Gladys May Hensley, a 62-year-old White female, was found deceased in her Eugene, Oregon, apartment on June 5, 1986. An employee of the senior citizen complex where she lived discovered her body during a welfare check after she hadn't been seen for several days. Investigators determined she had been murdered, likely in the early hours of June 4th. The scene revealed a brutal crime; her killer had gained access to the ground-floor apartment by cutting the screen of an unlocked window.
The curtains were drawn, and though the initial investigation did not yield any suspects, the case would eventually be linked to a series of violent crimes that instilled fear in the community.
For years, the murder of Gladys Hensley remained a cold case. The initial investigation stalled, leaving her family and the community without answers. However, detectives noted similarities between her death and other unsolved homicides in the area. Two weeks after Hensley's body was found, 33-year-old Janice Marie Dickinson was discovered murdered behind a car dealership. Nearly two years later, in February 1988, 73-year-old Geraldine Spencer Toohey was found killed in her home. All three women had been sexually assaulted and died from brutal homicidal violence. In August 2000, advances in DNA testing confirmed that the same individual was responsible for all three murders, officially linking the cold cases.
The breakthrough in the decades-old case came with the advent of new DNA technology and genetic genealogy. In 2016, Eugene Police detectives reopened the investigation, utilizing Parabon NanoLabs to create a "snapshot" profile of the suspect from the crime scene DNA. This innovative technique helped narrow down the pool of potential suspects. Ultimately, investigators identified John Charles Bolsinger as the killer. Bolsinger, a convicted murderer, had been paroled to Springfield, Oregon, just three months before Hensley's death. His violent history included a 1980 murder conviction in Salt Lake City, for which he served five years. Bolsinger was never arrested for the Eugene murders; he died by suicide on March 23, 1988, less than a month after committing his final known murder. The identification of Bolsinger finally brought a resolution to the case that had haunted the community for over three decades.
