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David Sinopoli sat in an airport cafe with his wife and another couple before sunrise on a February morning, while waiting for his early morning flight.
Unbeknownst to the 68-year-old Pennsylvania man, detectives were watching. And after she tossed a cup of coffee into a trash can at Terminal A at Philadelphia International Airport, they rushed to collect it.
For nearly five decades, the slaying of 19-year-old Lindy Sue Bichler — a newlywed found stabbed to death on the floor of her Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, apartment — baffled authorities. They pursued dozens of tips, interviewed up to 300 people, formed a task force, presented the case to crime experts and, as the years dragged on without answers, even tried to consult psychics.
What finally led to an arrest in the county’s oldest unsolved case was a discarded coffee cup — and genetic genealogy. Investigators zeroed in on Sinopoli after a researcher at Reston, Va.-based Parabon NanoLabs determined through DNA evidence that whoever killed Bichler likely had ancestors from a small Italian town called Gasperina. The researcher, CeCe Moore, flagged Sinopoli as a person of interest after delving into newspaper archives and historical records.
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After the detectives’ stealth mission at the airport, DNA from the coffee cup was compared to DNA found on Bichler’s underwear. It was a coincidence, Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams said. Authorities made the long-awaited arrest Sunday morning; Sinopoli, a former resident of Bichler’s apartment complex, was taken into custody and held without bond.
“This case was solved with the help of DNA and specifically DNA genealogy,” Adams said during a news conference Monday. “And quite honestly, without it, I don’t know if we would have ever solved it.”
She added: “The reality is that David Sinopoli was not on our radar.”
The gruesome murder took place on the evening of December 5, 1975, 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.” Bichler is lying 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 them when her attacker arrived from the police.
She is fighting fiercely for her life. But Bichler, a flower shop worker described by her husband Phil as “extremely compassionate” and “incredibly charming”, was pronounced dead at the scene.
Police said there were few leads from the start.
“We don’t really have anything right now,” Manor Township Police Chief Donald W. Sheeler said the day Biechler was buried, according to the Intelligencer Journal.
Authorities cleared suspects, reviewed a chilling letter from someone claiming to be the killer, asked the public for help and investigated leads before the case went cold. They revisited the case in the following years, submitting evidence for DNA analysis in 1997 and entering it into a national database in 2000.
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That same year, a task force including the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit delved into the case, the Lancaster New Era reports. The group said the killer was likely someone who knew Bichler and committed the crime in a fit of rage. Five years later, a group of forensic experts called the Vidocq Society decided to revisit the case.
“I prayed every night for 30 years that there would be justice for her death,” Bichler’s mother, Eleanor Giese, told Lancaster Online. “My God, maybe it will come.”
Still, it would be years before DNA genealogy, a new technique that became mainstream with the 2018 arrest of the “Golden State Killer,” cracked the case and led to Sinopoli’s arrest. Moore said Monday that her research into the killer’s genealogy pointed to Sinopoli as “a particularly compelling candidate for a suspect.”
“There were very few people living in Lancaster who were the right age, gender and had the right family tree,” she said.
None of the tips that came in to law enforcement over the years pointed to Sinopoli, Adams said. She said he lived in the same four-unit building as Biechler at one point in 1974. But she declined to provide other details about whether they knew each other or discuss a potential motive.
Few details were immediately available about Sinopoli or his life before or after the brutal murder. A former journalist with a commercial printing company, he was a hunter whose Facebook page showed him hunting and holidaying in Italy, the LNP reported. He married his first wife a year before Bichler’s death; they had two children together before divorcing in 1986, according to the newspaper. In 1987, he married his second wife, with whom he had another child.
The murder of a young girl remained unsolved for nearly 58 years. A 20-year-old student helped solve 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 tanning salon at a business where he worked, according to the LNP.
That appeared to be his only felony arrest in Lancaster County before Sunday. He now faces a murder charge.
“Lindy Sue Bichler was 19 years old when her life was brutally taken from her 46 years ago in the sanctity of her own home,” Adams said. “David Sinopoli’s arrest marks the beginning of the legal process. And we hope it will bring some relief to the victim’s loved ones and to the community, who for the past 46 years have not had answers.
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