely safe place and a really good place to raise a family.
I know I say this about a lot of places that we talk about on the show, but as someone who lives just a couple miles away, I can tell you that this is the truth. Corona Del Mar or Newport Beach just aren't places you think about when talking about the murder and rapes of 11-year-old girls. Right away, the police felt a tremendous amount of pressure to find Linda's killer.
Someone who sexually assaults and strangles a little girl just can't get away with something like that. Even Linda's friends from school wanted to help look for her killer. Side by side with the police, her friends hopped on their bikes and went looking for that strange turquoise-colored van that she was last seen near. They thought if they could find that van, they could find their guy, but it was never found.
Before all of this happened, Linda was just your typical 11-year-old girl. Her parents both worked stable jobs, and she was the middle child to two sisters. She was definitely what you would describe as a daddy's girl. They always shared a special bond since she was born, according to Linda's older sister, Cindy. Cindy also described Linda as a, quote, "...very gentle, loving soul, who loved Billie Holiday and Nancy Drew."
She was a Girl Scout who liked spending time in nature with her friends. Later on, Cindy told ABC News the family would vacation in the Redwoods and Linda would crouch down on the ground and little newts and snakes would just come right up to her. She was also someone who always saw the beauty in the world and always seemed to see the good in people. Yet another reason why her murder seemed so senseless. Just a girl walking home from summer school.
From the moment Linda's body was discovered, her mom Barbara harbored a lot of guilt about what happened. She made Linda walk home alone that day instead of giving her a ride. If she had just listened, then maybe none of this would have ever happened, she thought. Of course, she had no way of knowing that would have happened at the time, but it was something that she had to live with every single day of her life. The police really only had two clues in the beginning—
One, the suspicious man one of Linda's friends saw her talking to the day that she disappeared, the one with the blue turquoise colored car, but that never really panned out. They didn't have a good physical description of the guy, and despite searching for it, they never found the van. So there was no way of knowing if he even had anything to do with Linda's murder or not. The second clue was DNA.
They had been able to get the killer's DNA from Linda's body at her autopsy, but because this happened in 1973, there really wasn't much anything they could do with it. They could only collect it, put it into evidence, and just hope that someday DNA testing would improve. So that's exactly what they did.
If Linda's murder happened, let's say today, then we would probably have a completely different outcome. You could take the DNA, run it through CODIS and probably get a hit. Or you could dig through arrest files and maybe get a match that way. But back in 1973, we didn't have any of that. CODIS wasn't even around until 1990 here in the U.S.,
So when it came to collecting DNA in cases like this, the best you could do was hope for the future, that the testing would eventually become available. Now, this is something we talk about all of the time, especially with these older cases. Without advanced DNA testing, the police pretty much just relied on good old-fashioned boots-on-the-ground approach.
They had to go knocking on people's front doors, asking if they saw or heard anything if they wanted to get a lead. But that wasn't good enough in a case like this. They didn't get any tips. They didn't get any leads. And as the years and then eventually decades passed, their hope of finding Linda's killer started to fade. It wasn't until the Newport Beach City Police Department did something out of the box that they eventually got somewhere.
They turned to social media. Do you know what I don't miss at all? That vicious week before my period each month. If you're anything like me, that week is a complete nightmare. I'm craving the worst kind of food, like fast food and candy, and I just feel off. I don't feel like myself. But now, it's so much easier to manage my PMS with Estro Control.
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and right away knew that this was a case he wanted to take on. Everyone in his department had been staring at Linda's photograph that was hanging up on the wall for decades, so it was time to turn to social media.
So on July 6, 2018, Sergeant Depweg had Jennifer Manzella, the spokesperson for the Newport Beach City Police Department, create a segment on their official Twitter page called Hashtag Linda's Story. She was going to be the person in charge of creating the posts. The first post they put up read, Hi, I'm Linda O'Keefe, or Linda Ann O'Keefe if I'm in trouble with my mom.
45 years ago today, I disappeared from Newport Beach. I was murdered and my body was found in the back bay. My killer was never found. Today, I'm going to tell you my story. It was a pretty unorthodox move for the police to do something like this. It might even be considered a little bit risky for a police department to basically reveal key details about an unsolved case from the 1970s.
but at this point, they had nothing to lose. It had already been over four decades. So why not try something new? Why not use the power of social media, something that they certainly didn't have in 1973? Over the next 68 tweets, the police detailed almost every aspect of Linda's life and her murder, starting from the very beginning.
Most of the information came from the original police reports, as well as an interview with Linda's older sister. They wanted the story on every phone, every iPad, and every laptop in the country. Those were the police's exact words they told CBS News. The second post read,
Below that, they posted a map showing the short distance between the school and where she lived on Orchid Avenue. In a later tweet, they wrote, quote,
Finally, school is over. Like everyone else in the classroom, I'm getting excited about how to spend the rest of my afternoon and what I want to do this weekend. I obviously don't know it yet, but I won't get to have a weekend. The entire hashtag Linda story narrative on the Newport Beach Police Twitter page was seen, liked, and retweeted nearly 7 million times all around the world.
People not just in Southern California were interested in the case. According to detectives, they had people in South America and even Europe retweet the story. Australia, France, everywhere. There wasn't a corner of the world that wasn't talking about it. I think something about Linda's story just resonated with people.
A girl, 11-year-old girl, murdered while walking home from summer school in sunny Southern California. It's impossible to hear something like that and not want to help. And to help, all you had to really do was retweet the post. Her story just had something about it that captured people's attention. The Twitter campaign was also part of their strategy to basically lay a trap for the killer.
The police were confident that the DNA they had in the case would eventually lead to a suspect, but they knew it would be difficult to get a judge to sign off on a search warrant for cell phone and computer records on a case that predated digital technology.
But hashtag Linda's story would give them probable cause to basically argue that the killer could be one of the millions of people reading the Twitter story and searching for new information on the case. The tweets then talked about what it was like during the first few hours of the search for her. They read, "'Tons of people are looking for me. The helicopter has been scoring the canyons and remote areas of Corona Del Mar.'"
My dad is out looking for me too with some officers. My mom is still home, peering through the curtains at all the activity on our quiet street. Next, the part about the turquoise van. Quote, they see something they won't forget for a long time. It's me and the turquoise van. End quote. The tweets picked up again on the morning of July 7th when Ron Yeo and his son discovered the body.
One of them read, Later that day, another tweet. But now, 45 years later, I have a voice again. And I have something important to say. There is a new lead in my case.
A face. A face that comes from DNA that the killer left behind. It's technology that didn't exist back in 1973, but it might change everything. Hashtag Linda Story. The technology they're referring to is Parabon Nanolab's snapshot phenotyping technology. They always knew that having the killer's DNA would be the critical piece of evidence they needed to solve the case.
especially after everyone heard about the arrest of the Golden State Killer, a.k.a. Joseph James DeAngelo, with the use of DNA and genetic genealogy. So earlier that year, the Newport Beach police decided that it was time to finally do something meaningful with the DNA. First, they tried CODIS, our national DNA database, but they didn't get a hit.
Next, they picked up the phone and contacted Parabon Nanolabs, a private lab specializing in advanced DNA testing. And one of the things that makes them so great is their creation and use of what they call Snapshot. It works by taking unknown DNA collected from crime scenes and using that DNA to create composite sketches of what the suspect might look like.
From the DNA, they can determine things like eye and hair color. They can also figure out what race or ethnicity someone is, or whether or not they have freckles. So in this case, the police gave Parabon Nanolabs the DNA, and then Parabon created a sketch of Linda's killer.
Not only did they get one good sketch, but they got two. One showing him at 25 years old, then another age-progressed sketch showing what he might look like years later at 60. From the DNA, they determined that Linda's killer had an 81.4% chance of having fair to very fair skin color, 90.1% chance of having blue or green eyes, and
and 98.4% of having blonde or brown hair with few or some freckles. Now, some of that might seem pretty generic. There were probably thousands, if not tens of thousands of people living in Newport Beach or Corona Del Mar at the time matching that physical description. But for investigators, it was a start.
They could rule out a lot of people if they didn't match the sketch that Parabon Nanolabs created. For instance, they could eliminate Asians or African Americans because the DNA didn't match. They were looking for a white male. Once the police had the sketch, they attached it to the tweets as part of Hashtag Linda Story.
So everyone that had been following the tweets around the world got to see a picture of the man the police were searching for. All they needed was just one person to recognize someone they knew in the sketch for this whole thing to be cracked wide open. But not even the lead detective himself could have imagined how the investigation was about to unfold, all thanks to hashtag Linda's story on Twitter.
On February 19, 2019, more than 45 years after her sister was murdered, Cindy Borgenson received a call from Sergeant Depweg from the Newport Beach Police, telling her that they had arrested her sister's killer, 72-year-old James Allen Neal. Not only were scientists at Parabas Nanolabs able to create two very good sketches, but
but they were also able to take the suspect's DNA and upload it to various genetic databases, hoping someone in his family had already voluntarily submitted their DNA so that they could get a family hit. Once they identified potential relatives of Linda's killer, that's when the work of building family trees began.
One by one, Parabon Nanolabs identified the suspect's relatives until they narrowed their search to one particular person, James Allen Neal. Then once they had a name, it was the easy part. All they had to do was match Neal's DNA to the DNA collected from Linda's body. And just like that, they matched. So who is this James Neal person?
Well, at the time of the murder, he was living in Southern California and worked in the construction industry. But by the time he was identified in this case, he was living in Colorado, and that's where the authorities arrested him. Beyond that, we really don't know much about him or why he targeted Linda that day. Maybe he had seen her riding her bike to school before, and on that particular day, he decided to engage her.
Or maybe that was the first time he had ever seen her. And Linda was just tragically in the wrong place at the wrong time. But one thing we do know for sure is that Linda wasn't his only victim. Not only was he charged with murder in Linda's case, but he was also charged with two additional counts of lewd and lascivious acts on two other girls under the age of 14 between 1995 and 2004.
But just when you think justice has finally been served, the O'Keefe family got some really bad news. After Neal was arrested in Colorado, he was extradited back to Southern California to be tried for the murder. But before he could be put on trial, he died while in police custody at the Theo Lacey Jail in Orange County in May of 2020.
He was apparently transferred to a local hospital on May 25th because of unspecified illnesses, then died in the hospital early Wednesday morning. In the beginning, the Orange County Sheriff's Department suspected that COVID-19 had something to do with his death, which we all know was spreading at the time. But later on, it was believed that Neal died from natural causes, although the specifics of his death haven't been released publicly.
In a statement made immediately following his death, the Newport Beach Police Chief, John Lewis, said this, quote, Linda's story deeply touched the hearts of our community.
End quote. Linda's sister, Cindy, told ABC News, quote,
but then added that she was thankful for the additional closure brought to her by the investigators who never gave up, as well as the new technology which made it possible to process the crime scene DNA. She went on to say, quote, I'm astonished at what they were able to accomplish. My hope is that this case brings hope to other families who haven't had closure yet, end quote.
Combining advanced DNA testing and social media, the authorities were finally able to make an arrest in a four-decade-old cold case. We might never understand the motive or why Neil chose Linda all those years ago, but we can finally put the rest the biggest question in the case. Who murdered Linda O'Keefe over 40 years ago while walking home from summer school?
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